Tom:
>I come out of the Daniel Quinn/Ishmaelian end of things
Care to elaborate?
>>you are thinking that DE says man is not interdependent and IS
interdependent in the same breath. That is not my understanding of the DE
position.<<
Well, I'd like to hear why. That's what I read in Naess's somewhat misnathropic
pessimism.
>> In our case it may be that its just taken 300000 years for a particular mutation
to be sorted out, and the crash is the mechanism. (This supports your "evolution is
to blame" theory below quite well.) BTW, it is for this reason (and another one or
two) that Hallyx calls us Comet Sapiens, in honor of the LAST big dieoff 63 Million
years ago. <<
I agree that there is a certain circularity about all arguments from/to ontology and
teleology, mine included. It is hard to even talk about homo sapiens sapiens without
invoking teleological notions of the 'summit of creation' etc. But still it is true
that it has taken 3 billion years for DNA to get this far and (Stephen Jay Gould
notwithstanding) I'm not sure there is time enough left to do the process all over
again, if we become extinct: the heat death of the solar system will happen first.
So it comes down to this: either you say the planet is the thing, the biosphere,
Gaia etc. So it doesn't matter if there is intelligent life here, as long as Gaia
exists. Or you say that what matters is that life has evolved intelligence and is in
the process of adding to (consummating) the biosphere by the creation of a
no-osphere a la Teilhard. This is a moral or aesthetic choice as much as a rational
or scientific judgment about the destination of evolution, I suppose. But the fact
that the choice is being made at all, even by (especially by) deep-ecos, kind of
undermines their notion that humankind is somehow irrelevant, that Gaia is 'just
fine' and will easily eliminate us to remain so. In this case, deep ecos don't need
to be political at all, they can just sit at home and do whatever.
>>MJ: Arguably, if we hadn't come along something else would. Therefore, it is
not what we are doing to nature that is the problem, but what evolution is doing to
itself.
Tom: Yes, logically it would look like that would be true doesn't it? But it is
simply not
true. It IS what we are "doing to nature" that is the problem of OUR
survival in our niche (and the survival of some of our species neighbors
around us -- like most of them). Objectifying "evolution" as some sentient
force who is to blame is part of the anthropocentric trap. Evolution has
done nothing to "itself", since there is no such thing as evolution in that
sense. It's cool to blame it, but it gets us nowhere. Were evolution an
entity, it would be just as happy to wake up one morning and find a biomass
made up solely of bacteria and roaches.<<
I don't disagree with this. It is a blind watchmaker. It doesn't care.
>>To the extent that DE thinks that's a bad idea, Carrol is right in
identifying DE's (and Marx's) concerns as "anthropocentric." <<
agreed
>>What DE is asking for is recognition of the line we have crossed outside
of biocentric behavior, and asking that man continue to use his evolutionarily
unique capacities to adapt. (nothing outside of the theory of evolution in
that.) Adapt toward biocentrism.<<
I think this is where you give the game away, because you DO privilege human
intentionality/capability and make it somehow supra or extenral to 'nature'. I don't
buy that. 'Nature' is one seamless thing and we are inextricably part of it and
what's more, our 'anthropocentrism' is the quintessential expression of our own
status as an evolved species.
>>Tom: Yeah! We get off scott free because we are only doing what Mother Culture
told us to do, and she got it from Papa Evolution. We are not to blame, nassty old
Evolution is the culprit. Let's kick his ass.<<
I'm not arguing for a kind of Rush Limbaugh insouciance here. On the contrary, I'm
saying we have to take over, but to do that we have to use the tools we ourselves
have developed, like for eg genetic engineering: but they have to be put under
social control. In a word, we have to have planning, not the market, to make
allocations and to achieve that while retaining human freedom, we ourselves have to
take an evolutionary step. We have to create new institutions of accord, which
become inscribed in our behaviour as individuals and groups and which are as
important, as the social and biological evolutionary steps associated with the very
first emergence of hom. sap.sap. The emergence of enlarged brains which (uniquely
among mammals) continue to grow after parturition, the opposed thumb, the
development of collective forms of behaviour: a division of labour, beginning witht
hefanmily, and the moral/religious apparartuses of taboos and behavioural
constraints and schemata associated with the long-term parenting necessray to allow
infants with undeveloped brains to survive at all, etc. The emergence of
agriculture. What we are living thru now, and it's a bit like stop-motion, so we are
only dimly aware of it (our existential, individual life is too brief), is a huge
social evolutionary step, bigger by far even than the Neolithic revolution, bigger
even than the evolution of erect hominids with enlarged brains and opposed thumbs.
