tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24764482205548052092024-03-14T01:12:37.229-05:00HumAnarchistMeditations on Human AuthenticityUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger305125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-32669286541156346622016-06-15T13:01:00.001-05:002016-06-15T13:01:18.823-05:00Putting the "mass" in "mass shooting"Dear corporate media: <br />
<br />
STFU already! I really don’t know how much more I can take of your platitude-dripping violence-fetishizing orgasm over the Orlando shooting. Yes, of course it was a tragedy. I don’t need you or anyone else to tell me that fifty people dying from bullet exposure is a horrible thing (although it remains to be seen how many of those killed were victims of over exuberant SWAT cops in the spasmodic throes of their own power orgasm). <br />
<br />
And please, please, please stop calling it "the worst mass-shooting in American history" or "the worst mass shooting on American soil." This is simply not true, at least not without ignoring enormous chunks of documented history or radically deforming the definition of "mass-shooting"—a single event where lots of innocent people get shot—or both. <br />
<br />
Wikipedia tells me that as many as 300 people died at Wounded Knee (only one historical example among many). Many of those were children, and they all died during a single mass-shooting event. The event is part of American history. And Wounded Knee is, last time I checked, "American soil." <br />
<br />
Maybe you could revise your headlines to read "worst non-government-sanctioned mass shooting" or "worst non pogrom-related mass shooting" or maybe "worst mass killing on American soil not perpetrated by white men wearing uniforms." Although I’m not sure whether those would be entirely accurate either. <br />
<br />
Yours in disgust,<br />
<br />
OldDog<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-39674439230531994832016-06-14T13:48:00.002-05:002016-06-14T13:50:25.658-05:00Terms of service<a href="http://www.streetartutopia.com/?p=10571"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-J_dYOPGW8HqYYPI0ZtbSdqVv2zxMIsKOseat0oFpZtHpi8ikdUztTJ_31Rw4E-7mcF3iTL-nK2JnmjkHC8ebPC6DeeNiemDjY_FYkSJNczyHezfFmjUkFmNzu_fuMBnK7gRJ4XWIq9T6/s1600/street_art_february_2012_6.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-J_dYOPGW8HqYYPI0ZtbSdqVv2zxMIsKOseat0oFpZtHpi8ikdUztTJ_31Rw4E-7mcF3iTL-nK2JnmjkHC8ebPC6DeeNiemDjY_FYkSJNczyHezfFmjUkFmNzu_fuMBnK7gRJ4XWIq9T6/s320/street_art_february_2012_6.jpg" /></a></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-5541401783968902702016-05-12T16:48:00.003-05:002016-05-12T16:48:41.852-05:00No way back to the human side of the screen I see others around me, those others I care for the most, jacked firmly into their handheld universes, leaving only the barest shell of a human being behind, leaving me treading in desperation over the thinnest surface of a relationship, hoping to occupy those fleeting moments of transition in the ongoing flow pulsing across the slick screens in their palms. <br />
<br />
And I frequently end up there too, of course. I all-too often find myself seduced into digitally constructed worlds of distraction. The irony here is that the more time we spend distracting ourselves with these invented worlds of hollow meanings, the more we need to be distracted from our ever-hollowing lives. We are filling ourselves to the very brim with emptiness in a frantic attempt to keep our feelings of emptiness at bay. <br />
<br />
Research has confirmed the association between time spent with online social networking sites and depression, for example. And regardless of the direction of the causal relationship—whether online socializing causes depression or depressed people seek relief in online social distraction—our insatiable desire for increased connectivity suggests that there is something lacking in our lives, something essential, something authentically human. <br />
<br />
The biggest lie of all is that technology is neutral, that it is merely a medium for us to use as we see fit. Technology doesn’t dehumanize people, people dehumanize themselves with their technology—or such is the myth. Humans have always relied on technology. We are members of the only species currently in existence who could not exist without technical assistance. This was as true for our prehistoric ancestors 250,000 years ago as it is for us. But there is something about our tools today that reverses the natural relationship between us and our devices. Human devices used to serve human needs and goals. Now it is clearly the other way around. <br />
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Participation is our choice, after all. But peel back the veneer of techno-propaganda only slightly and it becomes clear that it is never a matter of free choice.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-34476481951747252432016-05-09T16:47:00.001-05:002016-05-09T16:55:06.502-05:00Everywhere in chains"Man is Born Free but is everywhere in chains" is the opening line to Rousseau’s <i>Social Contract</i>. It was not meant as hyperbole, but rather as a statement of the self-evident fact that participation in civilized society requires us to abnegate the lion’s share of our personal freedoms. <br />
<br />
John Gray, in his book <i>The Silence of Animals</i> suggests that there is something "fishy" about Rousseau’s statement by relating it to an analog that is literally about fish, something Gray calls an "ichthyophil" take on Rousseau. Suppose Rousseau’s statement is changed to "fish are born to fly, but everywhere they swim." And, further, suppose that you use the fact that there are certain fish that appear actually to fly for short distances as evidence that even though fish are water-bound for the present, they are continually striving toward flight. Of course this is absurd. Fish are water beings, with a host of finely-tuned adaptations that make them specifically suited for life underwater. They were born for no other purposes than the ones they in fact pursue during the courses of their subaquatic lives. Fish are precisely what they are meant to be. <br />
<br />
But why, Gray asks, should we humans be different from other animals? Why is it that we are not what we are meant to be, that we are born for freedom but are everywhere living as slaves? Civilization is obviously a human creation. To claim civilization as some kind of anti-human mode of existence seems as absurd as claiming that fish aren’t really meant for a life underwater. Termites build termite mounds, humans build cities. Fish move in schools, antelope in herds, ants and bees in colonies; and humans occupy violently guarded, bureaucratically structured systems of power and authority. Surely civilization is a natural part of the human design. Civilization is the human analog to the fishes’ water.<br />
<br />
But this doesn’t feel quite right to me.<br />
<br />
The logic of Rousseau’s statement might be attacked from a slightly different direction, and one that takes a more parsimonious route than Gray’s fish analogy. <i>Man</i> is an abstraction. Mankind—the species—is not born in a literal sense. And it makes little sense to say that man as an abstract category can be free, sad, strong, or any other adjective designed to describe the condition or circumstances of an individual agent. Individual men and women can be free or not. It is, however, a mistake to say an entire species is in possession of a characteristic that can exist only in concrete form in some proportion of individual members. <br />
<br />
But this approach seems artificially dismissive of what feels to be a truly substantive set of issues—most notably the fact that you and I are not at all free. <br />
<br />
