Ites! And now for something much less linguistically precise.
Iman have trod the darkest academic caves and stuffy tunnels at the heart of Babylon, and likewise explored the smelly neglected places on the underbelly of the movement for Icological Signing (or Ecological Design as some Babylonians call it), and the things Iman find only cry out the words from the Bible, quoted already enough by Jah Prophet Bob Marley (living!), that "the stone that the builder refuse shall be the head cornerstone".
Truly, it is what nobody wants to talk about that is always the most important thing.
The Rasta reshaping of language inspired me that "de-sign" is really better thought of as "signing". Like, signing your name on something that you helped make. In this here Ira of the I'm-a-throw-up-a-scene (or the Anthropocene as the baldheads call it), it is not only I&I human beings a look fi a sign, but I&I&I&I beings at all a look fi a sign, to guide and help them survive. It is not just human artists, but all a we, who must get to throw up a scene on the very walls of Babylon and walk into the landscape I&I have co-designed, or code-signed. Jah, I wonder if Zion is not to be found in a far off land across the sea after all, but in the very signing of I&I&I code upon the walls of where we now dwell? But, didn't Ile Selassie I say I&I must get it together in the lands where I&I live, before I&I can ready to leave to Zion?
How you feeling, Jamdown? I love Bob Marley, and I love you, and I really hope I get to see you, soon come.
Selah.
Showing posts with label speculative realism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label speculative realism. Show all posts
Monday, March 21, 2016
Monday, June 25, 2012
Why I've been out of touch for a while; Martial arts and Speculative Realism; Watch out for culty weirdos and don't make the same mistakes I did
It's very hard for me to make any promises these days, but I am going to try to start blogging regularly again. The reason why I stopped (practically everything, including writing, gardening, cooking, playing music, and physical training) has a lot to do with the "kung fu" or general martial arts aspect of this blog, and since it might be somewhat cathartic (and perhaps instructive to other martial artists or those thinking of becoming one) for me to talk about it, this is as good a time as any.
For some years (about six) I was involved in a martial art that I will refrain from mentioning by name, but I was really involved in it, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and many sacrifices of other personal aspects of my life. I had begun working for the school as an instructor, arranged my life totally around the school, and breathed, ate and drank the art. For my loyalty, about a week before my black belt test, I was fired without notice (and without, in fact, the requisite motivation for such action or any real, transparent investigation into claims that were made against me) in the middle of the worst recession in living memory, and at a time when all my extra money was funneling back into the art itself. The reason I was fired was because of a very easy (and actually quite trivial) mistake to make on my part, and a sort of fear-based feeding frenzy of the kind that sometimes occurs in groups of people who aren't communicating very well. It resulted in a year of all but suicidal depression for me and considerable emotional hardship for my wife Debra (who, if I haven't mentioned before, is absolutely the most golden-souled and happiness-deserving person I have ever known), to say little of the financial hardships suffered by we who were already having no easy time in that regard. So that's why my last blog post was about a year ago.
Anybody interested in devoting themselves to a cultish group of people for the sake of adding some meaning to their lives should be warned that there is no pension or retirement plan at the end of an experience of the kind I had. You're out on your ear at the end of the whole thing. If you don't fall into step exactly with the behavior patterns espoused by your superiors, you might very likely find that you are suddenly not "family" anymore. And staying in step might prove harder as you learn more.
Not that I have been barred from further training in the art. I could go back, my ex-teammates say, any time I want: it's in my hands. I accept that, although how I was to continue to do that with zero disposable income for a year escapes my understanding, and I would have had to forgive everything that was done to me and just continue my training without any effort being made at resolution (to my satisfaction, at any rate). But I could have gone back if I had really wanted to so self-abnegate, that's true. So now I'm going to talk about why I'm not going back, and why I will be very careful about what martial art I decide to practice next.
At this point I am actually very tempted to mention the name of the art so as to warn people away from a tremendous waste of time. But scathing indictments of the art have already been made in other fora easily located online (which is something I should have paid a lot more attention to earlier on), and I don't say that everyone would necessarily have the same experience as I have. I will simply keep referring to it as "the art" here, and hopefully I will be able to recommend a different art by name some time in the future rather than denigrating a bad one now. In fact, I should keep this as brief as possible, and get on with my life. There are just a few points I should really make for posterity.
1. Most importantly: Thoroughly investigate (google, research, etc.) any group endeavor you are considering participating in, particularly a martial art. Many schools are steeped in cultish authoritarianism, with beliefs and social structures that would never stand the light of day if they were known by people at novice rank and are only gradually learned (usually nonverbally) as one progresses to higher ranks. Lonely people who struggle to find meaning in their lives (a fair description of yours truly) are particularly vulnerable to this process, and cults are aware of this and foster it for the sake of the school, so a martial art that seems from the outside to be about exercise, fun, fulfillment, peace, and constructive activities for kids may actually have a very dark and scary inner core, in which quite a few people are really unhappy and insecure but are even more afraid of finding themselves on the "outside" again. This is true of many religions as well, as we see from the Catholic scandals in recent years, as well as others which easily come to mind.
