Why I won’t call myself “progressive”
Everyone from centrist democrats (speaking of the US now) to socialists refer to themselves these days as “progressive.” Allow me to explain why I will not call myself that, and why I believe the assumptions underwriting the idea of “progressivism” are so pernicious.
Let’s start with the word, then study the history. Then we can unmask the assumptions that underwrite what it means to call oneself “progressive.”
The root word is progress:
1. Movement, as toward a goal; advance. 2. Development or growth.
Now progressive:
1. Moving forward; proceeding onward; advancing; evincing progress; increasing; as, progressive motion or course; — opposed to retrograde. [1913 Webster]
2. Improving; as, art is in a progressive state. [1913 Webster]
3. (U. S. History) Of or pertaining to the Progressive party. [Webster 1913 Suppl.]
4. Favoring improvement, change, progress, or reform, especially in a political context; — used of people. Contrasted with conservative. [PJC]
Note: The term progressive is sometimes used to describe the views of a politician, where liberal might have been used at one time, in communities where the term liberal has come to connote extreme views. [PJC]
5. Disposed toward adopting new methods in government or education, holding tolerant and liberal ideas, and generally favoring improvement in civic life; — of towns and communities. [PJC]
First, let’s point out that the word is used metaphorically more than literally. If I am travelling from Deerfield, Michigan to Hot Springs, Arkansas, for example, and I have reached Louisville, Kentucky, then I can say fairly literally that I have progressed – I have literally closed the distance between where I started and where I want to end up. The literal understanding is of movement from departure to arrival… arrival being a necessary construct for progress to be meaningful. And the literal meaning is spatial as well as temporal. It is literally about moving across material space and using up some time to do that.
Philosophers call the notion of figurative movement toward an end point “teleological,” from the Greek teleos, meaning result. In figurative progress, result is treated metaphorically as arrival, even though they are not the same. Progress is aimed at, or pulled toward, a result.
That is how we use the term most frequently, figuratively. We talk about how biological evolution, for example, as progress, even though the spatial aspect of the literal meaning has been dropped. Biological evolution has occurred in the same shared spaces, limited to the crust of the planet, and we don’t mean to imply by the term progress that amoebas emerged in the Horn of Africa and travelled to Siberia where they were transformed into reindeer along the way. Whether we acknowledge it or not, our metaphorical use of the term implies a value-judgement; we believe that certain living creatures are superior, or “higher” on something called the evolutionary scale, that others, even though there is no reference to actual altitude here. At the top of this scale – unsurprisingly – we have placed our own species. We see ourselves as the teleos of biological adaptation.
Yet if we try and unpack this notion of superiority, what we find is that our dominance – which is implicitly synonymous with our “higher” status – within the biological realm can only be measured, if we conitinue to rely on natural scientific measurements, by our niche maximization, which in turn can be most consistently correlated with our entropic signature: our energy consumption footprint, if you will. So progress can be measured by how wasteful of energy we are.
That’s the problem with metaphors. When we forget they are metaphors, and begin to treat them as if they are actualities, we delude and confuse ourselves. Or we unpack them and find ourselves confronted not with some axiomatic reality, but with our own fantasies… in this case, of superiority. Our claim of objectivity is unmasked as value-drenched status-seeking.
Progress – in this light – becomes a little fuzzier. Because we are forced to confront the question of, what is the result?
So where did this notion come from? Was it always there? After all, it is a human notion. Other creatures evince no interest in progress, or even the capacity to share concepts as we experience them. That certainly differentiates us from other creatures – our capacity for complex symbolic and creative communication – though differentiation does not necessarily imply superiority, unless you define that as superior, in which case you have constructed a tautology: repetition of meaning, using dissimilar words to say the same thing twice.
Our difference is our superiority is our difference.
It’s interesting that in my own understanding of theology, mine also teleological, that we don’t aim at becoming God – as metaphorical progress might have it – but at reconciliation with God, which implies something far less linear, and something that reaches back as much as forward… metaphorically, to something called the Fall – which is a kind of loss of status… or standing. Redemption and eternity are in the present.
But I digress.
The answer to the question – Where did it come from? – is historical. The notion of progress has not always been with us. In fact, the very concept of progress – as we understand it in the Atlantic states – didn’t appear until the European period called – tellingly – The Enlightenment. There are still cultures for which this conept is utterly meaningless.
This “scandal of particularity” with regard to progress is that it is not universal and axiomatic; it is a particular notional construction of a particular culture and epoch, not an objective fact (but a reified metaphor).
Given this particularity, we have to turn the embarrassing question again about the result. If this is just our idea, what is our idea of the teleos of progress? What is the final result that progress aims at, or that it is being pulled toward?
Natural science, ironically enough, which grew out of this self-same Enlightenment, honest natural science, at least, has confronted us with some pretty scary answers about where our current progressive trajectory has aimed us. Ronald Wright, in his book A Short History of Progress wrote:
Material progress creates problems that are — or seem to be — soluble only by further progress … the devil here is in the scale: a good bang can be useful; a better bang can end the world.
I think he’s being overly-optimistic.
In fact, progress has thrust humanity into simultaneous and terrifying ecological and cultural impasses. Progress has given us the ability to wreck the biosphere and blow ourselves up, yet the very people who seem most interested in turning these trajectories around insist on calling themselves “progressives.” This to some degree accounts for why their record at turning things around has been so dismal. They keep chasing progress to amend progress.
Let’s turn now to the history of Progressivism, or the social trends “disposed toward adopting new methods in government or education, holding tolerant and liberal ideas, and generally favoring improvement in civic life.” (emphasis added)
First of all, I am not a liberal. I oppose liberalism. I think it is as insipid as it is dishonest. And this is what “progressive” has come to mean in popular speech, liberal… since the latter term has been effectively demonized, with liberals handing conservatives the stick to beat them with.
The term liberal has an evolutionary history as well, one that confuses matters in a world where the liberal-conservative linear continuum is taken for granted as some objective polarity on par with thermal measurements in Fahrenheit or Celcius. They’re no such thing, of course. It’s another cultural illusion, like progress, that unfortunatley – like progress – has terrible material force as manifested in cultural production. In the case of liberal-conservative, it supports the illusion of difference where there is none by magnifying the differences in nuance. Anarchists, communists, anti-nationalists, Black nationalists, pacifists, etc., are excluded through marginalization, as “fringe” ideas. The conservative-liberal polarity is contained within the larger historical phenomenon of Liberalism – another philosophical current growing out of The Enlightenment that is tied to the Myth of Progress with a Gordian knot.
Liberalism has been around since the American and French Revolutions. It is a deeply nationalistic political philosophy; and it is widely shared across our whole culture, even if it is not recognized. Axiomatic beliefs are seldom recognized, because they take on the apsect of Laws of Nature, as “common sense.”
We need to bring another development into this discussion to understand more fully the evolution of Liberalism, and it’s association with nationalism, and originally white nationalism.
Nationalist projects necessarily try to break down differences within the geographically defined nation, through a common language and the homogenization of culture more generally. This is a fitful, painful, and often bloody project, but it is inexorable if the nation is to take a stable form. The category citizen has to trump other categories for nationalism to succeed. The modern nation accomplishes this homegenization under duress, especially if the national economy depends on an internal periphery to exploit – colonialism turned inward, slavery in the US being one example, and later an expanding pool of cheap immigrant labor.
The US approach to indigenous comunities was not exploitative, but exterminist. They powers needed land, not the people on the land, who seemed disinclined to work as slaves, indentured servants, or wage laborers. So they drove them off or killed them… in the name of progress.
In the successive assimilations of various sub-cultures, nations elaobrate class structures consistent with various economic means of production; and in the modernist project – for reasons we won’t cover here – a growing domestic middle-class became an ever more essential part of an imperial nation in the US. This middle-class did not conjure itself out of cabbage patches, but emerged from poorer classes with aspirations to “move up.” There’s that progress-meme.
These aspirations in societies that are forming middle-classes are part of a collective and subjective terrain; and characteristic of that terrain has been the desire for acceptance by those who are on the next rung up. It is this desire that creates a felt need for something we can call “respectability.” It’s a ruthless idol, respectability; and so it is very effective at enforcing various kinds of conformity.
In Randall Kennedy’s Race, Crime, and the Law, he notes of the struggle for respectability in African America:
A … core intuition of the politics of respectability is that, for a stigmatized racial minority, successful efforts to move upward in society must be accompanied at every step by a keen attentiveness to the morality of means, the reputation of the group, and the need to be extra-careful in order to avoid the derogatory charges lying in wait in a hostile environment.
This very lucid description of the felt-need for respectability applies to the fetish of respectability for all aspiring and emergent classes; and in the American middle-class it became part of that class’ core identity remaining well after this class had established itself. It is in this way that respectability is imbricated with nationalism. It is consolidated in this relation for the functional reason that it serves as a baseline for a national, self-policing ethos. The desire for status locally – which respectability serves – determines a more general conformity that serves the stability of the nation-state and its dominant classes. Stability is the core value for dominant classes and their political institutions. The cultivated craving for respectability expresses itself in stability.
The fetish for progress is also a middle-class preoccupation, which is mirrored above in the reference to a desire for upward social mobility, in turn a supportive premise for the idea of meritocracy – a core article of faith in the ideology of Liberalism. That this idea of meritocracy is hypocritical in practice does not take away from its cultural and political power.
Historically speaking, then, respectability and progress are fraternal twins. It is this twinship that accounts for the capital-P Progressive movement at the turn of the 19th/20th Century embracing the notion of eugenics, which they didn’t let go until Hitler gave us an example of how eugenics looks in practice on a wide scale. In the US, progressives – including many mainstream eccumenical churches – were supporters of multiple involuntary sterilization campaigns conducted in the US. This is one reason feminism – as it is understood in the popular imagination – has been forced to live with the embarrassment that conservatives and other anti-feminists can cite blatantly eugenicist – and racist – positions taken by high-profile early feminists like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.
An ardent Malthusian, Sanger left her self-indictments etched on the annals of history:
“No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child… without a permit for parenthood.”
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“Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”
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“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
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“Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need … We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.”
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“Eugenics is … the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.”
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“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.”
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“As an advocate of birth control I wish … to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit,’ admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation…. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”
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“The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.”
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“Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying … demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism … [Philanthropists] encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant … We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”
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“The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.”
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“Give dysgenic groups [people with 'bad genes'] in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization.”
Those who know me know that I am not anti-feminist. Quite the contrary. I am, however, convinced of the wisdom of Amilcar Cabral when he says “tell no [convenient] lies.” The bad leavening in this bread is not women’s emancipation, but progress, which included, and still includes, the delusion that we can “improve” our own species. This is God-playing of the worst kind, the poison pill we swallowed when we learned to do natural science – not science inherently and in-itself, but science in the saddle of (ironically here) masculine arrogance. And lest anyone think that this Progressive vision has disappeared or was limited to early feminists, let me introduce some other quotes:
Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind…. Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum…. Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizens of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type. The great problem of civilization is to secure a relative increase of the valuable as compared with the less valuable or noxious elements in the population… The problem cannot be met unless we give full consideration to the immense influence of heredity… …I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feebleminded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them… The emphasis should be laid on getting desirable people to breed…
- Theodore Roosevelt, 1913 (elected by Progressives)
There is no permanent status quo in nature; all is the process of adjustment and readjustment, or else eventual failure. But man is the first being yet evolved on earth which has the power to note this changefulness, and, if he will, to turn it to his own advantage, to work out genetic methods, eugenic ideas, yes, to invent new characteristics, organs, and biological systems that will work out to further the interests, the happiness, the glory of the God-like being whose meager foreshadowings we the present ailing creatures are. (emphasis added)
- Herrman J. Muller, 1935
Galton’s eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him eventually to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics.
- John Maynard Keynes, 1946
I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing… War… has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full… The state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but what of that? Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people’s… There are three ways of securing a society that shall be stable as regards population. The first is that of birth control, the second that of infanticide or really destructive wars, and the third that of general misery except for a powerful minority…
- Bertrand Russell, 1953
Natural selection must be replaced by eugenical artificial selection. This idea constitutes the sound core of eugenics, the applied science of human betterment.
- Theodosius Dobzhansky, 1964
Problem-makers reproduce in greater percentage than problem-solvers, and in so doing cause the decline of civilization… In short, if capable, intelligent people had most babies, society would see its problems and solve them.
- Elmer Pendell, 1967
In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it.
- Jacques Cousteau, 1991
The first century or two of the new millennium will almost certainly be a golden age for Eugenics. Through application of new genetic knowledge and reproductive technologies…the major change will be to mankind itself…[T]echniques…such as…genetic manipulations are not yet efficient enough to be unquestionably suitable in therapeutic and eugenic application for humans. But with the pace of research it is surely only a matter of time, and a short time at that.
- Glayde Whitney, 1999
Here is Barbara Marx Hubbard, with a very explict claim to human God-hood:
Out of the full spectrum of human personality, one-fourth is electing to transcend…One-fourth is ready to so choose, given the example of one other…One-fourth is resistant to election. They are unattracted by life ever-evolving. One-fourth is destructive. They are born angry with God…They are defective seeds…There have always been defective seeds. In the past they were permitted to die a ‘natural death’…We, the elders, have been patiently waiting until the very last moment before the quantum transformation, to take action to cut out this corrupted and corrupting element in the body of humanity. It is like watching a cancer grow…Now, as we approach the quantum shift from creature-human to co-creative human—the human who is an inheritor of god-like powers—the destructive one-fourth must be eliminated from the social body. We have no choice, dearly beloveds. Fortunately you, dearly beloveds, are not responsible for this act. We are. We are in charge of God’s selection process for planet Earth. He selects, we destroy. We are the riders of the pale horse, Death. We come to bring death to those who are unable to know God…The riders of the pale horse are about to pass among you. Grim reapers, they will separate the wheat from the chaff. This is the most painful period in the history of humanity…
Finally this very sly one from our contemporary, Richard Dawkins, who coined the term, “the selfish gene.”
In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous – though of course they would not have used that phrase. Today, I suspect that the idea is too dangerous for comfortable discussion, and my conjecture is that Adolf Hitler is responsible for the change.
Nobody wants to be caught agreeing with that monster, even in a single particular. The spectre of Hitler has led some scientists to stray from “ought” to “is” and deny that breeding for human qualities is even possible. But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as “these are not one-dimensional abilities” apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice.
I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler’s death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn’t the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?
Damn that Hitler, he set progress back decades!
I want to point out again the undercurrent of “repsectability” running through these progress claims related to eugenics.
As a Methodist, it is important for me to point out how progressive churches, like Methodists and Unitarians among others, were strong supporters of eugenics. The racialism of eugenics was already inside the seed named “progress.” At one point, “progressive” Protestants actually talked about searching for a “cleanliness” gene! More on this further along.
Fellow Methodist Amy Laura Hall, a professor at Duke University whose talk, which I attended one evening two years ago, has influenced this piece, noted in an interview how, while churches have rejected the “excesses” of early eugenics, they still carefully “plan” their families and seem to have selected progress over the basic tents of their own faith:
While studying bioethics at Yale, I served at a merged, downtown church — African-American and white, working class and bourgeois-bohemian, professors and homeless folks — a church trying to know every child as part of the Body of Christ. In this context, I wanted to ask why so many mainline Christians are frightened to put our children in schools with children with disabilities or children who speak Spanish or children who live in impoverished neighborhoods? How is it that white Protestants, who worship a babe born in a manger, came to view a birth planned through in vitro fertilization as more legitimately a gift than a child conceived by an undocumented Latina teenager?
This foray into progressive eugenics is just the beginning, and I admit I start with it because it is so provocative. But I want people to think very seriously about this term not merely because of this nasty history, but because the progress-myth is stained by far more than the demon of eugenics, which might be cavalierly dismissed as some kind of anomaly.
Right now the country is embroiled in a health care debate, one in which “progressives,” to their credit, have been willing to abandon political maneuvering to undercut the Democratic administration in its effort to fob off mandatory insurance – an unfunded mandate on citizens – as reform for the most cynical political motives (to make Obama – and Democratic political operatives – look effective). The so-called Health Care Bill deserves to go down in flames, as it apparently now will.
If health care is what people need – an idea I will challenge in a moment – then at least they could do what other industrialized metropoles have done, and go for the single-payer option. My problem with the progressive vision of “health care” is that it carries with it a claim of entitlement – or rights – and no critique of the medicalization of society into which these “rights” provide a pass.
Medicine – not healing, which has in many cases been declared illegal – has become what Ivan Illich calls a “radical monopoly” that denies death as a natural function of life, that creates dependency on technology and a cadre of highly-paid professionals, and has alienated us from our own corporeal being. It has led to the pathologization of every aspect of our lives, turned us all into self-absorbed, freaked-out, body-monitoring risk managers, and serves to make us more effective cogs in the machinery of a heirarchical and highly-institutionalized society. It has led us to die in sterile hospitals, hooked to infernal machines, to practice the very eugenics decried above – albeit on the scale of individuals advised by their licensed medical shaman, and taught us the very biophobia that underwrites our current vandalism against nature.
Personal anecdote, I was a Special Forces medic in the army, a peculiar specialty that allowed us to practice, in certain conditions, in pretty much the same role as doctors (and occasionally veterinarians). We didn’t have the acumen in microbiology of a licensed physician, but we had the skill to manage severe trauma, identify and treat for a host of common maladies, and to conduct our own laboratory analyses using a small tactical set with a non-electric microscope and a hand-cranked cetrifuge. Our training lasted for 48 weeks, and was given to many without so much as a bachelor’s degree. I caught nine babies in labor and delivery, treated in mass-casualty situations, stabilized patients in the midst of combat, relieved dozens if not hundreds of people of parasites and protazoa, opened up bellies to remove shrapnel, effectively treated infectious diseases, extracted rotten and painful teeth, saved a horse dying of bloat, and treated aches and pains and sprains and strains, removed growths, sutured wounds and incisions, and a bunch of other stuff I won’t list.
Healers don’t need 8-12 years of training; and medicine is the biggest racket in the world next to war supplies. The training I received was to keep a Special Forces A Detachment functional – like a machine – and to “establish rapport” with indigenous populations for the purpose of bending them to the machinations of a US foreign policy that was not good for them. The purpose of modern medicine is twofold as well: (1) to make a lot of money for lot of physicians, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, and credentialing institutions, and (2) to keep our own population functional as consumers of these “products” and as workers. More and more, the latter involves psychotropic drugs to treat newly named “disorders” that before they were disorders were just part of life. “Stress,” for example.
