42 Comments

1. rootlesscosmo:

   I was diagnosed with lung cancer six years ago; I underwent chemotherapy and surgery, and here, as you see, I still am. That is to say that I owe my life directly to the achievements of medical science and molecular biology. Consequently when I read this

   That’s a very common question that is asked: Hasn’t science done a lot of good for the world? For the world? No. Show me how the world—the real, physical world, once filled with passenger pigeons, great auks, cod, tuna, salmon, sea mink, lions, great apes, migratory songbirds, forests—is a better place because of science.

   I can’t help concluding that Jensen’s foggy rambling about “the fundamental beingness of others” implies the very real non-beingness of me. He’s welcome to consider me dispensable, of course, but I don’t think I can be expected to nod agreement. Indeed if it came down to a choice between, say, a mosquito and this:

   Personally, I think she’s fairly cute, and if I’m going to do the objectifying rating of women thing, scores easily a six or more on a scale of one to ten

   I rather think the mosquito might be spared.

   31 October 2009, 12:51 am

2. Stan:

   DeeJay’s perspective that civilization is at the root of the problem is profound, though I’d temper that thought by replacing the notion of civilization with urbanization, a recurrent problem in the economics of inequality and enclosure for several millennia, and also – as Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World shows – the impetus for biome-destroying extraction of resources… a tendency that went global with the advent of hydrocarbon capitalism… including the experiments in state socialism that were always still contained within that capitalist world system, and always committed to Promethian techno-optimism as earnestly as any capitalist state.

   It is, however, a perspective that is – like other modern and liberal perspectives – a view from everywhere and nowhere. That’s how DeeJay – and other ecologic radicals – can overwhelm the argument with the very real species losses, eg, in the wake of the expansion and generalization of commodification. It’s also how they can overlook or dismiss rootless’ point that we are inevitably in the world we have inheritied, and our day-to-day existence, and sometimes personal survival, cannot be primarily mediated through the everywhere-nowhere perspective. I’m not dismissing that perspective, but saying that it’s good background intelligence, but shitty operational intelligence, to use a military analogy. It doesn’t contain a perspective that can be shared practically in any community except those based on ideological affinity.

   There is a fairly straight path – one created as it were by gravity, terrain and habit – between this disembodied perspective, once it is claimed as the only true perspective (often in tempo task terms), and advocacy of a form of lone-wolf politics that has no roots (sorry, cosmo, I know where your handle comes from) in the existing psyches, lives, and experiences of other communities, the vast majority of them in fact.

   There is a call to violence here, and it’s not particularly well concealed or intended to be. It’s very frustrating to watch the ongoing destruction of the biosphere for many of us, but the question always comes back to – individually and collectively – what is to be done? I would add to that a question that was abandoned by the political left, does the end justify the means? So there is a practical question, but a moral one too.

   The practical question is whether the planning direction advocated within the polemic will work, or whether it will backfire and strengthen the very forces that maintain the destructive status quo. The perspective from nowhere-everywhere takes no account of our collective consiousness on these matters, and handles that by decrying the situation, then pretending again that it doesn’t matter. Let’s just a few of us go blow something up.

   The moral question – for some just a question of collateral damage, but for myself a question about whether we will become like the authors of violence when we author our own – is subsumed in the tempo-task… one that I would contend will not work, because rootless’ response is going to be repeated millions of times, without even the critical filters that rootless brings to the conversation.

   Critically, we have to admit complexity, even the complexity that might undermine our polemics. In this case, the generalization that “science” is the problem, or “civilization,” are the root causes of our worst conditions. Humans committed ecocide before industrial capitalism, and did so often without understanding what they had done. One aspect of the late crises of the Roman empire was ecologic, part of an urbanization dynamic, and historians tend to overlook that to this day.

   And I’m glad rootless is around today. That’s not a testimonial for science, but a proclamation of friendship, even with a fella that I know only in cyberspace. I don’t see that perspective in these manifestos, but I posted DJ because I like him, too, and because he says provocative things that need saying in a Chomskian kind of direct way. One question I put critically is whether “the world, once filled with passenger pigeons, great auks, cod, tuna, salmon, sea mink, lions, great apes, migratory songbirds, forests,” is appreciated in this way by anything except the biped under indictment. Therein lies the hope, if only we can mobilize them for remedies. They don’t listen when one does nothing but indict and frighten them.

   31 October 2009, 7:22 am

3. rootlesscosmo:

   Thanks, Stan. I’d be seriously upset if you, whose judgment I respect, should give unqualified endorsement to the views Jensen expresses in that interview. And I have to admit that my personal outrage was so immediate and so strong that my own judgment may well be less than fair.

   All the same I think there’s something besides social unrootedness that’s flawed in Jensen’s argument. (I think there’s also a lot of careless thinking and beating up on straw men, but those are comparatively minor mistakes.) If you mix hostility to science with an idealized picture of “indigenous” people–a dubious category in itself–I think what you get is an updated version of Romanticism at its most pernicious: the cult of unreason and sentiment and a fuzzy notion called “Nature”, not so very far from Blood and Soil. The cruelty and destructiveness of modern industrial life repeatedly generate this critique, along with others; Romanticism has a long and in some ways admirable history. But it’s a bad–sometimes lethally bad–foundation for social action.

   31 October 2009, 9:43 am

4. Stan:

   It’s a discussion that needs having, because the powerful kernels of plain empirical truth in these arguments, and of some nearly-survivalist post-peakers, giving their point of view some credibility, especially when contrasted with the thin broth of establishment mystifications. But as with both these categories, that blend quite often in the same personnae, do claim a moral imperative, but the source of that imperative remains vague… and manipulable.

   Rather than plot a strategy of conflict answering conflict, there is still something to be said for (1) selflessness as ethos, and (2) exemplary (communal) lives that attempt, at minimum, to do no harm. “Do no harm,” is a big order. We haven’t tried it often enough in lieu of “strategy.”

   And for the record, I think DJ is a decent human being, a caring person, and a selfless person in as many respects as I can glean. The action paths for this line of thought are well-worn, however, as you point out. Science, as the Enemy in this narrative, is just as counterproductive the Science-as-God narrative embodied in the Promethian-Enlightenment outlook.

   We are on a pretty scientific medium here.

   31 October 2009, 2:29 pm

5. Frank:

   The notion that civilization–or urbanization–is the root cause of the current ongoing global ecological destruction is not profound, it is superficial. Human events are a function of mentalities. The seeds of the mentality that is currently destroying the planet, and which is now globalized, go back centuries. Fundamentally, as the American Indians have tried patiently to teach people, it amounts to a desacralization of both human beings and the universe in which they are embedded. This is not poetry–except for ignorant and “sophisticated” moderns.

