More or Less

The relation between human perception and the perceived world is part of a long-standing philosophical debate—but it is also a sociopolitical reality. People perceive different things according to their economic viewpoint and according to normalized opinions and beliefs (broadly speaking, culture). Part of the task of having a critical, social justice consciousness is to identify how and which ideas—including ideas of abundance and scarcity—may be informed and sustained by class ideology. Karl Marx wrote that humans will never have true freedom until we collectively have reasonable control over our society, partly because we will perceive the world from various class divisions rather than as a comprehensive class of people who are interested in the maximization of collective human flourishment.

Class-based divisions reinforce class-based perceptions of abundance and scarcity. (To be clear, when I use the term class-based division I mean the working class and the owning class most broadly, and then also the varying levels of economic stratification commonly known as lower class, middle class, and upper class.) This is the philosophical and practical conundrum that the economic system of capitalism leaves us all in. Individuals in the owning class are perceptually-conditioned over time to perceive the world according to their vested interests. Likewise, individuals in the working class are perceptually-conditioned over time to perceive the world in their ways—ideally leading to the recognition of their own exploitation and thereby organizing a revolution of the economic system. The tensions between the two broad groups are more than obvious, and some intellectuals have theorized that mass culture (mass television, media, and advertising) acts as a sort of ideological screen that often keeps the working class from boldly organizing upon the recognition of their alienation from their labor.

It goes without saying that the owning class perceives the world to be exquisitely abundant because they see rich things while the working class perceive the world to be scarce because they see few things over which they have material and political control. This often goes without saying precisely because the relation between class division and class knowledge is purposely obscured leading individuals to assume that the way they perceive the world is a universal human perception. But this cannot be so within a class-stratified society and globe.

I bring this up because I see it occurring regularly, usually after I have reflected on it, since assumptions like this are latent and widespread and tend to become imperceptible without the lens of reflective scrutiny. I would like to examine a recent adbuster, “Get Less Today,” that I think shows how latent class-divided perception and knowledge can be even when the occasion is a progressive cause.

“Get Less Today” is a public education outreach campaign spearheaded by the Solid Waste Management Coordination Board and Rethink Recycling that aims to encourage Twin Cities residents to reduce consumption and solid waste disposal in the region in order to improve the region’s solid waste management system[1]. I want to be clear that my intention is not to assail the campaign effort, which I view as a positive, well-meaning, and progressive contribution to the community, but rather to illustrate how economic assumptions are present in the campaign in latent ways, just like they are in newspapers, articles, and other campaigns. These assumptions frame knowledge from a certain perceptual viewpoint demonstrating just how pervasive economic assumptions are in the overall culture if they appear even in well-meaning, progressive, public education campaigns.

Here is the adbuster video from the “Get Less Today” outreach effort:

 

As you can see, the video begins with an image of a woman standing before a closet full of clothes, a box in her hands, sighing, “This is too much. What am I going to do with all this stuff?” The next image shows that same woman trying to get through a walk-in closet full of clothes. We then move to “Lester Moore” “selling” the value of less stuff. “Just like you,” he says in a passionate voice, “I worked hard to get cool things, follow fashion, and pick up the latest piece of technology. I could barely get through a week without picking up more stuff. In fact, at one point, I even had to rent a storage locker to fit all my stuff! That’s when I really realized that what I needed wasn’t more, it was Less.” Lester continues to come up with witty sayings that play off the idea that less is more.

I describe the video as an adbuster because it evidently does double duty as a satire on infomercials and advertising. It pokes fun at the ways in which advertisements deceptively sell us stuff that we don’t need and it also satirizes the over-cluttered household by depicting abundance in extreme and cluttered forms. All of these are useful points. The main charge I have is what I have spoken of earlier with regards to perception and class-divided knowledge. Capitalism can accommodate all of these ecological significations—buy less, spend less, reduce, reuse, recycle, and so on. But what any outreach effort that does not critique the economic system perpetually obscures from the start is that the very idea of reducing consumption presupposes that all individuals have too many things when that is absolutely not the case in actuality. There are vast numbers of people in our country—let alone in the world—who do not have enough food in their pantries, and some do not even have pantries. Having more in our present system means that others are doing without by necessity. In the “Get Less Today” adbuster, having more becomes a burden on privileged residents and homeowners as opposed to what could be a much more effective critique of the systemic distribution that allows some to have too much and others to have nothing. It thereby unconsciously reinforces the perceptions of people who have money to spend on things and money to save on less things and so reinforces the class-based divisions which are responsible for these differing perceptions in the first place. In failing to provide a systemic critique we may preserve and actuate the very harm that we seek to minimize.

Moreover, while the adbuster encourages less consumption and increases waste disposal efficiency it does not problematize the waste disposal system at large. Indigenous economist and author Winona LaDuke points out that the waste industry is one of the biggest industries in our society and is part of an inherently unsustainable linear economic model. She describes, in stark contrast to our present model, a cyclical economic model where resources are returned to the earth in sustainable ways to replenish themselves or create new resources. This model has no need for conceptions of reducing waste, since waste itself would no longer be an accurate term for what happens to items after they are used.

- A.H.

 

References: [1) “About Us,” Rethink Recycling

Three P’s

Physics

A recent America RadioWorks podcast “Don’t Lecture Me” reports on instructors questioning the effectiveness of the traditional lecture-mode teaching method dominant in American undergraduate courses. In the hour-long podcast, one of the speakers we hear from is Eric Mazur, a Harvard physics professor, who instituted a “peer instruction” model of teaching that focuses class time on allowing students to understand complex concepts, processes, and problems by talking them out with their classmates. Mazur instituted the change in response to a study that demonstrated that physics students taking a lecture-style physics course showed a meager 14% increase difference in understanding basic, foundational concepts from the beginning of the course to the end of the course. Mazur speculated that most students taking introductory physics courses have difficulty dislodging intuitive thoughts or beliefs with the newly acquired physics concepts or laws: we may believe intuitively that two objects of different weights will hit the ground at different moments respective to their weights, but, in reality, both objects will hit the ground at the same moment.

Perception

Foundational concepts or ideas which go against common sense are difficult for individuals to integrate into our understanding given that it takes a simultaneous leap of faith and of questioning to accept things that appear to contradict intuition. This might be one of the most uncomfortable—and exhilarating—lessons to learn since it means acknowledging that one’s own senses always retain the opposing potential of both presenting and misrepresenting reality. Walter Benjamin, in his rich and oft-studied essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” makes the vigorous claim that what and how individuals perceive is not only a function of the physical sensing body but is actually altered socially and historically by what we see, thereby producing and reproducing social conditions that can reinforce certain modes of perception in what may be understood as a dialectic exchange. It goes something like this: Technological reproducibility creates the capability for objects to be perpetually and exactly reproduced. The display of these mass-reproduced objects simultaneously alters human perception to crave this reproducible “sameness.” The regression of perception to the “sense of sameness” corresponds with the introduction of sameness through the means of technological reproduction. As a result, sameness is reproduced both by technological means and by perceptual habitation, turning the human perceiver into a machine-like observer of reproducible and reproduced objects. In order for the perceiver to align reality with his perceptions of the reproduced and reproducible objects, he himself must become reproducible and must be reproduced. The twin concepts of abundance and scarcity ought to be acknowledged to exist within a specific history, too; not only do the signifiers of abundance and scarcity change across time but also our physical perceptions of material abundance and material scarcity respond to the material world and alter our understanding. This means that our understanding of ourselves and of the world responds to material changes in the world. When we act on the material world, rather than be passive recipients of it, we change our perception along with changing the world.

