Jamais Cascio has published an enormously disturbing post on his blog Open the Future in which he indicates that he is becoming "increasingly convinced that, whether we like it or not, geoengineering is going to become a leading arena of environmental research and development in the coming decade."
"Geoengineering" is rather like the process of terraforming one encounters in science fiction novels that describe the process of re-engineering human-hostile alien planets into hospitable ones, but applied to the earth itself... on an earth that has been made inhospitable through human carelessness and greed. More specifically, geoengineering would involve deliberate, presumably megascale, interventions into geophysical systems intended to produce beneficial or remedial changes in climate and the terrestrial environment as a whole.
We are all aware that the practices of extractive petrochemical industry have produced planet-scaled environmental changes already -- namely, global warming, aquifer depletion, topsoil loss, species loss, cancer epidemics, and so on.
The idea of geoengineering is enormously attractive rhetorically and psychologically because it represents a would-be redemptive face of this human caused environmental catastrophe: proposing the application of industry to the wounds wrought by industry, proposing the progressive redirection of human ingenuity from the short-sighted personal pursuit of greed to the foresighted collective pursuit of a sustainable and resilient technoscientific human civilization.
But as Cascio together with many other environmental scientists and activists have repeatedly pointed out, the "technofixes" inspired by the geoengineering imaginary tend to be simplistic in the extreme, tend to ignore the underlying structural and social problems that keep producing environmental catastrophes in the first place, tend to involve hyperbolic and overoptimistic claims amounting to matters of public relations rather than consensus science, and tend to inspire interventions that would almost inevitably prove later to be far more limited in their actual beneficial impacts than promised, sometimes would prove unfounded altogether in their assumptions, and all too often would end up making matters worse rather than better.
Cascio points out we cannot altogether "rule out a breakthrough discovery making this [geoengineering] strategy safer," and concludes that, hence, "for now, its only environmental value appears to be as a desperate, last-ditch effort to head off catastrophe."
I agree with Cascio here, but I will admit that I am incredibly reluctant to voice even this highly qualified and circumscribed support for any expression of the geoengineering imaginary. The reason I say this is because I am so keenly aware (as is Cascio, by the way, I doubt this is a disagreement between us) of the way incumbent interests have demonstrated themselves to be all too capable and even eager to manufacture the false apocalyptic scene of just such a final "catastrophe" demanding just such a "last ditch effort" when it suits their interests in maintaining and consolidating their hold on unjustified authority and unearned privilege.
I speak here not only of the obvious apocalyptic conjuration of a "Clash of Civilizations" and "Global War on Terror" whomped up by neoconservatives (not to mention neoliberals) in an effort to maintain US hegemony and the supremacy of corporate-militarist elites in the context of planetary energy and resource descent, but more specifically of arguments like that of James Lovelock who proposes that we have crossed an environmental "tipping point" to justify his recommendation that we immediately start building many more dangerous, unhealthy, expensive, politically Pharaonic nuclear power plants.
What Cascio isn't emphasizing quite enough in his account of the politics of geoengineering (this is, by the way, entirely a matter of emphasis in my view, since Cascio is definitely aware of the issues, does not neglect them in his arguments, and holds positions on these questions with which I generally sympathize) is that the geoengineering imaginary is suffused with the assumptions, interests, and habits of what Yochai Benkler calls The Industrial Model.
The Industrial Model is in its particulars both literally and figuratively monolithic, centralized, and hierarchical, whether applied to traditional industries like steel, transportation, broadcast media, print publication, or imposed (usually catastrophically) onto more traditionally peer-to-peer practices like agriculture, healing, research, or mentorship. As Benkler points out, the particulars of The Industrial Model derive historically from the inter-implicated exigencies of risky capital-intensive investment (in the means of production, public infrastructure, and the like) taken on by moneyed and authoritative elites and by the distribution and application of limited but generally usefully knowledge by credentialed experts and professionals from core to periphery.
The contemporary face of democratic politics in my view consists primarily of the resistance of elite incumbent interests that have long preferentially benefited from social and cultural formations defined by The Industrial Model to the radically democratizing forces unleashed by peer-to-peer planetary networks and the collaborative practices they facilitate. As a practical matter, environmental politics represent the most urgent problems with which we are grappling collectively in this historical moment, but as a conceptual matter, these environmental politics politics represent one among a number of skirmishes across a technodevelopmental terrain undergoing the fraught transformation from industrial-elitist to p2p-democratic assumptions, institutions, practices, norms, and ends.
To clarify what I mean by this, let me point out that I read Cascio's comment on the rise of the geoengineering imaginary in light of Naomi Klein's equally disturbing recent piece in The Nation, Guns Beat Green, in which she shows that investment in general and venture capitalists in particular are throwing enormous amounts of money at the moment into military r & d, surveillance, privatized security, gated community services for the rich and so on, rather than into the enormously promising avenues for solar, wind, desalination, and other renewable technologies that one would expect -- especially given the Greenwashed public face corporate-militarism likes to show the world via the bought and paid for corporate media at every opportunity these days.
Although I would not want to deny the force of straightforward head-in-the-sand climate-change denialism and the usual Ugly American Exceptionalism in play in much of the skewed monetary investment and attention Klein is documenting in her piece, what seems to me most chilling in the story she is telling is that beneath the surface of much of the public cheerfulness and denialism of our corporate-militarists in the face of human-wrought environmental catastrophe is some serious behind-the-scenes plotting and planning that is clearly premised on an awareness of the scale, scope, and pace of climate disaster quite as keen and shrill as that which one might hear from the keenest and shrillest environmental scientists and advocates incumbents are so quick publicly to disdain.
This is because the actual environmental politics of incumbent interests is not so much Denialist as Escapist on Klein's account here.
Ultimately, I think the escapist fantasies of moneyed and war-criminal corporate-militarist elites is just that: facile fantasies.
Whether they hope to abscond with their ill-gotten loot and sex-slaves to Dubai or some tropical tax-haven or beneath a bubble-dome on Mars or in the asteroid belt (as one finds seriously discussed by more "futurologically" inclined corporate-militarists, typically the ones who really fancy themselves the smartest guys in the room wherever they go, poor things), the greedy bloodyminded would-be aristocrats who have been cheerleading humanity largely against our regular and loudly expressed will through the interminable unnecessary murderous vulgar and gross chapters of their "Great Game" and war adventuring will surely discover to their cost that they are finally no more secure atop their piles of treasure and skull-heads than anybody else is from environmental devastation and violent social unrest.
And so, it is probably right to say, when all is said and done, that while the Escapists are not Climate-Change Denialists in stricto senso, theirs is still a Denialist position… It is the usual denialism of people attracted to the reactionary rightwing politics of incumbents and self-appointed elites, the denial of the facts of the dependence of all individuals, however momentarily august and glorious they may be, on the collective inheritance of history and on the ongoing collaboration of their fellows for their survival and flourishing.
What Klein and Cascio are documenting, then, in my view, are two different but importantly complementary faces of the anti-democratizing politics occasioned by the growing planetary awareness of and increasing impacts of environmental catastrophes:
The "Geoengineering" Imaginary, on the one hand, represents the efforts of incumbent interests to divert as much energy, investment, intelligence, and attention to Industrial Model solutions to environmental problems, not because these are the best solutions to the problems but because these are solutions least likely to challenge their authority and privileges -- as authors and facilitators of these very problems -- but more likely in fact, obscenely enough, to represent opportunities for the further consolidation of their authority and further accumulation of their privileges.
The "Escapist" Imaginary, on the other hand, represents the desires and efforts of incumbent interests to insulate themselves from the adverse, unsustainable, socially destabilizing impacts of the of their irresponsible profit-taking enterprises (no doubt soon enough to include their opportunistic embrace of geoengineering strategies), primarily through an ultimately doomed fantasy of perfect physical sequestration and perfect military supremacy.