Working the kinds of alienating jobs we have under the Domoclean swords of debt and our incapacity for subsistence, while raising our kids to be well-adjusted to a system that no one ought to adjust to, and living in an environment that is bombarded 24-7 with the agitations of a world that is ever more commodified, creates tension in our bodies, including our psyches. Does medicine enlist in activities to escape from or overturn said system? No. It names our natural reaction to this extreme and ceaseless alienation as a disorder called “stress” – which is in fact the most natural reaction in the world, fighting or fleeing before a dangerous or uncomfortable environment – and “treats” said stress, usually with chemicals, and sometimes with “therapy,” that is, serial suggestive conversations and exercises, led by a credentialed expert of course, and designed to help us readjust(!) to this reality.
Progressives have been proselytizing for greater access to this phenomenon for quite some time, with no criticism of what it is to which we seek this access. But there is a more visceral objection that can be raised against medicalized culture, and it is how this phenomenon is reflected in our very consciousness.
Barbara Duden is a historian of the body. She looks at the cultural construction of the body, of how we “know” ourselves as embodied creatures, and at the successive alienations from ourselves as bodies throughout history. She and Silya Samerski have been investigating what they call the “pop-gene,” the gene in popular imagination, and their insights reveal the connection between the Progressive eugenics fetish of the ealry 20th Century and our own subjugation by the radical monopoly of medicine.
The describe how the pop-gene and our seeing ourselves as immune systems, the measuring and mapping of the body, have objectified us to ourselves, have placed us outside of ourselves, led us to regard ourselves as object of study, as positions in probability tables and statistical scatterplots. As David Cayley articulated this, self-objectification “has deprived us of our story,” and what Barbara Duden called “the propagation of risk management” as the essence of our lives. Like every system of control, it is based fundamentally on the propagation – before risk management – of fear. Fear of life. Fear of aging. Fear of every indiosyncracy.
It’s no wonder we think we need psychotropic drugs. We see ourselves on the outside, as nowhere-and-everywhere, as nothing-and-everything. The pop-gene, the body as a carefully monitored immune-system instead of direct experience, has unmoored us.
Progressives have no account of this monumentally signficant aspect of medicalized culture, and they resist this account because it undemines their campaign for universal access to the radical monopoly of instituionalized medicine. Progressives certainly don’t have much account of how this episteme of the objectified body might link to the eugenics fetish – still extant in selecting for desirable children – or even to the generally woman-hating content of ever more ubiquitous pornography, which progressives defend as free speech (because examination of the actual content of most pornography undermines their perennial campaign for “free speech,” another liberal abstraction that gives equal validity to Nazi propaganda or a haiku).
I have a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) right here in my hand. This is a medical manual published by the American Psychiatric Association. I want to list a few of the “disorders” from that manual, and the reader can make of it what s/he will.
Reading Disorder
Mathematics Disorder
Disorder of Written Expression
Expressive Language Disorder
Phonological Disorder
I’ll stop here, because it only becomes more bizarre; but I want to alert the reader that a critique of “educaton” follows that merges with these disorders in a tautological vice. If you don’t perform well at education, you are medically deficient, and in either case you shall require the intervention of expensively credentialled experts to correct your disorders or to administer and deliver your education. Want to hear the common language of some of these disorders?
The essential feature of X disorder is X ability (as measured by individually administered standardized tests of X calculation or reasoning) that falls substantially below that expected for the individual’s chronological age, measured intelligence, and age-appropriate education.
Welcome to institutional medicine. Welcome to institutional education. Welcome to the brave new world of progress.
I simply must insert some comments from my dry-humored friend De Clarke, after I pointed out the above DSM-IV definition list:
Agh! More weird taxonomy. I mean, we all do it — think how phrases like “he’s so anal [retentive]” or “she went all OCD on me” have migrated into the vernacular. And hell, they’re useful, descriptive, terse, and often funny. But the underlying project of taxonomising is really no funnier than it was in Hitler’s day – the descriptive so swiftly shifts to the prescriptive and then to enforcement and/or purification. Sorting out the “normal” from the “abnormal” and the Tainted from the Pure. In fact the vernacular uses are a kind of pushback, showing that these medicalised “sins” are in fact present in all of us to some degree… no purity, only our varying bundles of idiosyncrasy.
My sense of irony will not be satisfied until the DSM V includes “taxonomic compulsion disorder,” “violent control fantasy disorder,” and “conformist anxiety disorder.” Oh yes, and how about “cornucopian fantasy disorder,” “biophobia,” “obsessive misogynist disorder,” “gender panic disorder,” and a host of other mental illnesses of patriarchy? “hermetic border hallucination” would be high on my list of socially dangerous brain farts.
Medicine has come to “treat” menopause with hormone replacement “therapy,” not for a disease like malaria or influenza, but for getting old. It treats something called ADHD in children when they show no inclination to sit still in a prison called a classroom for six hours a day and apply themselves to “studying” some of the most boring test-taking drills and damaging state propaganda imaginable. The treatments for this “disorder” are chemical stimulants. I’ll have more to say about mandatory education further down, another progressive preoccupation that compels its advocates to prevaricate, evade, and lie.
Now we are faced with a daily television bombardment from unchained pharmaceutical companies who are creating drugs then defining new disorders to match them.
I don’t object to the campaign for single-payer health care per se I suppose. I understand that the people trapped in the system as it is are made dependent on the radical monopoly of medicine, and that access can, in the short term, ameliorate certain kinds of pain and misery. If I break my leg, I’d like to have it set without becoming homeless as a result. I do object to the fact that I have to pay for twelve years of higher education for something that can be done by a high-school drop-out with three weeks of apprenticeship. And I object to the refusal to define the real character of institutional medicine before we cry out for more access to it.
Progressives fought for the maze of regulations that mandate expensive and exclusionary licensing, resulting in the criminalization of everything from refusal of medical intervention to the corner taco stand to raw milk. That corporate predators were the target of these regulations at one point, and that uber-capitalists use libertarian arguments to bypass regulations that are inconvenient, again creates the campaign-environment that ignores the fact that the cure is worse than the malady. Regulation, licensure, and credentialing have served, more than anything else, to exclude smallholders and encourage monopolization by the well-resourced… or forced people to go into debt to become players, whether in business, agriculture, medicine, etc.
The accusation by the polemicists of the right that progressives want a nanny-state, while misogynist and gender-baiting in its articulation, appeals to many non-elites precisely because it is – divorced from its gratuitous gender-slap – true. Polemicists raise the argument because it has teeth. It unmasks the delusion that the world can be made risk-free, pain-free, death-free. It also makes explicit the fact that progressives can be control-freaks every bit as much as conservatives.
We return to the question: What is the result that progress aims at? What is the teleos? It is, in fact, another delusion based on an abstraction – perfection.
Perfect: entirely without any flaws, defects, or shortcomings.
The word as it is used now did not appear until somewhere between 1250-1300. That’s why theological claims of the perfection of Christ, for example, make no sense, because the notion did not exist in 1st Century Palestine. One could be righteous or unrighteous, faithful or unfaithful, but not perfect. Translations refer to “perfect” as complete; the way we might say “you know perfectly well…” – not ideally unblemished.
It’s a name for the nameless, like the number aleph naught – a countable infinity.
If we want to see the result of this trend toward perfection, think about the fallout from notions like the 4.0 GPA, the Perfect 10 woman, or the uber-mensch. Progressives have critiqued each of these manifestations, substituting their own version of perfection as teleos, but watering the same root instead of doing what needs doing, that is, tearing it out.
We can’t see past our own axioms because we confuse them with laws of nature. We share this misperception because we have mostly been conformed in the same forge, our mandatory education. Yet another article of faith in the progressive cosmos.
I said above that education damages our children as it has damaged us. It’s not an original observation. Yet progressives were and are the biggest proponents of mandatory, publicly-funded (say it, taxed) education… these paragons of “rights” and “diversity” support the idea that the state ought to compel, by force if necessary, every parent to send her/his children to a 13-year program that consumes their childhood and adolescense, forces them to memorize and regurgitate the propaganda of conformity and nationalism, disciplines them in floursecent cells, forces them to sit for hours – the equivalent of a torturer’s stress position – and compels them to silence and significations of abject obedience before institutional operatives.
The disagreements between progressives and conservatives is over some content, several techniques, what the funding streams for this militarized (and militarily-derived, read DeLanda on the roots of standardization and centralization) environment will be, and – again – whether or not certain policies prevent equal access to this cultural product. Progressives claim that children (and adults now) need education, like it’s oxygen or glucose, even though throughout 99.9999999% of human existence, the overwhelming number of humans had no such thing.
Mandatory education, indeed education itself, is one of the most powerful idols of modernity, specifically of Liberalism, and worshipped as well as vigorously defended by “progressives”; and by education I do not mean learning, but “education” the product, again run by a vast cadre of state-credentialled technicians within the technocratic monopoly.
It’s part of the progress-respectability-perfection axis; and it aims at standardizing humans like products.
Education, once a person has survived this social-Darwinian gauntlet, does credential, and credentials in the technocratic monopoly to open doors to advantages, but they are advantages that are part of the problem and certianly not of any solution. Conservatives want to maintain the harshest sorting methods to maintain existing social heirarchies, but at least they are not deluded about what they are doing. Progressives want a more “equal” distribution of (1) the product and (2) the outcomes, but they cling to the delusion of “improving the [human] race” through these regimens of standardized training in institutions called schools.
Speaking from my own memories of mandatory schooling, it was more miserable in many respects than my experience in the army, school being a place where we were sorted by age and subjected to the relentless cruelty of in-crowds, where we were fastened to seats, regulated by bells and buzzers like lab rats, subordinated to a lot of teachers who bored us out of our minds for hours and hours and hours or humiliated us at every turn, and where we suffered chronic performance anxiety. I learned to read at home before I ever started school, and I learned more by running wild on weekends or following my own interests around in a library than I ever did in a classroom… until I went to college after my first hitch of military service, where I chose my classes and professors. Chose, as opposed to mandatory.
At the very core of the education enterprise are (1) the regime of “meritocracy” and (2) the valuation of some people over and against others (until we can clone them into our own image of “improved”).
For myself, I am opposed in every respect to meritocracy. As a Christian, the idea of meritocracy is anathema. Which brings me to yet another contrarian response to “progressive” as term and as orientation: it’s sly statism embodied in a ridiculous abstraction called “freedom of religion.”
This is not an original complaint either, and it is directed at “progressive Christians” as much as its directed at secular progressives. Maybe more. Progressive Christianity – according to the faith I confess – is an oxymoron. There is nothing meritocratic about the message of the Gospels. We are commanded not ot value the literate over the illiterate, smart people over slow people, the respectable over the unrespectable, planned babies over unplanned babies, Christian people over non-Christian people, and we ought never have endorsed human-eugenics schemes.
Much of my critique here is cribbed from Stanley Hauerwas, the influential theologian at Duke University, and a lovely man who bought my lunch one day then made a gift to me of a copy of John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus. I hope I do his point of view justice here.
Let me start with a Yoderian point that lays the foundation for the rest of what I’m about to say on this matter. Yoder was a Mennonite theologian who decsribed Jesus the man and Jesus the Christ (the annointed) in three guises: teacher, prophet, and king. In his parabolic way, Jesus engendered wisdom for masses of peasants.. a teacher. In his provocative way, and in the Jewish prophetic tradition, He spoke and acted out uncomfortable truths to the powers – kind of an “emperor’s clothes” messenger; and the response of the powers was to show him not the emperor’s garments, but the emperor’s torture and execution device – a cross. Then there is the craziest aspect of this faith we profess. He is the King. This is a political statement, because kingship is a political position. Kings assume power with riches and weapons and extravagence. They remain in power only as long as they live, and their mode of power is initiated through conquest.
Most people aren’t familiar with what I’m about to say, even most folks who call themselves Christian (almost like it is a fading ethnicity). Our King assumed power through submission and service, He was humiliated by common soldiers who gambled for his dirty clothes as he was dying of torture, and He was quickly denied and forgotten during and immediately after His execution.
I believe that this man was the enfleshment, the incarnation of God, that God crashed through infinity and submitted to a human existence to pave the way for a reconciliation between humanity and God. I believe that His life was exemplary, that He was showing us – as a human – how to live as humans in a way that would reconcile us to God, and that the defeat of all sovereigns except God was accomplished first on the cross, and finally by the resurrection as the sign from God that death will not have the last word.
Let me reiterate the point that applies to this discussion. I do not recognize the sovereignty of states over that of God. In this respect, I am anarchistic; because I will disobey any secular power that tries to compel me to use violence or deny the humanity of any other human being. This shabby king we confess told us that we are free, and by God we ought to mean it. Furthermore, we are foolish enough to claim that the King already reigns, and that by our actions, by our confession and proclamation, and by our obedience to the mandate that we valorize the least of us, we bring that very Kingdom onto the earth “as it is in heaven.” Moreover, we need not submit to the evidentiary absolutism of modernity to “establish” the truth of our confession of faith. It is a revelatory faith, but this is not going to be a theologcial tract. The point is, early Christianity – the kind some of us still cling to – rejects state religion and the idol of nationalism.
I reject progressive nationalism as well as conservative nationalism.
The state has zero legitimacy when it acts unrighteously, for example, in waging war, or pushing tillers off land to build interstate highways and strip malls, or putting people to death. Moreover, we are called – in my opinion – to faithfuly discern the actions of individuals, institutions, and states, and to weild a prophetic voice in speaking truth against untruth and domination.
What “freedom of religion” is, is one item on a list of liberal abstractions that liberal states uphold only so long as the so-called “religion” (note how the word itself homogenizes, abstracts, and destroys the particularity of one’s beliefs) acknowledges the authority of the state and bows to the idol of nationalism.
Oddly enough, when Christianity (another over-generalization) was the state religion, captured as it was by what Yoder called “the Constantinian temptation,” it fought “freedom of religion” tooth and nail. When progress became the motif of social engineers, and when secular humanism became the dominant philosophical framework, “freedom of religion” swallowed sacred beliefs up inside the secular regime, making beliefs a personal choice. The state recognized the “choice,” onlyas long as the chooser recognized the state. Note that the state still prohibits religious practices (peyote, polygamy, refusal of medical care, refusal to pay taxes). So there are firm limits on this ostensible freedom.
I visited a church yesterday where there was an American flag next to the cross, a symbol of nationalism – which valorizes one nation against all others – next to the symbol of absolute catholicity, or that universalism that recognizes every person as a child of God. This grotesque contradiction did not seem to disturb the parishoners one iota. It was a progressive church, undisciplined except in respectability, a direct consequence of “freedom of religion,” and unrecognizable as the house church confederations of the 2nd Century that read John of Patmos’ defiant proclamations to one another in the face of imperial persecution.
The same applies to the silliness that is “freedom of the speech,” for example, that draws no distinction between an underground newspaper and a campaign contribution, even though the latter expresses nothing but power. This point will be difficult for some, because the domestications accomplished by power through these so-called freedoms have been effaced in our consciousness by liberal propaganda. The abstract freedoms of liberalism and progress have been immunized against critical discernment by years of brainwashing in mandatory public schools, etc. We have forgotten that the free expression that has actually borne the impact of sacrifice and courage were expressions made under duress, those asserted in the face of hostile power, from Jesus’ defiance of the priests and scribes to the SNCC’s freedom rides.
Inside these abstract freedoms is what Sojourner Truth called a “little weasel.” The erasure of all particularity except perhaps consumer choice – an illusion of capitalism. Speaking for myself, I am not a capitalist; and the empirical verdict on captialism, for that matter, is pretty much in, even if we continue to uncritically believe it is not.
This summarizes, perhaps too briefly, the critique of progressive Christianity from an ancient and now heterodox claim for the kingship of Christ. Now I need to explain a criticism of progressives more generally with regard to “religion,” which has already been smuggled into the discussion: anti-religion.
Many self-proclaimed progressives “cherish diversity.” So did US slaveholders, a lot, and that ought to tell us how vapid this slogan is. Enough said. Many other progressives, however, are anti-religious. They subscribe to the notion that all “religion” is backward and needs to be fought back. They can cite multiple instances of religious abuse, whereupon they conclude that religion itself – out of some inhering essence – is the cause of all social ills. This is a great example of a just enough knowledge to display one’s ignorance in bold relief.
After 9-11, many anti-war comrades adopted the belief that George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden were both acting predominantly from religious beliefs and carrying the rest of us on a downward spiral of terminal regression. It’s a simple idea, and simple ideas are often attractive. It is a preposterous assumption, however, that betrays a gaping void in the proponent’s grasp of geopolitics and history. Many also accused Bush of being a fundamentalist. In fact, he belongs to a Methodist church – which his wife convinced him to join – which is seen as a progressive church. But why dwell on inconvenient facts?
The majority of anti-religionists I have had commerce with fall into one or two categories: those who believe they are smarter and superior to anyone who is silly enough to embrace a faith, and those who have never bothered to compare theology and thereby assume all members of a given religious orientation (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, et al) to be the same. Many progressives are in both these catgories, and the most common complaint they have is against predominant Christianity, a term that conflates so many antithetical beiliefs and practices that it actually facilitates the error I will describe: attributing the popularly understood characteristics of politically-rightist “evangelical” Christianity (none of these adjectives are fully descriptive, but describe instead popular conceptions of religious institutions) to anyone and everyone who describes herself as Christian. They do not distinguish between Southern Baptists and Mennonites, between Presbyterians and Pentecostals, between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox.
It’s this knee-jerk attitude that led to one of my pet peaves, and that is the Fish War.
That’s those little Darwin-fish that began as a gratuitous slap at a symbol of the sacred for many people, a symbol of Jesus’ feeding of the masses. That provoked a response from those Christian elements who reject evolution out of a literal belief in the Hebrew creation story, where a Truth-fish swallowed the Darwin-fish. The point is that the anti-religionists started this unnecessary car-bumper feud, and the underlying assumption is that anyone who professes Christianity is unevolved (pun intended), backward (the opposite of progressive), and not as smart as those people who assert their supposed intellectual prowess by profaning a religious symbol. It is not an assertion of perceived truth, but of arrogance, of self-important superiority.