   For a good overview of the history and the philosophy, see for example: “Man and Nature: the Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man,” by S.H. Nasr.

   31 October 2009, 2:58 pm

6. Chris Schmidgall:

   My father was recently diagnosed with Lymphoma. While I am glad that science has improved the drugs he must use I am not so sure that Science and Civilization don’t bear some responsibility for the cancer itself.

   31 October 2009, 6:36 pm

7. Chris Schmidgall:

   By the way, I am very glad to hear that you’re treatment has been successful rootlesscosmo.

   31 October 2009, 6:38 pm

8. any67ways:

   Have either of you (stan & rc) read Danial Quinn – specifically his Books – Ishmael & The Story of B

   *** spoilers *** sorry stan I know you moderate

   He talks about the difference between indigenous & civilized cultures. He names them leavers & takers. He suggests that the taker culture which is all of civilization (east & west) is really based on what he calls ‘totalitarian agriculture’.

   Totalitarian agriculture breaks the law of limited competition (a phrase he coined).
   The law of limited competition goes something like this.
   You may compete to the full extent of your ability, but you may not hunt your competitors for the sake of removing them as competitors, nor may you systematically destroy your competitors food to make room for your own. Humans are the only species that do this, moreover civilized humans only do this, not non-civilized.

   from wiki:
   The people of our culture established a style of agriculture that Quinn labels as “Totalitarian Agriculture.” Prehistoric hunters and gatherers hunted according to a worldview that promoted coexistence and competition between predator and prey. However, the totalitarian agriculturist, operates with the worldview that the world is theirs to control and all the food in the world is theirs to produce and eat. Totalitarian agriculturists, while originally representing a single society, eventually began to overrun other societies as their food supply and populations grew. World population began to double, first taking 2000 years; then taking 1600 years; and eventually only taking 200 years between 1700-1900 AD; then again between 1900-1960 AD; and yet again between 1960-1996 AD. Over the last 10,000 years, this single society has expanded to include 99.8% of the world’s population.

   31 October 2009, 10:00 pm

9. Stan:

   I’d like to talk about why so many Americans, steeped in Judeo-Christian ideology, are attracted to catastrophism in the first place. It seems to me the underlying ideology is ultimately passive, it takes the world out of our control because it’s all going to end and there’s nothing we can do. But things continue on, and that’s a much more difficult problem to deal with.

   I think here of Derrick Jensen, who seems to witness the first signs of extreme environmental destruction around him and therefore prophesies the end of civilization. Would that it were that simple! In fact, societies tend to survive catastrophe and persevere, though the result may not be pretty or comfortable.

   IB: Again, no one is saying that we aren’t facing serious, extremely grave problems. What we are questioning is the millenarianism, the endism, you could call it, which is only part of a general ideology of “catastrophism”. This is the idea that the human drama is played out on a finite terrestrial stage. There is an abrupt beginning and an abrupt end, the whole affair lasting in one version just six thousand years. Darwin had to abandon his Christian catastrophism and for that he depended upon the great geologist Lyell who posited the very unbiblical idea of “deep time”, and immensely slow, gradual, change. Since Darwin’s time, for a hundred a fifty years or so, the predominant view in science has been gradualism.

   The politics of gradualism are very important here. Conservative in many ways, and certainly non-revolutionary. a Darwinian world is a natural meritocracy, in which of course only the…

   FULL

   1 November 2009, 7:04 am

10. rootlesscosmo:

    The Boal-Martinez exchange is very interesting–thanks for linking to it. A couple of comments: as I understand Marx, he accepts the existence of Malthusian scarcity but makes it historical, rather than universal; in his view, “carrying capacity” never exists outside a particular social organization and a particular level of technique, which implies that under another type of organization–even, perhaps, without major advances in technique–scarcity can be transcended. This is sketched (though never explained in detail) in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, which contrasts the first post-revolutionary system–distribution according to labor, i.e. a means of coping with scarcity–to the second, Communist” phase, where “the springs of wealth will flow more abundantly” and social wealth can be distributed according to need, scarcity itself having been abolished. One recent commentator has suggested boldly that these few paragraphs were actually meant as a parody of the Lassalleans, who were still an influential current in German Social-Democracy as of 1875; it’s an interesting idea but I have trouble believing no one saw through the satiric disguise before now. However that may be, there’s a serious contradiction, I think, between this vague description of a post-abundance, classless (and hence class-struggle-free) society and Marx’s earlier, more dialectical view that the satisfaction of one need through social production must inevitably entail the production of new needs; if this is true, then the springs of wealth can never flow abundantly enough to satisfy all needs, and existential scarcity–not just historical scarcity–will be a feature of human life forever. Extending the Malthus-Darwin link a little further, then, “catastrophes”–in social terms, more or less violent replacements of one type of social organization by by another–are perfectly compatible with a model of evolutionary change by selection under competition for scarce resources, with room both for innovations of technique the analog of random mutations and genetic drift) and for gradual adaptation to new conditions. (Darwin’s model is more nuanced than Marx’s, I think, because it allows for a much wider divergence of species, while Marx insists on slotting every concrete human society into one or another of a very few “modes of production.”) So I think Boal’s argument shares with some of Marx’s ideas the notion that economics isn’t the history of absolute scarcity but of specific scarcities and specific ways of coping with them, so that both Malthus’ absolute scarcity and the vague “communism” of Marx in Gotha Programme, i.e. absolute abundance, are ideologies, naturalizations of local, historical processes, not imperishable realities of human existence.

    I also think that both Jensen and Boal-Martinez skip much too lightly over history. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to think, based on their accounts, that human societies (Jensen’s “indigenous people”) practiced foraging in what Jensen calls “harmony” with the non-human world; then along came the Enlightenment and got us into the pickle we’re in. Omitted are the non-capitalist, but far from idyllic foraging, cultures that in most places intervened: were the Classic Maya “indigenous” in Jensen’s sense? Pharaonic Egypt? The Mongol Empire? The Enlightenment has a lot to answer for (including, via Rousseau, the Romantic idealization of the Noble Savage, which Jensen seems to share), but I think it’s a mistake to counterpose pre-Enlightenment happiness to post-Enlightenment misery, as though human life weren’t always a mixture (though not always in the same proportions) of both.