Power

Unlike the purely physical phenomenon of falling objects, there is nothing natural or evolutionary about most, if not all, of modern social structures and modern life. Even ideas about what is natural are historically-contingent. Vested interests can take ideas out of their historical context to make them appear to be natural. For instance, the conception and implementation of modern educational institutions can be traced to a historical moment that sought—and still seeks—to create obedient, “productive” members of industrial society while the parents of these future workers work long hours and so do not have time or energy to educate their children at home. The structure, routine, and habits of any society are historically-constructed and therefore paradoxically extremely amenable to all sorts of unprecedented—favorable and unfavorable—change. This can be one of the hardest ideas to integrate into consciousness because it implicitly calls for a practice of noncompliance and rebelliousness to everyday encounters of oppressive concepts and practices of any sort as it frees one from the belief that some potent force outside of history—nature, evolution—has erected the world to its present state. It constitutes a sort of freedom that is unquenchable, disrupting the habituated mind. WHAT IF I JUST YELLED THIS NEXT SENTENCE BECAUSE I FELT LIKE IT?

Or what if I started to end

these lines at my own poetic discretion?

These small individual expressions of freedom

may seem inconsequential

but they convey subjectivity and spirit

in a modern society that is constantly coercing

people to turn themselves into masses

with no distinction, no individuality, no spirit.

Children universally question everything—

they are constantly questioning assumptions

or things that adults take as natural

simply because they have been accepted

in our (life)time. Children are always trying

to understand what their senses perceive;

they have not yet learned socially-mediated

and historically-contingent ways of perceiving.

With the eyes of a child and the maturity of an adult

we ought to question everything we see and know.

(Not to mention it’s serious fun.) Socrates would

walk around Athens questioning any stranger or friend

willing to talk about why they lived their life

the way they did. His maxim, a rich contradiction

of knowing doubt: “I know that I know nothing.”

- A.H.

Throwing Stones

Throwing Stones: Signs of Scarcity in Meaningful Work

A guest post by Lucy Saliger

A century and a half after Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Life Without Principle” was published, I’m struck by what seems an epitome of the kind of work he called “meaningless labor”: the human being whose paid job is to become a walking advertising sign. Recently, I saw an African-American woman forced to wear a Statue of Liberty costume as a personified ad for a company with “Liberty” in its name. She wasn’t forced in the way so many black Americans were made through overt violence to work as lifelong slaves to some white Americans. But she was undoubtedly economically strong-armed into doing work she would otherwise never do, work with no inherent meaning.  And in that sense – despite cheery proclamations or condemnatory accusations from ever faithful believers in the sacred myth that we all can choose our paid work in this country – she was forced to put on the cartoonish, mock freedom symbol and parade before the public. I can’t help juxtaposing this image with another invocation of freedom, one as embedded in the American psyche by now as that famous New York harbor statue: the last words of Martin Luther King’s most famous speech, in which he envisioned what could become the real condition of all people, expressed in their exclamation: “Free at last! free at last! thank God almighty, we are free at last!”

America’s many manifestations of entrenched racism have always been bound to economic matters.  This was why, shortly before he was murdered in 1968, King kicked off the next step in his work, the Poor People’s Campaign.  A crucial goal was an Economic Bill of Rights which included a guaranteed income for all people and full employment. And not just any employment: in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, he called for “new forms of work that enhance the social good”  (172). Similarly, Thoreau had suggested a town “pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends.”  Yet deeply meaningful work for all remains only a dream.

Jeremy Rifkin’s 1995 The End of Work chronicled how, in the early decades of the 1900s, Americans were pushed, pulled, and squeezed by shallow, contradictory philosophies and promises.  The good life with abundant leisure would be theirs if efficiency zealot Frederick Taylor’s ideas infiltrated every aspect of society, particularly business. Corporations and economists realized the efficiently produced glut of commodities lacked sufficient buyers. They began a concerted campaign to get people to buy far more than they ever had.  Marketers appealed to anything from patriotism (“Your purchases keep America employed”) to convenience (boxed cereals and other new packaged foods) to new conceptions of sex appeal and status conferred through the modern and chic to enticing new suburbanites to “fill their castles” (18-23). Rifkin cogently argued that a crisis in employment was currently snowballing, but his solutions relied on benevolent politicians, corporate leaders, and other experts to unselfishly lead the way to needed transformations. There was little basis for believing they would; sixteen years later, they have not.  King maintained that we must “organize our strength into compelling power until governments cannot elude our demand …. It would be the height of naïveté to wait passively until the administration had somehow been infused with such blessings of goodwill that it implored us for our programs” (145).

The labor hours required to produce the necessities and niceties of life have been exponentially reduced.  Had we all shared equally in the remaining work needed and the goods produced with far less labor, we would not find ourselves economically blackmailed into making and peddling more than we need or truly want to one another. But the majority has not reaped the imagined benefit of more time and freedom. Now financial and political elites demand an austerity which cuts back on the very things an environmentally stressed planet’s economy should emphasize: education, health care, and other non-tangible experiential goods.  Meanwhile, those who desperately need material basics remain neglected. As in the past, the largest part of the benefit produced by improved technology has been syphoned off by a super-wealthy layer, while most people’s lives are disregarded as meaningless.

I tell myself I am fortunate in this regard: so far, I have escaped work as a “human directional” or any variation of this appropriation of our bodies by business. Passing them, I wonder how it feels, standing for hours on busy street corners or strip mall entrances, twirling signs up, down, and sideways, placed there to grab the fleeting attention of drivers or pedestrians and lure them in for special cheap deals to be had on fast food, oil changes, car washes, cell phones, model homes, loans, and so much more.  One company trafficking in human signs has a website boasting to potential renters of human placards that they have high attendance rates and (ominously?) “many quality control systems in place to insure that you are getting the highest level of service available from anyone.”  They list some of the major corporations they are “proudly serving.” Flashing back to a teen me and the French fries I once scooped and stuffed into bags to serve to customers, I imagine the company smilingly serving up people-signs on a platter to companies that order them.

But my sense of luck about this is misplaced. I had my body and mind occupied by not entirely different forces.  For over seven years, I phoned people at home or work, reciting scripts and overcoming objections. Bosses insisted that smiling faces emitted friendlier sounding scripted pitches.  That need to keep smiles plastered on our faces and peppy tones in our voices contributed to the common use of amphetamines in some of the phone rooms I worked in. Amphetamines’ ability to keep people artificially up and doing what they ‘should’ even when it has no intrinsic meaning for them has been increasingly pushed by the pharmaceutical industry and harnessed by a host of experts who now dole out speed to mass numbers of our people. This, too, is part of the occupation of our minds and bodies.