There is a third possible take on Rousseau, one that has the potential to redeem at least a small measure of the original intent of his statement, perhaps (although it might render the rest of his <i>Social Contract </i>a moot exercise). Consider <i>man</i> in the abstract sense of the term, as the human species, and interpret <i>born</i> as a metaphor for the evolutionary emergence of humanity. Man was indeed born free in this metaphorical sense. The human species emerged in the complete absence of violently imposed hierarchies of power and authority beyond those found in simple (and perpetually shifting) primate dominance relations, and has spent the bulk of its existence as a species in this primordial state of freedom. But now, and for only the last few millennia—a relative blink of an eye—the overwhelming majority of humans on the planet are forced to live in ways that reflect a profound absence of freedom, living lives that are far, far removed from the hunter-gatherer egalitarian prototype.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-3169529253568949392016-05-02T11:03:00.000-05:002016-05-02T11:03:23.023-05:00Democracy is a euphemism<i>"Doctrines that prevent people from understanding the cause of their social existence have great social value."</i> –Marvin Harris<br />
<br />
Modern democracy relies on the illusion that there is something special about majority consensus beyond the majority’s physical superiority if things were ever to turn violent. <br />
<br />
The power of the majority is a matter of simple physics: greater collective mass. <br />
<br />
The rules, laws, and social expectations of civilized existence rest upon a single moral principle: might makes right. This is as true today as it was in ancient Babylon.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-13135865756081041552016-04-27T09:24:00.001-05:002016-04-27T09:24:05.450-05:00A nasty and brutish fetish A recent entry in Futurity (an internet news (?) magazine) is titled <a href="http://www.futurity.org/early-humans-food-1118672-2/">"For Early Humans, Life was no Picnic 1.8 Million Years Ago."</a> The article is about some researchers who had mapped the landscape of the Olduvai Gorge during the time a couple of our ancestral human relatives inhabited the region. The short lived (30-40 year life expectancy) and short statured (4.5 to 5.5 feet tall) creatures had extremely hard lives, we are told.<br />
<br />
And how do we know this? How do we know their lives were extremely difficult? How do we know life was not, in fact, an actual perpetual picnic for these folks? <br />
<br />
Because, despite the fact that food and water were plentiful and shade and shelter were abundant, they had to compete with so many other carnivores for meat. <br />
<br />
That’s it. <br />
<br />
Life was hard for Paranthropus and Homo habilis because they couldn’t simply grab some McDonalds or pick up a roast for Sunday dinner at the local grocery store. <br />
<br />
It’s amazing anyone was able to survive long enough to reproduce. Their populations must have been microscopic and constantly teetering on the verge of extinction. It’s astounding that evolution had anything to work with at all!<br />
<br />
<br />
It is vitally important that we understand that the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors (and contemporaries) were (and are) full of unimaginable hardship and suffering. Hobbes’ view of life outside the warm and protective embrace of civilization has been enshrined—literally, as an idol might be placed in a shrine and regularly showered with offerings and ritual expressions of worship.<br />
<br />
It is vitally important that we know this right down to the very fibers of our modern civilized being because it is absolutely not true. <br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-67184757510286365122016-04-22T15:57:00.000-05:002016-04-22T15:57:21.019-05:00Go team human!A species is an organizational device, the result of a particular taxonomic structuring of the world. <i>Species</i> does not refer to a concrete entity. The human species can’t have needs, for example. Individual people have needs—and although each person shares many needs in common with every other person, no singular needy entity mysteriously emerges from the expression of these mutual needs. To say that the human species has needs—<i>as a species</i>—is to speak nonsense. Species is a concept, a construct, an abstraction.<br />
<br />
Don’t get me wrong—it is an extremely useful abstraction. But just like its close cousin, <i>humanity,</i> it is a tool of thought and a linguistic convenience, not a thing in the world. It is important not to lose sight of this fact because there are concrete real-world repercussions to treating abstractions as if they were actual entities (“Corporations are people my friend”). <br />
<br />
In addition, there appears to be a strong tendency for us to attach more importance to the abstraction, the idea, than to the concrete entities the abstraction subsumes—in the same way that the team becomes more important than the individual players. <br />
<br />
The movie, <i>Interstellar</i> provides an interesting case study of this tendency.<br />
<br />
The human part of the plot of <i>Interstellar</i> is simultaneously banal and unbelievable, but the broader story it sits upon is neither banal nor unbelievable: a future in which the Earth is rapidly becoming a dustbowl and humans are doomed. All government money and resources in this future world are being directed at food production. GMO corn is the last major food crop to survive, and there is every indication that it will be dying out in short order as well—GMO or not. All is not lost for the humans, however, because NASA has been secretly diverting billions of dollars to a massive space colonization project. <br />
<br />
The NASA project has a Plan A and a Plan B. Plan A is a city-sized space station that can accommodate an untold number of people—untold, but obviously far fewer than the Earth’s remaining population. The problem with Plan A is a lacuna in theoretical physics, specifically a missing piece of an equation involving gravity that would allow the space station to get off the planet. But not to worry, because Plan B is already in full swing. Plan B involves launching small groups of astronauts through a mysterious wormhole placed next to Saturn by some unknowable five-dimensional alien beings simply referred to as "they." The wormhole leads to a distant and unnamed galaxy, and allows access to a star system with a number of potentially habitable planets. Oh, and the important part, the astronauts sent through the wormhole are packing specially selected frozen gametes so that if they do find a good place to land they can eventually reestablish the human species, and also ensure a wide range of genetic diversity so that evolution has something to work with as the species accommodates the idiosyncrasies of its new planetary home.<br />
<br />
<i>Interstellar</i> suffers from a cadre of logical kinks, impossible coincidences, and hard-to-suspend-disbelief plot vehicles that are typical of the science fiction movie genre—the most egregious of which is that the mysterious five-dimensional beings turn out to be a distant future iteration of the human species. So, powerful five-dimensional beings go back in time to set up a wormhole close to their planet of origin so that they might survive to evolve into five-dimensional beings that can travel back in time to set up a wormhole next to their planet of origin….<br />
<br />
But set aside the recursive circularity of the wormhole’s origin for a moment. There is another issue being dealt with here that strikes to the heart of the matter, the real issue; the only issue: the future survival of the human race. The most important thing is that the human species survives. This is more important than any of the lives of any of the people involved. We must continue—although it is clear that this "we" is not all inclusive. Even stronger, the only "we" that really matters is some abstract "us" in the future that does not include a single soul alive today. This unanalyzed assumption sits like a monolithic <i>2001 Space Odyssey</i> obelisk on the brain of the movie’s writers and viewers alike: it is imperative that the human species has a future; humans must survive. <br />