We may fail, we may not. What happens to a large extent DOES depend on us as
individuals. We have to organise, to be socially conscious, to succeed. That is
called SOCIAL-ism.
>>MJ: If homo sapiens sapiens is functionally and morphologically part of general
evolution, we should stop arbitrarily abstracting ourselves from evolution. What
bigger or more characteristic anthropocentrism is there, than human guilt-trips?
What other species does this?
Tom: You are correct. There is nothing wrong with anthropocentrism PER SE, it is
just when we extend it beyoud the boundaries of reality that we get into trouble.
The idea that the crash is a "bad thing" is anthropocentric, but I kind of like
trying to prevent it anyway.<<
Yes.
>>NO competent DE "proselytizer" would ever consider that humans can single-handedly
negate (and transcend?) the entire evolutionary process. Cant be done, except in
the limited sense that our actions can single-handedly negate US.<<
Exactly, that's what deep-ecos believe and and this explains the despair and
pessimism of eg Arne Naess: but we should avoid apocalyptic alternation between
catastrophism and a desire for extinction of our species (to 'save' the planet --
but why? What for?) on one hand, and a belief in our own divinity and messianism on
the other. We shoudl avoid teleology. We are not divine. We must not be paralysed.
We have to act, and NOW, to save the situation: which still can be saved (ie the
ecosphere).
>> H Saps are NOT to be custodians! (wish I could repeat that a ba-zillion times) We
are "guardians" only in the sense as E.O. Wilson says: ". devising a wiser use of
resources than has been accomplished to date. And wise use for the living world in
particular means preserving the surviving ecosystems, micromanaging them only enough
to save the biodiversity they contain." WE do NOT put our hands on the levers of the
evolution machine, we simply "guard" against other H. Saps doing it. And there is a
certain amount of "slack" that we are entitled to as a species within the biosphere,
so DE doesnt seek to stop all human activity.<<
This is where I seriously disagree, and what's more, I deplore what I see as the
disengagement and complacency of Wilson. Not for nothing is 'Wise Use' also the
slogan of the coal and oil lobby. When Wilson talks about 'wise use' the people he
wants to give one more degree of freedom to, are precisly the corporate giants which
scavenge the ecosphere. He wnats to preserve the 'freedom' which means only the
freedom to exploit people and 'natural resources'. No surprise that this idea goes
hand in hand with deep political conservatism and even a glorification of what might
be called tribal mystifications of organised religion, also characteristic Wilsonian
themes.
>>I wish I knew how you arrived at understanding this to be an accurate
characterization of DE. NO responsible DE guy would spout such nonsense. ( Whales
can go extinct, not stay in stasis, that is perfectly FINE, and long as its part
of the evolutionary process. Whats wrong is Comet Sapiens killing all of them off
in a generation.<<
There you go again, moralising and all. This is where I think you are contradictory:
in adjacent paragraphs you (a) rubbish the idea that we have to 'take charge' of
evolution as a whole (there is no other way) and then (b) blame us for NOT taking
charge.
THAT aint "interspecies competition/maximisation ", thats murder.)
Oy, oy. So what's wrong with nature red in tooth and claw? Once more you privilege
hom. sap. sap. All species which ingest other organism commit murder, even deer
grazing grass.
>> Cant you see that "we have both the duty and the necessity to take charge, and
to be the custodians and then the inventors of future evolution and future
biodiversity, [for] evolution and
life [to] continue at all." has EXACTLY THE SAME FLAWS??? Trying to CONTROL all
change is as impossible as trying to STOP all change.<<
This is what we have to discuss and decide.
>Id laugh at DE and those guys if I thought that this is what they advocated. Id
campaign to put em up against the wall along with the CEOs of Time-Warner. I am
really saddened that this is your understanding of biocentrism. Where does Naess
"absurdly argue" that? Its not my understanding of him.<<
This sounds like a cop-out, but as part of the ongoing simplification of my own
evolutionary process I just unarchived my Naess files and can't be bothered to
locate them now. If you press me more I might get round to it. But since this is
what Naess mostly goes on about, I'm surprised you even asks where he says it. He
says it everywhere, all the time.
>>The concept that we can take charge is an illusion, and an illusion we have
nurtured through Mother Culture for 10,000 years. Cant happen. Its what has
brought us to the edge of the abyss. <<
Well, that's the issue we are talking about, because it's a live issue which is
right there before our faces, every day in the papers.
best to you, Tom.
Mark
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