Telemarketing felt meaningless and degrading, but it paid more than the lowest wage jobs I couldn’t survive on, jobs I knew from experience could be equally meaningless and degrading.  In my second fast-food job, our morning supervisor believed the best way to quicken our pace was to repeatedly shout, “Go! Go! Go!” while clapping to his own words. I lasted a whopping week in a plastics factory – racing the machine to remove throwaway plant-moving trays, cutting the edges and inevitably my fingers as I trimmed with a knife – stacking, moving stacks onto carts, moving carts – losing the race against the machine twice the first day, so that it melted trays before I could remove them – being threatened that if it happened again, I’d be fired.  I am in awe of those who worked at that company for years – primarily immigrants without documents.  Like that molten plastic, they were melted into pliancy by a relentless machine, and then hardened to last until they cracked.  So much of what we worked to churn out was trivial junk, stuff our society could mostly do without, but which, when produced and thus priced cheaply enough customers could find no reason not to buy.  Superfluous goods made by superfluous people.

But during many years, like others I worked with, I had work that mattered intensely, work I was often unable to do as well as I wanted.  Unpaid or paid, we’ve cared for the young, the old, the sick, and anybody who needs help, I’ve taken care of my kids, the kids of others, and sometimes adults.  In the mid-1990s, I watched a toddler for a woman in her mid-20s who was paid $6 an hour as an “assistant manager” for one of the major pizza chains and who worked a second job at a movie theater ticket window.  There were poorly paid workers in need of child care at all hours. I cared for the baby girl of an early-20s single mom working for a collections agency.  When she picked up her baby, Stephanie delayed going home to her empty apartment.  After talking all day to cajole folks into forking over some of their scarce money for overdue bills, she offered us that gift of a voice, entertaining us with alternatingly suspenseful and hilarious tales of her rural Virginia childhood replete with water moccasins and swimming holes.  To our California ears, it was magic. My husband drove a school bus for $6 an hour mornings and afternoons, and I telemarketed for the newspaper from home in between watching kids. Two or three evenings a week, we piled our kids and sometimes another child in our vehicle to deliver weekly newspaper supplements.  My oldest spooned out baby food.  Stephanie soon picked up a route of her own to do two nights a week after work.  We and the people whose kids I watched did the best we knew how to care for our children in a society which treats that work in about the same vein as if we were caring for our private pets – not something for which there is a sense of collective responsibility or much respect.

We often bought one of those large cheap pizzas from the chain the other mom worked for so that we could all eat as we drove around, me rolling and bagging newspapers, my spouse hanging the bagged papers on mailbox posts. When our economic situation deteriorated despite our efforts to bring together enough work and money to add up to what we needed, we got phone calls from other collection agency representatives like Stephanie. This is the loop – the ways in which we’re forced to buy from and sell to one another our labor and the goods we’ve wrung out of the planet’s resources and other beings’ lives, irrespective of whether these purchases are good for the majority of people engaging in them.  Unseen others insert themselves between us, syphoning off a huge share of our labor, redirecting it to enriching themselves, becoming middlemen even in our relationships. Capitalism mitigates how we interact with one another, making us define our interactions as economic exchanges rather than intrinsically valuable relations between living beings.

The baby and toddlers I took care of back then are almost college age now.  Their likelihood of attending and graduating is not high. If they do graduate, they will be exceptions demonstrating that ‘anyone’ – but, of course, not everyone – the system is not geared for that – any one can ‘make it’ if they really try.  And if they don’t spend too many life hours making fast food or plastic nothings, delivering papers, collecting from the financially desperate, acting as moving billboards or possessed ‘cheerful’ voices, or doing the myriad of other empty jobs our society assigns by default to so many.  But with the uppermost layer’s greed reaching new levels of gluttony, even if they graduate from college, they are increasingly likely to do variations of the jobs their parents did – not because humanity so desperately needs their labor for our collective survival, but because their lives are treated as throwaway, like so much else in a society where the primary goal is only to sell.

The work so many are forced to do devours our never-to-return time and that fresh green life which keeps trying to break ground in and around us.  What Thoreau lamented in 1863 – the disconnection between humans, our work, our earth, and our sense of meaning – is still the case:

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages.  But many are no more worthily employed now.

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.  As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down.

How do we choose not to cut our forests down?   As the system currently operates, we cannot all, one by one, opt to use our labor, directly or in the money we trade it for and purchase with, for what we actually want: meaningful work, lifelong deep education, enough nourishing food for all, homes not huge but loved, health care which not only wards off illness and injury but nurtures a physically and mentally healthy individual and society amidst flourishing ecosystems. To an elite layer looking down from on high, we and the products we make and sell may look like an over-abundant mass, a glut of easily replaceable living and nonliving things.  But the trees and animals which make up a forest are finite, as are the hours in one person’s life.  None of us should be forced to use up that finite supply of life working as a human sign or doing any of the other empty paid jobs which the crazed logic of corporate capitalism demands.

There is meaningful work to be had in our time. Thoreau found it in protesting the illnesses and injustices of his society and crafting a life which demonstrated that another way was possible. King together with many found it in protesting the illnesses and injustices of their society and forging lives which, without intense, committed struggle, would have been impossible. Both kinds of examples are vital.  We need to do what we can to carve out individual spaces of freedom to whatever extent we can now, and we need to use that freedom to stand with others for the right to live our lives doing what matters.  Until then, most of us will be forced to spend our lives throwing stones back and forth – and far worse.

The Dialectics of Our Split State

Minnesota’s split state—a DFL Governor and a GOP Legislature—appears to be the cause for the fiscal confusion that has shut our state government down. Such a claim assumes that the two parties are diametrically opposed and binary. Yet differences across party lines are not that vast—and certainly not static. Rather than meeting in the middle and accepting the false binary construction, our split state presents us with the gripping opportunity to explode contradictions, logical inconsistencies, and false consciousness that are at the heart of the fiscal confusion.

Publicly engaged citizens and our state lawmakers need to approach state governance dialectically. A debate, distinct from a dialectic, divides Democrats and Republicans outright and requires each party to defend and prove a pre-committed position. Reporters have noted that a major point of fiscal disagreement between Governor Dayton and the Legislature has been the issue of income tax. In line with the historical difference between the two parties, Democratic Governor Dayton has wanted to increase income tax on the highest Minnesota income earners while the Republican-housed Legislature has wanted to cut taxes and decrease spending. A number of smaller disagreements concern the distribution of the budget to various state-funded and state-supported programs, like public transit and higher education. These disagreements nonetheless have significant effects on Minnesota residents; for instance, the University of Minnesota, MnSCU, Metro Transit, and mental health service agencies are all at risk of losing large portions of much-needed state support. Governor Dayton budges here and there towards the “center” and the Legislature likewise budges here and there towards the “center.” Gov. Dayton may modify his proposed tax increases and the Legislature may increase funding for higher education or public assistance programs.

