the Matrix

Environmentalism

Gristmill (and then by extension the environmental eeconomics blog) recently asked, "How do you define 'environmentalism?'" Here's what I came up with:

I think that nature works through cycles, based on competition and cooperation, that exist at multiple scales within time and space. I think that modern human society lives in a way that, in any scale relevant to us, is fundamentally not cyclical--we have raw materials and we have wastes, and, except in rare instances, they don't support the complexity of life that nature's cycles (at comparable scale) do. Environmentalism, then, is trying to bring modern human society back into working in the same kind of cyclical way as the rest of nature.

I figured, with the previous post about why I'm doing the garden, now would be a good time to explain my thinking behind this a little bit.

If you follow those two links--which you ought to do--you'll see some of the other definitions, and a couple of them do things that I was trying to avoid. First is the notion of "impact." Viewing environmentalism as minimizing impact, though useful to everyday living, gets tangled up because, firstly, it's an impossible goal (though in the absence of anything better, impossible goals aren't all bad) and, secondly, it sets people off as separate from the environment. I don't think that you have to be biocentric to view that as fundamentally wrong. Even if we are in important ways different from the rest of nature, that doesn't change the fact that we essentially are reliant on the environment and the environment, in turn, must deal with us.

Second, it gives us a positive vision to work toward. It's not about reducing, about negating what we do, but instead should be about fitting in. Now, at this point, a lot of that fitting in will take the form of reducing our impacts and on a day to day basis I don't think my defition will make for any large difference in what we should do. But it does give us a different way of imagining the future, a different way of grappling with how we ought to live.

Third, even while it is essentially anthropocentric, I think that this understanding more easily accepts biocentric elements than other defitions. (In particular, J.S.'s "Environmentalism is the belief that the non-human world both provides tremendous benefits to humans that are often not taken into account and has intrinsic value above and beyond the use value of humans," in which the last bit about intrinsic value seems, to me at least, sort of wedged in and in tension with the rest of what he says.) Non-human nature, as I see it, works with us, rather than for us, and embedded in that understanding is a recognition that it has intrinsic value and deserve respect and dignity, even if in major instances we are managing it.

Finally, what I'm trying to get at is that the world as we know it is incredibly complex and dynamic, while environmentalism, as it has mostly been, is about stasis--hence it's mostly interchangeable with preservationism and conservationism. So, part of what I'm trying to do is acknowledge that humans can fit into that dynamism in a positive way. We can be a part of the ongoing increasing complexity which is nature at work.

I'm happy to get comments on this.

Trust, surveillance, and capital

I think I've become something of a trustmonkey lately. Every time I turn something over in my head, I come back to feeling that one of the roots of contemporary problems (from workplace deskilling to effects of suburban form) is the substitution of surveillance for trust. Now, by trust, I don't mean blind trust or assumed trust, so much as a sort of socially-monitored trust, based on dispersed, personal observation.

In urban form, this means "eyes on the street," having a sufficient mass of people, or presumed people, such that criminals don't commit crime and so that everyone feels safe moving about. A similar dynamic, I think, lies at the heart of workplace deskilling, where technology (say, barcodes) replaces human capital (say, knowing how much pears or Life cereal costs). In both cases, skill/trust is replaced by technology. In urban form, technology may be actual cameras, police patrols, or gated entries.

Key to both of these is the ability, and interest, of capitalists to develop technology that can substitute for other processes. I've been thinking about a different problem lately. (Rather, I've been returning to it, because it's a favorite of mine.) I think that political participation is the crucial problem of our time.Looking back at my vote for Nader in 2000, I was pretty much a single-issue voter, and that issue was fixing the system.

Perhaps part of what's gone wrong is that the intense social and human component of politics has drained away--as its drained away in public safety and in the workplace. Trust in public officials, political participation, and trust in sources of news all seem to be plummeting. However, in contrast to other areas, where someone has a strong interest in innovating to find technology to replace it (or, rather, the strong interest & innovation partly comes first), in the political realm, no one has the ability or interest to develop technology to replace this sociality. (To be clear, I dislike the technology solutions in other areas, though I recognize that they are generally functional in a narrow sense.)

I don't know whether the solution is to search for technological solutions as a way to boost political participation in the short run, or to work to reskill in other areas, and presume that political participation will move alongside that.

On the other hand--and it should be clear by now that I'm woolgathering and haven't thought any of this through--perhaps the problem is that the technological fix has already been developed. The technology is, say, the extreme gerrymandering that we've seen develop and the political knowledge and participation is exactly what's been replaced.