And so, one encounters yet again in the industrial and incumbent-elitist confrontation with environmental catastrophe a deeply conservative (however "futurological") politics conjoining a selective fetishistic embrace of the technoscientific toypile to a selective hysterical disdain of the open secular democratic technoscientific multiculture on which scientific discovery and progress actually depend to produce the usual idiotic feudalist retro-futurism.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Scattered Speculations on Secularism, Atheism, and Anticlericalism
The noisier advocates of organized authoritarian religiosity -- and especially troubling to pervy atheistical folks like me, Christianism in America -- seem enormously eager to collapse the notion of secularism with that of atheism, and I worry somewhat that some of the more careless advocates of the "new militant atheism" (so called) are abetting the theocrats in this facile identification.
In my view, it is crucial to distinguish secularism, atheism, and anticlericalism as stances -- all three of which I happen myself to advocate, but separately and each for different reasons -- else real mischief can result. This is especially so in a fraught era when, on the one hand, there is conspicuous contestation around issues of the proper relations of public citizenship and private faithfulness, as well as, on the other hand, at once reductive and expansive attitudes toward scientific rationality are apt to take on some of the historical coloration of organized religiosity (and no doubt the latter contributes to the former, and vice versa).
First off, for me the essence of secularity is the demarcation of private from public life as represented not by the ancient separation of oikos and polis (a problematically feminized and subordinated household economy as against a masculinized and valorized civic sphere), but by the more modern separation of Church and State. As it happens, I actually have a much more elaborated and idiosyncratic view of secularity (I'm a theoryhead, you have to expect these sorts of things from me) involving the demarcation of scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political practices of warranted belief, but one doesn't have to follow me down that path to get the substance of my argument here.
Be all that as it may, the iconic scene that captures secularity most essentially for me is the one in which the practitioner of some marginal religious practice or an atheist testifies in a court of law without calling the scene of civic adjudication into question.
The secular is sometimes taken as synonymous with the worldly and distinguished from the otherworldly, and on this basis some describe as secular only those societies in which there is no prominent role for religious belief or practice -- but it seems to me that the substantial content of religious belief and practice is in fact perfectly worldly and so this does not seem to me to be a useful characterization.
Now, atheism, for me, is a matter -- and quite true to what one should rightly expect from the term itself, actually, a-theist -- of doing "without god" in my personal life. I can't honestly say that I think there is much that is particularly positive or substantial entailed by this doing without god that I seem to have been doing cheerfully for a quarter century now, any more than there would be in pointing out that I do without phlogiston or heroin in my personal life.
Since the various characterizations and proofs of the existence of god I have stumbled on in my philosophical travels have never seemed to me particularly coherent, and certainly not to pass muster in the face of the standards of warranted assertability that apply in other circumstances when a person is offering up a candidate description as more useful than others in the way of prediction and control of the my environment, I must admit I have for the most part come to assume that people making what appear to be such assertions are really testifying to profound aesthetic experiences of the sublime and beautiful of a kind that make much more sense to me, whether from hikers recounting their encounters in wilderness, sensualists recounting their encounters in orgies, English majors recounting their encounters with Burroughs or Blake, esoteric mystics recounting their encounters in meditation or whirling, cognitive dissidents recounting their encounters with acid or mushrooms, and so on.
I will say that it seems to me to do equal disservice to the varieties of both mystical and magickal lifeways as well as to the variety of lifeways that do without god to shoehorn them into bland idiotic generalities like "people of faith" or "atheists" neither of which capture any of the worldly differences in practices or perspectives that constitute the substance of whatever is likely to matter most in the lives of all these variously believing folks.
As you can see, I'll admit that I think most of the attention atheism gets both from those who vilify and valorize "it" is wildly overwrought. Now, anticlericalism is another matter altogether.
It seems to me if the militant atheists were clearer about what really bothers them about organized religiosity they would shunt aside all the self-serving generalities about epistemology and irrationality and focus on the priestly patriarchal hierarchies that have captured especially the judeochrislamic monotheisms of the Book. I get especially annoyed when so-called "Champions of Science" (so much of whose "championing of science" seems to involve anti-intellectual diatribes by social scientists and culture warriors against effete elite humanities scholars in a sad and doomed effort to consolidate their own credibility as solid stolid He Men of Hard Science) claim to be carrying the torch of what they monolithically oversimplify as "the" Enlightenment Project.
For one thing, although it is clearly true that there were some atheists (or at any rate, close enough) among many of the key figures in especially the French and Scottish moments of the Enlightenment, the truth is that the overabundant majority of those figures were not, and indeed no small part of the various movements of European Enlightenment consisted of ferocious anticlerical interventions organized to faciliate more personal understandings of proper Christian faithfulness. Pesky facts like these should presumably matter to so-called "champions of science," especially given their endless harping on how devoted to truth they are compared to the rampant relativists and irrationalists they seem all too eager to dismiss everybody else as.
It is especially troubling to notice how often those who would claim to take up the torch of Enlightenment in historically insensitive ways coupled to militant enthusiasm go on to use this rhetoric to demand deference to authoritative would be elites and incumbent interests, precisely to the contrary of the anti-incumbency, anti-authoritarianism, anti-literalism that seem to me more properly to characterize the ethos of Enlightenment if one really must try to distill its complexities into a useful generalization.
This weirdly authoritarian commandeering of Enlightenment discourse seems to me to be afoot when militant would-be champions of Enlightenment mobilize racist construals of a hysterically monolithic Clash of Civilizations demanding we all do what the nice reasonable grown up executives and experts of white racist patriarchal capitalism tell us to do else be bulldozed by skeery highly sexed brown skinned irrationalists with guns who hate our freedom. (It is of course easily possible to criticize fundamentalist social formations without making recourse to such pathologizing and racist overgeneralizatoins and such are the criticisms I personally strongly prefer.)
This commandeering of Enlightenment also seems to me too often to be happening when militant would-be champions of Enlightenment mobilize anti-intellectual construals of a Fashionably Nonsensical Relativist Menace in the Elite Effete Humanities Academy among what are in fact mostly just sensible scholarly advocates of pragmatist, pluralist, social constructivist accounts of prevailing factual and normative descriptions soliciting belief, and propose instead that we defer to expert pronouncements (often by self-appointed "experts" without recognized qualifications in the actual fields under discussion) concerning vital technoscience questions rather than demanding a say in public decisions about the distributions of technodevelopmental costs, risks, and benefits that conspicuously affect us.
In such cases, it seems to me that these militant atheists, especially in their anti-political or presumably neutrally apolitical scientistic reductionist moods end up endorsing dangerously error-prone and parochially-minded authoritarian forms of technocratic clericalism in ways that endanger indispensable secular commitments. And despite the fact that I share their atheism (and am therefore very likely able enjoy a good joke and a drink at the bar with them whenever their talk turns to Festivus Poles, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, or similar trivia), I must say that my own anti-authoritarian anti-clericalism and pluralist secularism in many cases seems to trump my capacity to endorse much in the way of their programmatic attitudes and commitments when all is said and done.
In my view, it is crucial to distinguish secularism, atheism, and anticlericalism as stances -- all three of which I happen myself to advocate, but separately and each for different reasons -- else real mischief can result. This is especially so in a fraught era when, on the one hand, there is conspicuous contestation around issues of the proper relations of public citizenship and private faithfulness, as well as, on the other hand, at once reductive and expansive attitudes toward scientific rationality are apt to take on some of the historical coloration of organized religiosity (and no doubt the latter contributes to the former, and vice versa).
First off, for me the essence of secularity is the demarcation of private from public life as represented not by the ancient separation of oikos and polis (a problematically feminized and subordinated household economy as against a masculinized and valorized civic sphere), but by the more modern separation of Church and State. As it happens, I actually have a much more elaborated and idiosyncratic view of secularity (I'm a theoryhead, you have to expect these sorts of things from me) involving the demarcation of scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political practices of warranted belief, but one doesn't have to follow me down that path to get the substance of my argument here.