I’ll tell you something else that few seem to notice about this progressive anti-religionism. It’s white. Way white, and every time white progressives pop off with this stuff, they are guaranteed to offend the majority of Black and Latino folk.
It’s not good politics by progressive political lights if it pisses off some of the people that white progressives claim they want to be in solidarity with.
I say by progressive political lights because progressives also share a common delusion about politics that I once subscribed to, yet another reason I won’t call myself progressive no matter how many times I might share a space with progressives while participating in political resistance. That is the delusion of the efficacy of electoral/policy campaigns, especially the kind that require the support of established political parties – dismal swamps both.
Progressives are statists as their counteparts are among conservatives. They simply have different priorities for the state, which electoral/policy politics forces them to be dishonest about. The sad contradiction is that many-not-all progressives are actually motivated by impulses of decency in my experience, while many-not-all conservatives are motivated by racial animosity, the preservaton of socially-encrypted privilege, property and commodification of the commons, and a masculine devotion to patriarchy in the home and militarism. These differences are not negligible; but they miss the point that the state is an institution that is permeable only to disruption. It is not disrupted from within.
That’s why so many people are in the dumps right now over the supposed right-turn of Obama, support of domestic state surveillance, bailouts for the rich, and the near-manic expansion of the war.
There is no longer any public imagination of an alternative to the electoral/policy struggles that are part and parcel of the progressive world-view. And these diversionary games – which is what they are – lend themselves to dissimulation. We play them, and in the interest of winning this or that point, we ignore, excuse, cover up, and lie about inconvenient or contradictory realities. That is how we abandon the truth in favor of messaging and talking-points.
No example of this is more trenchant than the subject of sex.
People will accuse me of being anti-progressive because of my theological convictions; but I have objected to the term for far longer than I have confessed my faith. My critique of liberalism goes back to my days as a marxist, and my anti-modernism began as the skeptical anti-modernism of ecological leftists like Alf Hornborg and of feminists. The Enlightenment, Liberalism, and the myth of progress are male-dominant. Read Maria Mies, Carolyn Merchant, Carole Pateman, and Catharine MacKinnon… the list can be much longer… and know that this is not a specious claim, but one that has been demonstrated again and again through rigorous scholarship.
Progressive media never seems to tire of promoting sex as inherently good. My saying it that way will elicit exactly the reflex that needs to be called forward to prove my point. “Of course, sex is good,” people will say. “No one would deny this except religious zealots or the mentally ‘disorderd’.”
Now I’ll make another claim, and ask that the very people who had the predictable progressive reaction think carefully about it: Sex – actual sex as it manifests in our actual lives – is always inflected by power. I didn’t say sex is bad – the opposite of good. I said it is always inflected by power.
You can’t make a claim that there is such a thing as sexism, or patriarchy, or andrarchy – whatever you call it – and fail to acknowledge that our every encounter with sex is cultural and that there is structured hierarchy in our cultural constructions of sex. Like race. Like economic class. Like nationality. I’m not saying these boundaries are impermeable or non-negotiable, but that they have to be negotiated – if good will and understanding is present – with care, sensitivity, attention to responsiblity, and a degree of studied selflessness.
Sex is never abstracted out of the cultural power grid; and when we talk about it that way we are being disingenuous. Actual sex is inflected with actual power, and there is no sex except actual sex.
I wrote a book once about this, and how it relates to militarism and imperialism, and that book was edited by De Clarke, cited above in her remarks about so-called psychiatric disorders. De’s roots are in the radical feminism I was trying to get my head around as I wrote the book; and it was in that body of thought that I was confronted with the essential male-supremacy of the whole Elightenment project and how that legacy has survivied – albeit concealed by the male-meme of objectivity and the male penchant for abstraction – in the liberal/progressive enterprise.
Liberals and progressives, for example, see pornography as free speech. An abstraction in an abstraction.
If I describe pornography as simply sexually explicit media, then I have abstracted, or universalized, the category. If I describe it as an industry, then I am somewhat less abstract or universal. If I describe a production process in a specific building and time, with specific people who have specific histories, then I am more local and specific; as I am local and specific if I describe a specific pornographic genre being consumed by a specific 40-year-old man sitting at a specific address on his computer, masturbating.
In fact, an enormous number of men — from teens to late middle age — do predominantly two things during personal, private time on computers: they watch (and masturbate to) pornography, and they play war games.
The instant gratification as a sense of control and power that connects both these online activities is so obvious that I’m surprised there haven’t been multiple books written about that connection. The same control-freakery that progressives evince in their visions of perfect children in perfect families ensconced in perfectly safe societies. Progressives fight over something called privacy rights – and we know they are responding to invasions of privacy by governments, for example, though they don’t see schools as invasions of privacy – but they know little about the history of the public-private dichotomy.
The public-private distinction has only fairly recently in the sweep of history been enshrined as a neutral abstraction by liberal law. Historically, this division between the public sphere and the private sphere was a highly gendered cultural norm, wherein men occupied public spaces in male-hierarchies or as abstract equals, and where women were consigned to the private sphere which was a male-over-female domain. The private domain was where men could abuse their wives and children without interference. Privacy law was first popularized in the term “A man’s home is his castle.”
The irony that privacy rights law can be used by some women to protect themselves from some men is as inescapable as the fact that the abstraction of the law, pretending that men and women are equal, generally favors the status quo… or male social power over women.
There is a similar point to be made about the “social contract.”
The distinction between covenental and contractual relationships is obscure to us because the notion of contract is so completely embedded in modern culture and as the basis of liberal law, including the almight Constitution of the United States.
Wambdi Wicasa wrote in 1974, “A CONTRACT is an agreement made in suspicion. The parties do not trust each other, and they set ‘limits’ to their own responsibility. A COVENANT is an agreement made in trust. The parties love each other and put no limits on their own responsibility. Indian Leaders made Treaties with the Great White Father and called them Covenants, sealing them with the smoke of the Sacred Pipe. The trouble began when the Great White Father, his Lieutenants and Merchants, looked on the Treaties and called them Contracts. Thus began — in the basic religious difference — the conflict between Cultures.”
Carole Pateman’s book, “The Sexual Contract,” is canonical on this topic, in particular the implicit contract between male and female sexual partners that traditionally means one woman is protected from all other men by one man, in exchange for fealty to that one man. In contractual relations there is always the expectation that one has to “hold up his or her side of the bargain.”
Moreover, contract theroy was developed by Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau, then interpreted for the United States by the aptly-named Founding Fathers.
Pateman shows how modern patriarchy was developed by contract theory, how the sexual contract that was part of that theory has been ignored as an embarrassment, and how that evasion has served to conceal the problems when the theory was developed by men and for men, then the theory got itself grafted onto liberal feminist aspirations of abstract equality. Says Pateman:
In contract theory universal freedom is always a hypothesis, a story, a political fiction. Contract always generates political right in the forms of domination and subordination.
The presupposition of equality in contract theory is not accurate. Men and women are not equals in this society, and that can be proven.
Contracts have to be enforced by laws, which require lawmakers and law-enforcers… a state, that claims a monopoly of force. The contract is liberal, and it is inescapably male.
With the waning of the medieval age in the now-dominant culture, and with the rise of the liberal social contract, patriarchy changed. Women were ruled by fathers in medieval society — what Pateman calles “paternal” patriarchy. With the entrance of contract theory and abstract equality, patriarchy became fraternal… that is, each woman was potentially available — abstractly — to all men. The shift from paternal patriarchy to fraternal patriarchy was accompanied by the development of liberal law, the notion of privacy rights, the contractualization of human relations, a global surge in colonization to underwrite capitalist expansion, and — with consequences that are frighteningly apparent nowadays — the commodification of the biosphere… often also referred to as… Progress!
Progressive men have not generally celebrated the feminism that identified the connection between sex and power, but the liberal variant that they saw as expanding their access to the bodies of women.
That male prerogative gets defensive, too. That’s why I keep pouncing on pornography. Any critique of actual pornography, or of sexual objectification, will bring progressive men out of the woodwork in defense of the “free speech” they suddenly feel is under assault. I was at a conference of socialists – progressives if you like – among whom the men compared notes on what pornographic downloads they had in their collections.
These defenders of women’s social emancipation had no problem at all with products that more frequently than not objectified, humiliated, and portrayed sexualized violence against women. They couldn’t look at the women-hatred in the content because the supreme concern – a progressive one – was “free speech,” a principle (Progressives love principles) that can’t be upstaged by inconvenient facts. Actual harm does not enter into the equation.
It is deeply unfortunate that some progressive women have been taken in by this contradiction – more easily so because they are metropolitan women who are blinded by privilege and a consumerist account of free choice that allows them to embrace abstractions.
Major major pet peave as long as I’m on the topic…
Progressive men frequently insult women politicians and spokespersons of the right in clearly sexist ways, attacking them based on their sex, because they are considered enemy women, emphasis on women. I have also heard them revel in prison-rape humor. I’ve heard them naming certain enemy others as “whores,” and use other sexist slurs that are meant to prove their male bona fides. I remember one progressive acquaintence of mine who talked about how he’d “like to hate-fuck Sarah Palin.”
The gendered power hiding inside of progress comes to the fore when we reach way down for a good phatic utterance.
In summary
I have bent the stick a long way, and much of what I’ve said is not nearly fully explicated here, the gender portion for example, where grasping the male dominance buried in the history of the whole progressive project requires attention to lengthier scholarship. I hope I have at least encouraged people to think twice about this term and its antecedents, and that some will read the links, the scholars, and the books cited.
I also admit that my own generalizations necessarily efface the complexity and nuance of the many decent people who do claim this tag, progressive, and the compromises that we are all faced with in the immediate world created by progress and power. The fact that medicine treats problems created by progress and medicine itself does not, for example, account for the urgency with which one seeks to satisfy an addiction, or the tactics we employ to get on with our lives while we are trapped in convenience, traffic, respectability, gender, debt. Until I retired, I used sleeping pills to ensure my insomnia didn’t cause me to have an accident on a sometimes perilous job.
But my fundamental objection to the idol of progress remains, and so my refusal to accept the adjective progressive remains. If I am not homophobic, it means I am not homophobic. That does not make be liberal. It does not make me progressive. If I oppose war, it means I oppose war, not that I am a progressive. That I consider poverty a sin of the rich, or the destruction of the biosphere a systemic impasse, these do not mean I am a progressive. That I consider racism an abomination rooted in social structures does not mean I seek a solution in homogenization of cultures or the delocalization and abstraction of community.
I am not a progressive. Progress is an idol, and I have renounced it, I hope. Ivan Illich said, rightly I think, “To hell with the future, it’s a man-eating idol.” We have created one horror after another by projecting our fantasy of progress onto the future – half-drowned in the delusion that we can control said future, even in the face of history’s rebuttal. And I’ve watched policy-people and election-people, of whom I was one, flush vast quantities of energy and resources and time down the game-drain for miniscule and cosmetic changes that often themselves had iatrogeneic knock-on effects; when the same commitment to neighbors within earshot or the rehabilitation of soil and sense within reach would have done infinitely more and left our humility intact in the bargain.
We haven’t discussed one aspect of the progress-myth in any detail, and that is what De Clarke calls “the biophobic meme-plex.” It needs to be here, at least in a short abstract, because it is so interlaced with the ideological constellations of progress. In a discussion over at Feral Scholar – on water actually – the thread steered De into a nicely summarized account ot this “memeplex” in response to a reference to Louis Pasteur, a leading light of progress:
Pasteur was a wingnut, a monarchist revanchist who viewed “the people” and germs as similar pullulating masses of infection and danger.
The biophobic meme-plex he founded has been enormously powerful; it ties into other memeplexes synergistically, like longstanding masculine phobias about the messiness of life processes and the icky uncleanliness of females; European fantasies of superiority over “dirty savages”; technomanagerial fantasies of Progress; sky-father religious fantasies of transcending the physical to ascend into a pure and pristine ethereal realm [called "gnosticism" by theologians -SG], etc.
We are walking colonies of bacteria. They are not only our ancestors; they are us, we are them. When we declare war on the bacterial kingdom we declare war on ourselves, our own bodies.
This meshwork of notions that amend the purity-codes of the long-past with the medicalized episteme of The Enlightenment have come to dominate the whole progress paradigm. It’s the cleanliness-gene in a new guise. And it has an exterminist teleos smuggled inside it.
I’ll leave the reader to ruminate on the implications and to discover the connections in our day-to-day life, especially advertizing, where biophobia is mobilized for a plethora of purposes. In particular, watch for the hygeine commercials and how they mobilize fear of unseen life forms and methods for extermination. Note the respectability-motif in these ads, the safety-motif that looks almost like military defense.
I’ve said enough. It’s Christmas today, and we have many people to see.
Fire away.
Kim Sky:
“Healers don’t need 8-12 years of training; and medicine is the biggest racket in the world”
In considering your lengthy piece about the “progressive”, my response is to focus on medicine.
After so much hoop-la about the whole health care debate. I came upon the idea of seeking out an alternative way to educate myself in this field. And then perhaps others.
There is the rather remarkable history of midwifery in this country. Basically beginning on “the Farm”. And eventually becoming main-streamed. I gave birth with the aid of midwives practicing illegally, and was extremely pleased with that choice, as I would have been subject to a number of archaic (opposite of progressive perhaps?) practices governing that field at that time, 1987. I would have gone under the knife when nothing of the sort was necessary!
My plan is to take the five week course as a CNA. Hopefully I will learn something worth learning !!! My brother, a nurse, claims that most of what he learned was on the job. I cannot imagine myself working at a hospital? Other people I know have taken a wilderness training course, claiming the basics are taught there.
If you have any ideas about where to seek training, please let me know.
Thanx.
P.S. With your experience you could become a healer. Wow. Just read a book about Paul Farmer, inspiring.
25 December 2009, 1:16 pmCurt Kastens:
My response is to focus on education. I think that this subject best illustrates the catch 22 that mankind finds itself in. You painted a very true and grim picture of what state mandated and supervised education is doing to American society. Are you unable to see that one could paint a picture that was at least as grim if not even grimmer if there were no state mandated and supervised education.
For many years I had thought that I was a Libertarian Anarchist. What a bunch of popy cocky. I still agree with the idea that it is up to everyone to oppose unjust rule. Yet I recognize that 7 plus billion people on this planet will never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never live without leaders using force or at least the threat of force to keep society functioning. We can try to imagine a society without a state but if we are honest and truthful a state will always emerge from a society in which there is no state. Not only that there never never never never never never would ever be a society in which there was not a state in the first place. If someone ever thought that they had found one they would actually be making the mistake of not understanding the society well enough to recognize the institutions of the state.
There is one and only one key issue that separates a just state from an unjust state although there may of course be many ways of stating this difference.
No. Of course not.
One has to balance the Paine between the Buddhas.
No one can probably follow that. So what.
Do not fire away get out of the kill zone. I can be cruel. hahaha.
26 December 2009, 6:48 amGuy Montag:
This blog entry brings a book to mind I read long ago, “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and It’s Critics” by Christopher Lasch (1991).
Might be worth taking a look at it. In 1996, I attended the “Second Luddite Congress” (put on by a Plain Quaker called Scott Savage who used to hand-set his magazine “Plain.”) In the pre-blog age, I remember handing out my notes from that book which was well-received by others at the meeting.
. . .
I share your aversion to the “progressive” label. Years ago, when I still bothered to try to talk politics at the fire, I would call myself a “radical conservative” or a “traditional Southern Conservative” or a “traditional anarchist” when a ditto-head would try to tag a “liberal” label onto me. I was thinking of someone like Wendell Berry, or Leo Tolstoy,or Ed Abbey.
. . .
“Healers don’t need 8-12 years of training; and medicine is the biggest racket in the world”
I agree that higher education is another credentialism racket. I took it far too seriously, spending six years earning my Industrial Engineering degrees. Long ago,I was a Yuppie working in the Detroit office of Andersen Consulting (now “Accenture”). They hired motivated college grads, put them through a largely self-directed course, and in six weeks they were being billed out to clients doing computer programming (I knew English majors who had never programmed before who did this!) I doubt that few professions actually need a fraction of formal education to actually do the job.
26 December 2009, 11:32 amMichael Anderson:
Good that you made the comment about loyalty to the state as being a commonality between “liberal” and “conservative” labels—it’s just a matter of a detail here and there.
Idolatry—-I have become extremely uncomfortable with the flag worship in America. I keep seeing the Nuremberg Rally in my mind’s eye.
Many years ago I found a textbook on the bargain table at Payless Drug, a textbook about American-European relations that I have forgotten the details of. But there was a diagram in the back that caught my attention. It showed political persuasions not as line from left to right, but as a circle. On one side of the circle were non-violent groups, ones that might even be called “liberal”. On the other side of the circle, meeting at a point, were the extreme “left” and “right”. Their common factor on that side of the circle was that their reliance on extreme violence as one of the primary means to achieve their ends.
27 December 2009, 10:35 amJon:
Excellent: If you are not this or that, it does not make you “progressive.” Progress in any case is a begging of the question: in relation to what? Modern man’s “religion” is scientism and the idolatry of the machine and technology and of “civilizationism” that accompany it; as if the contents of empirical science or the novelties of “our times” advanced anyone even one step towards the really profound questions of life, which like it or not are the province of religion.
However, I have to say that a true principle can never be gainsaid by a fact, since facts by definition are “illustrations” of principles. Of course, there are theoretical “principles” in empirical investigations that in reality form the framework of hypotheses, which can indeed be gainsaid by facts. But you’re quite right: the term “principle” is bandied about too glibly and cleverly nowadays.
As for progressives and pornography, what can one say in the face of such frankly brutal and ugly barbarism and downright criminal degeneracy and hypocrisy? There is a coarse and stupidly vulgar, even diabolical (I know that sounds old-fashioned) element in society–”romanticized” and profited by a perfectly culpable media. I would even go further and say that given these surroundings “the devil” doesn’t even have to be particularly clever any more.
27 December 2009, 11:35 pmVeronica:
Very interesting post. You seem to be against principles. Is that a matter of principle? I must assume you think in accordance with a set of values and a view of the real–you call certain things “pernicious,” for example. How can one think at all without certain principles and presuppositions, unless one’s “thinking” is no more than a function of individual tastes and sensibilities–in other words, basically mere opinion?
That aside, I appreciate your critique of progress. De facto, it means progressive destruction of the planet and of human beings.
