Whose History?

"At bottom . . . we are faced with an alternative: either we suppose a real that is entirely permeable to history (to meaning, to the idea, to interpretation, to decision) and we ideologize or, by contrast, we suppose a real that is ultimately impenetrable and irreducible and in that case we poetize."

-Jean Baudrillard, from the intelligence of evil of the lucidity pact

I wasn't sure where to put this post, originally - it could have gone to the Surrational Rhetoric page and been about the fictionalization of an already fictional real recognized as such (the latter part of the quote from Baudrillard), or it could be here. So here it is, and as a result it will have more to do with ideology.

Things happen. Whether or not they are worth remembering is another matter altogether - an importance we imbue on them, conciously or otherwise. For instance: the life of a tree. Not really worth remembering, apart from the oxygen it provides for us to breath. But why not? It is part of the human condition in contemporary times that we imagine ourselves as apart - individual, atomized - as individuals, as cultures, as a species. Parallel to the idea of individuality, then, another one becomes pressing: that of identity. Without the notion of identity, there would be no way to speak about individuals since identity allows for a difference to be posited.

So we have histories. We have individual life histories, the histories of countries, the histories of cultures and subcultures, the history of the planet, of the solar system, of the galaxy, of the universe itself. Why do we have all this? Simply put: to figure out who the fuck we are. Then there are those who would like to tell us just that, and this is ideology. The mass media has for a long time had a large hand in manipulating minds, creating ideology by controlling history - or the portrayal of it - as it happens. With the explosion of internet usage this manipulation has slowed, or declined, or something - but I won't make any judgments on the actual value or what-have-you of the internet, since I'm still making up my mind.

-the ambassador

So I was watching a little television earlier today and saw this creepy commercial for the new Palm Pre - I think it fits quite well with the theme of my last post:

Masks and Markets

Michel Foucault, again in The Birth of Biopolitics, says that "the art of government . . . which has now become the program of most governments in capitalist countries . . . involves, on the contrary, obtaining a society that is not orientated towards the commodity and the uniformity of the commodity, but towards the multiplicity and differentiation of enterprises." This, I think, helps to clarify some of what I wrote in my previous post on human capital. It is not that the education system promotes uniformity and conformity in the development of human capital - instead, the genius of it springs from the "multiplicity and differentiation" that Foucault mentions.

The logical course that this differentiation follows would, I believe, flow down to the level of the individual. Enterprises may very well be - and are spoken of most highly when they are - individual enterprises.

Although this was probably not in the minds of those who developed the neo-liberal governmentality, the idea of differentiation at the level of the individual matches up quite well with an idea we can see in Lacan's psychoanalytic theory. This idea is that of the "decentered subject." In The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Zizek writes that "'Decentrement' thus first designates . . . the undecidability as to where my true point is, in my 'real' self or in my external mask . . ." This ambiguity, then, allows for the very differentiation within the individual that meshes so well with the neo-liberal project. It is precisely because we can slide between identifications - because, as Zizek writes, "the very process of shifting among multiple identifications presupposes a kind of empty band which makes the leap from one identity to another possible . . ." - that we are able to project the identification which makes us most "valuable" in the moment.

This shifting from one identity to another can be seen fairly clearly online. Subjects have multiple email accounts, multiple accounts on social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Friendster), and, subsequently, slightly different identities for each. What we see, then, is a diffraction of subjectivity at an individual level. Since it is impossible - or nearly, at any rate - to pinpoint exactly who our "real" selves are, it becomes easier (and the virtual world online facilitates this) to assume different masks in different situations.

To bring it back to Foucault, he posits that neo-liberal govermentality attempts - through constant intervention on the "conditions" of society - to bring every facet of life under the regulation of the market. My "added value" to his idea is this: we assume different identities, different masks, in different markets. With the proliferation of these markets into more facets of life, we must create and take on more masks - and it is the void of our subjectivity that allows this governmentality to proceed as it does.

-the ambassador

The Education of Capital

Something of an idea (which I'm certain has been voiced before, but which I'd like to echo here) came to me while I was reading a series of lectures given in 1979 by Michel Foucault, called The Birth of Biopolitics.

The idea was this: government, at least in the contemporary United States, has the majority of its populace seeking not to accumulate capital - as every good free market economist will tell you is the very point of life itself - but to become and develop as (human) capital. This constant struggle to increase the value of a body helps to minimally obscure, or at least marginally distract from, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the minority.