Be all that as it may, the iconic scene that captures secularity most essentially for me is the one in which the practitioner of some marginal religious practice or an atheist testifies in a court of law without calling the scene of civic adjudication into question.
The secular is sometimes taken as synonymous with the worldly and distinguished from the otherworldly, and on this basis some describe as secular only those societies in which there is no prominent role for religious belief or practice -- but it seems to me that the substantial content of religious belief and practice is in fact perfectly worldly and so this does not seem to me to be a useful characterization.
Now, atheism, for me, is a matter -- and quite true to what one should rightly expect from the term itself, actually, a-theist -- of doing "without god" in my personal life. I can't honestly say that I think there is much that is particularly positive or substantial entailed by this doing without god that I seem to have been doing cheerfully for a quarter century now, any more than there would be in pointing out that I do without phlogiston or heroin in my personal life.
Since the various characterizations and proofs of the existence of god I have stumbled on in my philosophical travels have never seemed to me particularly coherent, and certainly not to pass muster in the face of the standards of warranted assertability that apply in other circumstances when a person is offering up a candidate description as more useful than others in the way of prediction and control of the my environment, I must admit I have for the most part come to assume that people making what appear to be such assertions are really testifying to profound aesthetic experiences of the sublime and beautiful of a kind that make much more sense to me, whether from hikers recounting their encounters in wilderness, sensualists recounting their encounters in orgies, English majors recounting their encounters with Burroughs or Blake, esoteric mystics recounting their encounters in meditation or whirling, cognitive dissidents recounting their encounters with acid or mushrooms, and so on.
I will say that it seems to me to do equal disservice to the varieties of both mystical and magickal lifeways as well as to the variety of lifeways that do without god to shoehorn them into bland idiotic generalities like "people of faith" or "atheists" neither of which capture any of the worldly differences in practices or perspectives that constitute the substance of whatever is likely to matter most in the lives of all these variously believing folks.
As you can see, I'll admit that I think most of the attention atheism gets both from those who vilify and valorize "it" is wildly overwrought. Now, anticlericalism is another matter altogether.
It seems to me if the militant atheists were clearer about what really bothers them about organized religiosity they would shunt aside all the self-serving generalities about epistemology and irrationality and focus on the priestly patriarchal hierarchies that have captured especially the judeochrislamic monotheisms of the Book. I get especially annoyed when so-called "Champions of Science" (so much of whose "championing of science" seems to involve anti-intellectual diatribes by social scientists and culture warriors against effete elite humanities scholars in a sad and doomed effort to consolidate their own credibility as solid stolid He Men of Hard Science) claim to be carrying the torch of what they monolithically oversimplify as "the" Enlightenment Project.
For one thing, although it is clearly true that there were some atheists (or at any rate, close enough) among many of the key figures in especially the French and Scottish moments of the Enlightenment, the truth is that the overabundant majority of those figures were not, and indeed no small part of the various movements of European Enlightenment consisted of ferocious anticlerical interventions organized to faciliate more personal understandings of proper Christian faithfulness. Pesky facts like these should presumably matter to so-called "champions of science," especially given their endless harping on how devoted to truth they are compared to the rampant relativists and irrationalists they seem all too eager to dismiss everybody else as.
It is especially troubling to notice how often those who would claim to take up the torch of Enlightenment in historically insensitive ways coupled to militant enthusiasm go on to use this rhetoric to demand deference to authoritative would be elites and incumbent interests, precisely to the contrary of the anti-incumbency, anti-authoritarianism, anti-literalism that seem to me more properly to characterize the ethos of Enlightenment if one really must try to distill its complexities into a useful generalization.
This weirdly authoritarian commandeering of Enlightenment discourse seems to me to be afoot when militant would-be champions of Enlightenment mobilize racist construals of a hysterically monolithic Clash of Civilizations demanding we all do what the nice reasonable grown up executives and experts of white racist patriarchal capitalism tell us to do else be bulldozed by skeery highly sexed brown skinned irrationalists with guns who hate our freedom. (It is of course easily possible to criticize fundamentalist social formations without making recourse to such pathologizing and racist overgeneralizatoins and such are the criticisms I personally strongly prefer.)
This commandeering of Enlightenment also seems to me too often to be happening when militant would-be champions of Enlightenment mobilize anti-intellectual construals of a Fashionably Nonsensical Relativist Menace in the Elite Effete Humanities Academy among what are in fact mostly just sensible scholarly advocates of pragmatist, pluralist, social constructivist accounts of prevailing factual and normative descriptions soliciting belief, and propose instead that we defer to expert pronouncements (often by self-appointed "experts" without recognized qualifications in the actual fields under discussion) concerning vital technoscience questions rather than demanding a say in public decisions about the distributions of technodevelopmental costs, risks, and benefits that conspicuously affect us.
In such cases, it seems to me that these militant atheists, especially in their anti-political or presumably neutrally apolitical scientistic reductionist moods end up endorsing dangerously error-prone and parochially-minded authoritarian forms of technocratic clericalism in ways that endanger indispensable secular commitments. And despite the fact that I share their atheism (and am therefore very likely able enjoy a good joke and a drink at the bar with them whenever their talk turns to Festivus Poles, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, or similar trivia), I must say that my own anti-authoritarian anti-clericalism and pluralist secularism in many cases seems to trump my capacity to endorse much in the way of their programmatic attitudes and commitments when all is said and done.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Left and Right, Back to Basics
It doesn't matter what you are called or flatter to call yourself politically (I'm beyond left and right! I'm fiscally conservative and socially liberal! I'm a conformist independent! I'm the mushy middle!) -- it doesn't matter what neologistic tag you've glommed onto online (Constitutionalist! Upwinger! Dynamist!) -- it doesn't matter what political party you belong to… the fact is that you are perfectly intelligible as a person of the progressive democratic Left if you affirm or feel inspired by the following basic ideas, just as you are perfectly intelligible as a person of the conservative incumbent-interested Right if you feel indifference, skepticism, or even hostility to the basic ideas that
[1] All people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them;
[2] People who are not misinformed or under duress tend, in general, to be capable of articulating their own interests, of testifying to their personal knowledge, and of contributing a worthy measure to the collaborative solution of shared problems;
[3] It is always possible and desirable, however costly and difficult it may be, to reconcile differences and conflicts between people in nonviolent ways -- and this includes disputes over questions of what constitutes violence;
[4] The act of informed, nonduressed consent is a foundation both of democracy and nonviolence;
[5] The public provision and administration of civil rights, basic income, healthcare, general welfare, and common goods facilitates a scene of consent that is nonduressed, while the public provision of the widest possible access to education and reliable knowledge facilitates a scene of consent that is informed, and acts of consent are legible and legitimate as such only to the extent that they are so informed and nonduressed;
[6] Progressive taxation of property and income provides a means to meet the basic conditions on which the doubly foundational scene of consent depends, while at once providing a popular check (no taxation without representation) on the dangerous policing authority of government as well as a check on the tendency of individual stakeholders -- especially those who happen to be momentarily invested with conspicuous wealth, authority, reputation, or attention -- to forget or disavow their ineradicable social and historical inter-dependence in the always collaborative project of creative expressivity and collective problem solving.
"Beyond Left and Right"
It is one of the occupational hazards of seeking to clarify one's views online in particular that one is constantly confronting befuddling cut-and-pasted worldviews articulating what amount to rather straightforward left or right political propositions in fact, but tangled up in a thicket of superfluous neologisms, undigested notions, conventions, terms, and frames deployed without much sense of their discursive, figurative, generic, or etymological entailments, or sometimes even their basic definitions.
I can't tell you how many times I've been caught up in arguments with right-wing corporate-militarists who deny that their political viewpoint is authoritarian or conservative at all, all evidence to the contrary, but constitutes some newfangled perspective "off the traditional political map," "Beyond Left and Right."
