Re: Pakistan Supreme Court outlaws interest (fwd)

["Harry Veeder" <veed0001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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>From: xxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>To: POST-KEYNESIAN THOUGHT <pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Pakistan Supreme Court outlaws interest (fwd)
>Date: Mon, Mar 27, 2000, 9:55 pm
>

>
>I really don't understand why this is a flash issue. pakistani
>financiers are still capitalists regardless of what the pakistani supreme
>court decides. can religion be impediment to capitalism? not seriously,
>me thinks. To argue otherwise is it to take a eurocentric perception of
>eastern societies and to romanticize or orientalize them. on the contrary,
>capitalism transforms and reinvents religious identities (given that we
>are living in a highly integrated world economy where identities are
>highly contingent, fluid and flexible)


Capitalism does not alter true faith. It has of course
distorted faith and sustained distortions of faith.
If anything the capitalist economy emerged as a sort of
compromise between various religions and the state.

Changes to the physical environment brought on by climatic
changes, resource depletion, disease, or natural catastrophes can alter
religions. However, these changes are not explainable
using Marixist laws of economic history. [ I do not rule
out the possibility that history may be regulated or guided some how
but nobody now knows how and we may never know. There is a historian
by the name of John Landon (http://eonix.8m.com/) offers some
(meager) evidence of a pattern (a "wave") but he does not have a big theory
to explain it. As he puts, we are the first civilzation in history
to be to have sufficient historical and archelogical knowledge
to catch a glimmer of a pattern.]

Pending a major natural catastrophe, science (including bad science,
psuedo science, science-as-ideology) in conjunction with politics is
now a more important shaper of economies than religion.
To paraphrase John Landon: "Any theory of a society
that fails to consider its own models as parameters in the
society being studied is out of luck".

Harry Veeder