2007 State of the Universe Address

This is pretty good:

Swami Beyondananda’s 2007 State of the Universe Address

jd

Green capitalism

"Green capitalism" describes a kind of shift in capitalist thinking, a somewhat forward-thinking by a sector of capitalists about the limits of environmental destruction. The environment is a part of the conditions of production. Production, and hence the expropriation of surplus value cannot take place without an environment that can provide the wherewithal for production to take place, whether that is clean air, clean water, dry land, or relatively stable weather.

The recent push by some major corporations to manage the solutions to climate change indicates this broader awareness. The rhetoric is couched in terms of "saving the planet", but I think deep-down the apparent change of heart has more to do with the problem of continuing to make money under changing objective conditions.

Well it's more complicated than that certainly -- the real possibility of some sort of social rebellion around environmental destruction, could force political changes before the full force of, say, climate change, hits business. So business is attempting to get ahead of the wave, and manage it somehow. Hence a renewed interest in Kyoto-like non-solutions like cap-and-trade markets and interest in renewable fuels like ethanol that is creating havoc within agricultural markets. Anything but, heaven forbid, consider cutting consumption.

Anyway, there is a section of the environmental movement more than happy to sidle up next to this green wing of capitalism -- they never saw anything inherent in capitalism that eats away and destroys a healthy relationship with nature (and by this I mean one that sees nature as more than a machine to be tinkered with).

This accommodation came to light last week in the deal struck by the Environmental Defense (formerly Environmental Defense Fund) and National Resources Defense Council that blessed the buyout of the controversial utility TXU by the firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. The two environmental groups are highlighting how they extracted support from the utility for climate change legislation and to cancel planned coal-fired power plants. As David Wessel wrote in a March 1 Wall Street Journal column, it's a "business-friendly, market-loving strain of environmentalism". But Saturday's WSJ reported that the two organizations had been "snookered" by the utility, that the so-called concessions had been planned anyway, and that big loopholes in the terms of the agreement would allow the utility to proceed with the scrapped coal-fired plants anyway. (See "Environmentalist Groups Feud Over Terms of the TXU Buyout", p. A1

As Saturday's article notes, "[I]t can be difficult to determine who is empowered to speak for the environmental movement." But as last week's deal indicates, the idea of an "environmental movement" is a fuzzy, ill-formed one at best. As green capitalism matures, which it is quickly doing, the "movement" as such will need to come to terms, in a much deeper way than has been necessary up till now, on how it wants to relate to capitalism, what capitalism needs, and what environmentalists want. What kind of world.

jd

KFC

Here's some YouTube video of the frolicking rats at the Greenwich Village KFC:

Frolicking rat video

Why am I fascinated by this? Maybe it is the element of insurgent nature, the way that nature asserts itself, always ready to reclaim the city. And there it is on display, through the plate glass window. Not a zoo of captured and subdued exotica, but wily rodent mardi gras, in full view.

jd

Evolution of consciousness bits

Some evolution of consciousness bits:

-- Silly me. I finished a fairly long project, Globalization, Romanticism and Owen Barfield, which, among other things, is a look at globalization in the context of Owen Barfield's work on the evolution of consciousness. And thinking oh what novelty, only to find out that over the past thirty years plus there has been quite a lot of work done on the evolution of consciousness -- Jean Gebser, Erich Neumann, Ken Wilber, William Irwin Thompson are some key names. From what I have read since then, I don't think Gebser, Neumann, Wilber or Thompson brought/bring the same perspective or feel for the topic that Barfield did.

-- William Irwin Thompson has sympathetic instructions on how to read Rudolf Steiner in his book Coming Into Being (St. Martin's Press, 1996). Literalism is a kind of death. Steiner repeatedly emphasized the difficulty of putting his experiences into images and words in order to communicate them. One must of course not make the mistake of then taking Thompson's translation of Steiner's evolution ideas too literally either. The main point I think is that Steiner's material must be approached not rigidly and literally but flexibly and with an open mind -- poetically, imaginatively.