    Finally as to science and the causes and cures of cancer: it can certainly be said that my cancer, which was almost certainly the result of my any years of heavy smoking, was a product of science, since both the manufacture and the marketing of the 20th-century cigarette were “improvements” introduced by the big modern tobacco corporations; an interesting comparison is with a 1930′s Soviet propaganda campaign urging the public to smoke

    http://sovietposter.blogspot.com/2007/12/perfect-citizen.html

    presumably in order to raise the revenue to the state tobacco monopoly, a monopoly also directly operated by some states in the capitalist world.) On the other hand, it’s worth remembering that Europeans adopted tobacco smoking from indigenous peoples of North America, over the objections of Kings and priests, so if I want to allocate responsibility for my cancer then the Virginia Algonquians have to be somewhere in the mix. They didn’t smoke as addictively as I did, nor were their nicotine delivery systems cleverly fashioned to stay lit rather than going out if not inhaled, but hot tobacco smoke wasn’t any less damaging to their lungs than it was to mine, and some adults who survived middle age–a smaller section of the indigenous population than of ours–must have died of lung cancer and other smoking-related pathologies, whether or not they were diagnosed as such. The novelty is that science, even under the constraints of “developed” capitalism, has been able to find ways of arresting and even reversing the development of some cancers; science as a collection of social practices isn’t innocent, but Jensen’s blithe denial that it’s done any good “for the world” is still poisonous nonsense.

    1 November 2009, 9:41 am

11. Stan:

    Amazing link for the old Soviet posters.

    Pretty interesting direction for this thread, too.

    Anti-malthusianism strikes me these days almost like anti-religion or anti-essentialism. Polarized in advance by former debates, but transcendable in the particulars availabe to us right now if we can set aside the ideological hot-buttons. Fight’s been on so long now that both sides know the other’s debate playbook and begin the rubuttals during opening remarks.

    I’m the first to get my back up when malthusian population arguments crop up, and the first to claim the primacy of dialectics (or at least relationality) over dissectional analysis. That doesn’t lead me to deny, as I have seen some marxists, that “carrying capacity” is somehow a non-issue. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a limit on all physical reality, and that includes the ultimate and inevitable finale for hydrocarbon capitalism and its metastatic expansion. Erasure of this inconvenience by branding it malthusianism is neither as effective or honest as concrete descriptions of historical processes without the labels and the pressure to conform evidence to fit prior claims. As rootless points out, the historical process, inevitable in the past and partly-subject to will and influence in the future, is a lot more granular and complicated than we can ascertain by retrojecting formulae onto it.

    Oil wasn’t the main focus of industrial expansion, but it quickly evolved into its lifeblood, supporting the expansion of population as it went (and which Marx acknowledged as one of his “laws,” the capitalist law of population iirc). Most of that population is stranded inside a food system that will be hugely affected by the inevitably diminishing supply of fossil hydrocarbons, especially oil. Capitalism doesn’t think further out than the next business cycle… high and low we are all trapped, albeit some in a sumptuous cage.

    Crisis is inevitable, if it hasn’t already happened. But in frustration (and demoralization), and limited by the categories of our time like anyone else, we can easily throw up our hands at this realization and resort to misanthropy and explanations based on selfish genes and whatnot.

    People like one-stop shopping for fixing blame on a system. It validates the idea of a one-stop solution prefaced with “if only.”

    This particular constellation of contradictions is the one Hornborg tackles to a large degree in the book De and I keep pushing on folks – The Power of the Machine. He not only sets aside the labor theory of value (as normative) and replaces it with an energetic measure that can at least map inequalities empirically (and which shows an inverse ratio between energetic dissipation and marxian profit); but he also addresses culturally inscribed meanings in ways that – to me at least – overcome the objectivist-constructionist debate, and attend to money as a sign in our universe of cultural meanings – a semiotic account that actually serves as a kind of mishna on or extrapolation of Marx’s notion of fetishization.

    1 November 2009, 11:11 am

12. mark:

    I have one of EJ’s books. The subtitle is “civilisation is not sustainable.” I have enjoyed the book and always like to listen/read whenever he is interviewed. It’s curious to me that he is especially hard on Richard Dawkins – someone I’ve found very enlightening. I really enjoyed Dawkins’ “The God Delusion.” When EJ points out that Dawkins gets more google hits then “Mick fuckin’ Jagger” I think he is perhaps reading too much into this. Dawkins gets googled alot IMO because he directly challenges the religious dogmatists. Especially those in the US. (Where fundametalism is the most prevalent in the developed world)

    EJ quotes Dawkins saying that we exist in “a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication.” EJ goes on to say that this implies “that humans are the only meaningful intelligence on earth, and possibly in the universe.” Again I think he is reading way too much into Dawkins statement. I would say that Dawkins emphasises “selfish genes and blind physical forces” as a way of directly challenging the religious dogmatists. I just don’t see how EJ comes up with some of this stuff about Dawkins. I’ve really enjoyed his writings.

    2 November 2009, 8:04 am

13. xenia:

    several thoughts (while not intending to be harsh on rootlesscosmo)

    -for sure D. J. occasionally needs more historical depth. however, his basic direction strikes me as principled and brave in many ways. the passage on how every book should acknowledge how screwed up this world has become is something that most people would never say. the hysterical insistence of this society that we should have fun and consume no matter what necessitates an occasionally gloomy corrective, and in that respect D.J. should be appreciated.

    -smoking among north american peoples, just like the ingestion of mushrooms further south, was often heavily ritualized and not done at random. i’m not a smoker and i have never been dependent on any stuff (my life was too hard to lose control over myself), but i have some tolerance for chain-smokers among friends and family and i understand that many of them smoke to alleviate the stress and pain of every day living. however, cigarettes have additional garbage packed into them which would be impossible without industrial production.

    –alternative systems of healing, for instance ayurveda, which a highly developed and complex system, were actively obstructed and destroyed in the name of western style medicine. books were burned and in some cases people were mutilated for practicing it. gradually, it’s become clear that indian and chinese methods in particular are better suited for alleviating long-term suffering. yet, the medicine usually practiced even in india is western european hack and slash style, as is western technology. the results can be seen in heavily radioactive rivers, once seen as holy.

    –the argument of sanctity of science can be extended ad infinitum. i remember a discussion during which my colleague was arguing that it did not matter if all the oceans were poisoned, because we could surely genetically manipulate fish so that it suits the environment. he was saying this almost twenty years ago, and we see the lovely results of such reasoning.

    –instead of merging science mentally with advanced technology, which is more admired the more it loses its human character, i prefer to think about the old notion of scientia and its extended meaning, knowledge or wisdom. in that respect, the current use of the word science is a gross distortion: i have met very few scientists (meaning natural scientists, technicians, engineers) who understand human beings and prefer them to machines.