<br />
Why?<br />
<br />
Why does it matter whether the distant future is inhabited by our progeny? It makes no difference to anyone alive at this moment if every human on the planet disappears two hundred years from now. Our lives will be as rich and full and complete (or not) regardless of the future of the species (or lack thereof). <br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-31681213904118294062016-04-21T11:55:00.000-05:002016-04-21T11:55:37.783-05:00A brief anti-transhumanist rantIf human life is essentially a technology, then the problems associated with human existence are essentially technological problems, and as such, they have technological solutions. All social problems, for instance, can be solved by developing and applying the right kinds of social technologies—and most problems in modern society are political, requiring only minor adjustments to the present bureaucratic structuring of power. From a more personal standpoint, if human bodies are biological technologies that have been rendered inefficient by dumb evolutionary processes that are blind to the obvious advantages of rational intentional design, then it should be possible to compensate by intentionally augmenting the human body and extending the capacities of the human mind. So along with artificial hips and mechanical heart valves, we have an ever expanding inventory of chemical fixes and bookstore shelves filled with self-help books providing blueprints for organizing your life and techniques designed to get your life "back on track." Human nature—like all other aspects of the natural world—can be retooled and upgraded. <br />
<br />
This thought-form reaches its logical extreme in a bizarre utopian movement called transhumanism, which has apparently been gaining widespread popularity among technophiles, science fiction fans, and other techno-groupies. According to transhumanists, industrial civilization is leading us toward a "posthuman" future, a world in which humanity will have been eclipsed and replaced by its own technological offspring. The "trans" part of transhumanism is meant to highlight that we are, at this point and in the immediate future, moving through a transitional period en route to a posthuman state of technological perfection, a period in which more and more of our organs and cognitive capacities will be replaced or enhanced with technologically superior alternatives. At some point in the future, all that is human—like everything else on the planet and every other planet within our grasp, I suppose—will have been refashioned, and we will have made ourselves into an entirely new kind of artificial life form and thus achieve technological immortality. For transhumanists, this is our manifest destiny as a species.<br />
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Transhumanism is ridiculous on its face (whether that face is made of flesh or a synthetic bioplastic). Its core assumptions emerge from a failure to distinguish metaphor from reality—especially with respect to biological evolution—and reflect a post-industrial, technology-centered projection of enlightenment-era notions of human progress. But from a psychological standpoint, there is more to transhumanism than mere metaphoric confusion. It is a childish attempt to disguise and deny uncomfortable truths of post-modern life. It provides a kind of fairytale gloss over the dehumanizing and oppressive nature of global civilization. <br />
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Transhumanism is ridiculous; nevertheless it may harbor a kernel of validity, especially with respect to the "transition" part. Global industrial civilization—like all civilizations of the past—is unsustainable and simply cannot continue. As fossil resources become stretched to the vanishing point, as potable water and palatable food become more and more rarified commodities, as poverty spreads and expands among the masses while wealth and power become increasingly concentrated in a shrinking elite, we may indeed be transitioning into a posthuman future, albeit one in which humans—artificial and otherwise—are entirely absent.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-15441798538019794152016-04-20T14:47:00.000-05:002016-04-20T14:51:37.853-05:00Vengeful gods lead to global conquest?Headline from the Washington Post (February 12, 2016): <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/02/12/fear-of-a-vengeful-god-may-explain-humanitys-global-expansion/">“Fear of a vengeful God may explain humanity’s global expansion”<br />
</a><br />
Several thing here. First, and most trivially, god was spelled with a capital ‘G’ in the headline and throughout the article. I suspect that this was done so as not to offend sensitive monotheists. But more insidious are the dual implications that “humanity” refers to a singular kind of substance and that having this substance spread itself across the globe was a good thing. <br />
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Taken at face value the headline is tautology, obvious to anyone with an eighth grade public school understanding of world history. From the conquistadores to the Puritans, 16th century European colonial expansion into the new world is a tale of the exploits (literally) of vengeful god believers—with smallpox-packing missionaries thrust against indigenous resistance like psychological battering rams. <br />
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The story following the headline is about a psychology experiment finding that people whose religious beliefs include a vengeful, all-knowing god are less likely to cheat when playing a game in which their cheating could not be discovered. Basically, participants in the study played several rounds of a game in which they rolled a two-colored die in their head and put coins into cups depending on the imagined outcome. After a participant imagined rolling a die in their head, the experimenter told them what the randomly chosen color for that round was. If the color they imagined rolling “matched” the color the experimenter told them, they “won” that round and could put a coin in their own cup. If it mismatched, they lost and had to put a coin in the cup of an imagined distant person from their own religious community. Cheating was measured by the extent to which the coins were unequally distributed (in the person’s favor) after the game. Participants who believe in an omniscient god who would punish you for lying were less likely to put more coins into their own cup. <br />
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The researchers went from these results to the conclusion that this—the belief in an all-seeing and punishing god—explains the broad-based cooperation among strangers that is prerequisite for large-scale cultural expansion. <br />
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All-seeing sky-god = global conquest? Perhaps pushing the data just a bit. <br />
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Perhaps more problematic is the thought form that sees humanity as an entity capable of entering into cause and effect relationships. It wasn’t some abstract humanity that expanded itself around the globe. It was individual persons locked into potent and irresistible hierarchical power relations—relations imposed and enforced through lethal violence. <br />
