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May 11, 2005
Here's a bit of a challenge from Freya Mathews:
"Faced with the devastating environmental and social impacts of corporate capitalism and contemporary global markets, the advocate of letting-be might search for the essence of capitalism and find it in the liberal tenet of freedom---the right of everyone to pursue their own good in their own way subject only to a minimal requirement that their doing so not extinguish the like right of others. She notices the isomorphism between this principle of freedom and her own principle of letting-be. Instead of opposing this freedom, out of disgust for the havoc it wreaks on the environment and on the fabric of society, she expands its scope: truly to follow through on liberalism, she points out, is to let everything, human and other-than-human alike, work out its own good in its own way--in other words, to let everything be. How is she to convince liberals that not only human beings but all things are entitled to work out their own good in their own way? She will have to persuade them to change their metaphysical premise. And how is she to accomplish this? By couching her argument within her opponents' terms of reference. If, as is generally the case, liberals' terms of reference are rationalist, then she must demonstrate rationally that a change of metaphysical premise is needed. She must out-reason, out-argue, the proponents of reason and argument."
Freya Mathews, Letting the World Do the Doing. Letting things be is a different ethos to that of making things letter through control and domination that characterises the instrumental reason of modernity.
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