Above all, I think everyone should recognize the philosophical meditation that there is no "inside". We are all strangers, and it's really best to get used to the idea as gracefully as possible. I believe that my failure to be a good speculative realist in this regard had the effect of prolonging my involvement in a situation where I really did not belong.
2. The above being said, and the fact accepted that not all martial arts schools are bad in this way: The "supreme high teacher" (a loose translation) of the art I trained in and those immediately around her at the top echelons of the art are really bad people to be involved with if you're a free thinker. They coerce obedience and conformity by instilling fear of exclusion and push a lot of very hokey metaphysical beliefs on students, who are then in many cases required to teach the same nonsense, and I know for a fact that many instructors have no real belief at all in what they're saying. This is a philosophical and somewhat subjective statement, but I think that those who do are foolish and misguided. I was one of these, but was starting to wake up long before the incident that cost me my job.
Martial arts should be about exercise and fun. That's it. Form is the only "content" anyone really needs. As with ecological gardening such as permaculture, if your form is correct (your basics and technique efficient, practical and beautiful) then any "content" ("energy", spirituality, etc.) happens by itself, without having to really even be talked about, much less deliberately instilled. As soon as anyone starts talking about any content-like thing (any "energy" or "force" other than the E=MCsquared variety), I would advise you to immediately ask yourself, "But what's wrong with just form? Why isn't form good enough?" If your teachers are not teaching form as the end-all-and-be-all of the art, then they are not focusing on what's really going to get you there. Form is beautiful, matter is great, and every bit as mysterious and wonderful as any idea of "god" or "spirit" or any such thing, with the added benefit of being actually REAL. Also, stay away from any situation in which you are not allowed to ask questions. In the art I trained in, if you asked questions you were said to be "stinkin' thinkin'", or "coming from ego" or "a know-it-all". (One of my favorite quotes is "What is is, what is isn't"; meaning, "anything the teacher tells you is always true until it's convenient for her to say otherwise".) You should always ask questions about anything you don't understand, don't let anyone tell you different: it's a universal entitlement. If they're going to throw you out for asking questions, they're doing you a favor, as you shouldn't be there in the first place, nor should anyone. Of course talking too much wastes time in class, but a good teacher who is really practicing the art of being at peace should know that some time was just meant to be wasted. Like Roy Batty said in Blade Runner: "like tears in rain".
3. Some people have criticized the art I trained in as being useless for dealing with real combat situations (see websites like bullshido.com). While I understand that there are many different kinds and degrees of martial arts training, I am a fighter, and I trained in the art long enough to have more experience with it than most (though not all) people who level this criticism. I do not share the opinion that the art is physically useless...far from it. Aside from being very dangerous on the fighting side (I have had many minor injuries and two near-maimings, for one of which I had to undergo ACL surgery, and these happened in training exercises, not tournaments or street fights), the art offers much competence in avoiding fights altogether. Also, the forms are so beautifully elaborate, fast and dance-like (and there are so many of them) that people who train in this art are grouped, as athletes, with people who go out for the triathlons and such: real high-endurance stuff. Therefore it offers unparalleled opportunity for physical fitness and a general sense of physical self-assuredness that would be very valuable to anybody, and without which the human body and psyche are sadly impoverished. For self-defense situations and others in which physical skill in combat might decide the outcome, I would say this art is not useless at all.
This makes it all the more tragic that its flaws are what they are. There is another avowed purpose the art has, separate from fighting, for which it is entirely useless, and that is "world peace". Like any martial art in a capitalist country, its membership dues are significant, and over time this has the effect of limiting membership to those with gradually more and more disproportionate wealth as the economy declines. (There is a "foundation" that purports to provide money for low-income students to train, but having worked on its board, I find it hard to call anything so inefficient and ineffective a "nonprofit" except in the sense that it is no profit to anyone at all, other than perhaps in some tax-related way.) So hardly anyone in the "world" (notice the W word; why do we want to identify with fake objects that we make up in our heads?) is probably going to hear of the art, much less be brought peace by it. In seminars students have talked about using "principles" of the art to climb the corporate ladder. I should have left as soon as I heard about that. It was a good thing I did soon after, despite how much it hurt. The "peace that begins with the individual and spreads out into the community" (I'm paraphrasing the lingo) is not fostered by such a social environment. It's really a joke to believe otherwise.