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And while it is true that religion turns out to be an extremely useful tool for legitimizing these power relations, belief in an all-seeing deity with anger management problems hardly explains the African slave trade or the genocide of Indigenous Americans. <br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-39181632161444222012016-04-19T08:44:00.002-05:002016-04-19T08:44:21.612-05:00How to kill a zombieVampires, werewolves, mummies, and zombies, the classic horror movie villains, have something eerily in common. They all involve a tradeoff in which some version of immortality is obtained at the expense of one or more critical elements of their human essence. The "undead" vampire is reduced to photophobic hunter, his cold and emotionless immortality requiring continual renewal with the blood of fresh victims. The werewolf, entirely immune to all weapons not made of pure silver, is forced under the spell of the waxing moon to periodically abandon his humanity entirely and become a bloodthirsty beast. The mummy rises stiffly from his eternal resting place to serve sentence on those who flagrantly violate the curse that was cast to guard his dusty peace. Zombies continue as mindless and soulless corpses, hungrily pursuing the living in an insatiable quest for brains. The thing that makes each of these creatures scary isn’t so much that they go around killing innocent people—hell, cheap toasters do that—it’s that they are almost, but not quite, human. They have a quasi-humanity in which some critical component, some vital human element, has been removed. And in their almost-but-not-quite-humanity, they are exactly like us in a way that is truly terrifying.<br />
<br />
The zombie case is particularly informative. Here we have the merest form of the human, the decaying dead body animated by some inhuman force. What is curious here is that in most zombie movies, the locus of this animating force is not entirely clear. Is it an internal hunger for brains that drives the walking dead? If so, then the zombie is not entirely dead to the world of desire. Or, is it an externally existing power, a spirit of evil (or the machinations of a brain-eating virus) that drives the not-creatures through a web of magnetic attraction? Notice that the specific locus of the controlling impetus usually makes no difference in terms of how to actually stop the zombie. In almost every case, you "kill" the zombie by smashing or severing its head.<br />
<br />
There may be a cryptic lesson here for those who wish to escape the brain-eating beast called civilization and return to an authentic human realm of meaning and purpose.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-78303150458577908732016-04-18T07:30:00.002-05:002016-04-18T07:30:59.805-05:00A tale of two frogsThere is a well-known parable about frogs in boiling water: if you throw a frog into boiling water it jumps out immediately, but, according to the tale, if you put a frog in cold water and then heat the water slowly, you will have frog soup long before the frog figures it out. The slow ascendance of civilization over the course of millennia has put us in the position of the second frog. By the time it is possible to recognize what is happening, it is far too late. In addition, civilization erases all memory of anything outside itself; we are frogs in hot water who have forgotten what life was like before we were thrown into the kettle. For those born within civilization’s penumbra, civilization appears as the primordial clay out of which life is formed, it is the benevolent source of all personal meaning. All overt traces of what came before, the rich authentic human life-ways that have been destroyed in the civilizing process, have been lost to conscious memory and reside only as wispy shades of latent genetic potential and a pervasive sense of unease. <br />
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Historically, the dissolution of human authenticity occurred in two interpenetrating and overlapping waves. The first came with the slow transition to agriculture, a merging of social technology with lifestyles based on cultivated grain. The second came with the pestilent outbreak of cities, malignant concentrations of social power entirely dependent on resources obtainable only through ever-expanding growth and conquest. But history is just a story of the past; it cannot be the cause of future change. Securing the future requires access to the minds of children, and so history is made to repeat itself on a micro scale, as civilization tames and colonizes the emerging psychology of each developing child. By the time the water feels hot, all that is wild and human in us has already been blanched into a pale and helpless facsimile.<br />
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Language itself is in some sense the enemy here. Our ability to think symbolically and our penchant for carving the world into abstractions obscure the reality of our situation beneath an overabundance of easy rationalization. The truth of our circumstances should be obvious, but the truth is masked behind unanalyzable assumptions. Even if we suspect that we are sitting in boiling water, it is unlikely that we will correctly identify the source of the heat. And our capacity to rationalize—coached and trained and elevated to a fine art through formal education—makes the potential for misidentification extremely high. <br />
<br />
There is another far more obscure frog story that might be applied as allegory to our failure to recognize what should be obvious. It is a story about a scientist who trained a frog to jump in response to a shouted command, cut off the frog’s legs one at a time, and upon discovering that the distance the frog jumped became progressively shorter with each additional leg removed, concluded that cutting off a frog’s legs makes it deaf. <br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-30085895629519839322016-04-16T10:46:00.000-05:002016-04-16T11:32:14.517-05:00Ego-techPersonal identity has always been a social function. As individuals, we are nothing more and nothing less than the totality of our group affiliations. <br />
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Biologically, we carry the genetic residue of our ancestry, linking us to groups of beings long dead. <br />
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Psychologically, in the present tense, we are bound to those in close physical proximity by shared circumstance and the inertia of habit. <br />
<br />
Societally, we are deeply embedded in a shared soup of culture and subculture, communally connected to various others through traditional norms, through roles (voluntarily embraced and otherwise) and role expectations, and through implicit or explicit allegiances (voluntarily adopted or otherwise) to abstract entities, for example nations, states, ethnicities, religions, political denominations, and corporate masters. <br />
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Civilization involves an intentional structuring of the affiliations that make up our personal identities so that our identities are made compatible with goals that have little or nothing to do with actual needs of human beings. And in the present digital version of industrial civilization, mass technology has become both the means and the ends of the identity structuring process. <br />
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Technology, once simply the means by which a clever species adapted to the challenges and opportunities of local environments, has become the environment itself; technology has become both the thing to which our adaptation is directed and the thing providing the means of adaptation.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-16452652106951071272016-04-15T07:52:00.000-05:002016-04-15T07:52:02.341-05:00The other side of the wallPolar bears are not really white. Their skin is actually closer to black. And their fur has no pigment at all; its white appearance is due to light refraction. Polar bear hide has evolved to function as a solar collector: the individual hair fibers are clear and hollow, and act like fiber optic tubes that trap sunlight and channel warmth to the bear’s heat-absorbing skin. When polar bears are forced to live in zoos south of their arctic habitats, algae begins to grow in their hollow hair, and their pelt takes on a decidedly non-aesthetic yellowish brown color. During peak visitor season, zookeepers have been known to spray the bears with bleach because nobody wants to see a less-than-white polar bear. <br />
<br />