    –finally, all of my musings may be subsumed under one concept: DU shells.

    2 November 2009, 1:36 pm

14. (Boer) Tom:

    To Mark: Have you ever read Stephen Gould’s papers or lectures? (He has a nice paper on Kropotkin’s evolutionary ideas too…) I find the whole selfish gene notion a bit silly, and Dawkins’s arguments contrived at times (interestingly, I often hear similar half-baked notions from certain white racialist and other dogmatists back home, and Dawkins is after all a colonial (born in Kenya) – he has not escaped his upbringing), both on religion and on science. Gould often displays a flash of insight that I don’t see with Dawkins – also search this site for self-organization… Genes can only operate meaningfully within environments/ecosystems, except perhaps for the very earliest organisms.

    2 November 2009, 2:05 pm

15. mark:

    (Boer) Tom: Thanks for the links. No I haven’t read much of Gould apart from a few articles, I just might have to scrape together some money to order a book of his. On the lecture link you provided there is this quote from SJG:

    “To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.”

    This is precisely the thing Dawkins goes into in “The God Delusion.” Dawkins says that the position that Gould (And others) take with regard to science proving or disproving the existence of God make it sound like a 50/50 proposition. He then goes on to explain why this is simply not supportable. I think Dawkins has done a great service by writing about this important topic, though it has made the fundamentalists apoplectic. I’m sure he gets death threats from lots of “True Believers.”

    2 November 2009, 5:57 pm

16. Stan:

    Dawkins provides a perfect example of doctinaire objectivism.

    3 November 2009, 5:28 am

17. (Boer) Tom:

    To Mark: Where does Gould say anything of the sort (that science could decide the existence of God)? I’ve read quite a few of his papers, and have never come across it.

    3 November 2009, 9:00 am

18. Richard:

    I have numerous problems with Dawkins (I agree with Stan’s characterization of him as “a perfect example of doctrinaire objectivism”), however the selfish gene “notion” is far from silly. Combine it with a feminist and Marxian interpretation of the anthropological record, and you have a pretty good scientific basis for the necessity of cooperation in the evolution of human culture (our becoming culturally human, the emergence of language, etc). (I’m referring again to the “sex-strike” theory, first devised by Chris Knight. I’m reluctant to presumptuously link again to a blog post I wrote about it, but I might come back with other relevant links.)

    There’s science and there’s science. It seems to me that there’s a lot of good science–which I use in the lower-case sense to refer to the effort to understand the world–which has pretty clearly shown, ironically, that Jensen’s characacterization of capital-S Science is on the money (granted that we shouldn’t need to have science show us that; much of what even “good” science learns was previously known by earlier societies, but wiped out by progress). That understanding has generally been put to use in the cause of destruction (or “growth”, “improvement”, whatever).

    3 November 2009, 10:06 am

19. m.c.:

    I’ll agree that Dawkins is rigid in his doctrinaire. He does write in ‘The Selfish Gene’ that humans have the intellectual, emotional, and social capacities to transcend human motivations controlled by gene-manipulated behavior. An earlier 20th century sociobiologist, Konrad Lorenz in ‘On Agression’(he admitted that the original German book title doesn’t translate well into English; I don’t speak German) said that the animal world has what he called {A Parliament of Insticts} which jockey for dominance in decision making.

    3 November 2009, 12:45 pm

20. Stan:

    “…but wiped out by progress”

    There’s the religion that took science off course early. Progress.

    3 November 2009, 6:17 pm

21. (Boer) Tom:

    The reason I find the notion of gene being selfish silly is that many genes are dependent on other genes for their expression – a selfish gene, understood that way would quickly go extinct. I have not read Dawkins’s book yet, though.

    3 November 2009, 7:34 pm

22. Seb:

    IMO, The selfish gene is just Dawkins’ way of saying “I’m an asshole – because of Science!”

    Replace Science with God and you’ve got a religious fundamentalist.

    One way or another, it’s fundamentalism. (aside: does anyone have a word besides fundamentalism that keeps the connotative meaning but has a more accurate denotative meaning?)

    4 November 2009, 6:37 am

23. Richard:

    Dawkins knows that many genes are dependent on other genes for their expression (how likely is it that he doesn’t know that?). I think if you read the book you’d be surprised. If you have time, follow it up with Chris Knight’s important Blood Relations. Blew my mind, while also feeling so right and necessary.

    And, though it was misunderstood by many (who also likely didn’t read it) as being an argument for the selfishness of the organism, I didn’t read it that way at all. The notion of the meme, also introduced by Dawkins in that book, is a bit sketchier, but its appearance there, I think, is further acknowledgement from Dawkins that human beings are not over-determined by their genetic makeup. Human culture has intervened, changing everything.

    (I do not like that this sounds too much like a defense of Dawkins. I find him unpleasant, generally, particularly in his recent politicking against religion, and I find his certainty appalling. Though I feel some of his books are valuable, I found the prospect of reading The God Delusion distinctly unappetizing–though I suppose it can’t be worse than Hitchens’ utterly awful God is not Great, which unfortunately I did read.)

    “There’s the religion that took science off course early. Progress.”

    This is a great way of putting this, Stan. It’s remarkable how easily we fall into the language of progress, even if we’re aware of the problems. There’s a part of me that wants to hold onto the liberal paradigm of progress, wants it to be viable. But I know it’s not, so the effort becomes how to argue against it, how to live against its logic, where possible.

    4 November 2009, 10:22 am

24. Michael Anderson:

    @(Boer) Tom:

    Thanks for the link to Gould—-read the essay on Kropotkin, and plan on digging a bit deeper. I found the geographic aspect of Gould’s analysis of evolution, Darwin vis-a-vis Kropotkin, fascinating— the objectivity vs subjectivity of one’s surroundings again. I have always liked the idea of “cooperation” instead of competition, because it seems to avoid, for the most part, the ugly aggression that characterizes “progress” as we know it in Western society.

    Stan’s comment about religion derailing science made me think of Heinlein’s book “Revolt in 2100″…and the Stanford Prison Experiment…quarks flying off the mental particle accelerator, there.

    4 November 2009, 12:38 pm

25. m.c.:

    Dawkins’ book isn’t that hard. It can’be slow reading until you start to grasp his concepts.

    On another definition for Religious Fundamentalism. I heard a college philosophy instructor once say Organized Religion is just a type of Fossilized Philosophy. Fundamentalism might be called a narrow interpretation of that Religion. Take the 10 Commandments. Are there ever special circumstances where the breaking or perceived breaking of one could be excused or mitigated by other factors? If you say No then you might be a Fundamentalist thinker.

