Isis wrote
Richard Rorty argues that we utilize narratives or vocabularies (quite literally the words we use to describe our world, either external or psychological) to inform the way we think about our world, including truth and ethics. These vocabularies or narratives are shaped by our practical concerns. We consider the heliocentric or Copernican view of the solar system to be a more accurate description, not because we can "prove" it, but because the rest of our beliefs regarding reality seem to support it. We rejected the Ptolemaic view of the solar system because various other things we believed were not congruent with its principles.
This is why certain scientific theories take a long time to become a generally accepted truth. The rest of our belief framework may not support them as of yet.
I disagree. Many of us believe what we believe because somebody told us to believe it. When Copernicus came up with his model of the solar system it was rebuffed even though the current model didn't explain some things very well or at all. It was rebuffed by the church because it didn't fit in with their teachings, the man in the street went about his business not really caring as long as summer followed spring. If the church later said "actually things are like THIS" then he'd say "well I never" and go about his business. Most people in that time had little interest whether the sun moved around the earth or the earth around the sun. The church told them to believe this new theory and they just nodded their head and moved on.
In Europe of course. European and American philosophers tend to forget about the rest of the world. The arab world had figured out heliocentrism over a century before copernicus.
These days it isn't necessarily the church. It's the President, or some influential talk show host, or somebody in the media. We don't check the facts or their credentials, we just nod our heads and stop having our babies vaccinated for rubella.
The main issue with consumer driven capitalism is the fact that it tends to subjugate our creative descriptions of our purpose in life, responsibilities towards other sentient beings etc. to serve its own perpetual logic of consumption and production. It does this to such a degree that we run the risk of ending up in a situation where we quite literally lose our ability to render creative re-descriptions of our world.
That's our reaction to the consumerism. It's not clear that it's anything to do with capitalism because pure, unadulterated capitalism doesn't occur in this world right now on any meaningful scale. We get capitalism with constraints around it. Be that as it may capitalism, constrained or otherwise, has no interest either way in our "ability to render creative re-descriptions of the world". It just goes about doing what it does. I'd agree that there's too much focus on it, but it's we that have to refocus, we're the sentient beings with a mind that can weigh things and make choices.
If you don't believe me, consider why you did not watch that video I posted. Most of us are afraid of being confronted with narratives or description that might cause dissonance between what we are confronted with and what we'd like to believe. Instead of embracing being shocked out of our complacency, we simply turn a blind eye in order to avoid being yanked from our cushy lives.
Who are you speaking to and how do you know they didn't watch the video? I watched it. But then I don't walk around thinking that the earth is or even once was some idyllic place. Life has long been harsh and difficult and full of compromise. They systems that we evolve are not perfect, but hopefully we chose the lesser of evils. Parliamentary Democracy is far from perfect, but better than any alternative.
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
Winston Churchill said that most men, in their lifetime, stumble across the truth but generally they pick themselves up and continue on their way as if nothing had ever happened.