28 December 2009, 1:53 amxenia:
stan, i deeply appreciate this post. i only wish your usage of “gnostic” were more nuanced. they are more than a late antique intellectual fashion with a specific understanding of the divine and deprecation of physicality. it is a long and complex tradition, comparable to protestants as a whole. especially in the high and the late medieval period, the gnostics of southern france and the balkans were oppressed by the church and the state for their practical preachings of resistance to the church.
michael anderson, the problem with equating left- and right-wing violence is this: it’s a very common mainstream understanding in europe, and it’s tremendously effective in shutting up people. if leftist and rightist inclination to violence makes them the same, then a person who kicks a policeman while being teargassed or smashes a mcdonalds window is equal to a neonazi who kicks an african man in eastern germany to death (real life examples).
28 December 2009, 7:37 amBob Watson:
That a thing, a tool, a teaching, a practice, a principle, can be abused is not an argument against said tool, teaching, practice, or principle.
So, for you, I think I understand that if a critic of Christianity mentions some nominally Christian church support for the Inquisition or heretic burning or slavery or patriarchy or homophobia, your response is that such support was based on an abuse of Jesus’ teachings and thus the criticism has no validity or force. I get that.
I think of progressives in the same way. If there is going to be criticism of progressives, let it be of progressives at their best. What progressives do is to see some form of injustice, some group of their fellows who are suffering, try to think of a way to alleviate that suffering, and then move to do something about it. The wish is to make things better.
We have had the abolitionists, the land grant colleges, female suffrage, the labor union movement, the New Deal, the GI Bill, Brown vs Board of Education, the community colleges, Johnson’s civil rights legislation, the feminist and gay rights movements. Where is your dismissive critique of those?
Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream, that one day…” (and then the verbs go future tense) X will happen, and Y will happen, and Z will happen. Yeah, it’s about the future, but–peace to Ivan Illich, a great teacher—it’s not about Utopia, or human beings becoming perfect, Stan. It’s just incremental improvement.
28 December 2009, 4:52 pmJon:
“As a scientific theory, Darwinism would have been jettisoned long ago. The point, however, is that the doctrine of evolution has swept the world, not on the strength of its scientific merits, but precisely in its capacity as a Gnostic myth. It affirms, in effect, that living beings created themselves, which is in essence a metaphysical claim… Thus, in the final analysis, evolutionism is in truth a metaphysical doctrine decked out in scientific garb. In other words, it is a scientistic myth. And the myth is Gnostic, because it implicitly denies the transcendent origin of being; for indeed, only after the living creature has been speculatively reduced to an aggregate of particles does Darwinist transformism become conceivable. Darwinism, therefore, continues the ancient Gnostic practice of depreciating ‘God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth.’ It perpetuates, if you will, the venerable Gnostic tradition of ‘Jehovah bashing.’ And while this in itself may gladden Gnostic hearts, one should not fail to observe that the doctrine plays a vital role in the economy of Neo-Gnostic thought, for only under the auspices of Darwinist ‘self-creation’ does the Good News of ‘self-salvation’ acquire a semblance of sense.” (242-43)
[Elsewhere, Smith makes a sharp distinction between "gnosticism," and suthentic "gnosis" as the metaphysical core or essence of religion and spirituality. Their resemblance is only superficial. The adjective is unfortunately the same for both.]
http://www.newswithviews.com/Collins/phillip18.htm
28 December 2009, 8:10 pmJon:
Remarkable interview on the “Scientific Dictatorship”:
http://mp3.oraclebroadcasting.com/Intelstrike/intelstrike.2009-01-13_16k.mp3
28 December 2009, 9:56 pmStan:
Perhaps I’ll find a different adjective than gnostic, my use of which xenia correctly identifies – deprecation of physical reality (sometimes bordering on denial of it), embedded in an extreme dualism.
@ Bob: I appreciate your response, partly because it opens the door on a pivotal question.
The title of the piece was “why I don’t call myself progressive.” None of the social programs and historic decisions you mention were raised or pursued primarily by “progressives,” but by stakeholders and advocates who were far more diverse in their composition. The label “progressive” was retrojected onto these phenomena after this term regained popularity as the term “liberal” was effectively marginalized in electoral discourse. Many socialists also adopted this label, having constructed their own worldview along a reified line with progressive at one end and “backward” on the other pole. I myself used these terms when I was acting as a polemicist for various marxist formations and campaigns.
The point is, I think there are times when “the tool” has inherent difficulties, over and above its immediate application, as we have discussed here at some length… machine fetishism as defined by Hornborg comes to mind right away.
Progress falls into that category, imo, because it does carry its own meanings, prior to people’s adoption of the label “progressive.” Pointing out some of those problems was the gist of this rant. I believe a lot of very decent people who have adopted this label out of a sense of solidarity, even community, with others who call themselves the same, and who agree with them essentially on a given constellation of issues, have been inevitably shaped by the unexamined presumptions of progress. The results have been perverse; and the reason for these perversities, support for a damaging process called public mandatory education, for example, support for something called “development,” and even the history of eugenics, are not anomalous. They are contradictions arising from within the actual belief in “progress,” and seeking to resolve or even identify those contradictions outside the progress-trope leads us back into various misdiagnoses.
The notion of progress is more than a tool, and moreover tools have a determinative effect on our actions. Think of the internal combustion engine if you need a stark example of this.
When you use historical examples like the civil rights movement, the New Deal, the movements for women’s emancipation, the GI Bill, et al, we oughtn’t start with the assumption that these were unmitigated goods. As soon as I say that, of course, it will trigger a reactive assumption that I somehow “oppose” these movements and policies that sprang up from the merger of movement and the state. That’s simply not the case. It’s important to be honest about the actual state of society now, specifically where do those movements stand today – honestly!!! – and if there are problems with the outcomes, which I contend there certainly are, then understanding the problems requires a fearless self-inventory and analysis. One crucial question, in my own mind – the reason I posted this – is how has the notion of progress distorted and perverted the good intentions of people who were and are involved in these movements?
I just drove through Tennessee, where I passed places like Watts-Barr power plant, a coal-fired behemoth of an electricity-generating plant that was built by the TVA, a major progress-project of the New Deal. So a technology and its institutional framework was used for progress, and now the knock-on effects require us to seek new technologies and institutions to remedy these unforseen consequences. More progress?
I’d like to see some kind of systematic review of the states of social movements, or of various policies we regard as good in history, describing the states of these movements through the lens of the problematics of progress. Amy Laura Hall, who I cited in the piece, does this by using images from advertizing that employ the various progress-memes. Barbara Duden studies the history of the body – as we have variously experienced it at different times in history – in a way that intentionally raises questions about how ‘objective’ our own understandings are, but also whether or not we can accept unconditionally that our more progressive understandings are any improvement in our condition at all.
29 December 2009, 8:28 amBob Watson:
One of the pleasures of reading your site is the care and attention you give to terminology, but I can’t come all the way with you on the issue of a tight connection of progressive with the Myth of Progress. For me, progress, in common usage, is in sentences like, You making any progress on cleaning out the attic? The damned opposition has hung so many nasty connotations on socialist and liberal that those terms are of little use. We have to call ourselves something, after all.
And the damned opposition has often subverted to their own ends even the simplest kinds of reforms. Food regulations to halt practices like adding a bit of arsenic to cans of peas to make them stay green or adding plaster of Paris to cottage cheese for creaminess are now used to stop dairy farmers from selling raw milk to those who want it.
I have read John Taylor Gatto’s Underground History of American Education, and I understand why the damned opposition instigated and supported mandatory public education here. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that traditional beggars in India bound and deformed the legs and feet of their children in order that, so evidently and severely crippled, they would be more successful as beggars. The horror of this is more than matched by decisions of the rich and powerful in this country more than 100 years ago to require children to attend schools in which they were not helped to become good people, to become engaged citizens of a democracy, to become fully developed in their powers as human beings, but rather all of these were systematically and relentlessly stifled so that they would become docile and obedient workers. Gatto doesn’t just say this is so, he quotes Horace Mann and Elwood Cubberley and James B Conant and a dozen other so-called educational leaders who profess exactly these intentions. I went to public school and was damaged by this stultifying tutelage, and so were all of us.
So now when current educators extol education we understand them as the crippled pets of the system, the master’s privileged house slaves. On the other hand, the fact that there is counterfeit money suggests strongly that the real stuff might be around.
It is interesting to note that the damned opposition did not of course send their own kids to public schools. In the late 1800s, when mandatory public ed was being required in state after state, the 300 or so elite private boarding schools were created in the US. Fantastically expensive, more than Harvard most of them, did you know Obama went to one, and so did McCain, and Kerry, and Gore, and both the sons of Bushes? The course of study they got was far far different than what you and I endured. Gatto got access to many of these schools to study their curriculum and practices. So far as I know he has not written up his findings, but there is about 20 minutes of video where he describes what he learned. I think it incredible. It’s the first 4 videos on this page. Each one is maybe 6 minutes long.
29 December 2009, 4:03 pmhttp://www.edflix.org/gatto.htm
Curt Kastens:
I got a predominately public school education and I think that I got my monies worth. It is often aledged that public schools are not what they used to be but how can someone really know for sure. I have not seen any results on college test scores recently. I know that for many years they were getting worse and worse.
29 December 2009, 5:22 pmBut as teachers point out there are many things going on in society that effect these scores, not just schools.
Furthermore just because public education might suck in the US that does not mean that it is as bad in other countries of the world. So the idea of being oppossed to public education because it might suck in the US at this time is really a stupid reason to be oppossed to public education.
Does someone here want to make the claim that free markets or religous institutions are more likely to do a good job. Perhaps as a society we should just leave things up to chance?
Let me spell it out very slowly so that you can read it. Making public schools better is P-R-O-G-R-E-S-S. Do private schools have a place? Of course in offering classes that are not offered by the public school system. Should private schools be allowed to teach anything without any oversight from the state? I used to think that since human beings can not agree on what is true and what is not true it could never be said with enough certianty that an institution was teaching something false to prohibit it.
Now I say I do not care if I do not know what truth is with certainy. If I know that some school is teaching what I think is harmful bullshit and I have the power to stop or can persuade someone with the power to stop it that is exactly what I am going to do. If someone wants to call me a dictator because of it fine. I would also expect others to behave likewise.
Is expressing an opinion the same as teaching? ? ? Well?? Who is one expressing the opinion to? This is a very current issue in Germany.
Which gets back to the word PROGRESSIVE. Is there such a thing as a progressive Muslim and a backward Muslim? Who decides? Ok the obvious answer is that the state decides. But now the (German) state has the problem of deciding who will decide for the (German) state. What ever decision is made here I am 51% sure that it will be one that is better than 51% of other possible decisions that could have been made. I would not be so optomistic if it were US government officials responsible for the decision.
Happy New Year.
Curt
juannie:
The breadth and depth of this epistle is mind boggling in regard to my effort to respond but it seems respond I must. It dove too deeply into my psyche to not. I can’t take just one topic with which I must respond but seek to understand the whole of which you write. If this becomes too lengthy I think most will find the 8th paragraph on education most interersting and appropriate.
Superficially, and I say this realizing that the title was that of the progressive, I can respond to your denunciation of the progressive and your rational. I have of late tended to refer to myself as a progressive but as of now I no longer will. And not just because of my sensitivities to the “to be” equating which I recently addressed. I recognize the equivalence of progress as referred to by D. Jensen with exploitation of peoples and nature’s resources. Progress only occurs in his (and I believe he is right) opinion when conquest and exploitation occurs somewhere along the line of casual events. Your historical narrative gives me greater insight into the term and those who encapsulate themselves in it. It no longer suits me even if I accept as legitimate a label for myself.
This then brings me to the problem of semantics. “You making any progress on cleaning out the attic? (Bob)” Used in that sense the term seems harmless and useful.
I think that the equating factor (the verb to be, sorry to beat on this one again but I think it applies here.) becomes an obstacle in communication and understanding. Korzybski said (a paraphrase from memory) that the only thing we can accurately say about anything that we claim “is”, is that that is certainly what it is not. If I or someone else calls me a “progressive” it puts me in a box, encapsulates me and denies any other attributes that may not fall into that definition. It proclaims the fallacy of the excluded middle. That what makes it possible for the “opposition” to demonize terms like liberal and socialist (hang “so many nasty connotations on socialist and liberal”). I want to define myself as having certain characteristics: empathetic, warm hearted, maybe callous sometimes, emotionally stable, abrupt, scientifically minded, etc. etc. I have many characteristics and enumerating them in context could go a lot further in communication with others than labeling myself and leaving it at that for interpretation by others.
Your delving into eugenics and the progressive association makes me shutter but also evaluate my own leanings toward a more evolved species. Too many thoughts here for me to address in my limited capabilities for written expression but maybe further down the line as my writing ability “progresses”.
Your further narrative regarding the theological (Christian) investigation also moves me toward more in depth thinking before offering a written response.
The medical and educational expositions I find quite close to my own thoughts and ideas. So I guess I can expostulate a little here. Neither my wife no I have any medical insurance and we both practice healing arts to some degree. I spent a year in university level study (California Institute of Transpersonal Psychology) and my wife has completed training in aspects of healing mind body. We practice good nutrition on an ongoing basis and allow our instinctive faculties to function effectively through elimination of most of the daily fare that would clog these inherent abilities. I have on occasion seen my way through debilitating episodes of dis-ease by adhering even more stringently to the raw and natural that I would only have in the wilds if there were no “advanced” civilized healing alternatives. Except that I have a much broader choice because of the advantage of non local items. We acknowledge our mortality and have come to terms with it. While the fear honestly hasn’t just disappeared from my emotions, I feel ready to accept my impending demise when and on terms I have no control over. It is actually quite liberating to not “fear” death but in a non morbid way look forward to laying my burden down. The selling of “health care” is an obscenity of gargantuan proportions and speaks too loudly of the depths of depravity which our culture has descended into.
I agree with you and others here responding to the denunciation of the compulsory school system. The head master and founder (Arnold Greenberg) of an alternative school my daughter attended in Blue Hill ME wrote an essay called “The Meaning of School”. Some of the gems I picked up. I realize this reply is quite lengthy but I think the following will be of considerable interest to most who have responded in this thread. The following are all excerpted from Arnold’s article:
The meaning of the word school has changed dramatically from its Greek origin, schola—which means “leisure.” In Ancient Greece and for centuries afterward, men had the leisure to study, have discourse and explore ideas
There is abundant evidence that prior to the enactment of compulsory education in Massachusetts, Americans were already well educated. In 1776, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, sold 600,000 copies to a nation of two and a half million people. Prior to that Ben Franklin, a self educated man, created the widely read, Poor Richard’s Almanac. He also started the Philadelphia Library to provide books to a literate city. In 1817, William Cobett, a noted author, observed, “Every farmer is a reader, unlike the European peasant.”
Though America was largely agrarian, the Industrial Revolution was creating a need for workers in the mills and factories that were in most of the northern cities. There was a growing concern among government leaders and businessmen that though the American farmer was well read, he was also an independent thinker whose goal was to be as self-reliant as possible. What the country needed were workers who could follow instructions and not question authority. American industrialists and government officials became aware that Prussia was developing an innovative way of controlling its population
Our schools were modeled after schools in Prussia that were designed to create an “artificial national consciousness” worked out in advance by leading German families and heads of institutions.In 1819, the first American, Edmund Everett, went to Prussia and received a PhD. He went on to become the governor of Massachusetts. By 1900, all PhDs in the United States were trained in Prussia. The PhD is a Prussian invention and did not exist anywhere else. The PhDs came back to the United States and gradually became the presidents of all our universities and corporate research bureaus. Virtually all the founders of American schooling went to Germany and praised the new methods in widely circulated reports.
The Prussian approach basically involved dividing whole ideas into school subjects, each further divisible. Some of these subjects involved teaching them for short periods, punctuated by a horn. This fragmentation and frequent interruptions affected self-motivation andmade one dependent on an instructor. There were many training techniques but all were built around isolation from first hand information and having fragmented abstract information presented by teachers that would result in obedient and subordinate graduates able to be respectful of arbitrary orders.
The goal of American schools was to socialize the population in order to achieve cooperation. In 1896, Dewey said, “independent, self-reliant people were a counter productive anachronism in the collective society of the future. He went on to say, “people who read well or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered. They know too much and know how to find what they don’t know by themselves, without consulting experts.”
Three major ideas were transferred almost intact from Prussia:
29 December 2009, 10:15 pm1. State schooling did not exist to offer intellectual training but to condition children to obedience, subordination and collective life.
2. Extremefragmentation of thinking into subjects, fixed time periods, sequential units, externally imposed questioning would simplify problems of leadership.
3. The third premise was that the government is the true parent of the children.
The State was sovereign. In 1899, William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education assured railroad magnet, Collis Huntington that American schools were “scientifically designed” to prevent “over education from happening.” By 1910, a national system of education is in place and by 1918, all states had Compulsory Education laws. The Carnegie unit was initiated in an attempt to guarantee a high degree of uniformity throughout the country.
DeAnander:
Essentially the self-justification of our present ruling elite (and the sop to soothe the restless masses, the promise/threat that is supposed to nullify all qualms) can be summed up as “aren’t you better off than you were 200 years ago?” — much like an election slogan. Like the overbearing Vezzini in “The Princess Bride,” our ruling powers (and their voices implanted in our heads and the heads of our peers) ask us, when we complain about present conditions, whether we’d rather be back where they found us — helpless, hopeless, unemployed… in Greenland? We have, they tell us, escaped the unthinkably horrific life of feudal peasant agrarianism thanks only to their benign technocratic efforts for Progress. And we should be grateful. Progress (the icon, the idol) means “I am better off than my grandparents were, and my children will be better off than I am.” And the moment when modern people begin to doubt part B of that credo, let alone part A, is a socially traumatic, shattering crise de foi.
The other side of the ledger, of course — the story of dispossession and Enclosure, the systematic destruction of the commons, the enclosure and credentialising of many forms of knowledge (from healing to education even to the performing arts), the patterns of slavery and genocide and accumulation on a supra-Pharaonic scale, the story of exterminism — has been pretty much forgotten, erased, obfuscated… rewritten for example as a series of unrelated “bad apple” incidents involving inexplicably wicked people, stage villains, rather than as the necessary underpinning and backdrop of the “Progress” story.