And once one has followed one of these dot-eyed reactionaries off the cliff-face of that traditional left-right map one is inevitably inducted into a bewildering labyrinth in which the often dime-thin differences that distinguish libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, crypto-anarchists, Randians, minarchists, agorists, dynamists, extropians, upwingers, classical liberals, neoliberals, neoconservatives and so on get invested with epic significance demanding endless hair-splitting analysis and inspiring endless claims of unsubstantiated confidence and originality.
Meanwhile, all this endless slogging through the swamp of reactionary right-wing bullshit, this swamp of proliferating neologisms and public relations spinning to keep thought off-kilter and profit on-target, has always obscured or altogether obliterated our devoting any attention at all to or attributing any significance at all to the crucial difference that makes a difference distinguishing all this right wing crapola from basic democratic left attitudes that represent the real living alternative to the whole dumb debased range of these right wing "ideas."
My whole adult life since high school I have been constantly sermonized that "all the new ideas are on the right," that all "the excitement and revolutionary fervor has shifted away from the left to the right," and so on. Usually it seemed to me upon actually listening to all these "new ideas" and "excited revolutionaries" that this was mostly a bunch of stupid white assholes saying fairly obviously trite and idiotic things, not to mention rather ugly usually racist things, and in general confusing theory with something like used car salesmanship. And while it is true that there often was a real excitement on display among the Movement Conservatives, the Ayn Randians, the libertarians (you know, people who vote Republican but who are personally cool with pot and hookers and, sometimes, atheists), the extropian libertopian techno-utopians, and so on, this excitement always seemed more to do with pulling off a heist or a scam or otherwise getting away with something naughty than the excitement of being undone and remade in the confrontation with new ideas or engaging in anything like real revolutionary struggle.
Cutting through all the bogus novelty, empty neologisms, and faux innovation, it seems to me that there remains in force a basic distinction between the left and the right, between conservative politics organized by incumbent interests and progressive politics organized by the diverse dynamic demands of the plurality of actual stakeholders to historical change in the world. And, no, it doesn't matter, hot shot, that these designations derive superficially from the placement in the congressional chamber of partisans of conservative against progressive politics during the French Revolution, any more than it matters that Red and Blue have acquired a comparably accidental association with conservatism and democracy through the mass broadcast mediation of election coverage in the United States, the underlying and in my view abiding countervailing political orientations captured in these various accidental formalisms are what matters here.
I know that many of my colleagues (especially those who share my own focus on the politics of disruptive technoscientific change) find this to be a real blind spot in my thinking, but I honestly think all the overheated re-mappings of the political terrain one stumbles onto in popular political prognostication (especially online) tend to be faddish distractions from the enduring analytic utility of distinguishing elitist from democratic political ends.
I don't deny that disruptive technodevelopments, for example, can scramble and befuddle customary left-right constituencies, formations, and so on. But it seems to me that a clear grasp of the traditional distinction of left from right, democratic from elitist politics, provides indispensable guidance in such moments of befuddlement, reminds us that traditional allies -- whatever our basic political orientation -- may not yet have found their way to a politically consistent accommodation of novelty (as neither yet might we ourselves), and so it is a useful thing to provisionally reorient ourselves by way of our basic principles.
If nothing else, in moments like those, especially democratically minded folks of the left know to set aside their comfortable allegiances and formulations and remember to actually pay attention to just who is profiting and who is bearing the costs of some novel development, who is doing all the talking and who is getting ignored, who is holding the guns and where are they pointed, and so on.
I have yet to confront a situation, however otherwise unprecedented, that ultimately seemed to me "Beyond Left and Right" in any significant sense, once I had devoted time to understanding it properly in those terms. Neither do I know of any progressive or democratic outcome that has been facilitated by an analysis that flattered itself that it was "Beyond Left and Right" in this way.
Given the special predilection of market libertarians (most of whom are, face it, perfectly intelligible as right wing reactionaries in most of their desired outcomes and many of their deepest assumptions) for the claim that they are "Beyond Left and Right," and given indispensability of the "Beyond Left and Right" formulations to the neoliberal corporate-militarist hijackings of the Democratic Party in the USA by the DLC in the Clinton Administration and of Labor in the UK in the Blairite era of the so-called "Third Way," one would expect especially democratically minded people to be leery by now of expressions of the desire to get "Beyond Left and Right." Too often that desire seems upon close scrutiny to amount to a rather facile, however effective, effort to get the people of the democratic left to take their eyes off the ball and so abet the Right in their ugly awful Business As Usual.
I can't tell you how many times I've been caught up in arguments with right-wing corporate-militarists who deny that their political viewpoint is authoritarian or conservative at all, all evidence to the contrary, but constitutes some newfangled perspective "off the traditional political map," "Beyond Left and Right."
And once one has followed one of these dot-eyed reactionaries off the cliff-face of that traditional left-right map one is inevitably inducted into a bewildering labyrinth in which the often dime-thin differences that distinguish libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, crypto-anarchists, Randians, minarchists, agorists, dynamists, extropians, upwingers, classical liberals, neoliberals, neoconservatives and so on get invested with epic significance demanding endless hair-splitting analysis and inspiring endless claims of unsubstantiated confidence and originality.
Meanwhile, all this endless slogging through the swamp of reactionary right-wing bullshit, this swamp of proliferating neologisms and public relations spinning to keep thought off-kilter and profit on-target, has always obscured or altogether obliterated our devoting any attention at all to or attributing any significance at all to the crucial difference that makes a difference distinguishing all this right wing crapola from basic democratic left attitudes that represent the real living alternative to the whole dumb debased range of these right wing "ideas."
My whole adult life since high school I have been constantly sermonized that "all the new ideas are on the right," that all "the excitement and revolutionary fervor has shifted away from the left to the right," and so on. Usually it seemed to me upon actually listening to all these "new ideas" and "excited revolutionaries" that this was mostly a bunch of stupid white assholes saying fairly obviously trite and idiotic things, not to mention rather ugly usually racist things, and in general confusing theory with something like used car salesmanship. And while it is true that there often was a real excitement on display among the Movement Conservatives, the Ayn Randians, the libertarians (you know, people who vote Republican but who are personally cool with pot and hookers and, sometimes, atheists), the extropian libertopian techno-utopians, and so on, this excitement always seemed more to do with pulling off a heist or a scam or otherwise getting away with something naughty than the excitement of being undone and remade in the confrontation with new ideas or engaging in anything like real revolutionary struggle.
Cutting through all the bogus novelty, empty neologisms, and faux innovation, it seems to me that there remains in force a basic distinction between the left and the right, between conservative politics organized by incumbent interests and progressive politics organized by the diverse dynamic demands of the plurality of actual stakeholders to historical change in the world. And, no, it doesn't matter, hot shot, that these designations derive superficially from the placement in the congressional chamber of partisans of conservative against progressive politics during the French Revolution, any more than it matters that Red and Blue have acquired a comparably accidental association with conservatism and democracy through the mass broadcast mediation of election coverage in the United States, the underlying and in my view abiding countervailing political orientations captured in these various accidental formalisms are what matters here.
I know that many of my colleagues (especially those who share my own focus on the politics of disruptive technoscientific change) find this to be a real blind spot in my thinking, but I honestly think all the overheated re-mappings of the political terrain one stumbles onto in popular political prognostication (especially online) tend to be faddish distractions from the enduring analytic utility of distinguishing elitist from democratic political ends.
I don't deny that disruptive technodevelopments, for example, can scramble and befuddle customary left-right constituencies, formations, and so on. But it seems to me that a clear grasp of the traditional distinction of left from right, democratic from elitist politics, provides indispensable guidance in such moments of befuddlement, reminds us that traditional allies -- whatever our basic political orientation -- may not yet have found their way to a politically consistent accommodation of novelty (as neither yet might we ourselves), and so it is a useful thing to provisionally reorient ourselves by way of our basic principles.
If nothing else, in moments like those, especially democratically minded folks of the left know to set aside their comfortable allegiances and formulations and remember to actually pay attention to just who is profiting and who is bearing the costs of some novel development, who is doing all the talking and who is getting ignored, who is holding the guns and where are they pointed, and so on.