This is, of course, done in a number of ways. One method occurs through the education system. Noam Chomsky, for one, calls education a system of "imposed ignorance." It seems to me that throughout our primary education here in the U.S. of A. we are taught precisely how not to learn. We are taught to regurgitate conventional truths about the history of America - like the idea that we, as a country, are benevolent, or that the doctrine of Manifest Destiny ended way back in the nineteenth century. It did not: it was simply repackaged as a number of different doctrines along the way, all of them as presumptuous and arrogant as the rest. Most recently it was the Project for a New American Century - a doctrine written by the brains behind Bush the Second's regime, and the justification, for them, of the illegitimate war in Iraq. But I digress.

If we're lucky, in colleges we are actually taught how to learn - and how to analyze and criticize the things we do learn. But again, these cases are rare. Most college educations are simply a continuation of the indoctrination experienced from early on in life.

There is clearly much more to this than I've gone into here, but it's 8:45 in the morning and I'm hungover, so this will have to do for now. The coffee's done.

-the ambassador

Begining an Idea of Anthropocentric Holism

What in nature warrants our moral consideration and what does not? How do we balance our dependence on the natural world and the respect that we seem to believe it deserves? There are questions concerning what aspects of nature must be taken into consideration and what aspects do not. It may seem evident that any sentient being, at least, is deserving of moral consideration and that there is no need to stretch our ethical standards beyond creatures that can feel pain or have some notion of what life is. An environmental ethics discussion should not necessarily begin with trying to decide what has intrinsic value or what should be afforded moral consideration. We do not need to think of everything in the world being either valuable or not. It is all part of the natural world. Therefore instead of categorizing what is in the natural world, we should just attempt to follow ethics that will protect the world as a whole. Aldo Leopold had a holistic perspective of environmental ethics. It is through an idea of holism that I am going to attempt to show that everything is one working system and that it should all be taken care, if we must think of moral considerations then we should just think of the world as a whole system in need of moral consideration.
Seeing as I am a person and will be writing for other people, I am going to take the Andrew Light approach to writing about environmental ethics – that is I will look at things in an anthropocentric light. I will look at human activities and the way they affect the environment and how if people accept a holistic perspective then the damage we do to the earth may be reduced. Perhaps we can call this anthropocentric holism, even if that may seem like an oxymoron at face value.
It has been argued by Peter Singer that it would be enough to extend our current moral values to include all sentient beings. He claims that by doing this, and having a deeper concern for future generations, we would see that it is in the best interest of all sentient beings and all future generations to preserve certain aspects of nature. This standpoint relies on the assumption that future generations will appreciate nature the way we do. It also relies on our current ethical standards.
Forming a system of moral values based on our current values won’t do, as Don Marietta points out in his book For People and the Planet, many current environmental philosophers do not see an extension of current ethics suitable for the situation we are in. There must be a kind of over haul and rethinking of ethics, not as we know them, but a complete rewrite from scratch, if that is possible.
Aldo Leopold suggests a new way of thinking about the environment and our relationship to the natural world. He calls for a holistic perspective on the biosphere, which he describes as a complex system that is misunderstood by society. He describes the world as circuits of energy or a land community. The idea of a community immediately brings with it ideas of union, dependence and a balance of give and take. We have community watches to keep our neighborhoods safe, community fairs to bring us together and share a good time and community meetings to help figure out what needs to be done to better the community. All of these ideas of helping the community stop where humanity stops. Sometimes these community meetings may decide to have a “community clean up the park day” which is a lot like what Singer calls for in that it cares for the environment but only in so far as people are considered and will benefit from the aesthetic pleasures of going to a clean park. Leopold suggests that we have to include the park and nature as a whole as part of our community and take care of it for its own sake.
In important part of the community is the idea of balance between giving and taking. For example we give time and money (in the form or physical volunteering to clean parks and taxes) in order to have a park for all members of our community to use. If we expand our community to include the environment we should be able to find a workable system of give and take. If we need to build a house, we can cut down the necessary trees for the lumber, but then we should have to replant them. We should also only take what is absolutely necessary. The man who hunts for sport is certainly participating in a questionable activity, but the person who hunts for food, like African tribesmen, is doing only what is essential for him to live, the same way the animal he kills would have killed another animal in order to live.
In an earlier draft I proposed an idea that what is best for one aspect of the community is best for the community at large. It was brought to my attention that this can’t really be true. Like the tribesman who kills an animal for food, that is good for the mans family, but clearly bad for the animal. Or, for example (to keep consistent with anthropocentrism) a tax on every resident of a school district that pays for a high school basketball team does not seem fair for the resident whose child wants to participate in theater or oil painting. There would clearly be conflictions in what is best for anybody. However, the example used was what is best for humans may not be best for mosquitoes. I want to elaborate on this idea for the next paragraph or so.
