A Brief History of “Unempowerment” aka Unemployment

“From this know-how, what could be detached from human performance was gradually cut out and “perfected” with machines that use regulatable combinations of forms, materials, and forces…As its techniques are gradually taken away from it in order to transform them into machines, it seems to withdraw into a subjective knowledge (savoir) separated from the language of its procedures (which are then reverted to it in the form imposed by technologically-produced machines). Thus know-how takes on the appearance of an “intuitive” or “reflex” ability, which is almost invisible and whose status remains unrecognized.”

Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 69.

Being an intellectual child of the 90's I'm easily seduced by French theory, although the humanism that underlies thenRenaissance, the Enlightenment, and post-modernism is all of a piece in allowing full subjectivity only to the mind of the highly domesticated urban dweller, and that is a existential foundation that I have become less and less willing to grant. If you only "recognize" city people and the forms of knowledge generated in cities, then climate change and mass unempowerment and industrial mono-culture and "big data" is what you get.  

Still, French theory is a useful antidote to thinking in American terms, which some people would say is impossible anyway.  But there was Aldo Leopold. 

Aldo Leopold

“…The land is too complex for the simple processes of the “mass mind’ armed with modern tools.  To live in real harmony with such a country seems to require a degree of public regulation we will not tolerate, or a degree of public enlightenment we do not possess.

But of course we must continue to live with it according to our lights.  Two things hold promise of improving those lights. One is to apply science to land-use.  The other is to cultivate a love of country a little less spangled with stars, and a little more imbued with that respect for mother-earth - the lack of which is, to me, the outstanding attribute of the machine-age.”

Aldo Leopold, "The Virgin Southwest", 179 in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays.

"Biutiful"

Barcelona is not so different from Ka’u

I just watched the DVD Biutiful, a film by the Mexican writer/director Inarritu.  It is a movie that explores human wildness - set in the slum edges of sprawling Barcelona and following the last days of a good but troubled man, Uxbal, a father of young children, dying of cancer, caught in the pitiless economic system that is both “normal” and terrifying.  Even for the privileged, the monster of ruin is always lurking just a few footsteps away.  All it takes is a little twist of fate, a short string of bad luck for any of us to fall victim.

At first I was shamed by this movie.  My preoccupation with grass and animals, nature and beauty seem so out-of-touch, so precious compared with with the harsh realities of the urban dispossessed.  Yet -  the traps which entangle Uxbal are derived from our civilization’s abandonment of nature and the true needs of humans: making an honest living being one of those needs.  Not that Uxbal had much of a chance or choice to make an honest living, born a virtual orphan in a mega-city on a planet with a human population in overshoot and a crashing environment.  The movie itself makes this point with shots of beached whales on a bank of televisions that Uxbal passes and smokestacks billowing in the neighborhood where his family lives. All they can do is try to survive.

Lack of work and of money to buy a place to live are the problems that drive the movie.  Simple problems really, and simple to fix, if we could be honest with each other about what needs to be done and just in our dispensation of work and recompense.  There is plenty of work to do done but what our economic system rewards handsomely is not honest work but enterprising exploitation. By our twisted set of values, producing is considered demeaning, and exploitation clever and obligatory.

The problem of making a living are the same in the country and the city, as are the perverse incentives to profit off each other.  The traps that are built into the system and which can engulf a person a little unlucky or unwary are just as unforgiving in the country.  What is more, it is still the country that must subsidize and provide for the existence of the cities. It has always been that way in the cultures that we call civilized, since the time of the Mesopotamian kingdoms, since the ancient kingdoms of China.  To produce the primary materials that the city requires of the countryside in a never-ending stream is a far more demanding way of living than that of the urban dwellers who scavenge on the edges of the urban economy, as the characters in Biutiful do.  If there is ever going to be sustainable civilization on this planet a reconciliation between nature and the city is necessary, and the people of the countryside are the ones that know the language -which is a language of actual bodies working, living, and dying rather than a symbolic language of power and image - in which that reconciliation must be worked out. 

In the end, country or city, what we are  all looking for is the same, as  in the movie’s title: a little bit or, preferably, a lot of beautiful for our children.

Renewable Energy Connection

My daughter asked me a funny question yesterday: "Do you think it was sunny enough today that I could have a smoothie?"
Funny but practical.  You see I bought a powerful blender at Walmart, so powerful that its power demands overload the PV system, so unless the sun is blazing down, I usually have to start up the generator for the minute or so that she needs the blender to make her smoothie.
And I'm glad that: 1. she has a gut sense of the connection between energy production and energy demand without boring lectures and powerpoint demonstrations, and 2. that she is making a smoothie because they're yummy.

The US SOTU and Missing the Point of Climate Change

President Obama mentioned climate change in his SOTU speech the other day.  He said that it is undoubtedly the greatest challenge facing this generation and future generations and that his administration is making strides to address it: the landmark agreements between China and the US on reducing fossil fuel combustion and carbon pollution.It was an  admirable speech and yet it was also another example of missing the point on "climate change."

"Climate change" is Nature speaking to us, and the language that she is using is what we are calling climate.