I have yet to confront a situation, however otherwise unprecedented, that ultimately seemed to me "Beyond Left and Right" in any significant sense, once I had devoted time to understanding it properly in those terms. Neither do I know of any progressive or democratic outcome that has been facilitated by an analysis that flattered itself that it was "Beyond Left and Right" in this way.
Given the special predilection of market libertarians (most of whom are, face it, perfectly intelligible as right wing reactionaries in most of their desired outcomes and many of their deepest assumptions) for the claim that they are "Beyond Left and Right," and given indispensability of the "Beyond Left and Right" formulations to the neoliberal corporate-militarist hijackings of the Democratic Party in the USA by the DLC in the Clinton Administration and of Labor in the UK in the Blairite era of the so-called "Third Way," one would expect especially democratically minded people to be leery by now of expressions of the desire to get "Beyond Left and Right." Too often that desire seems upon close scrutiny to amount to a rather facile, however effective, effort to get the people of the democratic left to take their eyes off the ball and so abet the Right in their ugly awful Business As Usual.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Thinking About the Politics of "Design"
Over the last couple of years I've taught a few courses at Berkeley and at the San Francisco Art Institute exploring the interactions of "design" with "politics," especially in the contexts of "Green" design and social software/p2p coding for democracy, and so on.
"Design" discourses turn out to be really double edged for democratically minded people, since they can easily be either profoundly democratizing or profoundly anti-democratizing in their assumptions and effects and the popular forms of design discourse don't seem particularly well-equipped or even always particularly interested in distinguishing these assumptions and effects.
It is amazing how often those who emphasize questions of design and who "value design" really mean by this to denigrate democratic processes or to express a desire to circumvent politics altogether through elite decision making processes and what gets portrayed as politically-"neutral" engineering processes.
Those who would employ, educate, and implement sound design principles to democratic ends (many permaculture advocates, for example, as well as many social software coders) have always to pay close attention to the question of who gets designated as the designers in these design discourses, just where their powers come from, where their money comes from, whether or not they are accountable for the actual impacts of their designs in any way, whether those who are affected by design decisions have a say in the design process and in its outcomes, whether design functions (usually obliquely) to facilitate elite control/exploitation, whether what is marketed as the "introduction" of design into some chaotic state of affairs actually represents the imposition of a new and particular design vocabulary onto indigenous/local lifeways and vocabularies already in use and capable of emancipatory elaboration or reform rather than replacement, and so on. The politics of design is in the details.
This circles me right back around to a point that I really find myself hammering at incessantly among technocentric folks (of whom I too am one, so this is also a self-criticism): "Design" is a word like "technology" -- there is absolutely no conservative or progressive politics inhering in the affirmation or repudiation of "design" as such, at that level of generality.
In fact, the very idea of the blanket repudiation or affirmation of all design, just as with the idea of such a blanket repudiation or affirmation of all technology is literally incoherent: we are ineradicably socialized, acculturated, linguistic, historical beings, there is no human outside of selective attention, public testimony, applied technique. And so there can be no politics organized by the distinction of a "pro" versus "anti" design viewpoint, nor by the distinction of a "pro" versus "anti" technology viewpoint.
Actually, interestingly enough, the rhetoric of proposing otherwise here, of obfuscating technodevelopmental deliberation at the relevant level of concrete decisions, actual stakeholders, and discernible impacts for an abstract affirmation of "design" or "technology" conceived as bland generalities does often have a politics -- and usually it is a de facto conservative politics, even when it exhibits the superficial trappings of radical futurology. This is because taking things off the table, engaging in efforts at de-politicization, is inherently anti-democratizing, and hence inherently conservative.
Technodevelopmental politics look to me to be pretty conventional in fact: either people have a say in the decisions that affect them or "elites" make the decisions because they should for whatever reasons elitists care to supply. Democracy versus tyranny, collaboration versus control, left versus right, exactly as usual.
It is true that the speed, scope, and intensity of technodevelopmental change can sometimes introduce structurally coherent clusters of issues into the political scene that introduce problems into conventional left-right mappings, scramble conventional left-right formations, and so on. Technodevelopmental change isn't the only thing that does this, by the way, but it must be conspicuous in our thinking of the political today.
But I think it is mistaken to claim that these key but momentary complications redefine politics in a truly fundamental way. Given the conspicuously provisional character of analysis and the "strange bedfellow" alliances fears and fantasies around such issues seem to inspire it is easy to imagine there is a kind of unprecedented "third axis" (beyond familiar left-right concerns of democracy/anti-democracy) introduced by the politics of reproductive technologies (abortion, ARTs, contraception, sex education politics, and so on), environmental politics (resource/energy descent, pollution, monoculture, etc.), p2p politics (copyfight, a2k, Net Neutrality, sousveillance, etc.), non-normalizing medical technique (struggles of the differently enabled, the "drug war," transex/intersex politics, consensual mod-med, etc.). But it is my view that each of these fraught and contested edge-cities on the left-right terrain will eventually settle back into familiar democratic/anti-democratic terms -- indeed, in my view, already they are doing so -- as unfamiliar and unknown capacities, problems, costs, risks, and benefits are refamiliarized through the testimony of the relevant stakeholders to their impacts.
I agree that it is important to know when a disruptive development causes familiar mappings and organizing to go a bit haywire for a time, so as to understand better what the dangers and opportunities available in an historical moment consist of. But it is crucial to keep one's touchstone intact even so: The left-right map will eventually restabilize to accommodate the disruptive development. (Even if it is also true that there will always be emerging local disruptions, thank heavens, keeping the political terrain dynamic and futurity open, however intelligible it remains in terms of the basic left-right antagonism of democracy/anti-democracy.) The dangers and opportunities that matter most even in the moments of instability are still defined by the democratic/anti-democratic values onto which the map will re-stabilize soon enough. The politics are prior to the toypile.
It will always be possible to re-orientate the problems and promises inhering in concrete technodevelopments according to democratic versus anti-democratic politics, and to the extent that it is the politics that are being foregrounded presumably in one's analysis, then the values, alliances, and details that are relevant to that analysis will remain the ones that are democratizing or anti-democratizing. The utility of a distinction of pro- vs anti- "design" or pro- vs anti- "technology" as the lens through which to analyze technodevelopmental politics is, to my way of thinking, entirely a matter of observing the impact of these distinctions on and translating them back into terms of whether or not they conduce to greater democratization of deliberation and distribution of technoscientific costs, risks, and benefits to the actual stakeholders to those developments. As a person of the democratic left, I've come to be rather skeptical about both moves myself.
"Design" discourses turn out to be really double edged for democratically minded people, since they can easily be either profoundly democratizing or profoundly anti-democratizing in their assumptions and effects and the popular forms of design discourse don't seem particularly well-equipped or even always particularly interested in distinguishing these assumptions and effects.
It is amazing how often those who emphasize questions of design and who "value design" really mean by this to denigrate democratic processes or to express a desire to circumvent politics altogether through elite decision making processes and what gets portrayed as politically-"neutral" engineering processes.
Those who would employ, educate, and implement sound design principles to democratic ends (many permaculture advocates, for example, as well as many social software coders) have always to pay close attention to the question of who gets designated as the designers in these design discourses, just where their powers come from, where their money comes from, whether or not they are accountable for the actual impacts of their designs in any way, whether those who are affected by design decisions have a say in the design process and in its outcomes, whether design functions (usually obliquely) to facilitate elite control/exploitation, whether what is marketed as the "introduction" of design into some chaotic state of affairs actually represents the imposition of a new and particular design vocabulary onto indigenous/local lifeways and vocabularies already in use and capable of emancipatory elaboration or reform rather than replacement, and so on. The politics of design is in the details.
This circles me right back around to a point that I really find myself hammering at incessantly among technocentric folks (of whom I too am one, so this is also a self-criticism): "Design" is a word like "technology" -- there is absolutely no conservative or progressive politics inhering in the affirmation or repudiation of "design" as such, at that level of generality.
