STAN: Conquest: n., The act or process of conquering, or acquiring by force; the act of overcoming or subduing opposition by force, whether physical or moral; subjection; subjugation; victory.

But there is still some intrinsic sense of a very biologically/brain structure driven lust for money (money being a substitute perhaps) that I see as an essential part of the background in the behavior of individuals on various levels; and collectively. I can’t explain this. It’s more of a feeling and perhaps shouldn’t be discussed here. But I have watched folks that seem to care mostly about money move. One can feel the design of their thinking. Wait a minute, guess I just got back to Chicken or the Egg with that. Will try harder next time.

This caring labor goes beyond the household to schools, hospitals and nursing homes, et al. Again, women predominantly do the caring labor in these locations as well in our society.

However, this is _not_ in women’s genes. It is culturally determined, though this cultural pattern may have grown out of an analogy or continuation of the biological fact that only women can get pregnant, and “make” people in their pregnacies.

Subjects are made in caring labor. Objects are made in productive labor.

Wisdom can be distinguished from objectifying knowledge (sapientia from scientia) by its ability to manifest itself beyond the cleavage of subject and object.

Jessica Benjamin suggests the same thing in her exposition of an intersubjective psychological theory that tries to answer the whys of dominaton. Martin Buber when he wrote about “I and Thou” as opposed to I and it.” Merchant and Mies on the Nature=Woman=Colony domination meme. Here’s Audrey’s three-and-a-half-minute video on that again.

The topic is not new; but it keeps coming up. Dr. Wirzba’s identification of “blueprint” thinking with this abstraction is particularly interesting and helpful. I would also suggest that this tendency to reach for an abstract “blueprint” is decidedly male. When the polis was separated from the household, abstraction attached itself to the former and relational thinking attached itself to the latter. So the valorizaton of women in the coming period — as relational thinkers — is not what Benjamin calls the “reactive valorization of femininity,” as in magical thinking about some Sacred Feminine essence, but a historically-determined reflection of this division between polis and household.

Now the polis is self-destructing because of what it left behind at the house. The reintegration of the political with the relational is a crucial project: a process, not a blueprint.

And “desecrate” is a fine term here, imo. The opposite of consecrate (to put with the sacred).

I’d like to add…
I think “desecrated” might be a good term, Stan, as a reference to both the land and the people redirected into an abstract lifeway from the time of childhood. Shopping at the store for food, flushing the waste off to who knows where. The desecrated then desecrate further because of their wrongheaded ways. The professor and author Jack Forbes calls this “Wetiko disease”, or cannibalism. His book “Columbus and Other Cannibals” is very hard to find, but might be available through interlibrary loan. It is invaluable. Your work is so neccessary and appreciated by me. Thanks Stan.

Growth is a euphemism, a fairly recent one at that, to make it more anodyne for a culture that still claimed through its dominant systems of religion to stand with the weak and victimized (then someone like John Brown shows up and take his religion seriously). In olden days, those in power were straightforward in calling “growth” expansion and conquest. The Brits started that insidious equivocating when they talked about “the white man’s burden to civilize the darker races,” as a rationalization for mass murder and plunder. Now, since racism has been called out in the public square, a different, more sterile and abstract Idol was required: growth. Ask the person in the street what that means, and you’ll see how it operates as an unexplained axiom.

Behind that is what I’ll call the intersection of two major interacting/interchangeable metaphors that form the foundation of modernism’s episteme: woman-as-nature/nature-as-woman, and infection (or epidemic)/warfare. Chicken-and-egg question about which of the halves of these two interchangeable metaphor pairs comes first…but now you can call warfare the eradication of a pestilence or the eradication of life forms a form of warfare… you can call women chaotic nature to be dominated, or you can call nature a woman to be conquered.

That’s the background. And the epistemology did not appear out of our brain structures, but out of the minds and mouths of the most successfully consupiscient.

Our disenchantment is an outcome of our disembeddedness (de-localization). Our attachment to abstract and general (disembedded) “solutions” is a direct reflection of that lived experience and its corresponding episteme. That’s why it’s so hard to see. We are in it; it feels natural. That’s what Wirzba is saying — pretty obviously, I thought — when he says that with our “disaffection [disenchantment growing out of disembeddedness, and loss of the sense of the sacred] in the face of a valueless universe, we find fewer instances in which people deeply or responsibly love their bodies, their homes, or their habitats.”

Did anyone read what Wirzba is saying about “blueprints”? It is a very important point. Yet our first reaction to our crisis is to spin out blueprints… even when this is pointed out to us in the most explicit terms.

An earlier point, made here more than once, is that “civilization” is itself the core problem (pun intended). The core-periphery relation is inherently disembedding.

And I need to point out that the other subject that Wirzba takes on is love. We do have the capacity for love, but it cannot be abstracted without becoming meaningless. Anyone who has experienced deep love, for another, or for a place, knows that there is nothing selfish in it… it is the opposite of selfish, anti-concupiscience. Therein lies the redemptive hope.

A consumer-capitalist (and patriarchal!) society’s structure forces us to behave concupisciently, even forces us to work for the system. It’s no wonder we see the reflection of the system’s mandates in almost every individual. But anyone who has cared for small children and felt the deeply resonant sense of Now in the simpliest transendent moments — with no desire whatsoever to aggrandaize oneself, but “the desire to unite with, affirm, or love the other being” — has already seen the possibility of fulfillment through a moral and philosophical (read: reflective, caring, self-critical) life.

Wirzba’s thoughtful essay deserves to be considered for its main points: love and the destructive power of disenchantment (a concept that Hornborg emphasized as well).

Every professor, economist, human on the street, think tank rep., politician and “green energy advocate” who talks about “GROWTH” needs to be smacked down. But growth is the accepted model accepted by everything from churches to opportunists who see energy supply problems as an “opportunity.” Is the earth getting bigger? Does this system work? Lock yourself in your garage with a car running and see how sustainable that situation is. “Control” the populations of societies that burn the most if we are to go there. Don’t really want to go there. Actually, because of greed, sectors of those pops. regulate themselves because couples don’t want to limit there capacity for consumption and that “perfect american life.” In the US, immagration for obvious starving reasons makes up for that. Europe’s carbon footprint per captita is half that of the US. Is there room here for communication and improvement of the uses of extraordinary technology before they take the internet away from us and compartmentalize it into “Service Packages?” There is alot to discuss here. Re-Think GREED.

The overfarming by Romans was driven by the need to feed Rome itself’s urban (de-landed) population. This is spelled out in detail in a quite a few places, and I’d suggest A Green History of the World (Clive Ponting) for starters. The primary dynamic is not population; it’s a core-periphery relation. And it’s the core-periphery relation that creates the “population problem.”

I suppose it was the “pre-capitalist” indigenes that spread the plague of cotton and sugar across the continent to cut the trees and wreck the soil, then “opened the West” by slaughtering indigene foodstocks (Bison, eg). I suppose the Amazon rain forest that is disappearing now to grow cattle is part of that indigenous wreckage, too.

The greed of a well-to-do peasant cannot even begin to match the destructive power of a mediocre rentier capitalist who can use “general purpose money to trade tracts of rain forest for Coca-Cola.” All “greed” is not equal.

Before you come here and spout off, you’d be well-advised to at least take ten minutes to see if you are talking out of your behind.

The birth rate in the USA is 14/1000. In Bolivia, it’s 22.82/1000. Per capita energy use in the USA is 7794.8 kgoe. In Bolivia, it’s 503.8 kgoe.

Think about it. There’s still hope for you; but you have to give up being so white.