    Lorenz’ book title in German means something closer to: ” A Study Concerning the Nature of Aggression” On Aggression sounds sexier. His 4 Main Animal Instinct drives are; Food, Reproduction, Flight, and Aggression, although there are usually combinations of these.

    4 November 2009, 3:36 pm

26. mark:

    To (Boer) Tom,

    When SJG says “science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature” he is not refering to the actual existence of God, just whether he or to what extent he bothers to mess around in this mortal plain. I guess you could call this a form of Deism or maybe Theism. Anyway, what I was seeing in SJG quote was something similar to what Dawkins wrote in the “God Delusion.”

    Dawkins begins by saying that the common response by many to the question of whether “science” can prove or disprove the existence of god is that because science deals in observations of the natural world and god is generally thought to be “supernatural” it is beyond science’s purview to prove or disprove the existence of such a being. SJG is saying the a similar thing only in regard to god’s “superintendence over nature” not whether he/she exists or not.

    Dawkins then goes on to say that this makes it sound like the existence question (And IMO, SJG’s superintendence question) is a 50/50 proposition, which it is not. He then goes on to explain why. If Feral scholars are interested – read Dawkins book. I’m not going to try to repeat Dawkins argument here. Sorry for the confusion about SJG.

    5 November 2009, 10:53 am

27. James:

    I didn’t know where else to put this, so Stan may want to move it. But at least it’s related to “science,” and the viability of modern civilization, and it is very much worth reading carefully.

    Peak Cheap Oil Update – Part I: The glass is half empty

    ASPO-USA Conference Denver 2009 Trip Report and analysis

    In October I attended and was a speaker at the annual Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas in Denver, Colorado. Approximately 500 attendees watched 70 speakers present on the geology, economics, and politics of peak oil. In this two-part report I synthesize what I saw.

    http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?p=131484#post131484

    6 November 2009, 9:11 pm

28. cabdriver:

    One problem with Dawkins is his insistence that everyone’s concept of ‘God’ meet his personal criteria, which are comprised entirely of materialistic definitions, tests, etc.

    The idea that such a concept can operate as a metaphysic, unbounded by space~time, outside of the formal limits imposed by the material realm, simply appears to be over his head. It doesn’t compute, to him. (Or to a lot of people these days, it seems…from the neo-theosophical excesses of the New Age 1970s, the pendulum of societal attitudes in the USA presently appears to me to have swung toward leaden pronouncements of there-is-no-world-but-the-material, and like that. With the attendant pessimism and fatalism inevitably attached, often with an undercurrent of egotistical desperation in the mix.)

    I think that helps to explain why I find Dawkins’ meditations on the purpose for human consciousness to be so prosaic and mundane- a set of very unsatisfying just-so stories, that elicit almost no resonances with my own experience. Particularly when it comes to the experience of transcendence- like feelings of especially deep or significant connection with the natural world, or to other human beings.

    To me, experimental science appears to be all about focus- a point-centered process. The experimental result is the “point.” The “objective finding”, of how the delineated experimental conditions affect the particular phenomena being measured, described, defined.

    But- what about the field?

    In my opinion, Stephen Jay Gould is making a statement of simple humility when he grants that the question of the existence of God is beyond the purview of science and scientific method to even attempt to settle.

    And I think Dawkins is piqued at Gould, for- as Dawkins sees it- unnecessarily limiting the capacity of science to act as the ultimate arbitrator of reality and existence. Because Dawkins is in love with his model of Science: that it holds the potential to act as Omniscient Arbitrator, the ultimate Judge of what is and isn’t.

    In fact, he’s so in love with it that the only way he can find to explain Gould’s stance is to call it a cop-out, as intellectual cowardice.

    And that piqued insistence of Dawkins- his demanding that Gould’s forbearance on the question has to be an Error of some sort- is, I think, a “tell.”

    By the way, Stan, these are some discussions. When I’m in the mood for engaging the life of the mind on the Internet, this site is at the top of a very short list.

    7 November 2009, 9:51 am

29. James:

    America The Betrayed
    Walt Whitman: “Poet of the People”

    By Richard C Cook

    http://globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=15952

    7 November 2009, 1:43 pm

30. Stan Moore:

    on the semi-related psychology of the acceptance of some murder, but not other –

    my new essay is at:

    http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/68097

    Stan Moore

    7 November 2009, 7:40 pm

31. Stan:

    Cabdriver, you have packed a great deal in a small space. Nassim Taleb – who constantly challenges the Science he understands very well (with the implications of complexity for relieving Science of that “focus” you point out) – says that the militant atheism of a Dawkins is a form of arrogance. There is a petulance about it that I see in what I call the Bumper Sticker Fish Wars… the point-counterpoint bumper sticker debates with the Christian fish being replaced with Darwinian foot-fish, then Truth fish eating Darwin fish, etc etc etc. It was started (as adolescent provocation) by what I call anti-religionists – those folk who lay all human ills at the doorstep of an undifferentiated category called “religion.” The Darwin-fish was neither necesary nor appropriate, since many Christians (myself included) don’t find the confession of faith and the insights of biological science to be incompatible, since we don’t hold Scriptures to the exclusive truth-claims of science in the first place. What it did do was attack what other people hold sacred… a deliberate profaning designed for one purpose only… to assert that profanation of the sacred as an individual right (and they got their reaction from the Bibilcal literalists, who also implicitly accept some of the assumptions growing out of the Enlightenment). If challenged on the bad will that underwrites this business, the militant anti-religionists will invariably respond with generalizations about “religion” (as general a category as you might find, and mainly useless) or “Christianity” in this case (another category that can’t be effectively specified for critique because it envelops too broad a swath of history); and their generalizations attribute characteristics to these general categories that are in fact only applicable to a trend called Darbyism… more popularly (and inaccurately, called evangelical or fundamentalist). It’s great as a form of profaning self-expression; but stupid and insensitive as a cultural phenomenon… assured to strangle dialogue or collective agency in the crib. And it’s arrogant… it says, I’m smarter than you, and braodcasts it off the bumper of the car (the cars being evidence, I suppose, that none of us is all that smart in the first place).

    It doesn’t prove that they are smarter, however. It simply proves that they don’t know what they are talking about, and that they have little inclination to find out before they “express” themselves. This applies – with an important matter for mitigation and extenuation – to those who have adopted this petulant stance in reaction to very real traumas in their own lives at the hands of abusive religionists… leading them to accept the same generalizations as the intellectual anti-religionists. I think here of gay-lesbian folk (and others) who have been disrespected and abused by churchfolk. One church may reject you. Another may wash your feet. Don’t lump us together with Darbyists and bigots… please.