Yet a position-defending debate limits creative resolutions and visionary change. How can our lawmakers pass laws that correspond with Minnesotan’s longing for true wealth (based on human health, happiness, and sustainable well-being) if they are locked into defense mode? The Recession and ecological devastation together have provoked a growing class consciousness and ecological awareness that must be engaged and worked through. A dialectic exchange needs to take place at public squares and at the State Capitol to reveal contradictions implicit in both parties’ reasoning. Logical inconsistencies can thereby be surmounted through such an emergent dialogue. The urgency and necessity for lawmakers to engage the budget dialectically should not be mistaken by readers as a merely theoretical proposal—while we engage and stir our consciousness for an equitable, sustainable, flourishing society, we must remember that individuals and communities are bearing the consequences now of inaction and wrong-headed action.

A dialectic consideration of the budget reveals that as debates surrounding income tax and budget allocation continue, such debate accepts de facto the condition of employment and the constitution of money under capitalism. Reviewing very briefly this system, we see that income-earners are economically coerced to work for the owners of the forces of production, whether these forces be factories that produce rubber vehicle tires, mills  that ground flour, plants that assemble cell phones and laptops, or organizations that employ individuals to administrate, manage, supervise, do financial accounting, and many more tasks. Importantly, the pyramid’s flag-bearing peak is capital itself. The accumulation of money for the sake of money is the penultimate value and purpose of the entire scheme.

Accepting the unsustainable and inequitable system of capital is the core dysfunction behind the fiscal confusion and the state government shutdown. This acceptance amounts to a policy decision de facto. Budget formation, which unjustly receives less media attention than outright policy decisions such as marriage laws, for example, is in effect state lawmakers’ highest level of policy-making that affects individuals across all identity politics’ given demarcations. State budget planning and implementation requires, evidently, the use of money. But where does money come from in our capitalist system? From the surplus value that owners of productive forces extract from discrepancies between the worker’s waged labor, new technology that increases productivity, and the private sale of the commodity produced, as Philosopher Karl Marx painstakingly first analyzed in his seminal work Capital. Common sense and experience confirms these findings.

It is this foundational inequality that our lawmakers fail to examine and to surmount, effectively composing a destructive budget year after year. A balanced budge serves society, not exploits society in order to provide, after the fact, handouts for the disadvantaged and the poor that it creates as part of its very mandate. The existence of large numbers of impoverished peoples demonstrates the failings of capitalism to provide for the needs of all human beings. This lethal understanding of “budgeting” must be done away with. It is not the tax on income that we and our state lawmakers need to redress. It is not the amount of money to be allocated that needs to be discussed. It is not even the income discrepancies between lower, middle, and upper classes that needs to be addressed, though exceptional discrepancies will naturally dissolve when the core issue is surmounted. Indeed, it is the rotting, ghostly figure of capital that must be cornered and condemned. Collective ownership of the forces of production will end the privately traded commodities market for capital profit and restore the needs, goals, and prosperity of human societies.

Erudite philosophers, such as Hegel and Marx, have shown that work is critical to self-consciousness, to the existence of the human. There are many ways to be human—to experience the well-being and joy inherent in our rich and generous species-life. Late capitalism destroys the work-self-consciousness symbiosis that is critical to the human and obligates humans to give up our very consciousness. Individuals cannot work for our humanity but rather must work for capitalists, and for the capitalist’s god, capital wealth (the accumulation of money). Our labor is not only traded for private profit but, being so traded, alienates us from what it means to be human.

Cooperatively owned spaces and public-access spaces, like libraries, universities, parks, gardens, and public transit, showcase the cooperative spirit of the human giving for shared human use. These are not intangible ideals but real practices and places that exist; it is these very places and spaces that the fiscal dysfunction and consequent state government shutdown has ruined, or threatened to ruin. The de facto policy that leeches on the people’s blood and hearts is the clandestine consideration of what money is and how money is created, funneled, withheld, and accumulated in modern society. Unjustly acquired money does not belong in any law-abiding budget.

Minnesota has the rich natural and human resources necessary to sustain our human population at high levels of well-being and happiness. We are a state of farmers who have been producing nutritious foods for distribution and exchange at food co-ops around the state. We need more Minnesota residents to purchase their food needs at co-ops, whose pricing and collective ownership reflects the real needs of farmers, sustainable farm practices, and nutritionally-rich bodies, as opposed to corporate, for-profit grocers that sell towards the whims and mercies of the sociopathic stock exchange. We need Minnesota to keep running cooperatively led places, like the Seward Café in Minneapolis, and to open more. The contention that co-op costs are unreasonably priced for middle-income people is built on a form of reasoning that ultimately binds people—including the impoverished who truly cannot afford it—to the slave-like chains of repetitive, mechanistic, unfulfilling, corrupt, competitive, and time-drenching employment at the hands of the owners of productive forces. Such employment is economic coercion. We need a truly balanced budget. We must organize to work for ourselves, for our communities, and for our humanities.

-A.H.

Borderline States of America

Individuals with borderline personality disorder suffer tremendously, and often secretly, from this neurotic condition characterized by a pattern of tumultuous relationships and unreasonably risky, impulsive behaviors. Psychoanalysts believe the disturbance emerges as a “protective” measure in an individual whose sense of self has been badly bruised and humiliated in childhood. This sense of self has not been restored since the original trauma.

Sigmund Freud’s instructive thesis that unequal societies engender neurosis is relevant to our present consideration. Freud studied and treated bourgeoisie women who came to him exhibiting symptoms of hysteria. He argued that bourgeoisie class norms, expectations, and experiences repress normal, balanced human feelings and expressions and these repressed feelings rupture out in uncontrollable physical behaviors. Freud observed a corresponding increase in hysterical cases as the society in which individuals lived became more and more unequal.

I borrow from Sigmund Freud’s instructive thesis that unequal societies engender neurosis in order to say that capitalism is itself an organized site of structural borderline. That is to say, unreasonably risky, impulsive behaviors are normalized through systems and structures that destroy humans, animals, and life-sustaining beings in apparent and latent self-destruction. Since capitalism is now globalized, this self-destruction would amount to a destruction of the entire world, which is the world where we presently meet.

I have written in previous posts that capitalism is the superstructure that penetrates all frames of knowing and mediates relations between all individuals. That is to say, capitalism’s logic, material base, and cultural force frames the entire world through its sole consideration: capital wealth. But now I would like to add that capitalism penetrates (and fractures) the very foundation of knowing—the human self.

Thus it is not only that an unequal society engenders neurosis in some individuals but that an unequal society in fact engenders neurosis in all individuals, although in varying degrees. The object of resisting capitalism is then to address not only its material base, its cultural force, and its logic, but is also, crucially, to address its destructive psychological imprint.