At face value, this seems credible. Certainly we can use pesticides (as we do) that are air born and called “adulticides” to kill living adult mosquitoes that carry West Nile Virus. We also have the option of putting pesticides in water to kill the larvae.
Pesticides that kill mosquitoes appear good for humans and bad for mosquitoes, especially the somewhat innocent ones that carry no disease. However, according to a report released in August 2002 by the Citizens Campaign for the Environment and The Citizens Environmental Research Institute, most, if not all of the pesticides currently being used in New York are harmful to humans and other species of animals. Pesticides such as Scourge, Anvil, Permethrin and Malathion have been linked to cancer and nervous system problems in humans as well as increased asthma cases and allergic reactions. Other aquatic pesticides kill or make ill aquatic animals, perhaps the very ones we will eventually eat.
This pesticide issue should show that sometimes what is good for humans and bad for mosquitoes is in fact bad for both. I do not mean to advocate for letting mosquitoes run rampant, surely they annoy me all summer as much as the next person, but this idea that what is good for one and bad for the other may have unforeseen consequences.
You may say that this does not answer the idea that there are still conflicts. It just shows that there is a negative affect for humans by the use of pesticides. Sure. However, if we were to not bother trying to kill all the mosquitoes in the world (certainly holism would tell us to leave the mosquitoes alone), perhaps the rate of cancer would not be continuously increasing.
There are other, perhaps more obvious, reasons to consider adopting a holistic perspective as well. These include industrial farming, automobiles and the extinction (or near extinction) of wolves in Yellowstone Park.
Industrial farming is exploitative of both land and animals. We over farm what was fertile land in the Mid West to grow corn to feed cows in CAFOs also in the Mid West, which are then transported across the country and across the world. Michael Pollan details the amount of fossil fuels used by industrial farming, from the transportation of it, right down the fuel used to make nitrogen which farmers fertilize their fields with. This practice affects the animals and land involved the atmosphere and the quality of food on our plates. We now eat meat that has been grown far too quickly thanks to hormones and grown on the sweet sugars of corn which should have been grasses that would have been digested slowly in the bovine seven stomachs. Instead the cows suffer stomach aches due to the production of acids that are not needed to digest the simple sugars of the corn meal they are fed.
Automobiles are a pretty simple example compared to industrial farming. We make cars that are not fuel efficient and we buy new ones every three or four years. This is killing the atmosphere sucking dry whatever oil reserves there are left and creating much more waste than there should be. Where do the parts of a car go when we are done with it? Sure some of it is reused in next years model, but first we must melt the metal (using fossil fuels) and the rest, all the plastic, is most likely thrown in a hole in the ground or seen floating in the wasteland recently discovered in the Pacific Ocean.
The example of gray wolves being hunted to extinction in Yellowstone Park may be the easiest way to see how human actions have affects on many parts of the natural environment. Humans hunted wolves because the wolves wreaked havoc on cattle ranchers. The extinction of wolves then seemed like a fine idea for the economic and business practices of the ranchers. However when the wolf population disappeared, the elk population sky rocketed because wolves are the main predator in the area. That led to a drastic decrease, almost extinction, in vegetation life near rivers and creeks because there were more elk eating the plants. When wolves were reintroduced to the habitat a few years ago, scientists observed an increase in vegetation in the areas where certain ferns had almost gone extinct.
The problem now is that we see all of these activities from an economic point of view, a very parochial form of anthropocentrism. If we want to continue being able to farm and travel and look at the wonders of Yellowstone Park, we have to consider them all a part of our world community. It is not much different than talking about other nation’s people being a part of our world community. We do not say people in one place should be morally considered because they can read and write and therefore know whether they are being taken into account. We simply accept all people from all nations as people, part of our world community.
It is hard to make an argument to prove that all life forms have their own intrinsic value and therefore should be cultivated and cared for. That is why holism should be adopted as a new societal perspective. If we all saw the biosphere as one large, complex system, we would see the importance of trying to maintain “stability of the ecosphere.” (Marietta, pp. 47)
There is still the issue that to live here as humans, we are going to need to use some resources, we will always need shelter, transportation and farming. So when is it alright to use these resources? Can we use them without really harming the natural world?
Certainly we can. If we adopt small farming practices, like so many “Eat Local” campaigns are trying to do or invest in new more fuel efficient modes of travel, and travel only when we need to.
Peter Singer may claim that raising cows for food is altogether wrong and should not be done even if we are treating them right. I think the idea of giving and taking as a community would support the idea of farming. It is not exploitation, it is use. In return for the use of animals and the rest of the natural world, we have to give respect to the land. We have to cultivate the forest by letting them grow naturally and by not over hunting or over farming. Holism and accepting that we are all part of the same system is the first step toward real results that will allow humans to live at least similarly to the way we live now and allow the natural world to flourish as it should.