Climate change is the mother of all feedback loops in the vast system we are calling climate, but which is indistinguishable from the vast system we call life.  It is life that maintains the climate of life - trees in the forest, plankton in the ocean, birds, land animals, fish.

Climate change is merely the symptom of our indifference to life, our willingness to pollute our own habitat and poison life, including our own life.  

That indifference to life is learned as a norm in a culture that places little value upon invisible, immaterial, unquantifiable necessities - life and nurturance, love and community. 

We do not learn to see life.  We are not taught to become connoisseurs of life, as we taught to be connoisseurs of material things.  

We do not learn to see life in the foreground, to take pleasure in life, in its beauties and its miracles, to value life above all else. 

Which is a mistake.  A fault in our logic as a civilization, which is creating the symptom called climate change.  

What else is more important than life?  It is the most basic, the most necessary.  

When we forget this, when we allow ourselves to forget and discount and degrade life, we lose our way.  Lowell Catlett says it this way: “You cannot have healthy human beings without contact with plants and animals.”

If we are not surrounded by life, the core of our being is empty - we are plagued, individually by neuroses and illness, and we become a civilization heading inevitably to the destruction of our own life-support system, to the degradation of our environment and of our souls.  “We fall back into the biological category of the potato bug which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself,” says Aldo Leopold. 

Climate change is Nature saying to humans: Change!  Re-orient yourselves to what is most important, stop and think about what is necessary for your own existence and health.  Re-define civilization in light of life.  Reach deep and see what you are.

Such a re-orientation is not a revolution.  It is not about political power, although it can be expressed in politics.  It is not a religion, although it might speak to what we hold sacred. It is a choice.  It is a shift in fundamental values that we can make going forward, it is a change in how we can make decisions and choose life paths and trajectories.  It is a way to imagine and define oneself and one’s relationship to the world.  It is a way to overcome the blind selfishness that our civilization teaches us and which spawns our irresponsible consumerism, our worship of dead things and empty symbols, and our implicit sanctioning of rapacious economic development, predatory wealth and power based on brutality.  

To value life is also selfishness because there can be no self without life.  It is simply a broader and more logical kind of selfishness.   To see life in the center of one’s being is to come home to what is most real, to wake up after a long, strange dream.  

Ali'i

My Catahoula hound Ali'i died a few days after Christmas.  There is so much good and beautiful still in my life, but Ali'i was a magnificent creature and the bond between us was intense.  Vicki Hearne, the writer and dog trainer, in her essay "Oyez a Beaumont," writes about the "dangerous ones" that take ahold of your heart and don't let go. Ali'i came from a line of dangerous hounds.  He was the grandson of my dog King, who hunted wild cattle with me in the high mountain forests, before we settled down to being staid and semi-respectable ranchers.  He was the great-great-grandson of my brother's dog Handsome, who was the first Catahoula I ever met, and whose eyes burned with a blue fire that I'll never forget.  Someday, perhaps, I'll look into a Catahoula puppy's eyes and see a glimmer of danger.  Maybe I'll still be strong enough to meet that dauntless gaze...

what I believe

Along the way we forgot something essential to our health, to our happiness, to our success.  We forgot that we are animals before we are humans.  That fault in our logic, in our self-understanding, has distorted just about everything that we do.  We do not take the simple fact of our bodies, our biology, our identity as animals among other animals into account.  Our philosophies, our cultures, our very psyches display the neuroses that we inflict on ourselves in this strange misunderstanding.  We constructed our human-ness, at least in the West, by dividing ourselves from the animals, by defining our human-ness as “not animal.”  To call a human an “animal” is an insult, we say “dumb animals,” we call our violent tendencies “animal” when no animal is as violent as we are, we construct cities and technologies as devoid of and hostile to non-human life as possible.

(Despite our obsessive attempts to do so, we have yet to come up with a convincing definition of what makes human animals distinct from the other animals, so untenable is the attempt and faulty the reasoning.)

We are a kind of animal - a complicated kind of animal, no doubt - but animal nevertheless.  We have needs and desires that have been left by the wayside in the development of our identity as “not-animal.”  Simple needs like the smell of green grass in the wind and the sight of stars at night.  We have build up around us systems, machines, environments which are hostile to our mental and physical health as we pursue the idea of ourselves as “not animal”: as builders of machines and of political and economic powers; as inheritors of Godʻs dominion over everything we see, as thinkers and spirits somehow divorced from our animal bodies.

And yet the soul in us - the anima - grows more and more distressed.  We have become animals under stress.  Yes, we are richer than we have ever been, and our lives are, generally, easier and more secure.  Yet our lives are also subtly painful and frustrating, as well as more and more frantic.

What do our souls need? How do we understand ourselves as the animals that we are? What is it that we really want and need, as humans? I believe these questions are inter-related.  I believe that we began to lose our way when we lost track of ourselves as animals, lost track of the anima within ourselves that is also within all living things.   I believe that the moment we began to denigrate and deny ourselves as animals was also the moment when we began the great project of control and domination of all other beings and the extraction of all resources exclusively for ourselves.  It was a powerful moment.  It was also a moment of terrible violence to ourselves and to all other life.  


And we have to ask: is that what we wanted?  Is that what we still want?