Like a true borderline case, capitalism projects all of its deficits onto individuals. Consequently, it is individuals who have failed to keep up with mortgage payments, it is individuals who are too lazy or incompetent to find gainful employment, it is individuals who are greedy and hostile, it is individuals who are fat and unhealthy. (How many times have we heard the same individualist failure rhetoric applied to what should be appropriately considered a systemic failure?) Projective identification happens when individualizes internalize capitalism’s false projections and begin to identify with and perform these projected attitudes, behaviors, or roles themselves. I often encounter people who believe that humans are naturally greedy or corrupt. This sort of thinking is not only false, but very harmful. Capitalism’s never-ending crises, such as the recent US Recession, can in this way serve to capitalize on humanity’s present despondency by falsely projecting and essentializing greed, fraud, exploitation or weakness as natural traits of the human being. The financial crisis can be used to represent the human self, and, moreover, to marshal fear. This is an example of not only projection and of false consciousness, but also of manipulation.

These are all examples of capitalism affecting neurosis in the individual. Now what I would like to demonstrate is that capitalism is in itself structurally neurotic, specifically in the borderline sense. Renowned psychiatrist and author Alexander Lowen, in his book “Narcissism: Denial of the True Self,” writes that the “very term ‘borderline’ was created to denote a personality structure that is somewhere in between, both sane and insane” (24). Lowen argues that narcissism—of which borderline is one specific sub-type—is the primary psychological disturbance of modern life and that our culture is narcissistic. He also says that to be narcissistic in a narcissistic society is technically (though not reasonably) sane, since sanity is a measure of the discrepancy between “fantasy and fact” (24), and a narcissist therefore is a match for our present narcissistic culture.

Capitalism also is “somewhere in between, both sane and insane.” It is not completely psychopathic, nor is it obviously harmless. Its outward appearance, one could say, is normal. One could even point to the high level of material abundance it provides to residents of core nations like the United States. But this appearance is a mask which conceals the intense insecurity and emptiness of lives generally lived under its decree and furthermore reveals an incongruous split between “fantasy and fact.” Examples of risky and impulsive behaviors abound, behaviors that are self-destructive and that can be appropriately considered self-loathing acts. Consider the following cases. We live in a country where the average resident has access to modern technology and a modest standard of living, and where seven million people abuse prescription drugs. We live in a country that has some of the most advanced medical centers, and that has some of the highest rates of cancer in the world, such as the astronomical breast cancer incidence among American women. We live in a country that produces new knowledge and new technology in a variety of important disciplines, and that has an increasingly unsatisfied workforce  who are working longer and longer hours, usually for less pay. The cases go on and on. The incongruities are unreasonable and suggest a serious lack of human consideration at the most basic level: health and happiness.

Let’s take as another example the present situation of colleges and universities in the United States in order to further illustrate capitalism’s structural borderline. Many of our country’s public colleges and universities are losing state funding, and this increases the burden on individual students and families to pay rising tuition costs. The University of Minnesota has lost significant state funding in my two years as a graduate student. I have observed the English Department repeatedly cut costs because of this decreased budget; several cost reductions have directly impacted graduate students. Meanwhile, for-profit colleges and universities, such as University of Phoenix, are burgeoning and making private profit. For-profit colleges are directly traded on the stock market. A recent USA Today article (“For-profit colleges get rules tied to federal aid”)” reports that a new federal regulation “triggered a strong rally in publicly traded shares of for-profits college operations” because the regulation, intended to protect students receiving federal financial aid from problematic for-profit practices, is more lenient than had been expected. As a result of this unexpected news, the article reports that “Corinthian Colleges jumped $1.07 (27%) to $5.06, Education Management shot up $4.46 (22%) to $24.76, Devry climbed $7.87 (15%) to $61.86, University of Phoenix parent Apollo gained $4.71 (11%) to $46.90 and Washington Post Co., which owns the Kaplan school chain, rose $20.46 (5%) to $426.42.” These numbers illustrate the parody of the situation. And yet this is no fiction, but verifiable fact. What is reasonable and sane about buying and selling education on the stock market? This is an example of structural borderline—risky behavior that takes a worthwhile democratic pursuit and privatizes and trades it on the stock market for capital profit. Advocates of for-profit colleges may argue that these institutions provide additional options for students and do not take away from public universities, but the Recession has proven that everything is economically interrelated. Provoked by capitalist, for-profit undertakings that failed, the Recession troubled the government’s finances, and the government “balanced” its budget by cutting funds to publicly supported colleges and universities across the country.

This is not to say that structural borderline does not appear also in public (not-for-profit) institutions. Since capitalism’s logic and psychological imprint affects all individuals living under its system, one often finds a willingness—even by progressive groups—to work within its mandate. But since the system is borderline, wouldn’t working within it to promote human and nonhuman well-being be problematic? Wouldn’t one need to challenge and resist capitalism’s force as a fundamental part of any vision of social justice and well-being? It is an impossibility to believe that we can reverse ecological devastation and sustain human and nonhuman beings only by raising environmental consciousness because capitalism can absorb recycling, reducing, and reusing initiatives (and then some) with only a hitch. Consider environmental initiatives, such as the Natural Capital Project, to quantify nature’s value economically. These numbers will be used by decision-makers to aid in calculating and making decisions as a genuine attempt to preserve natural resources. But working towards the capitalist system, by quantifying nature economically, is a borderline act: it is half sane and it is half insane.

The discrepancy between the world we live in and the world we ought to live in is falsely dumbfounding because structural borderline is capitalism’s synchronous condition. Unreasonably risky, impulsive, destructive behavior should be by now recognizably predictable and cliché. We must resist such borderline consciousness and boldly assert the restoration and recovery that is so needed of the bruised human self-consciousness.

-A.H.

Citations:

Lowen, Alexander. Narcissism: Denial of the True Self. New York: Touchstone, 1997.

Anti-Humanism Sustainable Human

1

Philosopher Frédéric Neyrat describes humanism’s conception of the human: Humans are not born human but become human. We lack an essence that must be made. But what does “to become” or “to be made” mean? he asks. “The globalized world is based on a specific understanding of becoming. We believe that ‘to become’ is ‘to produce something.’ And we believe that man has to be produced. Not only produced, but endlessly produced” (IAS lecture link).

Neyrat explains that humanism is “always an overstatement, that is to say an interpretation of man, an interpretation of history and of a special kind of metaphysics” and he is looking at “our idea of humanism.” Our modern idea of humanism is transhistorical, he says, and has the goal of “producing a flexible human being.” Neyrat says that this humanization (the creation of the flexible human) creates humans who believe that we can destroy nature while still remaining safe.

The idea that human essence must be made fits perfectly well into the logic of capitalism, which aims to produce—and monetize—the entire world. Together humanism and capitalism instruct us that humans are deficient in-and-of ourselves. We are to be made good (enough). We “prove” that nature is nothing as we objectify our lack into a product, thereby negating this lack. The process must be repeated again and again since our lack is inherent. This endless production devastates the earth, leading us to our present ecological devastation and degenerate state. Because humanism defines humans by a lack of essence that must be made, and “to be made” under capitalism means to produce, humanism must be challenged if we are to sustain humanity itself, Neyrat argues. Anti-humanism is thus a resistance to humanism’s production of the human.