    Anti-religionism is mainly a metropolitan white people phenom, though never recognized as such, because many of the metropolitan white people who engage in it see themselves as evolved and progressive (puns intended). Some people, on the other hand, seem to have retained the courtesy and decency not to trample on what others deem sacred as an exercise in self-assertion.

    What the self-centeredness and intrinsic profanity of consumer culture has created is a hothouse for nihilism. The ever-more-frequent mass killings (by deranged individuals) is symptomatic of a culture that has aggressively profaned everything that is held sacred by anyone as the prerequisite for “progress” and its homogenizations. There is little left to seek after except the pale broth of notoriety. This kind of extreme alienation is only possible as the inevitable if still-marginal outcome of a world bereft of any meaning whatsoever — Dawkins’ real philosophical bunker. For the more sensitive souls scattered throughout this vacuum of meaning, those who have been convinced – as I was for a very long time – that the universe is a dead and pointless thing, it has left us not as deranged killers, but as sunken-ship survivors adrift on a liferaft waiting for the inevitable drowning and erasure. Sociologists and psychologists and philosophers spent a good part of the 20th C trying to describe this debilitating angst.

    8 November 2009, 8:17 am

32. cabdriver:

    Stan,

    Yeah, what you said. All of it.

    Over the past year or so, I’ve been in several “theologicial” (or what have you) debates over in the comment pages of Salon.com, where there’s a significant contingent of atheists and (for want of a better term) anti-Christians, including some quite outspoken and militant ones. I identify as a Christian (non-fundamentalist, with no particular attachment to the supernatural aspects that imo were most probably tacked on later), I witness for it when I feel the need. I’ve felt the need to do that more than once in Salon.com discussions.

    But I’m pretty much all talked out on that topic for the time being, other than offering a brief synopsis of my own present religous~spiritual ideas:

    I have faith in a monotheistic God of moral law- the universal God as first presented to the world by the Jews (cf. Tom Cahill’s The Gifts Of The Jews, a good popular summary with which I’m in general agreement);

    I think that a vital part of Jesus’ mission was to return the search for God to an affair of the personal subjective human conscience (no fronting, no posing! This is Real!), that search having been usurped and ill-served through the institutions of Theocracy (and I think Jesus would be displeased with the way that Zionism has been playing out these days, as the secular-territorial analog of Theocracy);

    that having fulfilled his part of the prophetic arrangement by putting his life on the line, Jesus survived his crucifixion (no nails in the palms, he was tied) with a nasty scratch on his spleen;

    and that although Mohammed shared in some valid insights on the nature of the monotheistic God, I would think more highly of him if he had emulated the pacifism of Jesus. (But history is what it is…people have their reasons, they sometimes get things wrong. Mohammed never read the Christian Scriptures, or studied among the Jews. Those insights came to him at a significant remove from his own time and place, and he was in the position of having to make his own way when grappling with those questions.)

    While there’s something in my personal theological ideas to offend at least one or two of the tenets of most of the major institutional monotheistic religious denominations, I didn’t intend it that way. I like to think I have some significant level of shared connection with pretty much everyone who acknowledges a God of moral law. (And if I lack that connection with atheists, it’s because they don’t want it, and reject it!)

    There. That’s it, that’s my creed. Unless I left a mistake in there somewhere. (And brevity can obscure.) My Christianity has remained in this form for around 12 or so years now, with little or no revision.

    And so much for that, for now.

    Back to Derrick Jensen, and his critique of industrial civilization: there’s been some good commentary on this so far in this discussion. I’d like to bring up the idea that it’s possible to enjoy the capabilities of modern technology- digital, space-age, electronic, right up to the forefront of it- without feeling compelled to have to always USE it. So much of the energy and consumption we associate with modernity, industrial production, and technology is a matter of mere convenience. Really- don’t you think that if everyone in American society re-oriented their minds and values, that we as American citizens could accomplish a drop in auto highway miles driven by around 20-30% within a year or so, simply by treating by not taking our personal automobile capabilities for granted? And this could be done simply by using some conscious forethought. It would be INCONVENIENT to have to learn how to use the automobile like that. Nothing more.

    To take it out a step further, as an example: I’m being serious here- I thought to myself: maybe we as a people could use a day or two a week of asceticism, of “privation.” Not out of masochism- more like delayed gratification. Like the original concept of the Sabbath: a full day where you just give it a rest. No driving. No heat, just stay under the covers if it’s cold, seeing your breath if you have to. It still isn’t as if anyone is freezing to death. (Not at all, that isn’t the idea. If it’s that bad- go on, put on the heat.) Prepare food without cooking it, one day a week. Etc.

    I think you get the idea. The purpose would be to preserve as much energy capital as possible, one day a week (although two days would be optimal at this point, I think.) And then use reasonable forethought and planning, for the other days of the week. The goal would be to accomplish a nationwide drop in energy demand of 20-30% within one year, simply through voluntary means. Active, applied energy conservation through frugality. Voluntarily, as a community effort much like the old scrap metal drives and victory gardens of WW2. It’s important to note that it’s possible for what I’m proposing to be accomplished without the necessity for a government to mandate it it and coerce it.

    There are no material or technological barriers stopping that from happening. The only real hang-up is popular attitudes. Consider that whenever such measures are proposed, they’re typically immediately attacked as Stalinist coercion, or some such- even if the proposed program is voluntary!

    And then there are those who attack proponents of such measures as anti-technological Luddites- I’m not out to destroy modern technology, I want to preserve it, for where it’s most appropriate and deserved! The ideal of American Way Of Life has somehow been distorted into the whining of a 2-year old that he didn’t get nuts and a cherry on top of his third hot fudge sundae of the day…

    8 November 2009, 11:33 am

33. Stan:

    Sabbatical is a term familiar to many, but I doubt many of them who know the word understand its origins. One out of seven days, stop dammit… stop, look, and listen. Something bigger and more important than we can imagine is going on around us right this minute and we have cluttered our minds up so badly that we cannot see this magnificence unfolding around us, in us, through us. (This also ensured that the draft animals didn’t get worked to death… the spiritual and the economic work together, as they do in the higher-sabbatical realm of jubilee, the periodic and mandatory leveling).

    The voluntarism of your approach, CD, might irritate the grand strategists. Not me though. Community meshworks. Exemplary communities. People might respond more positively than we expect if we learn to ask nicely.