-- I did a paper/article several months back on using Goethe's scientific approach (shaped via an exercise that Rudolf Steiner described) to investigate human artifacts (paper is Talking with history: Using Goethe's scientific approach with human artifacts). Mainly I was fascinated with all of the connections that come together in a simple artifact, and at so many levels -- physical, social, economic, historical, creative, which all taken together amounts to a spiritual experience.

And now I am reading Gary Lachman's book A Secret History of Consciousness (Lindisfarne Books, 2003), a very readable overview of work by different people (including Steiner, Barfield and Gebser). Lachman describes an experience that P. D. Ouspensky had:

During his experiments, he took a break on his sofa, smoking a cigarette. Flicking the ash, he looked with wonder at his ashtray. Suddenly he saw this humble object as the center of a vast radiating web of meanings and relations. In a rush of recognition, everything to do with the ashtray flooded his consciousness. Who had made it, its use the material from which it was made, the history of tobacco, the whole long development of humankind's ability to mold its environment. Fire, flame, and the match he had just struck: each seemed a hitherto unopened window on the world, through which he now looked with wonder and amazement. (p 44)

Silly me.

-- Jean Gebser, in his The Ever-Present Origin (Ohio University Press, 1985), breaks the evolution of consciousness into three broad periods: before perspective ("unperspectival"), perspective or "perspectival", and post-perspective or "aperspectival", a period we are entering now (and have been for a several decades). So the discovery of perspective in the period from the 13th to the 16th centuries, which also corresponds to the beginning of Scientific Revolution, and a general shift in the way that people, in Europe at least, viewed the world. The discovery of space, the space between things, the separation of things and in particular the viewer and the viewed were all part of this shift.

It was around this time that lace was first introduced; and here we see that even the fabric could no longer serve merely as a surface, but had to be broken open, as it were, to reveal the visibility of the background or substratum. (p 22)

The word "network", in the Oxford English Dictionary, has one of its earliest usages in connection to the making of lace. I am not sure what to make of that. Seeing networks required stepping-back from the world, abstracting it into nodes, "sectoring" it as Gebser might say. But I also think there is something new, perhaps "aperspectival" (not sure -- haven't gotten that far in the book!) in thinking about networks today. Perhaps the new thing happens when the network isn't see as just a map of nodes and links, but as a process of interactions.

-- Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko is a good read. I don't know that the basic good vs. evil thing holds up well when he tries to put it in the context of world history, and there is a certain endlessness to a struggle that seems to go nowhere. But I did like the basic thread that runs through it that those idle thoughts, the under-the-breath curses when cut-off or done wrong in the parking lot are actual, real curses that affect both the recipient and the world. A cautionary tale to promote right-thinking...

jd

Globalization, Romanticism, and Owen Barfield

Here’s a link (below) to a paper that I did that looks at the idea of a corresponding consciousness globalization to globalization. This consciousness that has been maturing for three hundred years under the general term "modernization," and the process has not matured uncontested. The Romantic Movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries provided an alternative consciousness with the possibility of alternative futures. Romanticism as an alternative consciousness can be seen not just as a historically specific event, but as an unfinished project. The work of Owen Barfield, the English philosopher, writer and poet, provides a framework for examining Romanticism, globalization and consciousness in the broader context of the evolution of consciousness. Within Barfield's structure, Romanticism constitutes a practical vehicle for evolving beyond the consciousness of globalization.

Globalization, Romanticism, and Owen Barfield

jd

Idea for a political organism

First the name. The tentative name is "Romantic Union". Well it is tentative. The mission of the organism is to restore the unity of the world, of subject and object.

We are trying to restore the Union: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Or "A long long time ago, our species brought forth on this planet, a new consciousness, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that consciousness, or any consciousness so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." (???)

Our field of activity is both in the mind, and in the world. Does that sort of violate our mission by assuming the duality? How about -- to people who see the world as a duality of subject and object, interior and exterior, it will appear like we have two sides to our task? Hmmm. Already this is getting complicated. But we bugger on...

Imagination is the first tool to be taken up in this task. We will use exact sensorial imagination to develop this tool. Goethe shows the way in this respect. Trust in this imagination, our intuitive powers will guide our work. Imagination can break the mind-forged manacles.

Our imagination reveals us as part of nature in profoundly deep ways that we have forgotten; we participate through our directed imagination in the ongoing creation, the eternally becoming of the world. The world, the planet is allowed to be whole again.