I suspect that we are all worse off than we were as gatherer-hunters; most paleo-archaeologists seem to concur that those ancient folks were healthier than we are, surprisingly long-lived, and spent fewer hours per day working to survive than the average office drone. The next organisational model — imperial agriculture, corvee labour and all the rest, in whatever language you like on whatever continent you pick — doesn’t seem too attractive; in general our physical size and the robustness of our skeletal remains declined (except for the handful of fortunate elite). That decline persisted, except in little pockets of relative egalitarianism, until the bonanza that was fossil fuel: an historic blip. I never lose the shudder of corrected-perspective and gut-level terror at that realisation: that all the grandiose techomanic assumptions with which I was raised are no more than byproducts of a brief historical blip, the equivalent of a mad yeast bloom responding to a tablespoon of sugar in solution.
That huge burst of “free” energy, powering “energy slaves” (hat tip Illich), made possible an era of accelerated looting of natural resources producing a temporary surplus of material goods for the denizens of the industrialised states, and a motivation for our rulers to accumulate abstract money rather than material goods themselves. In other words, it wasn’t painful for the ruling class to “share” the material wealth with the new middle class, since (a) there was a surplus anyway and (b) all the money the arrivistes spent on those material goods ended up back in the pockets of the industrial barons… often with interest. But, looked at from the point of view of physical comfort (even luxury) and entertainment value, the average peasant-equivalent in the industrial cores sure does seem “better off” than s/he was a generation or two ago…
… *except* for the accelerating biotic bankruptcy around us (expressed as toxicity and chronic disease, as soil loss, as low food quality, ecosystem simplification, mass extinction etc) and the enormous instability of the compound-interest usury-based capitalist “economy” [it irks me somehow to refer to something as "economy" that runs on, and rewards, unreality-based returns and chronic flagrant waste] which periodically wipes out notional money value. My Grandpa had no iPod, but he routinely (as a poor working man) ate fish (good clean fish, mercury-free) which today are rare and can only be afforded by the rich. And ordinary people today eat fish he would only have used for bait. Even when money-times were tough, he could with his own labour put food on the table, without participating in currency transactions. Very, very few people today can put food on their tables without currency transactions; and this is considered Progress, that when notional, fictitious, symbolic money systems collapse, people can and do starve.
As the true costs of industrialism and the fossil fuel bonanza make themselves felt, large numbers of people may accurately conclude that we are *not*, after all, any better off than we were 200 years ago; that we are paupers by comparison to our ancestors; that we live in a cultural world increasingly defined not by wealth, growth, and surplus, but by scarcity and decline. We are rich in iPods and very, very poor in potable water, stable weather, and fish. The day we decide that the fish matter more than the iPods, the “social contract” with our ruling class is visibly broken: they promised us Progress and they have given us Decline.
I suspect that the popularity of “anti-terrorist” legislation intended to quell dissent, the building of expanded detention centres, the abrogation of quaint relics like Constitutional law, and so on, are the pre-emptive, cautious strategic moves of a ruling class well aware that the Mandate of Heaven is about to run out.
Since we seem so hooked on the general idea of Progress I propose, somewhat mischievously, a new definition. We are “progressing” or “winning” if with each passing year there is more life, more topsoil, more bio-diversity, more available food, more food/water security, a higher level of health and robustness, all around us. We are losing or backsliding if there is less. We are “progressing” if the number of people forced to submit to arbitrary authority and control in exchange for survival is diminishing, we are losing or backsliding if it is increasing. How are we doing?
30 December 2009, 12:24 amDeAnander:
BTW I should add that “unthinkably horrific” is the ruling class’ description of peasant agrarianism, not mine
I can list of a number of ways of making a living that seem to me horrific (and some nearly unthinkable) but peasant agrarianism doesn’t even make the top 100, let alone the top 10. As someone or other — maybe Wendell Berry? maybe Henry George? — said, what makes peasants’ lives horrific throughout history is bullying and extortion by feudal overlords (or occupying armies), not the agrarian life in itself.
30 December 2009, 1:01 amDeAnander:
A timely coincidence: recent article by J T Gatto at Commondreams:
Gatto somewhat weakens his case, imho, by citing millionaire CEO “success” stories as examples of the self-educated beating the system… seems to me that this form of success is just more obedience — a more pro-active, opportunistic obedience — to the capitalist game. But his critique of institutionalised schooling is hard to fault; I still like Illich’s _Deschooling Society_ best, but that may be just a personal bias.
30 December 2009, 1:14 amStan:
Coupla pennies worth. First, a clarification. I said I was bending the stick, not breaking anything; and I do not “denounce” progressives. I re-nounce the name progressive… for myself. It is progress itself, the trope of progress, that has performed serial self-denunciations without coming to terms with how the notions of perfection, respectability, and control have led, for example, potentially emancipatory movements into an embrace of something like eugenics. We ate the meal; then we got sick. Why?
@ Kurt, standardized tests are measures of the ability to take standardized tests. If these have great value, then they are – by definition – valuable… to someone, for something. Public schools now give students the ASVAB battery. Everyone knows the acronym, but few realize it is the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. I’d love to see more publication on the historic connection between public school organization and military organization; but of course, then we’d have to figure out how to devalorize the military which is actually held in higher esteem than any other institution in our society now. That esteem is part of the militarization of society that, btw, has progressed (: under the Obama regime just as inexorably as it did under the Bush regime. “Love the warrior, not the war,” is a more progressive slogan I saw during anti-war activity (a preposterous slogan that tries to have the cake and eat it too, leaving the valorization of armed service completely intact… why not “love the person, lead them away from war”?). But again I digress.
My objection to the label progressive is not that we don’t identify whose version of progress gets embraced. “How can we define progress, when it is different for each person?” That is a liberal argument, already abstracted, inherently relativistic… and in this case, solipsitic. It waves a liberal magic wand to abracadabra away the existing and potent cultural content of the idea, pretending that this potent idea can be spoken out of existence.
My objection is to the actual, established, existing content of the notion. Our casual use of “progress,” like hey, you’re really making progress on that garden, or whatever, oughtn’t be confused with this critique. I don’t want to demonize a simple word.
I very much appreciate De’s connecting this to the energy-blip. The material basis of our epoch has to be included in any critique of its ideas… and practices.
My critique, not denunciation, of progressives (some of my best friends are progressives) includes – expansivley – my suspicion-turning-conviction that political gaming – which is what the term has always been part of – is a devil’s snare that leads to dissimulation, then dishonesty, then cognitive dissonance, then self-delusion. It subordinates (then suffocates) our discernment to campaign tactics.
30 December 2009, 8:39 amCurt Kastens:
Juannie,
30 December 2009, 9:02 amWho are the real parents of children the one who gave birth to them or the state?
I think this is a good example of the need balancing. Is there any doubt that some biological parents make horrible parents? Is there any doubt that the state can also be a horrible parent? When I was a follower of Murray Rothbard and the like,
I went with the idea that since that parents were OK most of the time the State should butt out of child rearing. Now I think that a just state has a roll to help parents become better parents and to butt in when parents are doing a really terrible job.
I once thought that the state should never but in because it could take children away from folllowers of Murray Rothbard, or Ayn Rand, for example and since I would not want the state to do that to me I would not want it to have the power to take children away from other despised minorities such as nudists or religous cults. Now I think that those in charge of making decisions on behalf of the state have the right to butt in on a case by case basis. They may make the wrong decision sometimes. Hopefully they will learn and get better at it.
The important thing is when children get raised properly in the first place they will make good parents and then it will not be necessary for the state to butt in.
I recognize that the state will be enforcing an orthodox view of what is considered good at that time and place and that orthodoxies are bad. Over time both stupid and good ideas conatined in that orthodox view will be challenged.
From this conflict a society will change for better or worse.
Curt Kastens:
By the way,
30 December 2009, 9:31 amSince when is socializing children to get along with one another a bad thing?
Kindergarten is a good Prussian word.
Is feeling like you valued contributing member of a family, and extended family and society a bad thing? Of course no one here would say that it is.
A state education should should ensure that. The problem is not the state per se but an unjust morally bankrupt (USA) state. Of course if one said even if a state might not be morally backrupt today, all states are in the process of evolving to a point of moral bankruptcy, I would have to be silent because that might be correct.
Because men are not good they need a state to supervise them. Because men are not good who ever gets placed in that higher role has their own flaws magnifed by the power they possess. Who supervises the state? It should be the citizens.
History shows that they are seldom capable of the job. I think that a dictator could help prepare them for thier responsiblity. But it can not be any dictator. It would have to be a very special dictator. I reccommend the Commander for the job. Unfortunatly, she has gone away for awhile because she is angry that she has been betrayed. But if we are lucky, when she cools down she might come back. Fortunately, she told me that I was the XO before she left. Sadly, no one in any state appuratus seems eager to accept my position. Of course she obviously knew that would be the case. So, she must have had a good reason for it. Will we ever find out? You be the judge.
(Boer) Tom:
Two comments – 1. Sanger wasn’t the first to introduce birth control – Emma Goldman was (in USA); I read the latter’s autobiography twice, but the last time was about a decade ago, so I cannot be sure whether she had any notions of eugenics for motivation. Anarchism has several progressive tendencies, along with a general blindness to ethnicity, both weaken it – I’m speaking as an anarchist…
2. Control and the evolution thing go together – many scientists are quite arrogant – anyone who’s had a look at PZMyers’s blog can tell you the general tendency is arrogance – I find it relatively easy to get people who reject evolution to consider it – they just taunt.
Stan, I’m really pressed for that article of yours on Colombia – is there any way you could provide a reference or link?
30 December 2009, 10:50 amStan:
On the education topic, Illich ran into some heavy sailing with this issue, even having had friendships disrupted on account of his explication and the reaction of others to it.
I doubt he or any other education-critic wants to see the creative capacities of this and future generations stunted. Those of us who advocate for relocalization have argued the contrary, that we need more creativity – and that means a more generalist and artisanal approach to learning, something that metastasizing institutions treat as anathema. The problem has become that we can’t seem to divorce the idea of learning or growing from the idea of an institution. Institutions can be useful to communities, but they bear close watching because they put themselves over and above their communities… and seem intrinsically inclined to do so. (Still haunted by Dunbar)
30 December 2009, 11:08 amjuannie:
I oftentimes ponder whether my reading and contributing to Blogs or Forums or for that matter writing letters to editors isn’t somewhat a wasted effort and more akin to mental masturbation than effectively helping to create a better world for myself and others, especially my offspring and her generation. As often happens and is wont for me from her contributions I find reassurance, enlightenment and inspiration from De.
My pondering stems from the idea that we’re just all singing our favorite songs back and forth and those who don’t like our genre will never listen anyway. I, and probably most of us, like to think that our writings and ideas will somehow pierce the protective armor of others’ denial. Even most of my close friends not so subtly stifle their yawns or bluntly persuade me to cease and desist and let them get on with their business of living much better lives than their ancestors. A recent article by Bruce E. Levine, “Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free?”( http://baltimorechronicle.com/2009/120809LEVINE.shtml ), helped me understand that the promulgation of even more of the horrific stories of what is happening to the world and our lives may actually be pushing us even deeper into denial; abuse syndrome.
So if I’m going to continue my efforts and keep writing and talking how or what could I write or say to better accomplish my goal of generating more public pressure on the psychopaths steering corporate consuming culture and global imperialism. Maybe it’s communicating the fallacy of the B part of the credo De refers to: “I am better off than my grandparents were, and my children will be better off than I am.” and help create the “…socially traumatic, shattering crise de foi” This I think is a new and important approach for me. That coupled with Leviene’s suggestion that people respond better to “encouragement, small victories and models of courageous behaviors.” Here in VT that opportunity possibly exists in the growing self sustainability successionist movement. Our town meeting form of government gives hopes of efficacy here.
Curt, in answer to your question I personally believe that it is we, the biological parents or appointed surrogates, who are the “real parents” of our children. But I would agree with you that sometimes “balancing” is necessary. In the event of “horrible parents”, to me abusive parents, the community of which we are a part of have, not just the right but the responsibility to insure that abuse doesn’t take place or continue if discovered. This I would extend to all of our communities members where abuse, violence or fraud are discovered. The state/government to which we refer to now is but the handmaiden to the very wealthy who are in control of resources and power over most all aspects of our culture and world. Another quote from the article I referenced above: “Our schools became part of a social engineering scheme designed to create a passive, obedient population that would not question authority.” Can you deny that this isn’t exactly what the public schools in this country are designed to do and accomplish quite successfully. I think what you desire is a decent educational chance for all. As indicated in my above post, Franklin, Cobett and DeToqueville (not referenced above) among others commented on how well educated were Americans long before compulsory education. What is clear to me is that this is exactly what the elites in power and control who enforce compulsory education do not want. The well educated and freethinking creative populous don’t make good slaves or servants.
30 December 2009, 1:46 pmCurt Kastens:
First a few comments that I had not intended to write.
i do not agree that relocalizing, which sounds to me like an educated word for decentralizing education, will be any better than centralized education. Decentralized of course means more ways of educating. The thing is some of those ways will be good and some will not. Everyone learns differently. Some thrive in an institutional setting. Some thrive when they see and do with help and then by themselves. I imagine that others have other quirks that can promote or inhibit there learning potential. So if after decades of trial and error, which the world has been doing up to now, a very good system is developed, why not insure that all systems follow more or less the successful system. Limited experiments can of course be continued to improve the already good system. Of course the catch is how do we measure the performance of a system? I think that some smart people can come up with a good answer to that question. Standardized tests might not be part of the answer.
Stan, Institutions can be useful to communities, but they bear close watching because they put themselves over and above their communities…and seem intrinsically inclinded to do so. Perhaps because they figure out that they are not being watched? Perhaps because specialization of labor makes it to difficult for people to the learn enough about the subject (education, medicine, transportation, military affairs, energy, banking, and so on) Whether it is true or not perhaps the idea that people are being watched by Gods or Buddhas or Aliens or a benevolent Big Brother is an idea that has to spread. They of course avert their eyes at the proper moment when you have a legitimate need for privacy. Of course I curse the Gods or Buddhas or whatever for not making it more clear that we are under observation. They must accept the blame for giving people more temptation than they can handle.
30 December 2009, 2:09 pmFurthermore they must accept the blame for allowing mankind to go down the path of industrialization not fully understanding the consequences of such a decision. One could easily draw the conclusion that humans are all alone. That conclusion itself is a source of temptation.
Curt Kastens:
Now on to what I had intended to write. I was pissed off before but after thinking about what jerks the other powers are I am really steamed.
30 December 2009, 2:24 pmWhat has me pissed off is the fact that such a big deal is made out of college athletes getting paid or making any money for their participation in a university sports program. Look very closely now because I do not want to lose my temper. If a student can get paid to wash dishes in the cafeteria when the student is not in school why can they not get paid to play football when they are not in school. What is the difference? First of all when an athlete gets a scholarship the athlete is being paid already. Second I am sure that a drama student could get paid if they took part in a Broadway performance while they were not in school. It is blatant discrimination to prevent college athletes from getting paid for the work that they do.
Yes I know that it seems obvious now that I have pointed it out. But this was an extremely important subject subject that was being overlooked by the nations economists. So I will not disapprove if you submit my recommendation to the Nobel Prize Committee for a Noble Prize in economics. You better do it fast or else you will have to pay more postage once you move to Costa Rica.
Curt
Michael Anderson:
A good book on education—-”The Underground History of American Education”, by John Taylor Gatto. He documents the Prussian influence, among others, in the American system.
There was an interesting vid on NYT awhile back, about the Swedish schools. Sometime back, they recognized that we don’t all learn the same way, so in their system, EVERY school is a charter school, and it seems to provide a lot of diversity. Is this “progressive”? Of course, the country of Sweden is much smaller, with less population and ethnic diversity than here, too. Does this make a system more workable?
There are charter schools here, of course, but they seem to be in the process of being monopolized by the military and the weaponized Jesus crowd.
So—how does Dunbar’s number relate to a world with almost 7 billion people in it? How do we keep from mistrusting other “tribes”? Is this what the internet is for?
30 December 2009, 3:13 pmJon:
The “unthinkably horrific” conditions of the peasants reminds me of an excellent book that disabuses one of many errors and prejudices concerning the Middle Ages–largely propagated by the French Enlightenment.
“Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths”
“As she examines the many misconceptions about the “Middle Ages”, the renown French historian, Régine Pernoud, gives the reader a refreshingly original perspective on many subjects, both historical (from the Inquisition and witchcraft trials to a comparison of Gothic and Renaissance creative inspiration) as well as eminently modern (from law and the place of women in society to the importance of history and tradition). Here are fascinating insights, based on Pernoud’s sound knowledge and extensive experience as an archivist at the French National Archives. The book will be provocative for the general readers as well as a helpful resource for teachers.”
http://www.amazon.com/reader/0898707811?_encoding=UTF8&token=jAE3%2Fm62fipkCpWxGz%2BC1tWHZFJW%2FCGhVydht8spsD4%3D&ref_=sib%5Ffs%5Ftop&page=13#reader-link
30 December 2009, 5:25 pmStan:
Drat!
30 December 2009, 6:41 pmStan:
@Veronica, on principles.
If I were to come at you or anyone, befriending you perhaps, and doing so with a hidden agenda, I would call that unprincipled behavior. That seems descriptive and important.
But when people say a principle is worth fighting for, they are talking about something altogether different than behaving with some semblance of integrity. They are talking Principles, fraternite, for example; and those are the kinds of principles that “pervert the best.”
30 December 2009, 6:53 pmlatte lenya:
It’s so interesting how all this — progressivism, education, science, religion–is so double-edged (at least), and so entirely resistant to bumper-sticker thinking. You have to chew on it, to consider it, to listen to others about it, to come back to it, and you’re still not there. We’re very product-oriented, even with ideas; we’re trained to want ‘the answer’.
30 December 2009, 7:20 pmIf there is an answer, surely the way this discussion has unfolded is an important part of it.
As someone who has outlived a great many labels, the best I can do right now is to call myself a subversive. I’m a schoolteacher. I read Gatto’s book last year in September and the year got off to a very rough start. It’s too bad the libertarians have claimed him, but maybe he’s living through labels himself.