-the colonel

Ecological Integration

It occurred to me that perhaps I could frame the colonel's argument in a different manner: that of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The project is immense and I won't pretend that I can add anything of any importance, but the least I can do is put my two cents into the conversation.

What the colonel is trying to do is reconstruct the way we relate to the environment. It is an attempt to integrate the environment and ecology into our symbolic orders in a new way. The symbolic order refers to the network of symbols that allows us to make sense of the world around us. It is, in effect, language. That being said, with the rise of language there came a divide between "the real" and "reality." The real is formless, nameless. Reality, on the other hand, is seen through the symbolic order and so becomes . . . well, ordered. It is the symbolic order that allows us to interact with each other, to give meaning to otherwise coincidental events, and so on.

The colonel's aim, then, is to integrate the environment into the symbolic order in such a way that it takes on a totally different meaning - and more importantly, how our actions affect it (and, in turn, affect all of us) means something different too. We (as a country, as a planet, whatever) have made some strides in trying to do this already - but I question how serious it is. Buying a hybrid is not "doing your part." Buying green helps, but it can't be the end. Instead of simply "acting green," perhaps we should simply be green. I won't say that I know where the colonel's project will take him, but I will say this: once we realize that we are not separate from nature (as the colonel pointed out at the end of his last post), it becomes much easier to see why we shouldn't wreak havoc on the environment just because we can.

-the ambassador

Environmental Ethics: I

I will start my meditations with an attempt to summarize what has been said time and again about the origins of our current attitude toward nature. That which is to say that nature and its resources are by in large their for our use, and as Don Marietta points out in his book For People and The Planet for us to use the resources provided man first assumes we must conquer nature. Which may be the assumed view, but I do not think we must conquer nature to use its resources (I think we must use natural resources to live) we just must work with nature, more on those thought will come later.

Lynn White did a great job of tracing this idea of man being above nature and conquering nature back to the book Genisis in the Bible. It is the story of creation when God tells Adam that he has created all the fish in the sea and the animals on the land for Adam to name and conquer. White suggests that this passage (which I have very roughly summarized) has God telling us that we are somehow above animals and that it is our duty to rein over them.

This creates many questions in my mind. I'm not religious, but I am going to have to defend the Bible here. Lynn simply misinterpretted what Genisis is saying. God does not want us to harm nature by using it, instead he wants us to be more of a steward, to look after the animals and plants around us. I also wonder about this assessment because, now, we all know that animals came before us along the evolutionary chain. So I think there is too much emphasis put on this passage.

What I am trying to say is that, it is not the Bible, it is the way in which people have interpretted the Bible. The same way people have been going to war for centuries in the name of God or Allah or whatever religion they might deem favorable. It is so interesting how men through the ages have beleived that some god "is on our side." If there is any god, I doubt he gives a hoot about who wins a war, there seem to be bigger problems in the universe.

One thing is for certain, humans have beleived that they are somehow apart-from-nature for far too long. This is where I wish to start my meditating on the subject. I am not concerned with why or how this idea of man-apart-from-nature came from, dwelling on the past is no way to move forward. Instead we must assume that we have not been a part of this anthropocentric view that has dominated our intellect in the past.

We have to avoid this because there have certainly been other views throughout history as well. For whatever reason, the apart from nature view has gained the most acceptance. Consider the societies of North America before the Europeans settles. Many Native American tribes had a very deep respect for nature as a part of their livelihood. We can also look at ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean cultures (as Marietta points out) that had mostly nature centered paganist religions. So it seems a futile effort to try to find the source of why things are the way they are, they just are and something needs to be done.

We must try to see ourselves as a part of nature, which is more of an intricate system of give and take, we are biologically 98% identical to an ape - why do we think ther is any reason we should conquer that ape and its inhabitat?

I have class soon, but more is to come.
-the colonel