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Sorry to pop in at this late stage, but I must confess I'm somewhat bemused at the poverty of the debate here over Rushdie. Leaving aside (the admittedly important) factor of the inherent ludicrousness of the anachronistic UK honours system, I think on literary merit alone Rushdie deserves...

Oh I dunno - maybe he'd have made like your other date and punched you in the face? And how does the 'most terminally shy Guns n Roses fan in Twickenham' get barred from a pub anyway? Were you too shy to go the bar and order a drink?

Someone on another message board reckoned it looks like Lisa Simpson giving head...

Well I agree about the spot paintings (god, is he really still producing them?) but I don't think the shark and the subsequent vitrines were commodity orientated in the way this latest piece is. You describe it as a piece of decorative art - is that so? Is it designed for decoration? If so, that...

Well, who's to say he won't?

I'm with you IR. I used to genuinely admire Hirst's work but I don't think he's done anything decent, original or inspiring for around ten years now. This latest piece just seems vaucous in the extreme: an embracing of the art-as-commodity ethos in the most cynical and empty way possible. To...

Dunno - I would have thought that the production/distribution and consumption of food took precedence in 'shaping society' before the arrival of capitalism, personally. Witness the fundamental shift in social organisation pre-and post-agriculture, for example.

No, I challenged the question. What 'society' (and at what stage?) does the question address? If it's this one (this one being, to paint with vague broad strokes, I take to mean post-Enlightenment, industrial 'western' society) then very little any more - as, to reiterate, I think the norms...

I didn't say I thought it had no role - more that while people naively muse on abstracts such as Judeo-Christian 'morality' they entirely overlook the central structural determinant of our society: capital. Capital has entirey replaced Christian morality as the foundational reference of western...

The fact that a number of posters have quoted the supposed importance of religion in American politics misses the point. The fact that US political discourse is dominated by cultural issues like abortion/gay marriage etc doesn't refute my point, merely proves it. As such, American political...

I think money/capital is the single most important transformative/structuring factor in contemporary 'western' society. Religion, as such, is an absolute irrelevance and it's staggeringly naive to suppose anything else.

I'd recommend you read Levi-Strauss's essay 'On the Origin of Table Manners' in The Raw & The Cooked - very illuminating.

Agree entirely. But Friday afternoon, when all is quiet and I have hours of time to devote to boards such as this, seems to be when everyone disappears. Probably down the pub already, the b'stards! ...

This phenomenon is recognised in central America. A mate of mine experienced it (while in Guatemela, I think) much to the terror of the family he was staying with. Such a visitiation, in their folklore, presages disaster or tragedy of some description. There was a small earthquake, I think...

I miss the Compendium Bookshop in Camden. It stocked just about everything in terms of avant-garde/left field fiction, poetry, thought etc and had a truly staggering collection of periodicals. Nothing was too obscure. Real bookshops like that, alas, just don't exist anymore. I used to spend...

The James Baldwin short story 'Sonny's Blues' is fantastic - though more about a musician than his music

Yeah, sad news indeed. Another one bites the dust. As the great man would have said: so it goes...

Ah, right. I see. I wasn't wrong then...

I was pointing out that such a conclusion seems to be the logical outcome of such an argument. Am I wrong?

A couple of points: I think you make the fundamental mistake of abstracting from diverse phenomena an underlying urge, drive or, as your man Pinker puts it, an 'instinct'. You say, for instance, all societies have a form of marriage - ergo the 'marriage instinct' is universal. You do not argue...