In fact, the very idea of the blanket repudiation or affirmation of all design, just as with the idea of such a blanket repudiation or affirmation of all technology is literally incoherent: we are ineradicably socialized, acculturated, linguistic, historical beings, there is no human outside of selective attention, public testimony, applied technique. And so there can be no politics organized by the distinction of a "pro" versus "anti" design viewpoint, nor by the distinction of a "pro" versus "anti" technology viewpoint.
Actually, interestingly enough, the rhetoric of proposing otherwise here, of obfuscating technodevelopmental deliberation at the relevant level of concrete decisions, actual stakeholders, and discernible impacts for an abstract affirmation of "design" or "technology" conceived as bland generalities does often have a politics -- and usually it is a de facto conservative politics, even when it exhibits the superficial trappings of radical futurology. This is because taking things off the table, engaging in efforts at de-politicization, is inherently anti-democratizing, and hence inherently conservative.
Technodevelopmental politics look to me to be pretty conventional in fact: either people have a say in the decisions that affect them or "elites" make the decisions because they should for whatever reasons elitists care to supply. Democracy versus tyranny, collaboration versus control, left versus right, exactly as usual.
It is true that the speed, scope, and intensity of technodevelopmental change can sometimes introduce structurally coherent clusters of issues into the political scene that introduce problems into conventional left-right mappings, scramble conventional left-right formations, and so on. Technodevelopmental change isn't the only thing that does this, by the way, but it must be conspicuous in our thinking of the political today.
But I think it is mistaken to claim that these key but momentary complications redefine politics in a truly fundamental way. Given the conspicuously provisional character of analysis and the "strange bedfellow" alliances fears and fantasies around such issues seem to inspire it is easy to imagine there is a kind of unprecedented "third axis" (beyond familiar left-right concerns of democracy/anti-democracy) introduced by the politics of reproductive technologies (abortion, ARTs, contraception, sex education politics, and so on), environmental politics (resource/energy descent, pollution, monoculture, etc.), p2p politics (copyfight, a2k, Net Neutrality, sousveillance, etc.), non-normalizing medical technique (struggles of the differently enabled, the "drug war," transex/intersex politics, consensual mod-med, etc.). But it is my view that each of these fraught and contested edge-cities on the left-right terrain will eventually settle back into familiar democratic/anti-democratic terms -- indeed, in my view, already they are doing so -- as unfamiliar and unknown capacities, problems, costs, risks, and benefits are refamiliarized through the testimony of the relevant stakeholders to their impacts.
I agree that it is important to know when a disruptive development causes familiar mappings and organizing to go a bit haywire for a time, so as to understand better what the dangers and opportunities available in an historical moment consist of. But it is crucial to keep one's touchstone intact even so: The left-right map will eventually restabilize to accommodate the disruptive development. (Even if it is also true that there will always be emerging local disruptions, thank heavens, keeping the political terrain dynamic and futurity open, however intelligible it remains in terms of the basic left-right antagonism of democracy/anti-democracy.) The dangers and opportunities that matter most even in the moments of instability are still defined by the democratic/anti-democratic values onto which the map will re-stabilize soon enough. The politics are prior to the toypile.
It will always be possible to re-orientate the problems and promises inhering in concrete technodevelopments according to democratic versus anti-democratic politics, and to the extent that it is the politics that are being foregrounded presumably in one's analysis, then the values, alliances, and details that are relevant to that analysis will remain the ones that are democratizing or anti-democratizing. The utility of a distinction of pro- vs anti- "design" or pro- vs anti- "technology" as the lens through which to analyze technodevelopmental politics is, to my way of thinking, entirely a matter of observing the impact of these distinctions on and translating them back into terms of whether or not they conduce to greater democratization of deliberation and distribution of technoscientific costs, risks, and benefits to the actual stakeholders to those developments. As a person of the democratic left, I've come to be rather skeptical about both moves myself.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Many of the Faithful Are Really Just Aesthetes
Upgraded and adapted from Comments:
In my last post I proposed "that scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes of belief-ascription are all warranted as reasonable according to different criteria, [and] that these are not reducible to one another in their proper work, their proper forms, their practices, [or] their histories. But since I do believe one can warrant one's beliefs in any of these modes with good reasons it isn't really right to say that I am a relativist in the sense Americans tend to mean [by that charge.]" This is a proposal I have expanded on in many places, but especially here.
My friend (and Friend of Blog!) Robin responded with the following question:
When people start making religious claims that might otherwise sound questionable to a longstanding atheist, secularist, and appalling voluptuary like me I find that if I adjust my Universal Translator a bit and hear them making aesthetic claims ("I am following my bliss"), or moral claims ("I try to be a decent person according the norms of my community") instead of making troubling onto-theological claims in the philosophical sense, I have discovered to my delight that the overabundant majority of religious discourse becomes pretty unobjectionable even to crusty atheistical ears like mine.
Not only that, but I have found that I can carry on quite sustained and detailed conversations with people who locate their religiosity pretty close to the center of their selfhood in ways that seem completely mutually respectful and intelligible so long as I keep these mental translations to myself. That makes me think these translations are probably capturing the substance of what is really at stake in much of the discourse that passes for "religious."
From all this I conclude that
(1) my sense that the United States is pretty much a secular country despite the megaphone organized religion has got is still perfectly sensible,
(2) my Deweyan faith that Americans, like everybody else, are critical enough to sustain democratic institutions and intelligent enough to collectively solve shared problems is still perfectly sensible,
(3) my belief that most people really are mostly right about most things most of the time isn't ruled out by some prevalence of rampant irrationalism after all, and that
(4) too many of the new "militant atheists," so-called, are mistaking as terrifying irrationality what is often little more than a rather glib usage of superficially theological vocabularies to express aesthetic and moral beliefs, and this mistake of theirs makes these militants feel more alienated, scared, and desperate about the state of the world than they need be, attesting to what I have long suspected has as much of a reductionist failure of imagination and an anti-democratizing failure of nerve in it as it has good sense.
All that said, when a fundamentalist champions patriarchy, when an evangelical jackhole champions genocide or theocracy, when a Robot Cultist muddies the distinction between policy discourse and flim-flam artistry and fraud, when people uncritically substitute the dictates of priestly authorities (religious or otherwise) for critical engagement, well, you can be sure I do call them on it for dangerous nonsense.
In answer to your specific question, then, I don't finally think "religious" is properly added to my list of modes of warranted belief, but mostly because the bits of religiosity that do seem to me to be warrantable are already subsumed under the aesthetic and moral categories.
If it hurts the feelings of an otherwise unobjectionably religious person to put that point so baldly, I'll just do the mental translation in my head and go ahead with dinner.
Does that answer your question? I didn't take it as a hostile provocation or challenge at all! I like answering this question. I tend to think my approach on this subject could be much more widely applied to good result.
In my last post I proposed "that scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes of belief-ascription are all warranted as reasonable according to different criteria, [and] that these are not reducible to one another in their proper work, their proper forms, their practices, [or] their histories. But since I do believe one can warrant one's beliefs in any of these modes with good reasons it isn't really right to say that I am a relativist in the sense Americans tend to mean [by that charge.]" This is a proposal I have expanded on in many places, but especially here.
My friend (and Friend of Blog!) Robin responded with the following question:
What would you say to someone who puts "religious" just as comfortably in your list that includes "scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political"?
(This isn't a challenge, by the way. I'm just genuinely curious!)
When people start making religious claims that might otherwise sound questionable to a longstanding atheist, secularist, and appalling voluptuary like me I find that if I adjust my Universal Translator a bit and hear them making aesthetic claims ("I am following my bliss"), or moral claims ("I try to be a decent person according the norms of my community") instead of making troubling onto-theological claims in the philosophical sense, I have discovered to my delight that the overabundant majority of religious discourse becomes pretty unobjectionable even to crusty atheistical ears like mine.
