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i dont see the point of this discussion to the extent that it has been derailed onto something about whether one rationality is "better" than another--i don't see what is at stake in it, why it is interesting. the euro-rationality was predicated on agricultural production and private property--capitalism came later. most native american rationalities were centered on patterns that did not include notions of private property. there are basically different sets of possibilitilies for interaction with the environment that follow from the presence or absence of private property, and both have consequences--for example, in the n.a. cases the question of scale (at the level of population, say) was settled in one direction, while the euro-rationality opened onto other possibilities of scale, eventually. once you segue into capitalism, things diverge more radically--for the n.a. groups (in general) the environment was integrated into the ways of thinking and being in the world--there was no particular separation--which is entirely logical---and for capitalism, the environment is an abstraction, land here interchangeable with land there--and this has some advantages (it enables production to unfold on a scale not possible within other relations to the environment) but also some very significant disadvantages--the rendering abstract of nature as a "resource" entails an erasure of the consequences of production--extraction of "natural resources" combined with the idea that nature is an abstraction (and an endlessly available one at that, a gift from some god) opens onto a discounting of the consequences of extraction---so if you run out of shit in one place, you just go to another--and it doesn't necessarily matter, the shambles you leave behind. this is basically different, and if you want to play the game set into motion in the op, it makes some sense to try to focus the conversation on specific aspects of difference at this kind of level rather than get locked into some bizarre-o "debate" about whether native americans or white folk are "better" one than the other.
and it is simply not the case that the history of capitalism follows necessarily from its rationality, or that the rationality is not itself the result of processes, and so a construction in a sense---so for example the single most important development under capitalism which explains the acceleration of population growth, which puts increasing pressure on production, which grinds the rationality shaping productions closer and closer to its limits, is the fixing of nitrogen and the development of nitrogen-based fertilizers--this more than the ability to move meat from one end of the country to another by rail, for example.
and this last point refers back to the problem of the thread itself--it is entirely ahistorical--but you can't talk about any of this stuff in an ahistorical manner because what it's about is nothing but history.
enough of this for the moment.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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