It is useful to note that it is humanism plus global capitalism plus modern technology, according to Neyrat, that negates the value of production. Work is critical to self-consciousness—to the human—as influential philosophers Hegel and Marx cogently articulate. But under capitalism, humans are alienated from our work and so from our humanity. Even if humanism’s claim that we become human were true, then we cannot become human under present-day conditions (since we are systematically separated from what we produce).

Neyrat also demonstrates that humanism is itself a “mode of production” since it “produces an integral difference” between nature, nothingness, and humans. That is, humanism is a concept that produces a pernicious divide between humans and nature as humans must be made from nature into culture. Humanism produces a particular frame of understanding human existence and possibility. It is false consciousness to accept the conditions of this frame as if it were self-constituted law. We must consider the limitations of humanism’s construct. We need to change at the conceptual level if we are to surmount our present global economic system and reverse human and ecological destruction.

2

Problems of sustainability can be re-evaluated as emanating from humanism’s self-destructing contradiction under capital rule. To become human is to produce. But alienated from our work we must produce perpetually—ineffectually—and thereby destroy the very earth that makes the world habitable to humans.

Conventional sustainability theories suggest anthropocentrism—or human-centeredness—is a dominant cause of ecological devastation. Humans only care about other humans (and themselves) and this exclusive focus on humans destroys the nonhuman world. One popular response to anthropocentrism is the turn toward subverting or deconstructing the animal/human binary. Such a response often attempts to portray specific examples of the “animality” of the human as a way of representing the permeability of this binary. If we can successfully reposition the human focus as a less anthropocentric being, then perhaps we will stop destroying the planet.

But let us give consideration to Neyrat’s challenging claim that it is not anthropocentrism but “anthro-indemnification” that is responsible for ecological destruction. The term “indemnification” means to compensate for a loss or hurt; in our specific context, it would mean to compensate for the lack of human essence. So humans devastate the globalized world not because we are self-centered but rather because we are without self. (This is not the same thing as being selfless; one cannot be selfless unless one has a cohesive self to “give up.”) Lacking a stable, composed self, we “act out” against the material world in behaviors that could be described as self-loathing—this hate is spawned from and directed at the absence of a coherent self. The entire world can be seen as a hostile escape from this systemically-organized and individually-occupied self-vacancy.

Sustainability efforts and environmental philosophy must re-consider the systemic subjugation of the human in present times in order to restore the perceived lack of human essence and to bring to a halt the dehumanization of humanity. Our society has failed the human. The human self itself must be restored and sustained.

-A.H.

False Materialism

1

Whether or not we live in a “society of spectacle” is debatable. What is less debatable is that we live in a system of global capital that penetrates all frames of knowing and mediates all experiences and relations between individuals.

2

The initial motivation to examine concepts of Abundance and Scarcity for the Symposium was indeed the US Recession, and one can easily describe the Recession as a financial crisis between capitalists and workers, between bankers and low-to-middle-income home lendees.

Capital wealth signifies the material wealth–human and natural resources–from which it cultivates itself and from which it simultaneously separates itself. Those who control the greatest amounts of capital bear the least material consequences.

The Recession’s financial shrapnel assaulted capitalists in the form of monetary symbols….yes, they saw their fortunes disappear on computer monitors but all in all their duress was limited. (Some corporations even saw record sales.) However, these monetary symbols assaulted the working class in material ways, leaving individuals and families without income and without a place to call home.

Individuals who actually use money to live–as opposed to individuals who live to accumulate money–obviously stand to suffer material consequences when money is lost–this class of people is at the mercy of (low-)wage employment and of the highest rates of home foreclosure.

Attempts to “restore” un/employment rates fail to shed capitalism’s false consciousness–the structural inequalities that persist under capital rule whether or not the employment rate is strong or weak. Restoring employment rates admits the ever-growing gap that must exist when people cannot work for themselves, but must work for capital profit.

3

Materials lose their presence in other contradictory ways under capitalism. Materials, such as cell phones, sneakers, and automobiles, become signs and representations that convey status and belonging. As these materials are exchanged in the capital market, they undergo a double de-materialization. First, these materials obscure the labor-power that has gone into their production–what Karl Marx identifies as “commodity fetishism.” Second, these materials are undervalued as actual, physical objects and merely stand in for immaterial qualities and identity markers.

The proliferation and disposal of material objects such as laptops, televisions, cars, pens, and clothes indicates abundance. But what appears to be material abundance is actually material scarcity given that these ever-increasing materials are consumed as representations of “nonmaterial meanings” that are subject to ever-changing fashion trends and so must be newly consumed again and again–what Juliet Schor identifies as the “materiality paradox” (Schor, Plenitude).

Technology’s promise to decrease material use is hollow. According to Schor’s research, US domestic extraction of natural resources used to create materials has risen by 66% between 1980 and 2005 (Plenitude), a period of rapid technological changes. This is due to the fact that the governing logic of capital insists that the earth’s resources be considered always-and-only subsidiary to monetary price and profit. Valuing materials–whether or not these materials emerge as new tech gadgets–goes against the basic requirements of capitalism. It is an inherent good to sell the largest quantity of product as possible because capitalists must continuously increase production and lower cost in order to compete with each other to increase their share of the market (Marx, Wage-Labor and Capital). Yet the earth’s rich and precious resources are finite, and there is a point at which no more materials can be extracted from it. We have already exceeded sustainable extraction levels of many of our most important, life-sustaining resources.

4

The financial crisis is a condition of capitalism, not an exception. Capitalism must coerce more and more people into its working class, from whom it builds its unsustainable wealth.

The abundance of capital is conditioned on the abundance of human and nonhuman resources it can exploit. Yet as capital grows, the material world disappears. It disappears the work that laborers have put it into its production. It disappears the objects that are exchanged not as the things themselves but as signs of status and belonging. It disappears the finite nonhuman resources such as trees and coral reefs that the earth requires in order to be habitable to humans. And when capital decreases, it is the low- and middle-income classes who suffer the greatest material consequences.

False materialism affects the entire world, alienating humans from our work in the world and alienating humans from our home on earth.

-A.H.

–
Citations:
Marx, Karl. Wage-Labor and Capital. New York: International Publishers, 1935.
Schor, Juliet. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. Penguin Press, 2010.

–

Originally posted here on May 25, 2011

The New Normal?

I am mourning the end of a relationship–a recent break-up–so my mind is naturally trying to work out this new normal. Eating lunch and dinners on my own. Wanting to share a bike ride with her now that the Minnesota winter is finally over. Regretting my absolute absorption in books, school, and writing at the cost of the relationship. Though I am living the new normal now, I am afraid of the future, and I have a desire to return to the old normal.

The trouble is, of course, that the old normal had its shortcomings and its violations that ultimately led to its end, and the new normal is a temporary normal that must be surmounted to achieve a balanced normal. If that balanced normal includes her is a question that must be lived now, or face never being answered.