    (You know that the pronoun “you” in the Bible, when spoken by YHWH, was not singular, but plural… hereabouts we’d say “Ya’all.”)

    Bit more…

    …you note that much of commoditization now revolves around convenience. True that. Convenience has itself become the commodity (I once named the giant island of plastic trash in the Pacific the “Isle of Convenience.). But convenience is now more than convenience… in a faster paced world – that pace having been facilitated by convenience – convenience becomes necessity as we are lashed through our daily tasks. It’s a new master; and we the servants of mandatory consumption.

    8 November 2009, 1:04 pm

34. Juannie:

    Thanks Stan for this thread on the Derrick Jensen interview, or perhaps more accurately on his ideas. However the responses have moved more toward Dawkins than Jensen (interesting commentary and perhaps a Dawkins thread is apropos). I just noticed cabdriver has returned to Jensen. Thanks cabbie.

    In the interest of full disclosure and context, be it known that I have read the majority of Jensen’s works (thrice for one volume), attended one of his workshops and am in the process of reading the unread remainder of his published works.

    In the breadth and depths of Jensen’s writings I have found nothing that I consider rambling and foggy about his heartfelt and rational view of “the fundamental beingness of others”, including the fundamental beingness of other humans and even those in our species who are blind to the idea. What I have found is insight into the nature of the thinking that underlie the denial of such; namely, the objectification of everything and everyone outside the thinker’s own mind. This concept is explored in depth and in many diverse context, especially in “The Culture of Make Believe”. “…if I’m going to do the objectifying rating of women…” is of course, a tongue-in-cheek reference within the context of the paragraph in which he uses it and an almost ubiquitous tendency within our culture in which we objectify women thus assuaging our conscience to their relegation to lesser status and followup exploitation.

    I, as you have probably already surmised, agree with Stan’s comment on the profundity of Jensen’s perspective of civilization but disagree with the tempering of the concept of civilization with urbanization. Civilization began with the accumulation of wealth, i.e. grain storage, and the need to exploit the land bases apart from the urban centers where the wealth was stored and those who controlled (owned) the wealth probably established residence. But, Stan, I am hopelessly lost by your “everywhere and nowhere” paragraph. You are correct that his “… call to violence…” is not concealed or unintended to be, although I would in this case temper your term violence with action or agency. Is blowing up dams to save the salmon any less justified than blowing up the bridges to thwart the enemies’ troops and artillery advance? This is a tough call, at least for the non military one and Jensen acknowledges this and explores, again in depth and I believe with some anguish, this question. Indeed, I can envision how even the military option might backfire. In some sense even with the military example, haven’t we already become like the authors of violence?

    I have a lot of trouble with Jensen’s apparent hostility toward science. Science has been a cornerstone of my thinking and vocation (I’m an engineer and presently working as science associate) since highschool. I see science per se as but a means of or procedure for discovering material truths and processes. In fact at the Jensen workshop I attended my question for him was “is all technology bad? An axe can split someone’s head or my firewood”. I was left a little befuddled by his, in this case for me, foggy answer, which focused on magical thinking. I hope to press him further on this subject if the opportunity ever arises.

    A couple of further comments based on other responses within this thread:

    That civilization is at the base of many of today’s ills is at least a nontrivial idea. I have to admit I found the concept initially disturbing and unpalatable but the further I dug into Jensen’s arguments the more profound it became for me.

    As far as science is concerned, I don’t’ think the method is the problem but the consciousness of those who would objectify everything within the realm of its sphere of influence. Examples abound and arise with regularity of the application of science to solve problems which inappropriate application of science has created in the first place.

    In closing, I would encourage those who have responded here to further explore Jensen’s writings. Many works of his are available and within those I have read I have found little unnecessary repetition of ideas or arguments. I believe he is a seminal thinker of great worth and at the very least stimulating, to which this thread certainly attests.

    8 November 2009, 3:02 pm

35. cabdriver:

    “…in a faster paced world – that pace having been facilitated by convenience – convenience becomes necessity as we are lashed through our daily tasks. It’s a new master; and we the servants of mandatory consumption.”

    Hey, that’s what “rush hour” is all about, right?

    In the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s not uncommon for auto commutes to take 1 1/2-2 hours, sometimes even 3 hours. In each direction. There are people who live in Central Valley cities like Tracy and Stockton, and commute to the Bay Area. That’s been a trend for around 15 years.

    Pardon me, but for anyone charged with the considerable responsibility of navigating their own vehicle attentively through traffic- especially if it’s heavy traffic- that adds up to an 11 to 14-hour work day. I’m not even sure if that life qualifies as “middle class”- no matter what the occupation, education level, or assessed house value of the poor souls who have to do that for 5 days a week.

    The Washington D.C. area is even worse. The commutes are at least as long, for most people. I lived there 2006-2008, in an area of heavy traffic and Beltway interchanges, and any local resident who had any sense treated the hours from 4-7pm as if they were under house arrest, unless it was a dire necessity.

    Is this a system?

    And for some reason, the technological work-arounds- like staggering the work hours, telecommuting/cyber-commuting, and daily pre-scheduled residential bus/van/cab routes- all appear to me to be woefully under-utilized.

    In particular, the Washington DC area is simply choked with traffic. There used to be surface streets where professional drivers and people with map skills could evade many of the Beltway/Route 66/main artery snarls. Those roads have long since filled up, too.

    And Northern Virginia is now in the final stage of putting a Metro track out to Dulles Airport, through Tyson’s Corner.

    When I consider the construction costs and the disruption this is bound to entail, I wonder if the money out that way wouldn’t have been better spent on subsidized van pooling. But that doesn’t have the hallmarks of a Big Project, along with the associated windfall to the builders.

    I like the DC Metro. As a rule, it’s clean, fast, and safe. But I hope that the public infrastructure survives long enough to yield a return on the investment in public money.

    And nearly everyone still has to drive to and from the Metro parking lots! Since most of the pollution generated by an auto engine occurs in the first few miles of driving it, before the engine warms up, I wonder how much of a benefit is obtained in that regard.

    As for the “island of plastic trash”…I was just discussing that myself the other day, on Salon.com. I did some quick Internet searching, and found out a few facts on the subject:

    Current commodity price of polypropylene plastic in the Chinese market: around $995/ton

    [current price of fish meal, on the Chinese market = $1010/ton]

    Estimated amount of pastic flotsam in the North Pacific Gyre: 100 million tons

    Estimated annual world production of raw plastic nurdles: about 125 million tons

    Estimated annual US production of raw plastic nurdels: 30 million tons

    [annual harvest of fish meal from the worlds oceans: 5.5-7 million tons (less in El Nino years)]

    Approximate size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch- twice the size of Texas; percentage of the Pacific Ocean comprised by the Garbage Patch of the North Pacific Gyre: uncertain: estimates range from between 0.41% to 8.1%, with nearly all of the plastic resource concentrated at depths less than 30 feet under the surface.

