The demise of culture

More nonsense from the Guardian, I'm having a field-day!
This time is from M. Bunting who gives the impression of having never entered a library preferring some cheap reads of pop-science.
Madeleine Bunting’s astonishment at learning that human beings are influenced by their environment in the choices they make is bewildering. Marx, Gramsci and Bourdieu, to name but a few, analysed how society, economics and culture shape our consciousness and dispositions. Jung and Freud theorised on the functioning of our minds and how these are affected by the world around us and inside of us. Freud’s nephew, Bernays, put his uncle’s theories into marketing practices. The plasticity of the brain has been part of neuropsychiatry for a rather long time and one would like to think that evolution theory is rather well established. Today’s “potent brew of extraordinary discoveries” is but a bad use of language which confuses free choice with free will, and volition with individual autonomy. The mechanics of the brain do not exhaust consciousness. The social and cultural inputs do not prevent individual autonomy. There is more to human beings than their functioning. The demise of culture has emptied our society of ideas and filled it with ready-made answers as if we were just another product.

the demise of science

Today's top prize for idiotic nonsense has to go to McFadden from the Guardian. In a rather confused and confusing article on the 'science' of artificial life, he cheers ‘mankind’ (sic) creating nature as a technological product to suit our lifestyle. Maybe it's not his fault if science has been turned into technology. Maybe it's not his fault if he, following technocrats, misses the point of the ‘world’s woes’. He stops at the symptoms instead of looking at the causes. That would require thinking a little deeper and questioning the premises of the 'science' he's championing.
More food and more fuel for more production will not end starvation, wars and diseases. The world is afflicted by overpopulation which condemns the poor to famine and ill-health, and the environment to ever increasing pollution and scarcity of resources. McFadden’s idea of science is a game of technology, which has abandoned its loftier aims of understanding nature, including human nature, and preserving the world rather than playing with it. To create new life forms as if they were toys from a conveyer-belt is to feed the insatiable beast of unrestrained production; it is to exploit nature rather than live of it and in it. It is at best counter-productive and at worst morally corrupt.