I have compared our civilized situation to that of confined animals on display in a strange sort of zoo where we act as both captive and keeper. Like the discolored captive polar bear, we are forced to accommodate an unnatural habitat and are disfigured by the mismatch. And like the bear, our keepers—that is, you and I—resort to superficial methods for concealing the resulting ugliness. But the ugliness is just a symptom, of course. The real problem, for us and for the bear, is captivity.<br />
<br />
But the zoo metaphor makes for a too rough analogy. For one thing, our enclosures are not limited to concrete walls and iron bars. Our enclosures are not mere physical structures designed to confine us to a circumscribed physical place. Instead they penetrate the very tissue of our thoughts and provide the psychological structure that frames our experience. Our enclosures appear absolute; there is no outside. Also, because we are ultimately our own keepers, our self-confinement needs continuous, moment by moment renewal. This is accomplished through a steady diet of anxiety and fear. Fear serves as an ever-present reminder to keep to our assigned place in the bureaucratic order, and anxiety becomes our mantra of impotence. <br />
<br />
Both the fear and the anxiety are of our own design—we hold the keys to our cage. All we have to do is open the door and walk through. But first we have to find the door. And before we can do that we have to know that a door is possible, we have to recognize that there is a world outside after all.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-26122151745359790892016-04-14T10:31:00.000-05:002016-04-14T10:31:17.100-05:00Stepping throughThere is a place not far from here, much closer than you might imagine, where there are no strangers, where the birds and the trees and the mountain and the wind are known by the names they call themselves—names spoken in a language without words, in a dialect older than the sun. <br />
<br />
There is a place nearby where each day is accepted without question as a gift of infinite value from a giver of infinite benevolence, a precious vessel to be filled to the point of overflowing with laughter and story and song and dance and breath and life, where thirst comes on strong with throbbing in the temples and cool water is always close at hand.<br />
<br />
There is a place where children play from sunup to sundown and yet have few toys, where school is in session all year long, but the humiliations of a classroom are unknown, where all living things are wise and patient teachers, where each day’s lesson reveals a new and marvelous world.<br />
<br />
There is a place just outside the fence where there are no fences or walls or enclosures of any kind, where the land freely caresses the horizon in the spaces between the hills and the sky bends down to carry your feet lightly along the path to the river where a lover waits with hopeful eyes.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-5257247750488028442016-04-13T07:51:00.000-05:002016-04-13T07:51:23.941-05:00Opening prayerThe meeting begins with a medieval ritual incantation meant to secure the attention of a bronze-age sky-dwelling war god, and then proceeds as if the agenda can be taken seriously from that point on. But it is taken seriously—and that’s the thing that really amazes me. I’ve been teaching at a Catholic college for almost two decades, so one would think I would be used to it by now. But it still catches me on occasion: the degree of psychological compartmentalization required to accommodate the absurdity of Christianity in an overhyped digital age that proclaims god is dead more loudly with each new technical innovation.<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-58053601885313397012016-04-12T09:43:00.000-05:002016-04-12T09:43:48.563-05:00Built atop a mountain of corpsesOne of the most nefarious facets of belief in progress is that it leads to a moral disengagement from the past. Progress erases the evils of previous iterations of Western civilization through an "ends justify the prior means" logic. <br />
<br />
Simple case in point: the genocide of Native Americans was not merely something that happened, it was <i>necessary</i> in order for the US to exist in its present form. Perhaps a simpler case in point: black slavery was not just a regrettable period in US history, it was <i>absolutely essential<i></i></i> to produce the present circumstances. <br />
<br />
And this is not just a theoretical exercise—it’s intimately personal. Rewind history to the year 1610, remove the slave trade, and then let history play forward again, and not only would the United States fail emerge in anything comparable to its present form, but neither you nor I would exist. Our personal presence on the planet is not independent of the entire history of events prior to our birth. <br />
<br />
"But that was then and this is now, and we shouldn’t dwell on things in the past that we cannot change." <br />
<br />
But the past has not gone anywhere. It is still with us this very instant, in all of its brutal ugliness, right now, whether or not we have the stomach to acknowledge it. We are all reaping the concrete benefits of eight millennia of genocide and war and slavery and torture and the immiseration of countless millions of humans and beyond countless billions of other beings. <br />
<br />
We all were born in sin. But with devout and unwavering faith in progress all of our sins are resolved.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-82347191800154196682016-04-11T10:06:00.001-05:002016-04-11T10:06:55.670-05:00This moment nowPrior to birth there was nothing. <br />
<br />
There were no nouns, no persons or places or things. Nor were there verbs, there were no events because there was nothing to be moved. There were no beginnings or endings to frame the present moment. There was no past or future tense. Nothingness itself was nonexistent because there was no opposing principle by which it could be made into an object of contemplation—even if we set aside the utter nonexistence of a contemplative being.<br />
<br />
There is little about this eternal state of prior nonbeing that seems personally threatening to me now. Why is that? Why am I able to calmly imagine an infinite expanse of time when I wasn’t? There is something about the present moment that renders my prior nonexistence irrelevant. I find myself in the present moment occupying a richly furnished dynamic state of being in a universe densely populated with nouns and verbs and tenses—most of which I have yet to discover and many of which I will never know. Contemplating the infinite temporal space prior to birth is little more than an intellectual exercise, the mapping of a mental rabbit hole. <br />
<br />
But things appear quite different when I turn my gaze the other direction. When the universe ends for me the same eternal absence-of-even-oblivion from which I emerged waits only to wrap me in its disintegrating, obliterating embrace. I die, but I can never <i>be dead.</i> Death is a feature of the living present moment. Death is a verb. There is no after-death in the first-person. In my mind I can project the universe beyond myself, but this is an illusion of objectivity. After this, there is nothing. Death leads us not just to an end of life, but to a complete annihilation of all that ever was, the universe itself, with its unfathomable substances and uncountable beings never existed. Life doesn’t come to an end with death. With death, life never happened to begin with. <br />
<br />
Yet here, now, in the present moment, it seems as if there is something worthy of my attention.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-35114009637646637052015-01-01T18:55:00.001-06:002015-01-01T18:55:24.069-06:00We love surveillance<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlmYHbg5i_w"><br />
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlmYHbg5i_w</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-64666150294315956282014-11-28T11:46:00.000-06:002014-11-28T11:46:21.095-06:00Power is not black and white, but police cars areA too narrow focus on the colors on the surface risks missing the fundamental issue.<br />