In economics we are communist: from each according to ability (no shirkers!); to each according to need. Difficult to imagine anything except food when one is starving or freezing or sick. Need to get to work on that one, right away.

Imagination can help us break the chains of property, but we might get some extra resistance on that one.

In structure, we are not network -- too schematic. We are not organization -- too mechanical. An organism though -- that's the thing. Interconnected, dynamic, in motion, alive. Various organs conscious of what needs to be done because we are part of the organism, it's in the -- can't really say DNA, too mechanical -- the soul? the urphänomen? Tied together by a shared vision, program, and understanding of mission. But a remarkable degree of independence and at the same time, cohesion and coherence.

We recognize that we live in a mighty web of relationships with other people, through the work and play we do and the things we enjoy. We reject the fetish of things as things, we embrace them as products of fellow human beings striving, laboring, creating. We share that with each other; we are mutually dependent on each other. So likewise we reject the notion of intellectual "property". We should have gotten that out of our system in the romper room. No one ever had an idea by him or herself.

We embrace science, but don't stop there. Science can be deepened, extended, made whole. We embrace a new empiricism that allows us to grow new organs of perception.

We embrace technology, but don't allow it to turn us into machines. We know what it is and what it isn't and aren't fooled.

We embrace sensuousness, feeling, creativity, active play. We know if we attend to nature -- we study a flower, we stare at clouds, we feel raindrops -- an awareness or knowing arises; there is something real in that. We embrace the felt change in consciousness when we read a poem, and know there is something real to that. We know, or have known, or want to know, what it means to love and be in love and be loved. We recognize the reality of that. We embrace that reality.

What else? Maybe a good closing line, like, "We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win." I don't know -- what do you think?

Ecosystem of globalization -- comments and questions

I received some comments and questions on my Ecosystem of Globalization paper. They were good comments, and I thought I wd share my response. Comments are in italics.

Sorry to be so long in replying. Some of the language was new to me, and I wish I knew more about economics, etc., but it was easy enough for me to follow a lot of it. I thought if you ever expand this, I, personally, would benefit from examples, for example, of extension and intensification.

Extension means growing geographically, by pulling new markets into capitalism. So China becoming a capitalist economy (in whole or part) would be an example of extending. Another example would be a local, non-capitalist economy being pulled into the world economy. Extension is a way of increasing profit etc. by selling more to the new markets, tapping into resources, integrating people as workers and consumers into the (capitalist) world economy.

Intensification is making more profit out of the same market. This can be done by turning existing activity into profit-making activity, e.g., privatizing public services, or people buying services that used to be done by unpaid labor at home (e.g. childcare, food preparation, house cleaning), or people consuming more (helped by easy debt).

So the idea is that once there are no more new areas to pull into capitalism, the only way it can grow is through "intensification."

Random thoughts.

Re: Transportation and globalization. It seems to me this is an important cost to the ecosystem of increasing globalization. I wonder how one would figure the relative costs and benefits of local production and consumption vs spreading out production and shipping goods around the globe.

This is an interesting question. It gets to what is counted as a cost. You are saying that if all of the externalized costs were factored in, global production might not be so cheap...

You say on p 2 “there is no ‘wilderness’ today…outside of capitalism.” Right. Some time ago, the National Forest Service began using the language of “recreation amenities” in relation to public land management. This fits into the original paradigm of public land management as resource management and conservation, rather than preservation. First, it focused on extractable resources like timber, mining, and grazing. Then, recreation amenities came into the same paradigm. I know there are economic analyses of recreation showing how many dollars a nearby community gains from having, say, a national park nearby. I imagine there are more sophisticated economic analyses of recreation as a commodity, but I don’t know.

I think also, even if it isn't managed as a park or for economic exploitation in any way, it still isn't "wilderness". That even if it is "unspoiled" or unexploited, it still is related to capitalism in some way (e.g., an "other" or as a resource reserve that allows everything else in capitalism to go on.

Another negative effect of globalization is the disruption and disenfranchisement of local communities, especially land-based communities. As local communities get caught up in globalization, they lose their connection with the land, resulting is less sustainable ways of treating the land. This might be another concern related to speculative capital on p 3. Disruption of local communities has both human and environmental costs.