I like Leon Kass

That doesn't really have anything to do with anything, I thought I'd just get it out there. I went through a period after my sophomore year in college that, looking back, was a significant finding myself period. Of course, I didn't really do any of the things that people usually do when they find themselves. About the most explosive--and stupidest--thing I did was to break up with T. (It lasted about three months.) But I also threw myself into reading contemporary things, to a degree I'd never done before. Magazines, particularly newsmagazines of different sorts. While I explored magazines I'd eventually come back to--say, The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly--two magazines stuck immediately. First was Might and second was The New Republic. What struck me about TNR was the cover story of the first issue I picked up: Kass's "The Wisdom of Repugnance."

I mention this partly because nostalgia is fun and partly because I'm fitfully reading the joint of review of Beyond Therapy and Enough in a recent Harpers. Beyond Therapy is the most recent book by the President's Council on Bioethics, of which Kass is the head and, by all accounts, the most determinative member. Enough is by Bill McKibben, who appears to be a fairly radical environmentalist. (I'm skimming bios, so that might be unfair; I'm not otherwise familiar with him, save for an awareness of his name.)

The Harpers review, usefully, is written in part to emphasize the similarity in their views, particularly regarding the engineering and selection of our children. Critics, such as this guy, argue that McKibben is incoherent in arguing against this sort of tinkering, because the only possible argument he can put forth is that it defiles man-as-created-in-God's-image.

I'm not so sure that this is the case. I think that there's a pragmatic argument, based on what we can already see around us, against the careful genetic selection and modification of children. I see parents who push their kids to become model children--top of the class, targeted for Harvard since preschool, that sort of thing. I have no doubt that I'm reacting to some easy journalistic tropes; nevertheless, I don't think anyone really contests that some parents see their children as attempts to produce the perfect second attempt at their own lives, be it as young models, in t-ball, or with grades.

I think, and I think most agree, that this saps at the child's ability to fashion his or herself. Certainly, no self-fashioning will be total; likewise, no parentally-induced fashioning will ever be complete. It's always a question of what balance to strike. And just as I would say that letting children find their own way from day one, with no parental involvement, is a recipe for disaster, so do I also say that this excessive parental management goes too far. The relevance of this to biotechnology is that genetic modification is one step further. I very much see it as not something new, but something more, and further into excess.

the freddy krueger viral meme as a viral meme

If I tell you to go read jbu's fascinating posts on freddy krueger as a viral meme (one and two) am I passing on an interesting way to pass three minutes, or am I spreading a virus?

A Virtuous Act

This post, an account of the blogger shooting an intruder into his home, has me thinking. I came to the link via Instapundit. What caused me to follow the link was this statement by Reynolds:

And I regard shooting a burglar as a virtuous -- not merely a permissible -- act.

To me, this is simply an extraordinary view to hold. I understand that it exists, that people feel this way, and chalk up a lot of tragedy in the world to it, but seeing it put so starkly and calmly, by a purportedly reasonable person, is astonishing. To what extent is the virtuousness of the home-defender different from the virtuousness of the Palestinian suicide-bomber. I don't follow Instapundit closely, but my presumption is that he would see no equivalence between the two. And while I'm sure he--or anyone, myself included--could provide a thousand distinctions and to some extent that would be persuasive, it doesn't get to the key fact of the righteousness, and that righteousness is what connects to the two. Is this relativism run amok? Maybe. I recoil from violenceAnd so you're probably wondering what I thought of Kill Bill, which I saw last night. Is the connection jarring? Is it appropriate--or maybe instead is it necessary--to link over-the-top cartoonish violence with something like this? I can't say; only that as I typed "recoil from violence," my mind went first to Kil Bill. easily, true enough, and that makes it easy to lump various sorts of violence, and various sorts of praise of violence, together. But within my moral world, there's a tension between right and necessary, and it's this onto tension that Instapundit shoves his thumb. Right, to me, is perilously close to Kant's categorical imperativeMy understanding is minimal at best, but essentially the categorical imperative holds that we should never treat others as a means to an end, but always as ends in themselves. To me, it seems the strongest statement that we should not harm, by intent or by expediency, others., and is absolute: killing is wrong, regardless of the circumstances. Pain is wrong. Hurting is wrong. Necessity is a bitch, though, and makes allowances for conflicting rights, as well as for wrongs based on human failings. I can understand necessity, even in cases where I would not condone it. But to confuse necessity with right is to succumb to thuggishness parading as Good.