-

How can our person-to-person relationships be healthy and humane when so many of our person-to-society relationships are fundamentally handicapped and even abusive? I ask how contemporary society is downright alienating to the individual and yet the individual is asked to surmount his alienation on his own. I ask to know and I ask knowing the path begins with us confronting this profound dilemma that has been created before most of us were born. This must not outlive us unanswered.

-

Since the financial crisis emerged, many pundits and media reporters speak of “the new normal.” The old normal was to purchase things one couldn’t afford by the miracle of credit. (Take a look at the documentary “Money as Debt” (available on YouTube) to see how the so-called miracle of credit is really a creation of debt.) The powerful banking industry, as we saw and experienced in 2008, capitalized on the weakness of U.S. residents pressured to consume more and more. Many lenders enticed–even targeted–low-income people of color with sub-prime mortgages. These mortgages, once they had outrun their sub-prime grace period of a few years, skyrocketed to a monthly payment that was much beyond the financial means of the new homeowners.

The new normal is about scaling back on credit, on living within one’s means. Even below one’s means, as some finance experts recommend. The new normal is about purchasing modest homes or alternatively renting. The new normal is about spending less.

The trouble is that the new normal–a clear reaction to the old normal–does not surmount the old normal in any significant manner. Neither the old normal nor the new normal is balanced. The new normal accommodates to the failures of the old normal. The new normal insists we restrain our spending more. What the new normal (still) fails to question and to surmount is the global inequity–a product of empire and capital–that creates the option of even having an over-abundance of goods to consider purchasing or not purchasing in the first place.

This new normal budgeting-101 while helpful in the short-term as a temporary normal exhibits a clear case of false consciousness when it is depicted as a reasonable solution to the old normal. The new normal makes few structural changes and instead directs much attention to personal financing and “smart” budgeting plans. The new normal repeatedly fails to address global inequity that is the basis for the old normal even existing. The new normal is engaged in a form of bargaining and denial. If the new normal was your date, it would be a rebound.

-

American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön tells a powerful story of overcoming fear and uncertainty:

The first time I met Trungpa Rinpoche was with a class of fourth graders who asked him a lot of questions about growing up in Tibet and about escaping from the Chinese Communists into India. One boy asked him if he was ever afraid. Rinpoche answered that his teacher had encouraged him to go to places like graveyards that scared him and to experiment with approaching things he didn’t like. Then he told a story about traveling with his attendants to a monastery he’d never seen before. As they neared the gates, he saw a large guard dog with huge teeth and red eyes. It was growling ferociously and struggling to get free from the chain that held it. The dog seemed desperate to attack them. As Rinpoche got closer, he could see its bluish tongue and spittle spraying from its mouth. They walked past the dog, keeping their distance, and entered the gate. Suddenly the chain broke and the dog rushed at them. The attendants screamed and froze in terror. Rinpoche turned and ran as fast as he could–straight at the dog. The dog was so surprised that he put his tail between his legs and ran away. (When Things Fall Apart, 14-15)

This idea–to run towards fear–is a critically imaginative one. What if we said we were each going to run towards the thing that we feared most? Wouldn’t that make us braver?

What if we applied such a practice to the failing economic system? What if we said we were going to run towards the alienation between individual and society, between individual and commodity? Wouldn’t that alienation tuck its tail and run away?

I recognize that in the meantime people need to be able to put food on their table and to have healthy bodies and minds. Some people need to put in back-breaking hours at minimum-wage jobs just to be able to survive week-to-week. That’s how ideals can get away from us even as we need them to know where we’re heading, and why.

-

Yesterday I went to read in the park. I had been reading a book when I looked up to see a medium-sized mutt, who had apparently escaped the grip of his leash, running towards me. He stopped halfway between me and his guardian, assumed a guarded position, and then ambled towards the bench I was sitting at. I kept my attention directed at the dog. I did not shrink away inwardly with fear and worry. I let the external show me what it was. The dog had a black spot around his left eye and dribbling pink lips that made his expression appear heartwarmingly lopsided.

-

After discussing the Chödrön quote with a dear friend, my friend sent me this message: “Remember to get all you can out of this painful experience with your breakup. I don’t mean all that ‘think on the bright side’ fake cheery stuff, but rather ‘running toward the dog.’ I wonder what that boy would see if he could observe everything as he ran that way.”

-A.H.

Originally posted here on April 15, 2011

About Time

Time is a requisite for being. Not time as an abstract concept or dimension, but the experience of time. A stone does not experience time though we can say it is an object of time, as we can observe a rock’s erosion over time. Plants, animals, and humans experience time first-hand as subjects. A person who has passed has not only stopped breathing but has also stopped being a subject to (worldly) time.

Isn’t that what we mean when we use the terms mortal and immortal? A being that is immortal, or not subject to time, is a special sort of being–what we might call a Supreme Being. In many traditions, angels are considered Supreme Beings–they stay the same “age” and even if they do “age” we take for granted that they do not experience time’s passing. They have no anxiety about their existence in relation to its end, a terminal point on time’s axis. They are not aware, or have no need to be in any case, of time’s dimension.

Human beings, on the other hand, have been inquiring about, enduring, and studying notions of time for, well, quite some time. The phrase “quite some time” means not only an actual (long) length of time, but also conveys the seriousness or significance of that matter. The fact that individuals have philosophized about time for centuries conveys the seriousness of that inquiry.

Because time is so significant to human existence, it’s no wonder it’s so wrapped up in our language and everyday discourse.

A very politically-minded and intelligent friend of mine says one often hears time’s “rightness” invoked as a way of maintaining the status quo, however damaging that status quo is. The old “Now’s not the right time” refrain, as my friend points out, prevents action and conveniently keeps things the way they are. The virtue of patience, or taking one’s time, flipped on its head and exaggerated as a way to undermine action. Patience, when properly understood, is on the contrary the character trait that sustains, not undermines, action.

This pseudo-normative approach recalls the notion of time’s abundance–there’s plenty of time to wait, simmer, and eventually do something (by which point of course we’ll need to postpone doing that something in order to deliberate again!). Individuals who say, “Now’s not the right time to reprimand the banking institutions for the financial crisis” or “Now’s not the right time to demand living wages…look, we’re in a recession,” are not really after the normative question: “How can we make things better?” but rather: “How can we let things blow over?”

The premise “Time heals a broken heart” is so widespread and settled that we understand its true meaning. We recognize that the dimension of time does not on its own show a great preference for healing hearts. For all who have experienced it, the implicit understanding in the premise is that we grapple with our heartbreak, enduring it over time. That active process on our part doesn’t happen overnight. It “takes” time. A broken heart must work through time, and, in extremely bittersweet cases, against it. (After a particularly wrenching separation, haven’t you felt each passing hour peeling from your skin like dried glue?)