<br />
Please don’t get me wrong here. It is an empirical fact that African Americans have been pushed toward the lower regions of the power machine—and it’s the folks at the base of the pyramid who truly feel the crushing weight of the many parasitic (and increasingly light-skinned) layers perched their backs. But it is power that put them there and keeps them there because skin color makes for a convenient sorting strategy. Yes it matters that Michael Brown and Tamir Rice were black. But it wasn’t their skin color that killed them. <br />
<br />
Fundamentally, it’s not about race. It’s about power. It’s about safeguarding the fairytale narrative of authority. A badge is not merely symbolic. It is a magical talisman that converts the wearer from human being to servomechanism for power, an appliance of control, a conduit for the administration of overwhelming force to promote and preserve the myth that power is legitimate.<br />
<br />
Anyone who chooses to wear a badge needs to be fully aware that they are choosing to abandon their humanity to become whores to power, mindless plastic gears at the business end of a massive exploitation machine. And those of us (of all skin colors) who are still human beings who value our humanity will have no reason to treat you as anything other than disposable.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-78533398621824821922014-11-13T13:15:00.000-06:002014-11-13T13:15:51.577-06:00Pro-civ ill-logicPro-civ arguments frequently have the same form as arguments for the existence of god made by theologians who are also true believers: start with the conclusion you want, and then work backward to find ways to support it. <br />
<br />
The fact that humans are an adaptable species is sometimes used to dismiss the negative aspects of civilized life. The idea is that humans will eventually “evolve” in ways that make civilization a more suitable lifestyle. Unfortunately, evolution operates on a far broader timeframe than the lifecycle of a typical civilization. <br />
<br />
But human adaptability is irrelevant anyway when it comes to questions of how people should live. Plantation slaves “adapted” to hard labor—and the ones who adapted the best were able (allowed) to reproduce and thus provide additional slaves who, because they inherited their parent’s genes, were likely to be able to adapt to a laborious life themselves. But that’s hardly an argument for slavery.<br />
<br />
A related form of this argument is that although humans aren’t necessarily “meant” for civilized life, once it occurs we are adaptable enough to learn to live with it. It might not be the best way of life, but it works. What is invariably glossed over is that not all of us are living with it. Several people are being killed as a direct function of the normal operation of civilization even as I write this. <br />
<br />
Too bad for them, I guess. And I need to stress that killing people is part of what civilization does—all civilizations everywhere. <br />
<br />
Civilization most definitely doesn’t “work”—except in the short term for an increasingly small minority of elites. <br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-62544375027732139182014-11-04T19:32:00.000-06:002014-11-04T19:32:00.486-06:00Still looking for a hole in the fencePolar bears are not really white. Their skin is actually closer to black. And their fur has no pigment at all; its white appearance is due to light refraction. Polar bear hide has evolved to function as a solar collector: the individual hair fibers are clear and hollow, and act like fiber optic tubes that trap sunlight and channel warmth to the bear’s heat-absorbing skin. When polar bears are forced to live in zoos south of their arctic habitats, algae begins to grow in their hollow hair, and their pelt takes on a decidedly non-aesthetic yellowish brown color. During peak visitor season, zookeepers have been known to spray the bears with bleach because nobody wants to see a less-than-white polar bear. <br />
<br />
I have compared our civilized situation to that of confined animals on display in a strange sort of zoo where we act as both captive and keeper. Like the discolored captive polar bear, we are forced to accommodate an unnatural habitat and are disfigured by the mismatch. And like the bear, our keepers—that is, you and I—resort to superficial methods for concealing the resulting ugliness. But the ugliness is just a symptom, of course. The real problem, for us and for the bear, is captivity.<br />
<br />
But the zoo metaphor makes for a too rough analogy. For one thing, our enclosures are not limited to concrete walls and iron bars. Our enclosures are not mere physical structures designed to confine us to a circumscribed physical place. Instead they penetrate the very tissue of our thoughts and provide the structures that frame our experience. Our enclosures appear absolute; there is no outside. Also, because we are ultimately our own keepers, our self-confinement needs continuous, moment by moment renewal. This is accomplished through a steady diet of anxiety and fear. Fear serves as an ever-present reminder to keep to our assigned place in the bureaucratic order, and anxiety becomes our mantra of impotence. <br />
<br />
Both the fear and the anxiety are of our own design—we hold the keys to our cage. All we have to do is open the door and walk through. But first we have to find the door. And before we can do that we have to know that a door is possible, we have to recognize that there is a world outside after all.<br />
<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-77008856517368465752014-10-22T09:31:00.001-05:002014-10-22T09:31:22.802-05:00The counterfactual thinking trap: what if civilization wasn't?I had just finished cooking a stellar batch of sweet potato fries to use as a vehicle for testing my latest attempt at homemade ketchup. I walked the pot of still smoking-hot oil carefully down the back steps and out to the compost pile. I read somewhere that cooking oil shouldn’t be thrown into the compost because it can make the composting process less efficient by sealing off areas of the pile from air and water exposure.<br />
<br />
Fuck efficiency.<br />
<br />
I have two side-by-side four foot square “compost corrals” made by alternately stacking 4x4 pieces of heavy-duty oak pallet wood that my son-in-law brought home from a construction site. When the first one fills up, the contents are shoveled into the second, where they sit until the following spring when they are spread on the garden. It was late summer, the second corral had been sitting full for a couple months already and the first had a sizable start with yard debris from the last storm and the usual surfeit of kitchen scraps forming an amorphous damp mound in the center. <br />
<br />
I emptied the pot directly above the kitchen scrap mound and witnessed a holocaust beyond all reckoning. The hot oil instantly deep-fried the debris at the top of the pile, releasing a violent waft of steam accompanied by a satisfying sizzling sound. I was expecting that. But what I hadn’t anticipated was the number of living creatures that came pouring out from the moist earthy depths—a desperate and screaming mass of life, each wriggling, crawling, buzzing part expending every drop of itself in an attempt to escape an oily incineration. <br />
<br />
Compost is decayed organic matter. And a compost pile is a pile of organic matter in varying stages of decay. But, a compost pile is also a vibrant local ecosystem that includes all manner of invertebrate animal life, and in a moment of thoughtlessness I had committed an atrocity, the local effects of which will resonate for days. <br />
<br />
My initial surprise quickly turned to shocked remorse, and then to anger directed at my own lack of forethought. I should have known. <br />
<br />