But what did I expect? It's a cult. As another person who trained in the art and got even higher in rank than I did (I won't mention his name) recently told me, "to expect reasonable behavior from people in cults is itself unreasonable". So why did I stay so long? Well, I'm not proud of it. An individual can be very smart, but groups of people are often not, and it often takes serious self-deception to continue to be part of a group. I only hope my experience can be of value to someone, and that I've gained some wisdom along with my sadness.
4. One more thing: Children. The art is full of people who are weird about kids, for personal reasons of their own on which I will not speculate. Kids are objectified and romanticized, and there is a schizophrenic juxtaposition in the art between teaching kids to be self-reliant on one hand and treating them like perfect little angels to be protected and hidden from anything "inappropriate" on the other. Of course, it's always one person sitting in a room and deciding what might be "inappropriate" for others, which brings several problems immediately to mind, but leave that aside for the moment. It is of course almost any martial arts school's bread and butter to have kids' classes, as many parents can no more afford not to have their kids in an activity after school than they can to take martial arts classes themselves (not a joke: believe me, I know)! But you can't teach that many kids the real martial art, for the simple reason that learning the real martial art is not why most of the kids are there. They are mostly there so that their parents don't have to stop working at 3:00 in the afternoon. Most of them would be better placed in an activity that suited their own actual interests, but it is an unfortunate reality that a great many parents similarly objectify their children and do not listen or pay attention to their children's interests, and many more who might can't afford to do much about them. So the result is that the school gets a huge influx of kids for whom the martial art has to be watered down. The school, in this respect, has become more of a daycare center than a martial arts school, and this is by no means an exaggeration.
I have trained with highly skilled, dedicated, formidable martial artists who happened to be as young as 12, 10, 8, and even 6 years old. At least two of them were stronger fighters (by which I mean they were simply better at it) than I was. But for every kid who seriously wants to train, there are about a hundred who are simply there to be babysat.
It is my strong opinion that training in martial arts is not for babies. What babies need is parents who train, and who can do the fighting until the kids are old enough to be really apt and inclined for it. The schools should not have "kids' classes"; they should just have "classes", and allow individual kids with aptitude to train at the adult level. Anything that dilutes the seriousness of the martial art is potentially dangerous to its students, who might find themselves in a situation they think they can handle, but really can't. Also, anything that lumps individuals under a label like "kids" and assigns them special classes limits all the individuals' training to the lowest common denominator, which ruins prospects for kids who are actually serious. I have seen this happen more times than I like since the school started focusing on kids' classes so much, and there's nothing good about it. All of the new crop of junior-high age black belts that I've seen should never have been tested. They are irresponsible, disrespectful, boastful, and incapable, and as instructors they teach similar behavior to their peers in age.
That's it, I'm way out of time. I need to get back to writing my novel. Lance Shaw is standing around and tapping his feet at me in impatience. "I told you that martial arts bullhonkey was stupid," he says. "Any of those freaks come around here, I'll make them a broadhead shish kebab, toot sweet."
For some years (about six) I was involved in a martial art that I will refrain from mentioning by name, but I was really involved in it, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and many sacrifices of other personal aspects of my life. I had begun working for the school as an instructor, arranged my life totally around the school, and breathed, ate and drank the art. For my loyalty, about a week before my black belt test, I was fired without notice (and without, in fact, the requisite motivation for such action or any real, transparent investigation into claims that were made against me) in the middle of the worst recession in living memory, and at a time when all my extra money was funneling back into the art itself. The reason I was fired was because of a very easy (and actually quite trivial) mistake to make on my part, and a sort of fear-based feeding frenzy of the kind that sometimes occurs in groups of people who aren't communicating very well. It resulted in a year of all but suicidal depression for me and considerable emotional hardship for my wife Debra (who, if I haven't mentioned before, is absolutely the most golden-souled and happiness-deserving person I have ever known), to say little of the financial hardships suffered by we who were already having no easy time in that regard. So that's why my last blog post was about a year ago.
Anybody interested in devoting themselves to a cultish group of people for the sake of adding some meaning to their lives should be warned that there is no pension or retirement plan at the end of an experience of the kind I had. You're out on your ear at the end of the whole thing. If you don't fall into step exactly with the behavior patterns espoused by your superiors, you might very likely find that you are suddenly not "family" anymore. And staying in step might prove harder as you learn more.
Not that I have been barred from further training in the art. I could go back, my ex-teammates say, any time I want: it's in my hands. I accept that, although how I was to continue to do that with zero disposable income for a year escapes my understanding, and I would have had to forgive everything that was done to me and just continue my training without any effort being made at resolution (to my satisfaction, at any rate). But I could have gone back if I had really wanted to so self-abnegate, that's true. So now I'm going to talk about why I'm not going back, and why I will be very careful about what martial art I decide to practice next.