Not only that, but I have found that I can carry on quite sustained and detailed conversations with people who locate their religiosity pretty close to the center of their selfhood in ways that seem completely mutually respectful and intelligible so long as I keep these mental translations to myself. That makes me think these translations are probably capturing the substance of what is really at stake in much of the discourse that passes for "religious."
From all this I conclude that
(1) my sense that the United States is pretty much a secular country despite the megaphone organized religion has got is still perfectly sensible,
(2) my Deweyan faith that Americans, like everybody else, are critical enough to sustain democratic institutions and intelligent enough to collectively solve shared problems is still perfectly sensible,
(3) my belief that most people really are mostly right about most things most of the time isn't ruled out by some prevalence of rampant irrationalism after all, and that
(4) too many of the new "militant atheists," so-called, are mistaking as terrifying irrationality what is often little more than a rather glib usage of superficially theological vocabularies to express aesthetic and moral beliefs, and this mistake of theirs makes these militants feel more alienated, scared, and desperate about the state of the world than they need be, attesting to what I have long suspected has as much of a reductionist failure of imagination and an anti-democratizing failure of nerve in it as it has good sense.
All that said, when a fundamentalist champions patriarchy, when an evangelical jackhole champions genocide or theocracy, when a Robot Cultist muddies the distinction between policy discourse and flim-flam artistry and fraud, when people uncritically substitute the dictates of priestly authorities (religious or otherwise) for critical engagement, well, you can be sure I do call them on it for dangerous nonsense.
In answer to your specific question, then, I don't finally think "religious" is properly added to my list of modes of warranted belief, but mostly because the bits of religiosity that do seem to me to be warrantable are already subsumed under the aesthetic and moral categories.
If it hurts the feelings of an otherwise unobjectionably religious person to put that point so baldly, I'll just do the mental translation in my head and go ahead with dinner.
Does that answer your question? I didn't take it as a hostile provocation or challenge at all! I like answering this question. I tend to think my approach on this subject could be much more widely applied to good result.
But I'm Not a Relativist
An e-mail interlocutor has patiently explained to me why he thinks I protest too much when I insist that I am not an effete postmodern relativist to the solid stolid champions of He-Man science who sometimes like to criticize me online. He then proudly affirms his own relativism. I appreciate his support, of course, and the fact is that this particular interlocutor is a European with an actual background in philosophy and so he doesn't mean by these terms quite the same thing that people tend to do who excoriate my muzzy relativism in online debates as a way of assuming their Priestly vestaments in the defense of dumb death-dealing scientism.
In a nutshell, the key philosophical figures for me are Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Judith Butler. I'll probably spend the rest of my life struggling to find the language in which to express intelligibly to others how these four weirdly incompatible figures in some ways have come -- probably in no small part completely accidentally -- to crystallize a harmonious perspective from which I understand the world.
Philosophically, I am most legible as coming out of the tradition of American pragmatism (James, Dewey, Rorty) and working today in the discourse of queer theory in Butler's practice of it (which seems to me to mean something more like the delineation of non-sovereign performative/prosthetic self-determination in planetary multiculture these days). All of these figures are post-Nietzschean and one finds in all of them an expression of something like his perspectivalism.
In online anti-intellectual discourse in America "relativism" is defined as something like the belief that any belief is as good as any other. I don't believe that and it isn't really worth the time to walk Americans all the way through to the place in which they can better understand what the actual claims involved are. I do believe that one can warrant one's beliefs with good reasons, and understanding that point gets most folks close enough to what I really mean that there doesn't seem much point in going further into the matter, unless they indicate a real sympathy and talent for the nuances involved.
I propose that scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes of belief-ascription are all warranted as reasonable according to different criteria, that these are not reducible to one another in their proper work, their proper forms, their practices, their histories. But since I do believe one can warrant one's beliefs in any of these modes with good reasons it isn't really right to say that I am a relativist in the sense Americans tend to mean, and probably not according to the sense in which many Continental philosophers use the term either.
In a nutshell, the key philosophical figures for me are Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Judith Butler. I'll probably spend the rest of my life struggling to find the language in which to express intelligibly to others how these four weirdly incompatible figures in some ways have come -- probably in no small part completely accidentally -- to crystallize a harmonious perspective from which I understand the world.
Philosophically, I am most legible as coming out of the tradition of American pragmatism (James, Dewey, Rorty) and working today in the discourse of queer theory in Butler's practice of it (which seems to me to mean something more like the delineation of non-sovereign performative/prosthetic self-determination in planetary multiculture these days). All of these figures are post-Nietzschean and one finds in all of them an expression of something like his perspectivalism.
In online anti-intellectual discourse in America "relativism" is defined as something like the belief that any belief is as good as any other. I don't believe that and it isn't really worth the time to walk Americans all the way through to the place in which they can better understand what the actual claims involved are. I do believe that one can warrant one's beliefs with good reasons, and understanding that point gets most folks close enough to what I really mean that there doesn't seem much point in going further into the matter, unless they indicate a real sympathy and talent for the nuances involved.
I propose that scientific, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes of belief-ascription are all warranted as reasonable according to different criteria, that these are not reducible to one another in their proper work, their proper forms, their practices, their histories. But since I do believe one can warrant one's beliefs in any of these modes with good reasons it isn't really right to say that I am a relativist in the sense Americans tend to mean, and probably not according to the sense in which many Continental philosophers use the term either.
Monday, December 03, 2007
Cranks
Superlative technocentrics who fervently believe in the imminent arrival of a postbiological superintelligent Robot God who will end human history, or in the imminent arrival of precisely controlled self-replicating nanoscale robots who will deliver a superabundance that will end human stakeholder politics, or in the imminent arrival of genetic and prosthetic medical techniques or brain scanning and modeling techniques that will transform some of us into imperishable robots and end human mortality always want to make you believe (and indulge themselves in the make believe) that they are the Wright Brothers or Thomas Edison. However all appearances are to the contrary.
What they are far more likely to be instead is the dot-eyed crank in the basement who thinks he’s got a swell idea for a perpetual motion machine or a scheme to square the circle.
Those who imagine they have demolished the critique of Superlativity simply by noting that vaccinations and moonshots and so on had naysayers would do well to peruse the incomparably larger archive of technoscientific hype and fraud and unintended consequences rather than dwell on the same handful of success stories they inevitably fetishize before trying to imply that all you have to do to be visionary is aspire to the incoherence of theological omni-predicates.
Superlative aspirations to Singularitarian superintelligence fail to grasp the inter-implication of mind and embodiment, superlative aspirations to Nanosantalogical superabundance fail to grasp the inter-implication of plurality and politics, superlative aspirations to Technological Immortalist superlongevity fail to grasp the inter-implication of life and vulnerability.
Superlative Technocentric hopes are essentially faithful and not scientific and the hysteria and false certainties Superlativity mistakes and peddles as hope are worse, essentially fundamentalist. One need not, and indeed should not, join a Robot Cult if what is wanted is to participate in technoprogressive education, agitation, and organizing to democratize technodevelopmental social struggle and so better assure that the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change reflect the interests of the diversity of stakeholders to that change by their lights.
What they are far more likely to be instead is the dot-eyed crank in the basement who thinks he’s got a swell idea for a perpetual motion machine or a scheme to square the circle.
Those who imagine they have demolished the critique of Superlativity simply by noting that vaccinations and moonshots and so on had naysayers would do well to peruse the incomparably larger archive of technoscientific hype and fraud and unintended consequences rather than dwell on the same handful of success stories they inevitably fetishize before trying to imply that all you have to do to be visionary is aspire to the incoherence of theological omni-predicates.
Superlative aspirations to Singularitarian superintelligence fail to grasp the inter-implication of mind and embodiment, superlative aspirations to Nanosantalogical superabundance fail to grasp the inter-implication of plurality and politics, superlative aspirations to Technological Immortalist superlongevity fail to grasp the inter-implication of life and vulnerability.
