Searching for Accurate Maps

More specifically, I don’t read opinion pieces. Here’s an example of why I don’t. In the Dec. 24th edition of the Financial Times, Harry Eyres wrote in a piece called Human beings or human resources?

… the Enlightenment project of raising human reason to god-like power has had disturbing results. These can be seen both in the state of nature, reduced and damaged possibly beyond repair, and of human beings, retooled as “human resources” – that is, means to be exploited rather than ends in themselves.

Really? What faculty is journalist Harry Eyres using here to figure out whether, in fact, nature has been  “damaged possibly beyond repair”? What faculty is he using to distinguish between human beings and human resources? Gut instinct? Emotion? Reflex? Ayn Rand would have a field-day with this: “an attack on human reason… part of the arsenal in the battle between reason and progress on the one hand, and those who would have us return to barbarism on the other.” Even worse, Eyres is a journalist, a moulder of public opinion, and as an educated man, he should know better.

As Constitutional historian John Whitehead wrote elsewhere in a different context, The media has been very bad about informing us about what is going on. They focus on surface things.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Feeling Randy: Rationalization (rockpapershotgun.com)