At this point I am actually very tempted to mention the name of the art so as to warn people away from a tremendous waste of time. But scathing indictments of the art have already been made in other fora easily located online (which is something I should have paid a lot more attention to earlier on), and I don't say that everyone would necessarily have the same experience as I have. I will simply keep referring to it as "the art" here, and hopefully I will be able to recommend a different art by name some time in the future rather than denigrating a bad one now. In fact, I should keep this as brief as possible, and get on with my life. There are just a few points I should really make for posterity.
1. Most importantly: Thoroughly investigate (google, research, etc.) any group endeavor you are considering participating in, particularly a martial art. Many schools are steeped in cultish authoritarianism, with beliefs and social structures that would never stand the light of day if they were known by people at novice rank and are only gradually learned (usually nonverbally) as one progresses to higher ranks. Lonely people who struggle to find meaning in their lives (a fair description of yours truly) are particularly vulnerable to this process, and cults are aware of this and foster it for the sake of the school, so a martial art that seems from the outside to be about exercise, fun, fulfillment, peace, and constructive activities for kids may actually have a very dark and scary inner core, in which quite a few people are really unhappy and insecure but are even more afraid of finding themselves on the "outside" again. This is true of many religions as well, as we see from the Catholic scandals in recent years, as well as others which easily come to mind.
Above all, I think everyone should recognize the philosophical meditation that there is no "inside". We are all strangers, and it's really best to get used to the idea as gracefully as possible. I believe that my failure to be a good speculative realist in this regard had the effect of prolonging my involvement in a situation where I really did not belong.
2. The above being said, and the fact accepted that not all martial arts schools are bad in this way: The "supreme high teacher" (a loose translation) of the art I trained in and those immediately around her at the top echelons of the art are really bad people to be involved with if you're a free thinker. They coerce obedience and conformity by instilling fear of exclusion and push a lot of very hokey metaphysical beliefs on students, who are then in many cases required to teach the same nonsense, and I know for a fact that many instructors have no real belief at all in what they're saying. This is a philosophical and somewhat subjective statement, but I think that those who do are foolish and misguided. I was one of these, but was starting to wake up long before the incident that cost me my job.
Martial arts should be about exercise and fun. That's it. Form is the only "content" anyone really needs. As with ecological gardening such as permaculture, if your form is correct (your basics and technique efficient, practical and beautiful) then any "content" ("energy", spirituality, etc.) happens by itself, without having to really even be talked about, much less deliberately instilled. As soon as anyone starts talking about any content-like thing (any "energy" or "force" other than the E=MCsquared variety), I would advise you to immediately ask yourself, "But what's wrong with just form? Why isn't form good enough?" If your teachers are not teaching form as the end-all-and-be-all of the art, then they are not focusing on what's really going to get you there. Form is beautiful, matter is great, and every bit as mysterious and wonderful as any idea of "god" or "spirit" or any such thing, with the added benefit of being actually REAL. Also, stay away from any situation in which you are not allowed to ask questions. In the art I trained in, if you asked questions you were said to be "stinkin' thinkin'", or "coming from ego" or "a know-it-all". (One of my favorite quotes is "What is is, what is isn't"; meaning, "anything the teacher tells you is always true until it's convenient for her to say otherwise".) You should always ask questions about anything you don't understand, don't let anyone tell you different: it's a universal entitlement. If they're going to throw you out for asking questions, they're doing you a favor, as you shouldn't be there in the first place, nor should anyone. Of course talking too much wastes time in class, but a good teacher who is really practicing the art of being at peace should know that some time was just meant to be wasted. Like Roy Batty said in Blade Runner: "like tears in rain".
3. Some people have criticized the art I trained in as being useless for dealing with real combat situations (see websites like bullshido.com). While I understand that there are many different kinds and degrees of martial arts training, I am a fighter, and I trained in the art long enough to have more experience with it than most (though not all) people who level this criticism. I do not share the opinion that the art is physically useless...far from it. Aside from being very dangerous on the fighting side (I have had many minor injuries and two near-maimings, for one of which I had to undergo ACL surgery, and these happened in training exercises, not tournaments or street fights), the art offers much competence in avoiding fights altogether. Also, the forms are so beautifully elaborate, fast and dance-like (and there are so many of them) that people who train in this art are grouped, as athletes, with people who go out for the triathlons and such: real high-endurance stuff. Therefore it offers unparalleled opportunity for physical fitness and a general sense of physical self-assuredness that would be very valuable to anybody, and without which the human body and psyche are sadly impoverished. For self-defense situations and others in which physical skill in combat might decide the outcome, I would say this art is not useless at all.