Superlative Technocentric hopes are essentially faithful and not scientific and the hysteria and false certainties Superlativity mistakes and peddles as hope are worse, essentially fundamentalist. One need not, and indeed should not, join a Robot Cult if what is wanted is to participate in technoprogressive education, agitation, and organizing to democratize technodevelopmental social struggle and so better assure that the costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific change reflect the interests of the diversity of stakeholders to that change by their lights.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Glands and Computers
Curiously enough, it seems that Giulio Prisco really objects to my claim that “the brain is more gland than computer.”
Note that it is "e)" that bears all the weight of superlative hope and conviction in this formulation, and that all the rest are just initial throat clearing gestures in a more or less conventional materialist mode, although, granted, skewed in a rather "cybernetic totalist" way.
Presumably, once something is "fully understood" (notice that "fully"), then it is "possible" (remember, as always, the difference that makes a difference betweem "possible" and "likely") to design "another mechanical device" (somehow once a thing is "understood" it becomes through that understanding a devised thing, perhaps Prisco is a closeted advocate of "Intelligent Design" or something since he keeps flogging this point so interminably -- and, yes, I'm joking), and once one can replace an understood thing one is also assured that it can be replaced with a better thing (no reason why is offered), although "better" is thankfully qualified at least with "according to appropriate criteria" (who specifies and polices these criteria is left as an exercise for the reader).
Hey, far be it from me to deny that when scientists understand stuff they enable greater powers of prediction and control, (some of) which palpably improve our capacities and enrich (some of) our lives.
But I still don't see how any of this justifies going off on a Robot Cultist tear handwaving about imminent superintelligent post-biological Robot Gods ending human history, imminent precisely-controlled self-replicating nanoscale robots delivering superabundance and ending human stakeholder politics, or imminent genetic and prosthetic medical techniques or brain-scanning techniques delivering superlongevity and ending human mortality.
Let's keep our eyes on the ball here. One can easily admit the world is susceptible of scientific analysis, and admit that warranted scientific belief delivers powers of prediction and control, and admit that fantastic capacities are at any rate compatible with logic whatever their remoteness from practical realization all without ever once feeling the slightest transcendental temptation to embrace Singularitarian, Nanosantalogical, or Technological Immortalist nonsense.
Be that as it may, Prisco continues:
Quite apart from my utter bewilderment at Prisco's apparent perception that saying something as simple and obvious as "the brain is more gland than computer" is some kind of effort at woo-woo mystical pseudo-profundity (I would class it with statements like "dirt is more brown than purple," frankly), I can't for the life of me understand why this observation launches him into a diatribe about "vital spirits" and so on. What's so mystical about a gland? It seems to me that glands are perfectly concrete, technoscientifically intelligible sorts of things. So, I really am curious about Prisco's attribution of this kind of statement to religious fundamentalists.
My challenge? Name one. Name one single religious fundamentalist who has said “the brain is more gland than computer” to make some kind of anti-science point. Name just one, how hard can that be, since you claim it is so frequent?
As for Prisco insisting that glands are computers, that everything caught up in intelligible causality is a computer… I can follow this move easily enough, as it happens. Prisco wants to describe as a “computer” any complex system susceptible of scientific analysis. OK. I think it probably is more useful to distinguish computers from non-computers, inasmuch as it seems to me in common parlance there are plenty of intelligible non-computers in the world, but, hey, I get functionalism, I’m down with it.
I don’t honestly think that's what Prisco is really up to here, though. I think he's just uncritically flinging fetishized terms around and not getting my critique particularly. For Plato the mind was a mirror, for Nietzsche it was a stylus inscribing a surface, for Freud it was a steamworks, now people fetishize the computer as our quintessential tech and now inevitably enough the mind is computer, or more of a neurocomputational network as the popular focus nudges that way.
But all that, I suppose, is neither here nor there.
Am I the only one for whom this latest exchange really seems weird?
Now Dale, I don’t know on which New Age book you found this apparently profound statement, but it is just nonsense because:
A gland is a computer
A gland is a computer because it:a) Is a physical object that obeys the laws of physics;
b) Reacts to inputs generated from its environment and produces a corresponding output;
c) Stores and executes electro-chemically coded programs that determine its dynamical responses to its inputs;
d) Its behavior can be fully understood in terms of physical laws;
e) Once its behavior is fully understood, it is possible to design another mechanical device to reproduce the same behavior, or a different behavior considered “better” according to appropriate criteria.
Note that it is "e)" that bears all the weight of superlative hope and conviction in this formulation, and that all the rest are just initial throat clearing gestures in a more or less conventional materialist mode, although, granted, skewed in a rather "cybernetic totalist" way.
Presumably, once something is "fully understood" (notice that "fully"), then it is "possible" (remember, as always, the difference that makes a difference betweem "possible" and "likely") to design "another mechanical device" (somehow once a thing is "understood" it becomes through that understanding a devised thing, perhaps Prisco is a closeted advocate of "Intelligent Design" or something since he keeps flogging this point so interminably -- and, yes, I'm joking), and once one can replace an understood thing one is also assured that it can be replaced with a better thing (no reason why is offered), although "better" is thankfully qualified at least with "according to appropriate criteria" (who specifies and polices these criteria is left as an exercise for the reader).
Hey, far be it from me to deny that when scientists understand stuff they enable greater powers of prediction and control, (some of) which palpably improve our capacities and enrich (some of) our lives.
But I still don't see how any of this justifies going off on a Robot Cultist tear handwaving about imminent superintelligent post-biological Robot Gods ending human history, imminent precisely-controlled self-replicating nanoscale robots delivering superabundance and ending human stakeholder politics, or imminent genetic and prosthetic medical techniques or brain-scanning techniques delivering superlongevity and ending human mortality.
Let's keep our eyes on the ball here. One can easily admit the world is susceptible of scientific analysis, and admit that warranted scientific belief delivers powers of prediction and control, and admit that fantastic capacities are at any rate compatible with logic whatever their remoteness from practical realization all without ever once feeling the slightest transcendental temptation to embrace Singularitarian, Nanosantalogical, or Technological Immortalist nonsense.
Be that as it may, Prisco continues:
Apparently profound but actually nonsensical statements like “the brain is more gland than computer” are frequently used by religious fundamentalists in support of their delusional belief that living organisms are characterized by some nebulous, ineffable “vital spirit” forever beyond the domain of science.
Quite apart from my utter bewilderment at Prisco's apparent perception that saying something as simple and obvious as "the brain is more gland than computer" is some kind of effort at woo-woo mystical pseudo-profundity (I would class it with statements like "dirt is more brown than purple," frankly), I can't for the life of me understand why this observation launches him into a diatribe about "vital spirits" and so on. What's so mystical about a gland? It seems to me that glands are perfectly concrete, technoscientifically intelligible sorts of things. So, I really am curious about Prisco's attribution of this kind of statement to religious fundamentalists.
My challenge? Name one. Name one single religious fundamentalist who has said “the brain is more gland than computer” to make some kind of anti-science point. Name just one, how hard can that be, since you claim it is so frequent?
As for Prisco insisting that glands are computers, that everything caught up in intelligible causality is a computer… I can follow this move easily enough, as it happens. Prisco wants to describe as a “computer” any complex system susceptible of scientific analysis. OK. I think it probably is more useful to distinguish computers from non-computers, inasmuch as it seems to me in common parlance there are plenty of intelligible non-computers in the world, but, hey, I get functionalism, I’m down with it.
I don’t honestly think that's what Prisco is really up to here, though. I think he's just uncritically flinging fetishized terms around and not getting my critique particularly. For Plato the mind was a mirror, for Nietzsche it was a stylus inscribing a surface, for Freud it was a steamworks, now people fetishize the computer as our quintessential tech and now inevitably enough the mind is computer, or more of a neurocomputational network as the popular focus nudges that way.
But all that, I suppose, is neither here nor there.
Am I the only one for whom this latest exchange really seems weird?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)