(Boer) Tom:
I’ll make another comment about evolution, as science, in the context of the popularization of science. In north America and Europe, science is popularized as a set of conclusions to be accepted, with some interpretation – a very religious approach, and decidedly unapplied in its popularization. I had a friend (Pakistani expat), very devout, who asked me whether I thought that humans, genetic engineering and all, would slowly be changed into some new form of creature. I understood of how extremely complex systems (genetics, e.g.) have highly dynamic and unpredictable (within human and computer capability) consequences, e.g. interactions with environment (try modeling a simple biochemical reaction with quantum mechanics, much less a complete organism). I had also heard all sorts of scary stories about how Muslims are supposedly culturally opposed to science, so I said ‘If you take the evolutionary/genetic perspective, it is not clear what the outcome will be, but generally, one may expect that such individuals may suffer all manner of unexpected problems – I have more pity for such individuals and their children than fear,” and added some basics of unintended consequences, interactions between separate genes in expression, interactions between genes and environment, etc., and the issue of looming peak oil and high-tech’s dependencies. My point is that if one wants to popularize science (e.g. climate science, matters of peak oil, plant disease, agriculture etc.), one should apply it, rather than demand some fundamentalist allegiance to a set of shifting assumptions underwriting some research program.
In one of the continuing blog wars on ‘ClimateGate,’ someone with the relevant scientific background pointed out that CO2 absorbs photon radiation in the IR at a certain wavelength very strongly, thus causing the greenhouse effect; fine, but why not show the relevant math (blackbody radiation of the sun per unit wavelength, times absorptive spectrum of CO2, and integrate, each with some explanation, followed by a differential equation solution to the equation of the earth’s surface heat content gain and loss from solar radiation, CO2 absorption, and resultant earth blackbody radiation)? Actually, it is a rather simple project, and gives immediate insight, without having to master the final details of calculus – one may simply use numerical methods (which is what tends to happen in practice in any case – scientists just want to show off their specialized knowledge), and get the point across. This is what tends to happen in technical colleges (rather than universities – I quit school after grade 8 to do technical college, before later getting a grade 12 and university schooling), and as a result, technicians are often much more grounded in their scientific understanding than ‘scientists’ – an engineer related that he had wanted to estimate some parameter, that required an integral to calculate, so he created a numerical model to predict the shape of the function that had to be integrated. A curious technician asked what he was doing, and then asked for a printout of a graph of the function to be integrated; the technician cut out a square containing the graph, and then cut the graph out of the square, and using a sensitive scale nearby, weighed the two pieces and found the integral as the ratio of the graph mass to the square’s mass, by using two trivial math transformations…
Also, it is more valuable to teach the more basic science and associated math, so that one may critically evaluate new research – I was recently baby-talked down to by someone with some nutrition-related background for daring to challenge him – and this attitude tends to discourage non-’educated’ individuals to become skeptical of science as an enterprise, yet all I wanted was some numbers for an estimate, and he demanded that I first memorize the intricacies of the metabolism of sugars. Many scientists cannot think outside a very narrowly defined box, but don’t want others to understand what they are talking about. I should point out that this is not a question of ‘education’ in an institutionalized sense – right now I’m doing research, and a bit of the math I had learned as a child in programming graphics (learned on my own time, at a public library – children love showing off) proved useful to me a few months ago – I learned the math, because it was useful to me at the time.
As to the question raised above about living under an extremely violent state (Kurt), I think the issue is bigger than that – the USA state demands that other states deny their populace food independence, so you end up with extremely dependent shanty dwellers. Also, there is a greater sense of responsibility to family, which changes the structure of opposition – it is not an individual question only – we third-worlders (Africans and Caribbean diaspora in particular) work in places like Europe and North America to send whatever we can home. Now one may complain that this doesn’t end up causing resistance, but it is a bit hard to resist if you are not secure in the tenure of the roof over your head – rebellions are easy to crush, and it takes relatively secure people to sustain a resistance. And again, if one is not involved in a project (e.g. growing food), the notion of resistance to Monsanto et al. for food security becomes a form of babble, yet it is food resistance that is basic to any other form of resistance involving any state – have you read Hudson’s Superimperialism? The introduction is a bit heavy, but the chapters are quite readable – go look what the USA state does to prevent food security abroad; Mies was mentioned above – she gives another angle, specifically regarding the EU’s actions in India regarding food (and debt).
30 December 2009, 11:47 pmStan:
I am reminded of my late friend Mark Jones again, a hard-nosed Bolshevik who alienated many of his comrades when his attention – and his ruthless honesty even about inconvenient facts – turned to these energy and ecological issues. They began calling him “the parson,” and “catastrophist” when he began to question the assumptions of modernism. He said once in a somewhat despondent email that the marxist project of overturning the ruling class had to be more fundamentally a project of overturning divisions of labor, and that the first on the list for this cleansing of the temple was the intellectual division of labor.
On evolution, adaptation, and even genetic engineering… we’ve been gene-selecting for some millennia now by breeding plants and animals, and adaptation – as well as maladaptation – happens over time no matter what. Every species adapts to its habitat, even building it to some degree, until catastrophic changes in the habitat render null the former adaptations – of heredity, but also practice.
Deep secular cycles are eventually affected by the collective activity of any species, but our ability to exosomatically exploit energy, our ability to pass on acquired skills and ideas in a kind of Lamarkian way, and the exploitative dynamics of hierachical citification, have created some fairly forseeable unintended consequences: climate change, peak energy, topsoil destruction, et al, in conjunction with a quasi-malthusian population outbreak based almost entirely on exploitation of fossil hydrocarbons – that blip that De described. Moreover, this population (which is not the primary problem) is being further and further stranded in cities and even megacities, creating greater and greater vulnerability to the more inexorable consequences of these secular trends.
Any number of environmental phenomena could generate a quantum shift in this situation, a new epidemic comes immediately to mind, and a heretofore unacknowledged trait – even a genetic trait – might protect some and harm others.
One of my own preoccupations has been with the American middle-class, and the extreme dependency of that class exposes it to that Lamarkian danger – that they have no cultural capacity left for self-sufficiency or adaptation of any kind, except the one capacity they still retain – enormous political power. Even when they go off to get their mostly male bona fides in the military, they are dreadfully expensive and vulnerable, requiring tons of special equipment and special treatment (bottled water. eg) to put them into action. Their ecological footprint is far higher than even a profligate six-figure suburban family; and if you remove those inputs, they are no longer viable.
It would be easy to embrace a kind of schadenfreude about this situation, but that seems a pretty bitter portion.
31 December 2009, 9:05 amDaveS:
Good People,
Thank you for this interesting discussion. Good to see you over here Jaunie, nice points.
I just wanted to interject a few thoughts. I hope nobody’s upset, but because of the recession I can only afford ten-cent words.
This starts with a story about a conversation between me and a guy with two college degrees. This took place many years ago when I was a young, non-college educated photojournalist working at a daily paper and a former photographer who had dropped by to visit old friends at the paper and we started talking shop.
I was bemoaning my lack of education and how I’d missed a job because I lacked a college degree, and he looked at me bemused and told me I was lucky that I hadn’t been “institutionalized”, which is what you do to people who have problems. You put them into institutions to try and “fix” them or hide them, and that I probably didn’t need fixing. His conversation changed my life and how I looked at myself.
Education is very different from institutionalization, which is what public schools do to pupils. An education demands asking questions and searching for answers. Institutionalization is indoctrination, repetition of task without question.
Anything close to an education I might have is the result of a couple really inspirational teachers and a lot of reading and doing on my part. Going to school? I learned to be very suspicious of my fellow humans and their motivations. I learned how important it was to be part of the “right” group, because those fellows don’t have to live life by the same rules as everyone else. I learned that if you speak in favor of unpopular ideas or people, prepare to be shunned or worse – punished. I learned that thinking too much and too deep was going to cause pain.
August after graduating from high school I tried to join the armed services, any of the armed services, none would take me because of a youthful stupidity. And I tried really hard too, even going to the marine facility in the bay area to become a human popsicle on the end of a doctor’s large finger. This while 19 other guys watched. Kind of a public rape, and they still wouldn’t take me. Thank god!
Two days after getting back home the local newspaper ran an ad looking for a darkroom technician, two weeks later I was shooting my first high school football game… And that’s how I ended-up four years later talking to this guy about school, while I was working at a bigger paper, and watching a couple of high school friends going to college to become journalist. Luck has a lot to do with it too.
Public schools can be helpful, but I believe they cause more harm than good by creating the illusion of a free education. Learning is never free, it always requires a certain amount of work. Learning is not graded on a curve but on real results. An education prepares a person to face the world, ask questions, analyze the answers and make decisions based on this process. What we learn in public schools is to keep our mouths shut, answer questions “properly”, repeat what we’re told, and most importantly, fit-in. But it’s ok if we don’t achieve any of these things very well, because all this education requires is a good attendance record for 13 to 20 years, and test scores somewhere between the worst and the best.
31 December 2009, 9:45 amDeAnander:
I think we could subsume the corrupt practises of “public education” and the process of Enclosure in a more general project of the Elimination of Autarky, a project of the ruling classes to ensure that “the masses” are abjectly dependent (“dependent shanty dwellers” whether those shanties be cardboard or gypboard), without the means of self-nourishment (be that literal or intellectual/cultural). The abject dependency (Stockholm Syndrome, anyone) almost guarantees that the masses will never question or challenge their ruling classes, as they “know” that the elite — who can convincingly pose as beneficent, or remove the mask and threaten withdrawal of life support — are “necessary”.
Perhaps the biggest elephant in the bedroom right now is that 90 percent of the activity (and all the ingenuity and energy that supports it) of industrial cultures is *unnecessary garbage* having nothing to do with the nourishment of decent and happy human beings. More on the Age of Uselessness another time… but I think the War on Autarky is recognisable in many forms.
31 December 2009, 12:47 pmld:
SG:
One of my own preoccupations has been with the American middle-class, and the extreme dependency of that class exposes it to that Lamarkian danger – that they have no cultural capacity left for self-sufficiency or adaptation of any kind, except the one capacity they still retain – enormous political power.
JG:
Perhaps, but feast on a couple of qualifiers/addenda.
Maybe the “extreme dependence” of the American middle class — and hell, let’s not pretend the USian working class/poor have a much better skill set at their disposal — is increasingly extreme. But I’d hazard to say that in the overdeveloped metropoles of Northeast Asia, now including not only Japan and South Korea but also significant layers of the population in places like Beijing and Shanghai, the phenomenon you delineate is even more advanced. For the last century in the US at least, “rugged individualism” has functioned as a justificatory bourgeois myth, faintly rooted in the continent’s bloody history of white settler colonialism and frontier conquest… but I’d actually argue that the residual traces of this myth in practice offer a stronger material foundation for the required self-sufficiency/adaptability of which you speak than does the cybernetic hyper-capitalist work-consumption regime in which the denizens of Northeast Asian conurbations have become enmeshed in the last half-century or so. Eons of know-how embedded in peasant agriculture and petty commodity production have been vaporized in one or two generations. Just because pseudo-cosmopolitan East Asians drive smaller cars, live in tinier apartments, and eat healthier food does not mean that they watch less reality TV or spend less time engaged in internet shopping than USians. Technological fetishism, GDP idolatry, and brand worship have no equal anywhere. And dreadful though the US public schools are, no pedagogy is more geared toward producing
“cheerful robots” (C. Wright Mills’ phrase) — or “suicidal robots” as the case may be, given the astronomical suicide rates of both Japan and South Korea — than the pedagogy that prevails in the East Asian educational system. It may be a robust cultural stereotype, but in my experience and the experience of many thoughtful (as opposed to prejudiced) observers it is absolutely true that, comparatively speaking, Japanese and South Korean (and “new middle class” Chinese?) students are quite adept at memorizing and reciting decontextualized facts, but terribly deficient at spontaneously applying critical perspectives to unanticipated problems. What is my point here? I’m not sure, exactly, perhaps it’s simply to caution against a provincial habit sometimes displayed by USian radicals of various stripes, which is to assume that the most noxious traits of late capitalist overdevelopment are monopolized by the decadent imperial center that is the US, and that by necessity the US will be the “advanced” society least equipped to dealing with the putative dissolution of what Elmar Altvater calls “fossil capitalism.”
I was going to write more, but I’ll save it for later, if I get back to it.
31 December 2009, 2:51 pmld:
Whoops, in the previous message “JG:” should read “LD:”… I was simultaneously composing another message to another comrade and got confused for a second there.
31 December 2009, 3:01 pmMax:
Re: “90 percent of the activity (and all the ingenuity and energy that supports it) of industrial cultures is *unnecessary garbage* having nothing to do with the nourishment of decent and happy human beings.”
Absolutely! And I assume that by “nourishment,” DeAnander means it in its broadest sense. If only people would really grasp this and the consequences in their own lives. They usually just think of buying less and elementary conclusions of the kind. This notion goes much farther. It involves the entire scheme of values and meaning of life. The first conclusion should probably be: “90 percent of my life (and all the ingenuity and energy that supports it) is unnecessary garbage having nothing to do with my being able to be a fulfilled human being and helping others to be so.”
31 December 2009, 6:33 pm(Boer) Tom:
Just a comment on Stockholm syndrome – I agree that most people suffer it, given the political-economic reality, but there is another aspect, that can be used to good effect, especially with those politically horrendous middle classes, of whom the men watch online porn and play those online war games, i.e. who have internet access, and irrespective of their (narrow) political affiliation, will often participate in political discussions with like-minded people. One may use Stockholm syndrome as a political education tool, and instigate Stockholm syndrome in an individual to make that individual generally immune to it.
In an online discussion, if you give an effective insult, that strikes to the core of such a middle class individual, that may cause a temporary Stockholm syndrome orientation toward you (i.e. you are the fellow with the gun), which may be used to present some basic facts, that would otherwise be ignored or belittled; it helps if the insult is tied to the facts you wish to present – in person, you are more likely to be assaulted
The insulted individual (usually a man) will typically seek to regain control of the discussion, and a victory, by presenting factual (as opposed to opinion) claims, which can be corrected or be given relevant context one by one. After the initial insult, further overt insults are usually unnecessary. Two basic categories of claims that I’ve more or less taken to an art form 
(I’m exaggerating) are on the violence of Islamist groups, and third-world food dependency:
After the individual claims that there is some need to attack Muslims in some fashion, I typically use something along the lines of “So the Islamist terrorists don’t kill enough innocent individuals to win your respect: whereas all Islamist terrorist groups combined have not killed more than 100k civilians in the last twenty years, you have killed 2 million in Iraq alone, with the deliberately structured sanctions, and invasion.” Usually, a set complaints are then made about (depending on the religious affiliation of the individual), either religion in general, or about Islam’s history in particular. Further insults are usually counter-productive, and a sympathetic (to the individual, as well as to the comparative histories of different religions) presentation of facts is called for; this may take several exchanges of comments. Examples include suicide bombing (LTTE, anyone?) and hijackings of aircraft (a certain Syrian Airways flight in 1954, anyone?). Finally, the individual may complain about ‘ad hominem’ attack (it isn’t – an insult is used – ad hominem would be ‘ignore that individual because he is garbage,’ whereas the insult simply says ‘you are garbage’), and this is also an opportunity – I say something along the lines of “Yes, ad rem works better with ad hominem as a catalyst, and I got you to a point of insight. I needed to instigate Stockholm syndrome in order to reason with you.” That individual can then decide whether he wants to be that way (need to be under the Stockholm supervision of another person in order to have a serious discussion with that person) – I cannot direct his moral and intellectual development – I can only instigate it.
Likewise with food dependence, some insult, typically implying (correctly) that the individual is helpless and dependent on his state for food is used as an opening, with say reference (a link) to Hudson or another author on how the third world is made food dependent, and some reference (a link) to peak oil and how the individual or his country will suffer hunger and decline (insults) may be added for good measure. In the ensuing exchange, one might bring in the humanure handbook.
It is important also to allow the person to regain a sense of self-control and dignity – seriously consider his arguments made in the ensuing exchange, and avoid further insults – if the person is trying to recruit others to some dubious cause, simply undermine him by presenting relevant facts to the broader audience (who might read those comment exchanges), e.g. in a recent case some jerk was defending apartheid in South Africa, so I linked a book that mentioned documented medium-scale assault and threatening of children by police and military forces in shanty towns (84-86). Individuals so targeted tend to be more attentive to evidence in future.
PS I need criticisms on these tactics, as they tend to shock, and as such, I don’t get feedback on how to improve them.
31 December 2009, 7:38 pm(Boer) Tom:
@ DaveS
). To get the detailed understanding of the realities, online discussions (if you can afford access) is really helpful – one may clarify one’s own understanding, and see what misunderstandings are common.
2 January 2010, 7:00 amIf you want to educate fellow low-level participants in an institution on the realities, e.g. peak oil, political repression etc., three things really help – being a bit older, being valuable to an institution, and having a detailed understanding of the realities. Being older teaches one a certain ‘tact’. When I was younger, I’d simply state the matter, and make people very uncomfortable, angry and ready to punish me; now I can simply take a colleague or friend to the side, and explain the matter, give readings etc.; certain things don’t get said in public, if one wants to be effective. People who might otherwise have punished me for political agitation are much more sympathetic when they don’t face face-loss, and higher management cannot keep track, or doesn’t want to get rid of me (competence coupled with a demonstrated detailed understanding of the work, and creating dependencies
Bob Watson:
There have been numerous synoptic visions that lasted long in human history. They catch on because they explain much, inspire many, make life meaningful. The Greeks gave us several, the tragic vision, Platonism, Stoicism, others. The world religions gave us more. With the Enlightenment we get Liberty Equality Fraternity, Scientism, the Progress idea, Romanticism. Marx. Freud. The list grows tiresomely long.
These are each fat, polysemous notions of what is true, important, possible for us, and I don’t think there are knock down arguments for or against any of them. But I do think the canon of intellectual honesty ought be followed in any critique: What do we speak of, what speaks for it, what speaks against it, what alternative views are there and what speaks for and against them, what do we conclude? Short of that, it’s special pleading, cheerleading, and solidarity with one’s colleagues. Nothing wrong with any of those as such, but they are not good arguments or even explanations. It’s just stacking supposed negatives about progress.
I probably ought not be this impolite without some for instances. Take the last topic you raise, the Pasteur/hygiene/biophobia one. “Wingnut and revanchist Pasteur” (not a progressive in his politics, right?) just an ad hominem slap. Even if his politics combined Nero and Torquemada, they are irrelevant to his ending small pox. But we aren’t going to allude to that achievement; it might look too much like progress. And if his hatred of germs and dirt and vermin gave him the drive to pursue his science, well, how bad is that? Simple hand washing and sanitation stop bacteria that would kill real people with puerperal fever and cholera and many other diseases. Looks even more like progress to me. You can say that Pasteur’s anality initiates biophobia, but the long effort to understand bacteria that he was part of has given us people like Norman Borlaug, people whose work has done nothing less than saved the very lives of countless millions of human beings. It’s real hard to gainsay that. They haven’t “declared war” on bacteria; they have loved them.