This makes it all the more tragic that its flaws are what they are. There is another avowed purpose the art has, separate from fighting, for which it is entirely useless, and that is "world peace". Like any martial art in a capitalist country, its membership dues are significant, and over time this has the effect of limiting membership to those with gradually more and more disproportionate wealth as the economy declines. (There is a "foundation" that purports to provide money for low-income students to train, but having worked on its board, I find it hard to call anything so inefficient and ineffective a "nonprofit" except in the sense that it is no profit to anyone at all, other than perhaps in some tax-related way.) So hardly anyone in the "world" (notice the W word; why do we want to identify with fake objects that we make up in our heads?) is probably going to hear of the art, much less be brought peace by it. In seminars students have talked about using "principles" of the art to climb the corporate ladder. I should have left as soon as I heard about that. It was a good thing I did soon after, despite how much it hurt. The "peace that begins with the individual and spreads out into the community" (I'm paraphrasing the lingo) is not fostered by such a social environment. It's really a joke to believe otherwise.
But what did I expect? It's a cult. As another person who trained in the art and got even higher in rank than I did (I won't mention his name) recently told me, "to expect reasonable behavior from people in cults is itself unreasonable". So why did I stay so long? Well, I'm not proud of it. An individual can be very smart, but groups of people are often not, and it often takes serious self-deception to continue to be part of a group. I only hope my experience can be of value to someone, and that I've gained some wisdom along with my sadness.
4. One more thing: Children. The art is full of people who are weird about kids, for personal reasons of their own on which I will not speculate. Kids are objectified and romanticized, and there is a schizophrenic juxtaposition in the art between teaching kids to be self-reliant on one hand and treating them like perfect little angels to be protected and hidden from anything "inappropriate" on the other. Of course, it's always one person sitting in a room and deciding what might be "inappropriate" for others, which brings several problems immediately to mind, but leave that aside for the moment. It is of course almost any martial arts school's bread and butter to have kids' classes, as many parents can no more afford not to have their kids in an activity after school than they can to take martial arts classes themselves (not a joke: believe me, I know)! But you can't teach that many kids the real martial art, for the simple reason that learning the real martial art is not why most of the kids are there. They are mostly there so that their parents don't have to stop working at 3:00 in the afternoon. Most of them would be better placed in an activity that suited their own actual interests, but it is an unfortunate reality that a great many parents similarly objectify their children and do not listen or pay attention to their children's interests, and many more who might can't afford to do much about them. So the result is that the school gets a huge influx of kids for whom the martial art has to be watered down. The school, in this respect, has become more of a daycare center than a martial arts school, and this is by no means an exaggeration.
I have trained with highly skilled, dedicated, formidable martial artists who happened to be as young as 12, 10, 8, and even 6 years old. At least two of them were stronger fighters (by which I mean they were simply better at it) than I was. But for every kid who seriously wants to train, there are about a hundred who are simply there to be babysat.
It is my strong opinion that training in martial arts is not for babies. What babies need is parents who train, and who can do the fighting until the kids are old enough to be really apt and inclined for it. The schools should not have "kids' classes"; they should just have "classes", and allow individual kids with aptitude to train at the adult level. Anything that dilutes the seriousness of the martial art is potentially dangerous to its students, who might find themselves in a situation they think they can handle, but really can't. Also, anything that lumps individuals under a label like "kids" and assigns them special classes limits all the individuals' training to the lowest common denominator, which ruins prospects for kids who are actually serious. I have seen this happen more times than I like since the school started focusing on kids' classes so much, and there's nothing good about it. All of the new crop of junior-high age black belts that I've seen should never have been tested. They are irresponsible, disrespectful, boastful, and incapable, and as instructors they teach similar behavior to their peers in age.
That's it, I'm way out of time. I need to get back to writing my novel. Lance Shaw is standing around and tapping his feet at me in impatience. "I told you that martial arts bullhonkey was stupid," he says. "Any of those freaks come around here, I'll make them a broadhead shish kebab, toot sweet."
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Ecology Without Nature, or Doctor Who vs. the Myth of Subject-Object
I'm a big Doctor Who fan, and have been since the early '80s, long before the special effects and makeup were believable. This has nothing to do with this post. I only mention it because that's how excited I am by what I'm learning from a guy named Timothy Morton, whose blog can be found here.