Likewise, we must not believe time can heal a broken economy. We mustn’t believe things will simply get better as we get older or our children get older, conceptually operating under the wrong-headed and archaic model of “evolutionary time,” as conceived and articulated by anthropology professor Johannes Fabian.

Not to reduce the real negative impacts of the financial crisis on the lives of individuals and families, but I do hope the crisis has forced many of us who have experienced it to grapple with our financial heartbreak and hopefully to see it as an expression of a very damaging relationship between our current economy and civil society. We’ll need to work through time to mend global inequities and heal the alienation of people.

Of the many sayings about time, the one I find most pithy and valuable is the simple, two-word dictum: “Quiet time.” This phrase prescribes no arbitrary length of time and makes no false reliance on time to do work that we each must do ourselves (and together). “Quiet time” connotes time away….from something. Mind’s time away from the thick of experience and emotion in order to gain perspective. Mind’s time away from the vitriolic noise of polemical debate. There is no tipping towards time’s scarceness or abundance, though the phrase, at least in my understanding, is spoken in a context of hurriedness, rashness, and, I may add, societal filibuster. Not denial, but on the contrary a heading-off of denial.

US economist Juliet Schor proposes four compounding features of a plenitude economy, and the first feature is the reclamation of time and the resistance of unfulfilling time use. I continue to firmly believe in the importance of each individual taking agency over his or her time use first for self-fulfillment and second for social change. We can have self-determination over the hours. It is our birthright.

-A.H.

Originally posted here on April 7, 2011

Societal Filibuster

In the US Senate, the filibuster, or long overdrawn inconsequential speech, is a tactic used to stall a vote or prevent a real issue from being discussed at session. In its designated use, the filibuster functions as an agreed-upon and okayed (albeit annoying) performance. But the key point is that people known it’s a performance, an act, a “stunt,” if you will.

What happens when the public sphere is filled with artificial and inconsequential banter–societal filibuster, if you will–and individuals haven’t as a majority agreed upon or been made consciously aware of the performance?

Let’s take the “debate” about global climate change for example. Increasingly, the debate itself has become more important–publicized in the media, discussed in social groups and on social networks–than the actual content that the debate is purportedly about. The fact that an overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree on the validity of human-induced global climate change hardly seems to matter at all.

The societal filibuster is on full volume; meanwhile the real issues are stalled from being acted on. Discussion, however off-topic and useless, becomes more valued than action. (Deliberate action, of course, not action for the sake of action, which would be a different, though equally performative, stunt.) Contemporary society so kindly and conveniently allows me and everyone else to perform our “voice,” to contribute to a debate in which we may or may not have any expertise in whatsoever.

The more voices that are heard, the richer the debate. Abstractly perhaps this makes sense and maybe even overtly demonstrates a democratic spirit, but when examined, especially in its modern-day application, the reality becomes harder to swallow.

The opportunity for individuals to participate in the debate remains merely an opportunity to participate in debate in itself and for itself, and worst yet undermines a change in policy or systemic structures that could realize actual adjustments that would beneficially impact the public as a whole.

Moreover, the more controversial one’s position is, regardless of objective facts and in spite even of a seriously troubling lack of humane spirit, the more embroiled the debate becomes in and for itself. As long as somebody prattles on about issues they likely have no relevant expertise in, the consideration and implementation of any real action is stalled indefinitely.

One can see my thinking challenges postmodernist theory, which claims that there are no objective truths and that every discussion operates as a set of “narratives” that need to be deconstructed to reveal power interests. While I agree that it is critical to consider power and privilege, I find the denial of objectivity to be harmful. There is an objective world and empirical data do exist (I might also add to the consternation of postmodernists that I believe in universal human values). Global climate change becomes a debate in the reality-trafficking that is postmodern thought taken too far.

In their 2009 book, “In Praise of Doubt,” internationally renowned scholars Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld discuss the dangers of postmodernism and make clear how postmodernist and relativist theories can lead to absurd conclusions. The authors offer the example of some postmodern theorists who now argue we need to dispute reason, logic, and empirical data itself.
Furthermore, they show how such theories deny reality, rather than clarify it:

All forms of relativism contradict the commonsensical experience of ordinary life. Common sense is cognizant of an outside reality that resists our wishes and that can be objectively accessed by reasonable procedures. Even a postmodernist theorist operates on this assumption in ordinary life. Suppose that a postmodernist consults his doctor. He wants to know whether a tumor is benign or malignant. He expects the doctor to give an answer based on objective methods of diagnosis and to do so irrespective of personal feelings about the patient. (66-7)

Likewise, I find it a contradiction to common sense that business CEO’s, religious fundamentalists, or politicians with no formal knowledge of earth sciences may, for example, dispute the validity of climate change science, and that their disputes will be taken seriously and given air-time in media coverage disseminated to the public. Time must be made for them, after all, in the name of “fairness” and objectivity–yet another glaring contradiction between ideas and their application. How congruous is it that the existence of objectivity is denied on the one hand and then on the other hand exalted as a staple of democratic media? Let’s be real. These opinionists earn their credibility–and betray their biases–simply because they add fuel to the so-called debate.

A Sunday, March 20th Star Tribune column by Jason Lewis called “Getting warm. Or cool. Let’s make it policy!: Climate change is natural, and we don’t have the data to predict it” demonstrates aptly the dangers of having unqualified individuals offer their opinions to “richen” the debate. In a big, bolded inset, the column highlights Lewis’s opinion: “The global-warming hysteria is based on computer models, not empirical data, because the records simply don’t go back far enough.” Yet a simple search on NASA’s website leads to a graph that shows atmospheric CO2 levels for 650,000 years (okay, it’s not millions of years, but it is quite some time!), and shows the massive spike of CO2 levels since the heavy modernization of the 1950′s.

Another key scientific error Lewis makes is by repeatedly misrepresenting global climate change as global warming, thereby using evidence of cooling temperatures in some parts of the globe as evidence that there is no scientific consensus about global climate change. However, an earth scientist, or any individual who has studied earth sciences seriously, will very quickly tell you that human-induced global climate change, induced by steepening emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning, causes increased temperatures in some parts of the world, decreased temperatures in other parts of the world, and minimal or no temperature changes in yet other parts of the world. Some scientists postulate the ocean’s thermohaline, or deep water, circulation will alter global temperatures in this way as an effect of global climate change.

I’m not sure why media outlets don’t vet their columnist’s articles for basic facts. Does having an opinion mean all facts can be dismissed?

It would take a million light years to get anything done if every single person who has an opinion needs to be consulted before a decision is made on anything. On second thought that would be a better reality than what we have now, and what we have now is only the illusion that the average person’s opinion actually matters. Instead, a steady number of people with political, economic, and at times religious clout stimulate the debate in perpetual arousal, obfuscating the issues as they raise them. It’s not easy to think clearly, let alone act mindfully, with so much ongoing, relentless excitement.

Bottom line? Contributing to important issues should be a genuine attempt to elucidate the issues in order to address them in the material world, not spin them to the point where we don’t even know what we’re looking at anymore.

- A.H.

Original posted here on Mar. 27, 2011