The idea of progress maps events like these, and like those in the string of sociopolitical achievements I listed in my first post above. If advertising has tried to exploit the cleanliness meme, that’s no surprise; it has long been a powerful metaphor for us humans (cf. baptism). (I just smiled to myself. I’m sure some obscure theologian I haven’t read can explain how I have misunderstood baptism here, despite the words in a hundred million hymnals.) So, Isaiah: Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. Strikes me as a sound progressive agenda.
–
A question. A phrase from the Gatto essay quoted above:
“that ordinary people might one day learn to un-divide themselves, band together in the common interest, and take control of the institutions that shape their lives”
Would that be progress?
2 January 2010, 10:57 amL Diablo:
life span is double what it was 100 years ago in the 1st world.
this is too true to ignore. I’m not defending capitalism… but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We live longer. So something must be working. ?Unless life itself isn’t enough?
Next: has anyone read: ‘The Blank Slate’? Genes do matter in every species on this planet. Humans live on this planet. My main disagreement with ersatz leftist and xtians is their denial of our biology. We are not computers. We are genetically aggregated and organized beings. My genes are kinda weak actually; so I’m not claiming superiority. But genes do matter. BF SKinner is wrong and the neo-Skinnerisms are just as wrong.
2 January 2010, 9:35 pmJon:
http://fora.tv/2006/11/28/Paradigm_Wars#fullprogram
Paradigm Wars–Jerry Mander gives a talk on his new book, a collection of essays on the plight and struggles of indigenous people worldwide.
2 January 2010, 11:55 pmld:
Norman Borlaug? Did you ever get the feeling that you walked into the wrong tavern? Or perhaps you’re so enthralled with the sound of your own tongue clucking that you didn’t notice? Borlaug (and Borlaug’s posthumous cult) epitomizes precisely what Stan and De have been critiquing about “progress” and “progessivism” — technoscience blind to social context, complicit with politico-economic power, smugly grandiose in its bogus claims to having “saved millions of lives.”
And I swear, Stan’s rather free-from anarcho-Christian musings posted here seem to give far less disciplined/talented writers the impression that they can serve up whatever half-formed pseudo-philosophical gibberish they want, and earn plaudits for it. It’s increasingly frustrating how much dross one has to file through here in order to get to the good stuff. (On this final point, I’m not referring to you, Bob.)
3 January 2010, 8:53 amCurt Kastens:
Is it really the fault of the school systems in America that so many people do not question American Supremacy, or doubt what Generals tell them and so. School is where I learned to doubt authority. I would especially like to thank my 6th grade teacher Mr. Johnson, and my German teachers, Mr Mueller, Mr Seidel, and Ms. Cooper. Mr. Mueller and Mr. Seidel were both school children in Nazi Germany. They naturally had a lot to say on the subject.
4 January 2010, 3:48 amMs. Cooper was the first Unitarian Universalist that I had ever met.
Furthermore I had so many teachers that stressed the idea that to learn critical thinking was more important than learning facts because facts could always be looked up in a book. Was my experience in public schools really unusual?
Stan:
Quality, not being quantity, cannot be measured. The quzlity of life cannot be measured. Statistical scatterplots are measurements. Statistics cannot measure the quality of life.
What are the “externalities” for that 75-year lifespan in a core nation?
4 January 2010, 7:36 amCurt Kastens:
Jon, the concept of tempo tasking has come up here before. I think that your link gives support to the idea that the sooner there is a revolution in America the better. Sooner means more time to do the things that need to be done in Amerika with out creating chaos. Change can not be to slow in any case or it will loose momentum. I am really really worried that the current system will not get over turned fast enough. I am even worried that it is already to late to save the planet. CO2 from idustrialization causes the cookoff of methane and CO2 from the permafrost which causes the cookoff of those things from the ocean floor. The way that the whole world lives or wants to live has to be replaced very quickly. No one is even working on the project.
Well except maybe to kill off 4 or 5 billion people. But even that will only be a temporary measure.
4 January 2010, 10:19 amBen:
Stan,
I haven’t read all the comments here but I guess I’m just not clear: if not progress, then what? Sure, we’ll never reach perfection, and in fact the idea that we could is dangerous, but it sounds like you are saying that because we don’t want to chase some dangerous dream of utopia, we should give up on the idea that things can get better.
I don’t think you would agree that you are saying that, but I’m not sure how else to understand what you are saying. In order to make things better, don’t we need a vision of the future and maybe some principles or values? Even if the vision is a nonviolent, inclusive, patriarchical-concept-abandoning paradise, that’s still something we progress toward, right?
In other words, if we only define ourselves by what we are not, then what are we?
4 January 2010, 12:36 pmMark:
“If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference?” -Richard Dawkins, The Emptiness of Theology
4 January 2010, 3:52 pm(Boer) Tom:
@ L Diablo
Regarding that doubling of life expectancy – another way to think of it is what the inputs are for the increasing life-span: mass-produced potable water and medicine, both of which take huge inputs in terms of oil; the water, after some point, is pulled out of the ground, thus depriving forests and other ecosystems groundwater for their own needs – we are back to radical simplification of the ecosphere. And actually it is worse, because much of the increase in life expectancy is despite massive pollution, including exposure to such teratogens and carcinogens as petrochemicals, alpha-emitters, heavy metals (plutonium falling into both categories – read e.g. Derrick Jensen’s Culture of Make Believe on the matter of the Rocky Flats accidents, and have a look at this map of fallout in North America), massive consumption of calories and a reduction in physical activity, so medicine must protect as against all that as well. Thus we must spend even more resources on medication. So I ask you, what happens when the world’s forests are used up (the regrowth of forests in North America and Europe has been at the expense of forests in the third world – a part of Europe’s fuel needs are met by chopping down Indonesian forests and planting oil-crops for bio-diesel, and the soils don’t last very long), the soils depleted, the fisheries destroyed (wait a minute, we’ve done that already), the water-table sufficiently reduced to prevent economic extraction (e.g. as Coke has achieved in certain parts of India)? We’ve run out of resources already – how do you propose to repair all this? You first-worlders are staving off collapse in the first world by exporting it to the third world, through such methods as the dollar-wall-street regime and debt related scams – Mies was mentioned above – give her a read, and you might understand how your quality of nutrition is dependent on others being in debt and suffering a low quality of nutrition (and some other matters too). The reason you still have this high quality of life in North America is the same reason we have such a miserable quality of life in much of Africa, India and South America.
So I have a question for you: will you read these references?
4 January 2010, 10:06 pmMichael Anderson:
Another (disturbing) reference to development—-as it turns out, a study in Kenya showed that eco-tourism is worse for the environment than hunting is, because of the higher level of development required for fancy resorts and facilities, and is bad for the people because of the exploitative relationships with the companies involved in development.
It’s a vicious circle…
5 January 2010, 1:16 pmDeAnander:
It might also be noted that feel-good improved lifespan statistics factor in — somewhat disingenuously — the number of lives artificially prolonged in a state of advanced senility, discomfort, and disability; iirc about half the total USian medical budget is spent on “the last year of the patient’s life.” Each nonagenarian gasping out his or her life on a hospital bed on life support is inflating that progressive claim of “longer life,” and stoking the public’s hunger to believe in technomanaged immortality.
Serious questions arise about the *quality* of artificially extended life; this is why the debate on voluntary euthanasia (PAS) continues to rage. I don’t know of anyone, personally, in my 50-ish age group, who is not terrified of ending up in the clutches of the med mafia, infirm and incapable, without the option of “quitting” when it’s time to go. Is this progress, that we should live in fear of the institutions that are proudly claiming to “save” us? As organisms of course we want to prolong our lives (life wants to live), and yet most organisms in extremis seem to have a moment of surrender, when they accept that the game is over. Our medical technology denies that moment, or at least it has made a point of doing so during my lifetime; only in the last 10 years has the “right to die” (while dignity and personality are still intact) been admitted as a serious talking point. This — like standardised testing and GDP — is yet another arena in which the obsessive industrialist focus on Quantity obscures the equally important question of Quality.
Also, iirc the biggest upsurges in lifespan (and other health/robustness indicators) correlate approximately with improvements in nutrition and social justice (resource distribution), not medical technology. For example, counter-intuitively British public health improved during food rationing in WWII. Food was distributed more equitably and people ate less overall and fewer autopathic foods specifically. “More” is not necessarily better, nor is brute (or bandaid) technology the only fixer of problems.
Better indicators of public health are infant and maternal survival rates, bone density, and the number of people *not* on a constant regimen of pharmaceuticals (prescribed or self-administered) to “control” chronic conditions. At present, according to CDC, the “advanced” lifestyle to which all this Progress has brought us is leading to a reduced lifespan expectation for the current generation of children and young adults — i.e. they are not expected to live as long as their grandparents and parents. Even if lifespan considered quantitatively is accepted as a primary indicator of progress (and I remain skeptical on this, as people can “live” a very long time when kept incarcerated, supervised, heavily drugged, etc), it appears that we are not “progressing” by this metric.
Time to review Illich’s model of “watersheds” in Progress, and the recurring theme of diminishing returns. I’ll vote unreservedly for Progress in medical technology if we are talking about our improved understanding of bonesetting, dental repair, anaesthetics, and basic hygiene. However, past that first watershed we entered into diminishing returns and unforeseen consequences (like the pharmacomplex becoming one of the leading toxic polluters in our industrial state, thus feeding their own “cancer industry” with fresh patients).
I also couldn’t disagree more with Dawkins as quoted; theologians have had enormous impact on the world, for better and worse. Theologians who declare gay people to be intrinsic sinners against divine law, for example, or who historically declared women to be non-ensouled, have fuelled considerable real-world abuse and injustice — including torture, murder, etc.; and theologians who have insisted on the primacy of compassion, justice, and charity have alleviated much suffering and contributed enormously to social movements that are claimed — ironically — by earnest secularists as triumphs of Enlightenment Rationalism (like the civil rights movement, anti-apartheid struggle, socialist struggles in S America, etc).
Much as I enjoy Dawkins’ work, his staunch contempt and enmity to the religious impulse in human hearts amounts almost to a fanaticism of its own; perhaps the very definition of “fanaticism” or “zealotry” is any belief held with such fierce pigheadedness that it justifies treating other persons with disrespect or contempt. I am not sure how we can (as Enlightenmentistas) preach “multiculturalism” and respect for the cultures and folkways of others, and at the same time carry the banner of a zealous and evangelical atheism (and I speak as a practising atheist myself, though no longer an proselytiser for the unFaith).
5 January 2010, 1:35 pmDeAnander:
Actually it also sounds a lot like “regress” to the virtues of many historical social movements and tribal societies
Quakers, for example, band together in the common interest and try to control the institutions that shape their lives (or to secede from institutions that attempt to control *them*). They are considered very old-fashioned in this regard. “Primitive” people have banded together in the common interest since the dawn of our species. The thirst for justice, affection, sharing, reciprocity, and so on did not appear fully-formed out of the forehead of Emerson or Voltaire; it’s been with us since the beginning — as have the countervailing forces of greed, control-freakery, covetousness, selfishness, etc.
One of many contradictions of Progress is that in its current form (advanced industrial capitalism) it encourages greed, etc. and discourages sharing and cooperation. I don’t find it contradictory to refer to it as “advanced” — after all, one can also speak of “advanced” cancer (another instance in which Progress, the progress of a disease, is not necessarily beneficial to the community, i.e. the body… though it may benefit, in the short term, the cluster of cancer cells hijacking the body’s resources for their own selfish “growth” agenda)
5 January 2010, 1:41 pmMichael Anderson:
PS—good fallout graph. Makes me glad I live where I do.
5 January 2010, 2:35 pmMichael Anderson:
@ De;
I don’t think food rationing would be nearly as fair (or as nourishing)in this country. The poor get the crap food.
5 January 2010, 2:48 pmjuannie:
Yes, as organisms we are inclined to try to/want to stay alive but as you say De there is always a moment of surrender or else we go kicking and screaming and enter the realm of hungry ghosts. After 50 one had better be prepared to surrender at a moments notice or the panic of realization will take over and passing won’t be easy. My wife works with elders and has been there on many occasions when the end is inevitably soon. We (family, grandchildren) sat beside my father’s bed for several days as he was struggling to give up the ghost. He called out at times and my being there reassuring him that he was passing with loving family, I believe, led to a gentle letting go. A far cry from the hospital scenario of being hooked up to those infernal machines and saturated with those profit making drugs. The fact that my father’s situation and those of home and hospice deaths are now allowed are more to my liking of the concept of progress. But only progress back from the hell hole of the progressive’s world and back to the recognition of our organic nature.
What we haven’t progressed to yet in the struggle back is the learning of un-dividing ourselves and banding together into groups of caring and intimate communities where one can gracefully progress into our declining years with the relationships of family and friends in close proximity instead of sitting back isolated in their rectangular boxes receiving the news of our “progress” on the machine$ and drug$. This has been a passion for me since my 50′s (March this year begins my 70th year) but my younger 50ish friends now still haven’t gotten it. My living will and advanced directive will spare me the institutional nightmare and my wife will be with me (assuming I go first of course) but I still haven’t convinced my friends to band together in the proximity which would be my ultimate wish.
The only real progress we can make now in this “civilized” state of affairs is to truly surrender long before it is time to and practice that awareness on a regular, preferably daily, basis. It’s going to happen and we don’t know when so prudence would call for preparedness. Now to me that’s progress.
5 January 2010, 9:43 pmMichael Anderson:
Hey Stan…article in the MSM (shudder) on Costa Rica. Evidently, according to Kristof of the NYT, it’s a “happy” place.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/opinion/07kristof.html?th&emc=th
The Happiest People
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
SAN JOSÉ, Costa Rica
Hmmm. You think it’s a coincidence? Costa Rica is one of the very few countries to have abolished its army, and it’s also arguably the happiest nation on earth.
7 January 2010, 1:51 pmStan:
We’ll soon see. Landed last night at Juan Santamaria Airport. About 65 degrees last night, looking at around 78 for today’s high. That’s pretty “happy,” too. Baggage hassle, but the airport people are delivering our bags to the hostel today. I’ll start posting updates at facebook tomorrow or next… much to do. Much love, y’all.
8 January 2010, 7:43 amDeAnander:
Congrats Stan! Eager to hear about your adventures. I’ll try to post some fresh content to FS over the next few weeks while you’re busy with relocation.
8 January 2010, 3:02 pmjuannie:
I’d love that De.
How about something along the lines of positive and workable for transitioning into the post civ. era? I and I would bet most of us could use something uplifting. Bees, Humanure, Transition towns, … I run out of ideas fast but I’m wide open for yours running side by side with Stan’s adventures.
8 January 2010, 4:28 pmStan:
Thanks De. hugs
9 January 2010, 6:19 pmAlan:
Ben wrote:
“Stan,
I haven’t read all the comments here but I guess I’m just not clear: if not progress, then what? Sure, we’ll never reach perfection, and in fact the idea that we could is dangerous, but it sounds like you are saying that because we don’t want to chase some dangerous dream of utopia, we should give up on the idea that things can get better.”
Yes, I was thinking almost exactly the same thing! The critique of “progress” — with which I am quite familiar and largely sympathetic — has this fundamental flaw, which is that the “progress” in question is always, invariably, of a particular (and demonstrably ultimately toxic) kind. At the end of the day, to argue against the very idea of progress of any kind is to argue that everything is OK as-is, and there is nothing we need seek to change.
“In order to make things better, don’t we need a vision of the future and maybe some principles or values? Even if the vision is a nonviolent, inclusive, patriarchical-concept-abandoning paradise, that’s still something we progress toward, right?”
Yes, of course.
Stan (following others) is critiquing a particular narrative of progress, one with numerous undesirable and even nasty associations. The critique needs to be more careful to underscore that particularity.
Paradoxically, some of the things we need to progress toward are things that would undermine the old “progress” narrative and its implications. Stan points out that “There are still cultures for which this concept is utterly meaningless.” True enough. And we need to progress culturally in such a way that the old narrative is a LOT less meaningful and influential than it has been.
Stan writes that progress includes “the delusion that we can ‘improve’ our own species. This is God-playing of the worst kind, the poison pill we swallowed when we learned to do natural science”.
There’s both baby and bathwater in this.
As a matter of fact, we CAN improve our own species, just as we can improve a whole lot of things — and we should do so. For one example: compelling evidence has accumulated over several decades that nutrient deficiencies and toxin exposures can have profound effects on early neural development, and hence on cognitive capabilities — effects up to and including severe mental retardation. To me, it is axiomatic that if we have the capability to correct such defects, by means that are reasonably economical and otherwise practical, then we should. That’s real progress, and it has nothing to do with ridiculous and creepy notions of the eugenic “master race” or the like.
It is important not to allow our critique of a particular and problematic (or worse) notion of “progress” to interfere with the fulfillment of manifestly wholesome and desirable human and other potential. There is a risk, in all this denunciation of the Enlightenment, progressivism and some of their spawn, of ending up (perhaps unwittingly) in a position of reaction or nihilism. I’ve seen this kind of thing amongst the critics of civilization and those identifying with deep ecology and cognates — and in those cases it is not “unwitting” at all! More like explicit nihilism and reaction.
21 July 2011, 8:21 pmAlan:
L Diablo:
“life span is double what it was 100 years ago in the 1st world.
this is too true to ignore. I’m not defending capitalism… but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We live longer. So something must be working.”
Yes. Public health programs are working. Clean water, sewerage, vaccinations, that sort of thing. More the water and sewerage than the vaccinations, though. Medical technology makes a small contribution. Improved nutrition, including food fortification, makes a modest contribution. It is mostly hygiene, with medicine and nutrition playing supportive roles. It has almost nothing to do with capitalism as such. The most dramatic improvements of life expectancy were in the USSR and the PRC, starting after their respective revolutions. Life expectancies doubled inside of a single generation!
Stan:
“Quality, not being quantity, cannot be measured. The quzlity of life cannot be measured. Statistical scatterplots are measurements. Statistics cannot measure the quality of life.
What are the “externalities” for that 75-year lifespan in a core nation?”