Ecology Without Nature is the name of his blog, and also the title of his book. He has another, which he calls a prequel to EWN, called The Ecological Thought. And the concept discussed in both books (which I intend to buy as soon as I'm flush enough), that of ecological thought itself, is one that has been blowing my mind ever since I started to figure it out. This journey has been accomplished mainly by listening to the podcasts of his classes at UC Davis, where he is a Professor of English; these are free and available at iTunes (just search "Timothy Morton"), and I can't recommend them highly enough. I don't know that I agree with every aspect of his thinking; I do have some superficial issues with the ideas he has about art and aesthetics in general (yes, human aesthetics are a big part of how we "do" ecology, whether we know it or not). But on the whole (except that according to his philosophy, there is no "whole" to be "on"), I find his Ecological Thought to be rivetingly persuasive, open in its application and liberating in its ability to identify and erase thought-problems that I couldn't get past before.
What's odd to me is that Tim Morton himself doesn't seem to find it as uplifting. He seems to think that a lot of it is rather depressing, actually...and at first, it does seem like that to me as well. But when you apply ET (coincidental acronym? Perhaps not, since we are all pretty alien in this philosophy) to pragmatist design methodologies such as permaculture, you may find that a lot of things that you were refusing to think about--because you couldn't get them to fit--start making sense, and your practice becomes yet more practicable. Practice, if it leads somewhere, is never depressing, as gardeners and martial artists well know. Painful? Yes, sometimes, even to the point of deep grief. Frustrating? Indeed! But not depressing. Tim Morton describes Ecological Thought as "viral"; "getting" it is like getting a cold, and once you've got it, you can't do anything about it except let it run its course.
I have found, to my increasing delight, wonder, and astonishment, that this seems to be true. What I "get", so far, is as follows. I hope Tim will correct me if I misinterpret anything.
The reason we are in so much trouble that we can't seem to get out of, due to our destruction of the natural world, is that it was a disastrous mistake to ever start thinking in terms of "nature" and "worlds" in the first place. To talk about the "end of nature", or the "end of the world" is to invoke a whole range of mythical, imaginary hobgoblins that only serve to scare us into moping apathy. To end "nature" and "the world" as concepts is something we should get done as quickly as possible! For, as it turns out, there never was a "nature", not in any sense: "Nature" as a medium for living beings does not and has never existed, nor do beings have "natures" that you can generalize about. The concept of "Nature" as an "object over there", as Tim says, or as a backdrop to a separate and equally nonexistent object called "humanity" that we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are a part of, is absolutely useless to identifying our places as unique beings in an interconnected ecological mesh.
This interconnection is total. There is nothing "you" can identify that is "not you", or "other". A political party that wants to romantically identify itself as "Green" and its members as "greens" ignores a significant romantic irony in their own story: The reason we have the color green is because of an event billions of years ago that was, for the beings involved at the time, an ecological disaster of total proportion. Chlorophyllic (or "green") bacteria destroyed their own ability to breathe the planet's atmosphere by producing too much oxygen...which we now breathe as we poison ourselves. These bacteria now survive only by hiding in the cells of plants, like the human batteries in the movie The Matrix. Hardly a meaningful existence, you might think...except (and this is where it starts to get really Goth and creepy) that you could say the same thing about the plants themselves. For the Matrix was as much a machine for preserving humans as for imprisoning them, and viewed in this way, plants themselves are not "natural" in the way we used to think. They are machines for the survival of the chloroplasts, and really a kind of artificial life.
The mitochondria in our cells are similar. We die without them, but perhaps the more important point is that they die without us, and that's why we're here. It turns out that animals aren't "natural" either, and that even the categories of "animal", "vegetable" and "mineral" are themselves hobgoblins. Likewise "life", insofar as we differentiate between it and "non-life" of various kinds. For if the Turing test proves that there is a point at which you can't tell a computer program from a real person, the inverse also holds true, and we are all a form of artificial life.
I find that this has some very startling political implications. Take the issue of corporate personhood, for example. This is a very hot issue currently, about which my readers (if I have any) may have some strong opinions. The question of whether we should treat corporations as people or not is interesting, and capable of generating endless and potentially fruitless debate, but it's rather beside the point when you consider that we don't treat people like people! How does our legal system define a "person", anyway? Read the Constitution, read the Bill of Rights. This concept of "personhood" is so limited as to be demeaning, reducing people to objects that only differ from corporations in that they have something called "malice". Our legal system is not the sole culprit here; as individuals, we objectify people all the time. "Other" people are, to differing degrees, "good" or "evil" (to say nothing of our habit of manipulating them when we can and it suits us). Neither of these are things you would say about someone you truly regarded as a Person. Indeed, in objectifying "evil", we become evil ourselves, simply by identifying ourselves as "good". Good? You? Me? Us? What a laugh that is. I like this British sarcasm: "Good in here, innit?"
It would seem like the prudent thing would be to destroy the entire legal system we operate under and replace it with one that actually treats People (meaning you, me, the dog, the tree, the centipede, the cow, the lettuce, the computer program, the book, the humic soil molecule, the mountain, the idea, and the corporation) as People...but not as a "We the People". Because as it turns out, there is no "we" and there is no object called "The People" that can be manipulated by law. Each Person is wholly, universally unique. And each unique being is totally interconnected in an inescapable mesh called Ecology.
