Is that a moral value to prefer linear reading over something more scattered?
I’m not saying that all cultural goods necessarily have a moral component; but they do address questions of how the world should be. And, the stapler says the world ought to be organized. This is not something that all human cultures have taken for granted at all. I was in Kenya a couple of years ago, and I got to go on safari, which is what, I guess, most Americans do when they go to Kenya. We flew over the bush on our way to the Masai Mara, and we could see these human settlements from the air, very irregular little enclosures where they keep their cows and where they live. When you fly over the U.S., you see grids and circles, and the same in Europe; but when you fly over the bush in Kenya, you see these irregular, sort of, roughly circular shaped things. These are human cultures that don’t place the priority that we do on measurement and order. Is one system better than the other? It’s hard to say actually. In Kenya, they preserve certain kinds of possibilities in their relationshi