“I should have known” is a form of counterfactual thinking. It assumes that the past could have happened differently than it did, that there are alternative courses for events that have already transpired—or at least that there were viable alternative courses open at the time. Counterfactual thinking is clearly an adaptive human capacity. To re-envision the past is in some sense to prepare for the future. By imagining alternative outcomes for past events, we enhance our ability to act should a similar situation arise later on. The problem comes when we treat the alternatives, clearly visible in hindsight, as if they were actual possibilities within the unique context of the passing moment. This particular problem with counterfactuals has several names, <i>regret</i> and <i>recrimination</i> being the most common.<br />
<br />
Civilization didn’t have to happen. After 100,000 generations of human experience, civilization intruded unexpectedly, a toxic anomaly. That it happened when it did, that it took the historical forms that it did, that you and I find ourselves in the present moment, wrapped in its cancerous embrace—all of this might not have been. But it did. And it is. And the past can’t be undone. We must live with the past as it ingratiates itself on the present. There is no choice.<br />
<br />
But the future always and forever remains an open sea of possibility.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-55372838351711466292014-10-15T08:58:00.000-05:002014-10-15T08:58:27.491-05:00Civilized futilitySisyphus was a deceitful and murderous Corinthian king in Greek mythology forced to spend all eternity in grueling and futile labor pushing a boulder over and over again up a steep hill only to have it roll away from him just before he gets to the top. The number and nature of Sisyphus’ evil deeds makes it difficult to feel sympathy for him. But his punishment is not meant as restitution for the nasty treatment of his fellow mortals. There are many versions of the particular chain of events leading to Sisyphus’ torturous repetitive predicament, but in each case he is being punished for more-or-less successful attempts to outsmart the gods. In one version of the tale, Sisyphus’ sentence was devised by Zeus specifically to demonstrate his own godly cleverness and send the message that Sisyphus, the wisest of human tricksters, wasn’t so smart after all.<br />
<br />
Mythological tales are not necessarily supposed to make logical sense, but there is something about Sisyphus’ afterlife activity that doesn’t make any sense at all. Why does he keep at it? What is it that compels him to continue to push the rock? Why doesn’t he simply refuse to go on, sit down with his back against the hill, prop his feet up on top of his boulder, and give the gods the extended middle finger? I mean, really, he’s already dead. What more can they do to him? Does he fear an even worse punishment if he refuses? Surely if there was a worse punishment, Zeus would have thought of it.<br />
<br />
Of course, they’re gods. They can conceivably deprive him of all choice in the matter and make his limbs move of their own accord. But if so, then Sisyphus is no longer purposefully engaged, and his actions lose their futility. Once his free choice has been usurped he is just along for the ride and the most punishing feature of his punishment has been rendered inert. It would make no difference whether he rolls an uncooperative rock up a hill or hauls heavy sacks of dirt—or works in a Nike shoe factory. The thing that makes the boulder punishment different from simple tedious labor, the thing that makes it uniquely punishing, is that he is intentionally slaving toward a goal that he continually almost but not quite achieves. <br />
<br />
The writer and philosopher, Albert Camus, suggested that there might be more to Sisyphus’ circumstances than meets the eye. The tale is always told with an emphasis on the upward leg of Sisyphus’ hillside round trip. But the climb up is only half the journey. The other half is spent traveling burden free, and one might imagine in a leisurely fashion, downhill. In this, Sisyphus’ fate is not so different from normal civilized life: struggle toward largely futile goals interspersed with periods of respite. Could it be that Sisyphus managed to outsmart the gods yet again? <br />
<br />
But let’s return to the idea of futility, to the notion that there is something distinctly different about purposeful effort directed at an unachievable goal as opposed to forced labor, and to the question of what keeps Sisyphus—and you and me—from simply setting the rock aside and refusing to continue. <br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-33519380533843483372014-09-19T12:36:00.005-05:002014-09-19T12:36:58.705-05:00The hole: A children's storySuppose one day a small group of people got together and decided that digging a hole in the ground would be an interesting way to pass the time. There was no reason that they should choose digging a hole over any other activity, say, building a treehouse or carving pornographic images on rocks. Digging a hole just happened to be what seemed fitting to this particular group of people on this particular day. Suppose that after they had been digging a while, other folks came around and joined in the fun, and pretty soon there was a substantial hole in the ground, large enough for several people to be digging at once. <br />
<br />
And the hole got deeper and deeper.<br />
<br />
It didn’t take long before the hole was so deep that it was impossible to toss any more dirt out without it falling back in. At this point it was also getting pretty difficult to pull people back to the surface, and most of the folks stopped digging and said “Well, that’s obviously as far as we can go.” But then someone came up with a clever idea. By tying a basket to a length of rope, people on the surface could drop the basket into the hole, people in the hole could fill the basket with dirt, and the people on the surface could pull the basket up, empty it, and then send it back down for another load. Then someone else came up with the creative idea of tying two lengths of rope together at regular intervals to make a ladder that would allow people to climb easily in and out of the hole, and the people started digging once more. <br />
<br />
And the hole got deeper and deeper.<br />
<br />
The hole got so deep that it became hard for the people digging at the bottom to see what they were doing, and so they stopped digging, and said, “Well, that’s obviously as far as we can go.” But then, someone came up with a clever idea. By rolling beeswax around a string, they made a device that could be burned to provide light sufficient to dig by, and the people started digging once more, by candlelight.<br />
<br />
And the hole got deeper and deeper. <br />
<br />
After a while, the people digging at the bottom of the hole and the people pulling baskets of dirt to the surface got too tired to continue, and so they stopped digging and pulling, and said, “Well that’s obviously as far as we can go.” But then someone came up with a clever idea. By this point the excavation project had attracted a lot of attention, and there were several people just standing around watching. Some of the spectators could take the place of the diggers and pullers. And when they got tired, other spectators could take over for them. A few of the spectators were persuaded to climb into the hole and dig, and a few others were convinced to pull and empty baskets of dirt.<br />
<br />
And the hole got deeper and deeper.<br />
<br />
Days passed, and the excavation project became the only subject of conversation. “How deep is it today?” they asked each other. “How deep do you think it can go?” Soon everyone was involved. Everyone was expected to spend part of their day digging and part of their day pulling. Those who were too feeble to dig or pull were expected to make candles or weave rope and baskets.<br />
<br />
And the hole got deeper and deeper.<br />
<br />