Anarchosyndicalism, anyone?
"Other" things are not other, for our genotypes do not stop at our skin. As our mitochondria and the mercury in our tissues from the burning of fossil fuels make clear, these "other" things are not only under our skin, they are our skin! Each being is universal, and its skin is all other beings. Our universality is made horrifyingly clear when we realize that we can't have conversations about the weather without thinking about global warming anymore.
This leads to something called OOO, or Object Oriented Ontology. Levi Bryant gives a great layman-accessible explanation of this way of thinking about existence here. I disagree with him about refrigerators, but that doesn't really matter. OOO is related to a relatively new branch of philosophy called "speculative realism". As I "get" it (which maybe is not very well), what OOO does is to remove the firewall between subject and object. "I" am as much an object as anything else I can point to, and all objects (including inanimate ones) have a perspective and a point of view just as I do. There is no subject.
I find this very refreshing when I consider all those annoying ends to otherwise interesting conversations that go: "Well, that's just your opinion, and others are entitled to their own!" Or in other cases, the conversation ends before it begins, with the insipid "Well, this is only my opinion, but..." This is the brutal triumph of relativism over constructive argument. Or, if you're being accused of being an unoriginal, pointy-headed intellectual, you might hear, "Well, you just got that out of a book!"
It turns out that no one is entitled to an "opinion" at all. Reality is not some object that one is entitled to have different opinions about as it suits one. It has intrinsic being, and deserves one's sincere attempt at understanding. True compassion requires no less than that we develop and test our arguments. And what on earth is this demeaning talk of "books", as if books were somehow un-people that we can enslave, disenfranchise and say rude things about, as we've done with so many other un-people? We do treat them that way, though: we display them on our bookshelves as if to say, "Look! See? I'm not a racist! Some of my best friends are books!"
Well, I don't have any funky soundbite ending to this one, folks. Check out Tim's books, blog and podcasts, and grock to your heart's content. See you tomorrow or so.
Ecology Without Nature is the name of his blog, and also the title of his book. He has another, which he calls a prequel to EWN, called The Ecological Thought. And the concept discussed in both books (which I intend to buy as soon as I'm flush enough), that of ecological thought itself, is one that has been blowing my mind ever since I started to figure it out. This journey has been accomplished mainly by listening to the podcasts of his classes at UC Davis, where he is a Professor of English; these are free and available at iTunes (just search "Timothy Morton"), and I can't recommend them highly enough. I don't know that I agree with every aspect of his thinking; I do have some superficial issues with the ideas he has about art and aesthetics in general (yes, human aesthetics are a big part of how we "do" ecology, whether we know it or not). But on the whole (except that according to his philosophy, there is no "whole" to be "on"), I find his Ecological Thought to be rivetingly persuasive, open in its application and liberating in its ability to identify and erase thought-problems that I couldn't get past before.
What's odd to me is that Tim Morton himself doesn't seem to find it as uplifting. He seems to think that a lot of it is rather depressing, actually...and at first, it does seem like that to me as well. But when you apply ET (coincidental acronym? Perhaps not, since we are all pretty alien in this philosophy) to pragmatist design methodologies such as permaculture, you may find that a lot of things that you were refusing to think about--because you couldn't get them to fit--start making sense, and your practice becomes yet more practicable. Practice, if it leads somewhere, is never depressing, as gardeners and martial artists well know. Painful? Yes, sometimes, even to the point of deep grief. Frustrating? Indeed! But not depressing. Tim Morton describes Ecological Thought as "viral"; "getting" it is like getting a cold, and once you've got it, you can't do anything about it except let it run its course.
I have found, to my increasing delight, wonder, and astonishment, that this seems to be true. What I "get", so far, is as follows. I hope Tim will correct me if I misinterpret anything.
The reason we are in so much trouble that we can't seem to get out of, due to our destruction of the natural world, is that it was a disastrous mistake to ever start thinking in terms of "nature" and "worlds" in the first place. To talk about the "end of nature", or the "end of the world" is to invoke a whole range of mythical, imaginary hobgoblins that only serve to scare us into moping apathy. To end "nature" and "the world" as concepts is something we should get done as quickly as possible! For, as it turns out, there never was a "nature", not in any sense: "Nature" as a medium for living beings does not and has never existed, nor do beings have "natures" that you can generalize about. The concept of "Nature" as an "object over there", as Tim says, or as a backdrop to a separate and equally nonexistent object called "humanity" that we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are a part of, is absolutely useless to identifying our places as unique beings in an interconnected ecological mesh.