The second interesting aspect of the blogger's tale is highlighted by Clayton Cramer. Instapundit linked to this as part of his post, but I skipped it until I began writing this. It made for an interesting test of my own perceptions. If you haven't yet, go the original post. If you're like me, you were surprised to find out that the blogger is black, the intruders white, that the attack seems by all accountsSome comments on the original post call into question the veracity of the account, particularly the racist aspects of it. Reynolds himself holds no opinion on the matter. I'm content to assume veracity; for my purposes here, it's practically irrelevant, though. to be motivated by racism, and that the blogger has a history of gang-involvement. You were expecting the blogger to be white, had no real conception of the intruder, and were planning to be critical of a gun-nut. Did that change for you as you read it? I found myself softening my position, and taking a more view more sympathetic to the blogger. (It seems important to note that this follows a heated debate among friends from a week or two ago about the appropriateness of hate crime laws.) Am I racist? I don't think so. I think what's going on here is that, given the introduction from Instapundit, I was expecting a very traditional sense of the story, in a which righteous conservative, a strong believer in gun rights, eagerly exercises his self-defense. Which is to say, I think that it's less a matter of racism, and more a matter of easy political stereotyping.

Partial and perverse

There's a certain sense in which, yes, this category draws it's name from a well-known contemporary movie franchise. It is not my favorite movie, by any means; in fact, I'm not quite certain I even think it's a good movie (that goes double for Reloaded). However, it is a fascinating movie. I rewatched the original (%in between my first and second viewings of the sequel%), and it still held an odd power, that careened recklessly between horror and awe. The awe was fairly straightforward: cinematic tricks, in action scenes and all that in-between stuff (incidentally, the lack of fun cinema in between fights was probably my biggest real complaint with Reloaded). The horror peaked in the most controversial scene of the movie, when leather-coat clad Neo and Trinity assault the skyscraper in which Morpheus is held, wiping away the security guards on the first floor. The scene is notorious for its visual parallels with Columbine. For me, though, the horror, and it's an odd horror, I'll admit, was because of something slightly different.

Essentially, this scene is the realization of earlier dialogue between Morpheus and Neo, regarding the ability of the Agents to jump into any convenient body. The point of the scene is: You cannot trust those who are still wired to the Matrix; thus, they are fair game. I find this unsettling because it's essentially an ideology of revolutionary violence that I would hope we would see through by now. That is to say, the movie legitimates terrorist violence, arguing that most of the people are pawns of the reality that the Matrix is feeding them. Only when people are freed, can they see how the world really is; the gauze unshields their view.

Stripped of the violence, this view of ideology as blinding people to the world is not particularly remarkable. I believe, for instance, that it has strong Christian parallels. It was most explicit, though, in some styles of Marxism, particularly when class consciousness and false consciousness are emphasized. (That is, the working class, before realizing it's potential solidarity and abilty to rule, exists in a state of false consciousness, contributing to a system that brutalizes it; upon realizing who really gets what, the working class achieves enlightenment: class consciousness.) It's also been touched on by some feminists who feel that, historically, only women are able to truly understand the relationship between the sexes in our society. Ditto for some philsophers of color and racism. (All of these, it should be noted, are exaggerated to illustrate the point.)

I tend to go with Foucault on this, though, and believe that all perspectives (ie, what the working class thinks of the employer-employed relationship) are "partial and perverse." (I believe I'm quoting Susan Hekman, "Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited.") That is to say, everyone's a little bit blind when they look at the world.

The Matrix, then, is an interesting instance of a view I reject (ie, that anyone can unplug and really see how things are). My matrix, the primary allusion I want to make, comes with much stronger post-something or other credentials: Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and in particular the afterword that he added to the second edition to tidy up his wide and loose use of the "paradigm" (he claims to have been told that he uses the word in 33 different senses). In his afterword, he looks primarily at two senses of the word. First, paradigms are exemplary instances of a scientific vision. They can embody the heart of the theory, as well as its methods (think Einstein's work in relativity for post-Newtownian, ie "Einsteinian," physics). Second, a paradigm can be the theory itself. This second sense he split off into a new twenty-five cent phrase: "disciplinary matrix."

My interest comes in a perversion of Kuhn's matrices (which, keep in mind, are just useful for tracking work done in science, as it done "normally" and as it enters periods of revolution, when one disciplinary matrix is traded for another). In the Introduction to Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance, which he edited with Jack Douglas, Robert Scott brought Kuhn's matrices down to the level of individual worldview, and slapped it together with Berger and Luckmann's Social Construction of Realityand Mary Douglas's ideas on taboo and pollution, from Purity and Danger. Scott's primary view is to show how categories of deviance (from actual law-breaking to social deviants, including, for instance, the blind) are conceptual categories that people apply to the world around them; the primary characteristic that's being categorized then takes on other characteristics, that are linked within the worldview ("morally inferior" for criminals; "helpless" for the blind). This is especially the case when we encounter something new, which we have not previously fit into a slot.

As I said, Scott's primary concern is explaining where deviance comes from. Personally, I think that this is a pretty reasonable explanation of how people generally negotiate the world around them. This category, then, is for my own adventures in developing my understanding of the world--building, that is, my own matrix. In that wonderful way that we post-somethingists do things, this will include my own attempts to grapple my understanding of how these worldviews (taken as a generic bunch) themselves work.