    There must be some kind of way outta here…

    8 November 2009, 4:18 pm

36. Stan Moore:

    What about claims that science has cured diseases, helped extend human life expectancy, etc?

    This, too, is not a simple truth. Sometimes scientists have actually impeded progress, as was the case with Dr. Semmelweiss of Hungary, who showed 150 years ago that the simple act of handwashing could save lives, but he was ridiculed and even sent to a mental institution by scientists of his day.

    The following is from the website of the Semmelweish “Clean Hands” Award, which honors medical professionals who sometimes have to fight other scientists and science organizations to do what is in the best interests of the public:

    In 1847, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis pioneered the prevention of transmission of disease by washing hands (Prophylaxis), reducing the mortality rate due to Puerperal Fever from 12% to almost ZERO by enforcing the washing of hands with chlorinated lime.

    At the time, Dr. Semmelweis’ hypothesis was considered extreme and was widely rejected and ridiculed. When he refused to compromise his beliefs, the hospital that employed him was pressured into terminating his clinical privileges. Semmelweis’ sole “crime” was that he proposed a contrarian idea to current thinking, which directly challenged the (incorrect) current medical theories of his time.

    Despite the continued ridicule, hostility, and unemployment, Dr. Semmelweis tirelessly promoted his theory, sometimes denouncing physicians who refused to wash their hands as irresponsible murderers. His contemporaries eventually concluded that he was crazy and, in 1865, committed him to a mental institution where he was beaten to death by guards.

    Dr. Semmelweis’s theory was considered irrelevant, until Louis Pasteur connected germs to disease, and Prophylaxis is now considered standard practice around the world. The 1800s medical community’s refusal to consider his theories earlier clearly resulted in the continued unnecessary spread of disease and death throughout the world.

    8 November 2009, 8:02 pm

37. Stan:

    Thanks to all for making this thread travel over under around and through (cribbed from an old cigarette commercial).

    On civilization/urbanization, the former word’s root is “city” (civitatem). More to the point, though, and avoiding the chicken-egg dilemmas of historical speculation, urbanization is the metastatic driver for all the reasons Hornborg lays out in his arguments on negentropy, energy flows, and machines. Urban development sets up a core-periphery dynamic — the city being the consuming core drawing order in from the periphery and exporting disorder back out to the periphery. One of the under-remarked aspects of the dissipation of the Roman Empire was the expanding ecological collapse (the ruination of soil and deforestation) of peripheries to support and feed the population of growing Rome… forcing expansion (facilitated by the military) and finally overstretch.

    9 November 2009, 4:03 am

38. Sean:

    @ rootlesscosmo –

    While I would also be grateful if I’d been spared cancer death, I’d have to wonder how much of “modern science and technology” caused my cancer. Or how much of my own way of choosing things in my life may have caused it.

    Many cancers arrive due to exposure to a substance of one type or another. Lung cancer particularly. Smoking (affirmatively, with cigarettes etc), constant inhalation of bad substances like friable asbestos, air pollution…. There are so many man-made causes and triggers of lung cancer that most of the asbestos manufacturers in America evaded a lot of responsibility for the human harms they wrought in their mines and factories where people inhaled a lot of asbestos. Investigate the mass tort litigation of the 80s and 90s surrounding asbestos, see the “science” used by the asbestos mfrs to defend their position.

    Technophiles will always line up to defend “advances” in technology. Skeptics should always be there to remind people that technophiles are merely engaged in a form of worship that should never control human social policy. Worship is about faith, faith is about suspension of disbelief, meaning it’s about non-facts and illogic. What’s next? Human sacrifice? Oh never mind, we already do that! We just do it indirectly.

    Stem Cell research is the biggest abomination of the technophiliacs. It’s an end-run around the moral quandaries raised by eugenics.

    9 November 2009, 12:06 pm

39. Curt Kastens:

    So if urbanization is the core problem of mankind can we unurbanize ourselves?

    9 November 2009, 4:58 pm

40. Michael Anderson:

    One thing I noticed, on arriving in Fayetteville NC Sunday night from Oregon, is how much the place looks like all the other places we went through on the way, and how much it looks like “way out west”. Convienience, conformity, and speed all together in the Great American Big Nowhere, with a soldier in digital camo driving a BMW Z4 as a military-industrial garnishment after dinner tonight. I’ve been fairly provincial in my existence, but you’ve said it many times here, and I’ll reiterate it—get freakin’ local, ASAP. Derrick Jensen’s assertions seemed somewhat abstract last week (my apologies)….they are now concrete.

    9 November 2009, 11:08 pm

41. L Diablo:

    Stan I agree with and respect you 98%.

    But, why do you insist that all anti-religionists are claiming anything except this: The Ontological Claims of ALL regions are UNTRUE; and UNPROVABLE even if they were true?

    Jesus bro, why is this most salient and universal point missed by a clearly brilliant fella like yourself?

    Being a Christian is like being a follower of Minerva, Purple Unicorns, the XXXX [redacted] Death Kult… whatever. It’s all nonsense and their ontological claims (e.g., universal life, moral sanctions on pork or sex, miracles, et.al.) are just plain untrue and are Goddamn unprovable even if they were true. Why is this so controversial? Atheists are indeed smarter than religion-believers… just like people who accept the roundness of the earth are smarter than those who deny it… look at the curve of the shadow on the moon. Right? Right.

    One need not being a ‘believer’ to think capitalism is evil, that racism is wrong, etc… It’s just plain madness to assert that one must believe in things that are clearly untrue (or unprovable) in order to effect social change, or even want a decent society. It’s nonsense Stan.

    Second: Violence works. QED. Pacifism as Pathology by Ward Churchill. Read it. Live it. Love it.

    11 November 2009, 8:30 pm

42. Stan:

    “Atheists are indeed smarter than religion-believers… …Violence works.”

    Nice summary of my points. A very male summary, and one where you attempt to bulldoze other (unrepresented) points with your “ontology.” It’s very easy, isn’t it? You just restate the (uncriticized) philosophical bases of modernism, those that have taken on the aspect of “common sense.”

    I guess that means you are smarter than any of us who don’t share your certainties. But then, that’s what you said.

    12 November 2009, 6:12 am

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