This interconnection is total. There is nothing "you" can identify that is "not you", or "other". A political party that wants to romantically identify itself as "Green" and its members as "greens" ignores a significant romantic irony in their own story: The reason we have the color green is because of an event billions of years ago that was, for the beings involved at the time, an ecological disaster of total proportion. Chlorophyllic (or "green") bacteria destroyed their own ability to breathe the planet's atmosphere by producing too much oxygen...which we now breathe as we poison ourselves. These bacteria now survive only by hiding in the cells of plants, like the human batteries in the movie The Matrix. Hardly a meaningful existence, you might think...except (and this is where it starts to get really Goth and creepy) that you could say the same thing about the plants themselves. For the Matrix was as much a machine for preserving humans as for imprisoning them, and viewed in this way, plants themselves are not "natural" in the way we used to think. They are machines for the survival of the chloroplasts, and really a kind of artificial life.
The mitochondria in our cells are similar. We die without them, but perhaps the more important point is that they die without us, and that's why we're here. It turns out that animals aren't "natural" either, and that even the categories of "animal", "vegetable" and "mineral" are themselves hobgoblins. Likewise "life", insofar as we differentiate between it and "non-life" of various kinds. For if the Turing test proves that there is a point at which you can't tell a computer program from a real person, the inverse also holds true, and we are all a form of artificial life.
I find that this has some very startling political implications. Take the issue of corporate personhood, for example. This is a very hot issue currently, about which my readers (if I have any) may have some strong opinions. The question of whether we should treat corporations as people or not is interesting, and capable of generating endless and potentially fruitless debate, but it's rather beside the point when you consider that we don't treat people like people! How does our legal system define a "person", anyway? Read the Constitution, read the Bill of Rights. This concept of "personhood" is so limited as to be demeaning, reducing people to objects that only differ from corporations in that they have something called "malice". Our legal system is not the sole culprit here; as individuals, we objectify people all the time. "Other" people are, to differing degrees, "good" or "evil" (to say nothing of our habit of manipulating them when we can and it suits us). Neither of these are things you would say about someone you truly regarded as a Person. Indeed, in objectifying "evil", we become evil ourselves, simply by identifying ourselves as "good". Good? You? Me? Us? What a laugh that is. I like this British sarcasm: "Good in here, innit?"
It would seem like the prudent thing would be to destroy the entire legal system we operate under and replace it with one that actually treats People (meaning you, me, the dog, the tree, the centipede, the cow, the lettuce, the computer program, the book, the humic soil molecule, the mountain, the idea, and the corporation) as People...but not as a "We the People". Because as it turns out, there is no "we" and there is no object called "The People" that can be manipulated by law. Each Person is wholly, universally unique. And each unique being is totally interconnected in an inescapable mesh called Ecology.
Anarchosyndicalism, anyone?
"Other" things are not other, for our genotypes do not stop at our skin. As our mitochondria and the mercury in our tissues from the burning of fossil fuels make clear, these "other" things are not only under our skin, they are our skin! Each being is universal, and its skin is all other beings. Our universality is made horrifyingly clear when we realize that we can't have conversations about the weather without thinking about global warming anymore.
This leads to something called OOO, or Object Oriented Ontology. Levi Bryant gives a great layman-accessible explanation of this way of thinking about existence here. I disagree with him about refrigerators, but that doesn't really matter. OOO is related to a relatively new branch of philosophy called "speculative realism". As I "get" it (which maybe is not very well), what OOO does is to remove the firewall between subject and object. "I" am as much an object as anything else I can point to, and all objects (including inanimate ones) have a perspective and a point of view just as I do. There is no subject.
I find this very refreshing when I consider all those annoying ends to otherwise interesting conversations that go: "Well, that's just your opinion, and others are entitled to their own!" Or in other cases, the conversation ends before it begins, with the insipid "Well, this is only my opinion, but..." This is the brutal triumph of relativism over constructive argument. Or, if you're being accused of being an unoriginal, pointy-headed intellectual, you might hear, "Well, you just got that out of a book!"
It turns out that no one is entitled to an "opinion" at all. Reality is not some object that one is entitled to have different opinions about as it suits one. It has intrinsic being, and deserves one's sincere attempt at understanding. True compassion requires no less than that we develop and test our arguments. And what on earth is this demeaning talk of "books", as if books were somehow un-people that we can enslave, disenfranchise and say rude things about, as we've done with so many other un-people? We do treat them that way, though: we display them on our bookshelves as if to say, "Look! See? I'm not a racist! Some of my best friends are books!"
Well, I don't have any funky soundbite ending to this one, folks. Check out Tim's books, blog and podcasts, and grock to your heart's content. See you tomorrow or so.
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