This would be a good example of "extension."

On p 4, in your para which begins “It should be noted…,” is it also relevant that new technologies create new needs in existing markets, which in themselves are a sort of new market? Is this intensification? Is that even a useful way to think about it?

Yes, this is a useful way to think about it, it is an example of intensification.

Reading the section on the ecosystem of globalization, I thought of a recent book by Richard Louv, LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS. The subtitle has the catchy phrase “Nature-Deficit Disorder” in it. I liked the book. Among other things, he goes into how kids are blocked from direct contact with nature by insurance companies, homeowners’ associations, liability issues, etc. In other words, he takes up some of the institutional and structural barriers to contact with nature as well as the psychological ones. Now, looking back at my notes, I have no idea why I thought of that in reading this section of your paper. Maybe you can see a connection. Anyway, I liked the book.

No, it is very apropos. You had mentioned the book to me, and I think I had it in mind. (Wait -- I see Richard Louv is quoted in WSJ article in footnote # 10).

On page 6, note 11, I chuckled. Finally some light humor in a dismal situation!

I wasn’t sure what you meant by "the end of value" on page 7, but I wanted to know. This sounds like a useful and interesting concept.

"Value" is a Marx concept, and the way I understand it is that it describes a particular kind of relationship between people and between people and nature. The idea here is that capitalism turns everything into an economic quantity. So it is also way of looking at the world, not for any intrinsic usefulness or quality or in its own right something with a right to exist, but as a means to increase wealth. In this sense, the "end of value" is a good thing. That was another paper (http://www.gocatgo.com/texts/eov.html)

So, here is my big question, and maybe the central question of your paper. If I understand you right, capitalism is inherently anti-environment or anti-environmental-sustainability, by virtue of its need to continually extend and intensify production. Only an overthrow of Capital will foster sustainability. Got it. Are there variations on capitalism which are not inherently destructive; can capitalism evolve, or is a revolution required? And if capitalism is irredeemable vis a vis the environment, are there any practical alternatives in the foreseeable future?

I think what I was trying to get at is that capitalism is not "anti-environment or anti-environmental-sustainability". But rather that capitalism creates a certain kind of environment to ensure ongoing profitability. Although it often looks like it, I don't think capitalism will commit environmental suicide (well it still might, but it's a losing bet no matter how you think of it). "Sustainability" raises the question of sustainable on whose terms? Towards what end? So it might be possible to have a "sustainable environment" of tree plantations, ocean fish farms, and private nature parks. But your idea of sustainable would be much different I expect. But your main point, what is to be done -- that's the thing. It might sound counter-intuitive, but I guess the important thing is getting people to think differently, to be conscious of this, to realize that they can do things and that things can be different. You are certainly part of that. People have different talents and will apply those as they see fit. I think that there is something radical in developing a qualitative, holistic, monistic sense of nature; but a decent understanding of capitalism is important too. So the question to me is how does consciousness change, what ideas are put out there and discussed and argued out. And the political and economic solutions will flow from that. I hope.

I would like to bring these kinds of issues into my courses more. I did last week in a one-day discussion on ecopsychology with the Wilderness Therapy students, and they got into it. I think it is a set of questions they ask a lot, but which rarely get brought into ecopsychology discussions. Andy Fisher (RADICAL ECOPSYCHOLOGY) does too, questioning capitalism and current social paradigms, but still, it is oddly absent from ecopsychology discussions. Anyway, thanks for sharing this paper with me. Keep me posted. If you have or see anything else that would be a good, broad intro to the economics of environmental sustainability, let me know.

Hmm. James O'Conner has an essay, call "Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible?", anthologized in Natural Causes, that raises some important questions -- I think starts well, but gets dense as it goes on about capitalism (I still need to finish reading it). There's a chapter from the Deep Ecology for the 21st Century by Donald Worster, "The shaky ground of sustainability" that looks alright, but I just glanced over it. The Brundtland Commission Report "Our Common Future" from the late 1980s is the classic UN-type document, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Common_Future.

Or the Wikipedia entry on sustainable development might be helpful to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_development

I'll give it some more thought.

-- jd