I don’t know what a “core” nation is.
But I can say that 75-year life expectancy, across large populations, does not have to be expensive in resources or environmental impact.
As I pointed out to you on another (more recent) thread, China was able to double its life expectancy with only tiny energetic and industrial inputs, relative to the developed world. It really does not take much. The fact that the U.S. routinely uses 10 times more than it needs has a way of distorting the conversation, by making it appear that massive use of resources is somehow “necessary” for a good and long life. WRONG.
No, quality of life cannot be measured. But I can assure you that the conditions of pre-revolution China and Russia — the conditions which resulted in life expectancies of circa 32 — were miserable and intolerable: chronic malnutrition and deficiency diseases, chronic infections and infestations, living in filth, tainted water, etc., etc. The near-doubling of life expectancies in those contexts was associated with (and indeed was CAUSED BY) dramatic increases in the quality of life.
Those same conditions still prevail in parts of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. A handful of countries in that region still have life expectancies of under 40 — and the miserable conditions and quality of life that are associated with such short lives.
(Boer) Tom:
“@ L Diablo
Regarding that doubling of life expectancy – another way to think of it is what the inputs are for the increasing life-span: mass-produced potable water and medicine, both of which take huge inputs in terms of oil”
No, they do not. The public health programs (such as clean municipal water systems) that produce the big changes in life expectancy do not depend on oil at all; or if at all, only incidentally. Most public health infrastructure in the U.S. was installed well before the oil age got seriously underway — back in the horse-drawn world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Also, BASIC medicine does not require much (if any) oil. By that I mean medicine as of, say, circa 1950 — which includes essentially all the medicine required for significant public health gains. Oil- (and other resource-) intensive “innovations” since then have had little or no impact on key indicators such as life expectancy, though individuals may benefit.
21 July 2011, 10:01 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Alan
Chinese depletion of the water table to produce large quantities of food, and supply clean water, from NY Times, although other sources are also available.
But perhaps you could give some examples to illustrate, e.g. the manufacture of basic medicines? Prior to the age of oil, I’d expect two situations – low output, and in the occasional example of high output, pre-oil based energy (e.g. coal) – I’d be glad to be shown wrong. For example, how do you propose (or how did they)
1. clean water without Chlorine, or prepare Chlorine without massive energy inputs? I hope you have a basic background in electro-chemistry – the usual Gr. 12 chemistry texts cover the matter, though you might have to read a bit to get the per mole energies necessary for the various steps. Alternatively, could you suggest other water-cleaning strategies? Compost filtering may work, but Mao et al. didn’t have access to that, and it is generally more suited to smaller setups.
2. Preparation of basic medications often involve vacuum distillation – possible with horse or other animal drawn power (or steam engines, etc), and other expensive processes – how do you hope to mass produce hydrogen peroxide, for example? Note that the medications available in the 50s were already heavily based on chemical processing.
23 July 2011, 2:41 am(Boer) Tom:
@Alan
Another thing – the people living in filthy conditions in sub-Saharan Africa are generally urbanized (shanty dwellers), whereas Mao was improving the conditions of a mainly peasant population. I’d also suggest that you read up on the conditions in the various African colonies, and how the ‘post’-colonial states perpetuated the colonial practices to understand what is happening, African state by African state (there were huge differences between British colonial practice in Nigeria and Kenya, for example, and their problems today, aside from shanties and US food policy, are still very different).
Another thing – witness how the infrastructure is failing in the west – drinking water contamination scandals are rife in USA and Canada (Walkerton, ON and North Battleford, SK are more notorious, though smaller scandals constantly occur) – the rest of the world generally has less resources for maintenance.
23 July 2011, 6:30 pmAlan:
Hi, Tom. Thanks for your comments.
“Chinese depletion of the water table to produce large quantities of food, and supply clean water, from NY Times, although other sources are also available.”
Yes, the Chinese have huge water problems. Water shortages and (gross) supply were not the subject of my comments. But I agree that the Chinese have serious water supply problems. They also have, you should note, serious water WASTE problems; i.e. it would be quite easy for them to conserve and reduce consumption, dramatically. And they probably will. (Will be forced by circumstances to do so, if they are not smart enough to do it pro-activelly.)
Regarding the production of basic medicines: these are very cheap in all respects, including energetic respects. The evidence for this is in their prices, which necessarily include energy. Sulfa drugs, tetracyclines, and so on… all very very cheap, like a penny per gram or less. That includes the cost of all energetic inputs. Now, you could claim that energy prices are artificially depressed and do not include all the externalities — and I would agree with you. But with respect to the chemicals in question, the baseline absolute prices are so low that it doesn’t matter. So what if oxytetracycline goes from $12/kilo to $30/kilo? Or $60/kilo? All that means is that the cost of a course of treatment with oxytet goes from $.10 to $.40 or $.80. See? It just is not significant, even assuming dramatically increased energy cost. And I might add that energy cost is only a rather small fraction of the cost of these chemicals. Hence, oil/energy costs would have to go to some near-astronomical extreme before having such a big impact on finished goods prices.
Regarding water purification: I have no background in electrochemistry, but then I don’t need any. Chlorine (e.g. bleach) is very cheap, in the same way that oxytracycline is very cheap. The price includes all energetic inputs which, even if they were to multiply many fold, would still not have much impact on the processes in question. If chlorine preparation requires “massive energy inputs”, as you assert, then why hasn’t the price of bleach gone bananas over the last decade, since oil went from $10 to $100+?
I’m sure that raw concentrated hypochlorite prices have increased, perhaps even several fold, but that is not saying much since the baseline absolute prices are so incredibly low. We’re talking truly DIRT-cheap stuff here, man. Increasing by 1000% the cost of something that now goes for a penny does not have much impact.
Water purification involving the basic processes of sedimentation, filtration and disinfection was not difficult or expensive 100 years ago, is not now, and will not be 100 years from now, even assuming dramatic increases in oil prices, and even assuming complete unavailability of oil. As I said: “Most public health infrastructure in the U.S. was installed well before the oil age got seriously underway — back in the horse-drawn world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”
What WILL be difficult and expensive (and indeed impossible — thank heaven!) is running an insanely wasteful system in which 80-90% of resources are pissed-away on bullshit that is not only unnecessary, but positively harmful.
24 July 2011, 10:43 amAlan:
Tom:
“Another thing – the people living in filthy conditions in sub-Saharan Africa are generally urbanized (shanty dwellers), whereas Mao was improving the conditions of a mainly peasant population.”
Good point — superficially. But I’m seeing a distinction without much difference, here. The fundamental problems of hygeiene, provision of clean water and sanitation, basic nutrition, and so forth are the same wherever they occur — urban or rural.
“I’d also suggest that you read up on the conditions in the various African colonies, and how the ‘post’-colonial states perpetuated the colonial practices”
Yes, I’ve read a fair bit of material on that. And your point is that…?
“Another thing – witness how the infrastructure is failing in the west – drinking water contamination scandals are rife in USA and Canada (Walkerton, ON and North Battleford, SK are more notorious, though smaller scandals constantly occur) – the rest of the world generally has less resources for maintenance.”
Yes. And…? Here again, I don’t see your point. It is very easy and cheap to maintain clean drinking water infrastructure. The fact that it is easy and cheap does not mean that it will, inevitably, be done. Truly WILD misallocation of resources is a characteristic of our times, as I’m sure you know. It is quite easy to imagine a future dystopia in which billionaires zip around in private jets while basic public health infrastructure deteriorates, at catastrophic cost in human terms. Oh, wait! Come to think of it, that comes very close to describing what is happening right freaking NOW!
We have plenty of resources to head off the Malthusian nightmare. What we don’t have plenty of resources for is private jets for billionaires (and the like).
24 July 2011, 11:00 amAlan:
addendum:
1. I wrote: “Most public health infrastructure in the U.S. was installed well before the oil age got seriously underway” — not quite true. I meant that effective public health infrastructure *for the population existing at the time* was installed and operational before the oil age got seriously underway. Of course, public health infrastructure expanded to accomodate the larger population as the century wore on.
2. FYI: a paper that is becoming a classic:
24 July 2011, 7:04 pmhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15782893
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/cutler/files/cutler_miller_cities.pdf
Demography. 2005 Feb;42(1):1-22.
The role of public health improvements in health advances: the
twentieth-century United States.
Cutler D, Miller G.
[...snip...]
“Clean water technologies are likely the most important public health intervention of the 20th Century…. We show [here] that the introduction of water filtration and chlorination systems led to major reductions in mortality, explaining nearly half of the overall reduction in mortality between 1900 and 1936. Our results also suggest that clean water was responsible for three-quarters of the decline in infant mortality and nearly two-thirds of the decline in child mortality. The magnitude of these effects is striking. Clean water also appears to have led to the near eradication of typhoid fever, a waterborne scourge of the 19th and early 20th Centuries.”
Alan:
Further addendum:
I wrote: “It is very easy and cheap to maintain clean drinking water infrastructure.” — Correct, but did not mention the capital cost of building the infrastructure to begin with. For a large city, water and sewage treatment facilities might run into many hundreds of millions $U.S. This capital cost hurdle is probably what is keeping many cities in the developing world from providing such facilities for all. But few things are more important, and for the world as a whole to claim that it is too expensive is preposterous. We have unlimited $trillions$ for the banksters, so what the hell? An insignificant $25 billion per year — barely a rounding error on the global balance sheet — would be enough for several dozen large-scale urban water/sewerage installations; the cities of the entire developing world would be done in 10-20 years at that rate.
Beyond the capital cost hurdle: once the facilities are are built, they should be operational for many decades, perhaps over a century, even. And they are cheap to operate. I have data indicating that the electric energy cost (for pumping, treating, delivering and collecting) of all drinking water and sewerage systems in the U.S. is about $4 billion per year! Truly a trivial sum, amounting to about 13 bucks per capita per year — and a bargain even at a price two orders of magnitude higher. We get MORE health benefit from that piddling $4 billion than we get from $4 HUNDRED billion spent on all the high-tech medical bullshit.
24 July 2011, 7:59 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Alan
If you read the NY Times piece carefully, they were running into water table problems prior to the massive industrialization (whence the waste): “By the 1970s, studies show, the water table was already falling.” (page 2)
I went and looked up the water treatment prices – I stand corrected – prior to shipping, 1B people can get chemicals for 20L water a day at about US$10-17Million per year.
As to the medication costs – I’ll take your word for it – your argument makes sense.
As for sewage (the implied referent for sanitation) – I don’t see it happening. The shanty towns (often on flood plains) aren’t going to get it, because the locals don’t have the cash to pull the necessary political influence, and any collective effort at mass DIY will meet violent resistance of the state (or the newly improved land will be handed over to developers, with suitable application of violence – neoliberal states being generally violent). Stated another way, why is the infrastructure not being maintained (in Africa generally, as in North America – I estimate at least 50% of Africans do have some access to potable water)? More specifically, what institutions are doing this (I’d assume neoliberal states, with combined subservience to the Euro-North-American powers and their own desire to keep their populations destitute), and how to stop them?
Another aspect of this problem – state ownership/control does not impede capitalist greed and stupidity in management of such facilities – that is the lesson of the neoliberal era, considering your argument. So what alternative structures (or additional institutions) do you suggest for appropriate management?
All that does leave us with the issue of farming – the Chinese example does show that basic provision did lower the water table – industry merely (if greatly) accelerated that.
24 July 2011, 10:48 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Alan
25 July 2011, 12:56 amMy reason for bringing up studying of colonialism in the various affected societies is that many of the problems under colonialism were intensified by the ‘post’-colonial states. The example that sprung to my mind was around L. Baringo (see “The elusive granary” by Little) – agriculturalists displace pastoralists in low rain-fall areas, and irrigation makes for the lack of rain, drawing down water tables, lake levels, etc. The agriculturalists move in to farm marginal lands, as they are often among the poorer farmers of their own localities and ethnicities, and get pushed out in the various land grabs/enclosures/privatizations (late colonial to modern Kenya is a case study in how privatization precedes and causes the tragedy of the commons – Little often ends up arguing against the evidence he amassed) – poor farmers end up being the direct causes of water misallocation. I have some friends from Ethiopia who tell me that the same is happening in the south there. My other reason is that even in Nigeria, with its substantial pre-independence university educated population, they were unable to develop substantial resistance to the neo-liberal undermining/destruction of much of their water works, especially their sewage treatment – in many urban localities, dumping untreated feces on demarcated fields is the common practice.
Alan:
Tom:
“As for sewage…I don’t see it happening.”
Neither do I, most of the time (when I’m wearing my “realist” hat). None of my comments had to do with what is likely; all of them had to do with what is POSSIBLE.
The world is hurtling toward a catastrophe, and it is important to understand why. It is not because of a “shortage of resources”. It is because of a shortage of intelligence, magnanimity, creativity, humor, charity, faith, willingness to subordinate the ego, rigorous self-criticism, and other spiritual qualities.
There are plenty of material resources. Even water. Even in China.
“what alternative structures (or additional institutions) do you suggest for appropriate management?”
I suggest structures and institutions conceived in and with, and informed by, the characteristics and qualities I mentioned:
intelligence, magnanimity, creativity, humor, charity, faith, and so forth. Such structures and institutions would be able to manage things and steer us through the bottleneck without catastrophe.
Probability? Low.
Possibility? Yes.
25 July 2011, 1:54 amStan:
If it isn’t local, it won’t work.
25 July 2011, 4:36 amEric:
from Metafilter:
I once saw Yann Martel put forth the following analogy in a talk:
A deer in the forest has senses that let it monitor its environment out to a certain diameter. For the sake of the analogy let’s say it’s 250 meters, give or take depending on various factors (e.g. weather). That is all the deer needs. If a predator is further away then it doesn’t really concern the deer. Now let’s say we electronically augmented the deer’s senses so that it could monitor the forest up to a kilometer around it. It would be aware of a lot more predators but that wouldn’t actually be of any use to it because a predator further away than its unaugmented senses could detect shouldn’t be of any concern. The only result of augmenting the deer’s senses would be to stress the animal out, negatively impacting it. Almost every human being on the planet has senses that have been electronically augmented, through mass media and the internet and so on, resulting in the stresses of modern existence.
26 July 2011, 10:39 pmMichael Anderson:
Couldn’t resist—Phil Ochs’ “Love Me, I’m A Liberal” The more things change….:
I cried when they shot Medgar Evers
Tears ran down my spine
I cried when they shot Mr. Kennedy
As though I’d lost a father of mine
But Malcolm X got what was coming
He got what he asked for this time
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal
I go to civil rights rallies
And I put down the old D.A.R.
I love Harry and Sidney and Sammy
I hope every colored boy becomes a star
But don’t talk about revolution
That’s going a little bit too far
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal
I cheered when Humphrey was chosen
My faith in the system restored
I’m glad the commies were thrown out
of the A.F.L. C.I.O. board
I love Puerto Ricans and Negros
as long as they don’t move next door
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal
The people of old Mississippi
Should all hang their heads in shame
I can’t understand how their minds work
What’s the matter don’t they watch Les Crain?
But if you ask me to bus my children
I hope the cops take down your name
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal
I read New republic and Nation
I’ve learned to take every view
You know, I’ve memorized Lerner and Golden
I feel like I’m almost a Jew
But when it comes to times like Korea
There’s no one more red, white and blue
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal
I vote for the democratic party
They want the U.N. to be strong
I go to all the Pete Seeger concerts
He sure gets me singing those songs
I’ll send all the money you ask for
But don’t ask me to come on along
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal
Once I was young and impulsive
23 January 2012, 9:57 amI wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I’ve grown older and wiser
And that’s why I’m turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal
Michael Anderson:
From The Daily Ponderables, under the Native American Thoughts for today:
Native American
“In the absence of the sacred, nothing is sacred — everything is for sale.”
–Oren Lyons, ONONDAGA
The Elders often say that when something is sacred it has spiritual value. You’ll hear, on the Earth there are sacred spots. You’ll hear, our ceremonies are sacred, our children are sacred, marriage is sacred. When something is sacred it means it’s so holy you can’t attach a value to it. Therefore, it’s not for sale. It’s an insult to suggest buying something sacred. On the other hand, if we look at it differently, as there is no sacred land, ceremonies are not sacred, our children are not sacred, etc., then everything is for sale. Sacredness creates spiritual space. Sacredness makes things holy. Sacredness shows respect for God.
Great Spirit, let me honor things that are sacred.
21 November 2012, 2:30 pmMichael Anderson:
A couple of links about perfection, progress, sports, DEFINITE White middle-class respectability, and resemblances to Fascism:
http://www.registerguard.com/web/living/healthandfitness/29075695-57/sports-says-hirschfield-parents-kids.html.csp
“Shawn Worthy admits he’s a competitive guy — and a competitive parent, sometimes.
Yet even he was floored when a couple of mothers he met at a pro junior golf tournament told him that their teen daughters would be entered in 30 such events this past summer.
“Why are these young ladies out on the golf course playing competitively four or five days a week?” Worthy asked himself.
His own 16-year-old daughter, Soleil, holds down a job while participating in a few tournaments each summer. She and the other young women are good, Worthy says, maybe talented enough to play in college.
But 30 tournaments?”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2012/11/24/how-sports-parents-can-resemble-nazi-sympathizers/
“Since I’ve already Godwinned my own post, let me clear: I’m not saying crazy sports parents are the moral equivalent of Nazi sympathizers. However, the research presented here does show commonality, in that sports parents are presented with a very vague order: If you want your child to get a college scholarship (or even make the high school team), you have to ensure your child is of a certain athletic ability. If you’re a parent trying to figure out how to fit your child into that system, you figure out pretty quickly that there are other people spending big money on training and travel teams, and pulling strings to ensure their child’s success.”
26 November 2012, 6:12 pmStan:
Wow.
28 November 2012, 8:54 amMichael Anderson:
An eloquent quote from the NYT, Kirk Bloodworth:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/us/exonerated-inmate-seeks-end-to-maryland-death-penalty.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130206&_r=0
“The adversarial system doesn’t know who’s guilty or who’s innocent. The millstone does not know who’s under it.”
KIRK NOBLE BLOODSWORTH, the first inmate in the nation to be sentenced to death and then exonerated by DNA evidence.
The fact that something “progressive” like DNA testing proved he was innocent, is interesting to me in light of the quote, which illuminates the impersonal nature of the system.
6 February 2013, 4:48 pm