Then, one day tragedy struck. A torrent of water from a surprise rainstorm collapsed part of the hole and buried a group of diggers, killing them all. After the bodies were retrieved, family members of the dead diggers grieved and lamented, “Well, that’s obviously as far as we can go.” But then someone came up with a clever idea. Dying as a digger was a truly praiseworthy end. Such a sacrifice simply cannot go unrewarded. Surely there is an inestimable reward in the afterlife for diggers who meet such a fate. And the people agreed. And a shrine was built in their honor.<br />
<br />
And the hole got deeper and deeper.<br />
<br />
More days passed, and the hole become so deep that the air at the bottom was hot and hard to breathe, and even a few hours of digging became difficult to endure. And the pullers had to pull so long to raise a basket that their hands became blistered and sore. And they stopped digging and pulling and said, “Well, that’s obviously as far as we can go.” But then someone came up with a clever idea. A person who refuses to act of their own accord, can be convinced to act if they have to in order to survive. And so the community elders made it a law that an able bodied person could not have access to food or shelter or partake in any pleasurable community activities until they spent the expected amount of time digging and pulling. Those who were not so able bodied were still required to make candles and weave rope and baskets, but now according to law they could not eat until they met their candle or basket quota. <br />
<br />
And the hole got deeper and deeper. <br />
<br />
Then one day, a group of pullers decided that they had had enough, dropped their ropes, and left the town for the forest where they could hunt and collect their own food and live life in peace without having to work on the stupid hole. Soon several diggers, candle makers, and weavers joined them. And a few of the community elders said, “Well, that’s obviously as far as we can go.” But then someone came up with a clever idea. Since the people who fled to the forest broke the law, they have forfeited their rights to equal consideration in the community. A posse was formed and the defectors in the forest were rounded up, fitted with shackles, and forced to work on the hole at the end of a whip.<br />
<br />
And the hole got deeper and deeper. <br />
<br />
But the shackles and whippings made the workers clumsy and inefficient. Work on the hole began to slow to a crawl. Some in the community became uncomfortable with the cruel treatment of the workers and others started to question why there needed to be a hole in the first place. For a brief time, it looked like the entire hole-digging enterprise would collapse. But then someone got a clever idea. Children could be taught from an early age that hole-digging is the greatest of aspirations. What they learn as children will carry forward as adults, and shackles or whips will rarely be needed because the idea of doing something other than working on the hole will be unthinkable for most people, and anyone who would turn their back on the hole would become a pariah and considered an abomination. A program of compulsory education was developed and implemented. The children grew up with internalized whips and shackles, and eagerly joined the ranks of diggers, pullers, candle makers, and weavers. <br />
<br />
And the hole got deeper and deeper. <br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2476448220554805209.post-23358153851620146102014-09-02T08:13:00.000-05:002014-09-02T08:13:36.613-05:00Social ecology and the techno trapCorin Bruce penned <a href="http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2014083000130190">a nice essay</a> providing a cogent definition of green anarchism and situating green anarchism in relation to other anarchist perspectives. All forms of anarchism share a fundamental antagonism toward hierarchy. For classical anarchism, oppressive subordination to the bureaucratic state was the target. For more recent forms of “social anarchism,” the target has broadened to include all potentially oppressive hierarchical relations among people, including those based on race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Social anarchism holds that all relations should be fundamentally egalitarian. Green anarchism takes the logical next step and applies this principle to the nonhuman world as well. Green anarchism thus represents the most developed form of anarchist thinking, according to Bruce. <br />
<br />
Bruce then describes a variant of green anarchism that has been called social ecology, which takes all of the ideals of social anarchism and extends them to all sentient beings. Domination is wrong whether the target is a human being, a domestic pig, or an old growth forest. <br />
<br />
So far so good. But then Bruce dismisses primitivism with a simple wave of the hand, and rows the boat right off the edge of the map. <br />
<br />
Social ecology is not anti-technology, Bruce cautions, and should not be confused with those muddle-headed primitivist anti-civilization critiques that—although they “certainly come infused with interesting anarchist currents”—apparently don’t fit within anarchism proper. Social ecology is a perspective that happily embraces “the most desirable aspects of modern society, such as its alleged focus on reason, science, and technology.”<br />
<br />
Wait a minute now, Corin. The problem for all anarchists is the oppressive operation of hierarchy. Social ecology extends this anti-hierarchy focus to the nonhuman world, and presumably rejects all forms of domestication. What is primitivism other than a call to adopt non-domestic lifestyles? But let’s take reason, science, and technology in order. <br />
<br />
Reason should not be a problem for any form of anarchism. Reason is not an invention of civilization. Nor is it limited to humans. Several other species clearly operate on their environment in rational ways. <br />
<br />
Science, too, at least in terms of core notions about the importance of systematic observation, was practiced by the very first humans. However, science as a category of civilized activity that includes the partitioning and sanctioning of authority and expertise is a paradigmatic application of hierarchy in the social world, and is plainly inconsistent with the ideals of social ecology. <br />
<br />
But it’s the tolerance of complex technology that makes social ecology—and all other non-primitivist anarchist perspectives—incoherent. Technology is the direct application of hierarchy. Hierarchy is the single dominant feature shared by all forms of technology, from the simple hand loom to the international corporation. If green anarchy—and more specifically, social ecology—rejects the subordination of the natural world though the application of hierarchy, then all forms of technology are potentially suspect, and anything much more complex than a hand loom is rendered off limits. <br />
<br />
In addition, and most importantly, it is simply not possible to have complex technology without the hierarchical subordination of human beings. This basic fact is what renders classical anarchism and all other forms of anarchism that limit their focus to economic considerations incoherent. An egalitarian sharing of control over the means of production turns to millimeter thin ice when it comes to questions about who gets to work in the coal mines. <br />
<br />
I think that Bruce is on the right track in terms of placing classical, social, and green versions of anarchism in order of progressive coherence. And I really like the idea that the increasing coherence of anarchist perspectives is tied to an increasingly generalized rejection of hierarchical relationships. But the dismissal of primitivism is clearly unjustifiable. By Bruce’s own logic, primitivism represents the most highly developed form of anarchist thought because it casts the broadest anti-hierarchy net and takes the rejection of hierarchy to its logical extreme. <br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2