The Abject Humanism of It All I: Parks and Recreation, Research Time, 19/07/2017

So here’s something I came across reading Milton Friedman that I found really interesting. In the light of some contemporary politics and prosecutions around who has the right to do what on government-owned land in the United States, it’s worth thinking on.

He talks about the national park system in the United States, and how he thinks it should be privatized to individual businesspeople. So far, so doctrinaire. But think about the reasons why.

Friedman doesn’t position himself in any way like the activism of the Bundy family. He’s much more sedate, as benefits a professor rather than a cattle rancher.

He thinks national parks and federal nature reserves should be privatized because of general libertarian principle against government ownership of all that much. But he also thinks that private companies could achieve the same purpose much better.

Come on, son! You and your dad are goin' fishin'! Hyuk!

So what purpose does he consider national parks to have?

Camping. Hiking. Fishing. The enjoyment of the great outdoors. All that good old Outdoor Life Network stuff.

While outdoorsmanship may have been the original purpose of the national parks in Teddy Roosevelt’s mind, national park and reserve systems do a lot more than that now.

Friedman thinks about none of the ecological achievements of government or public trust in stewardship of the land. Setting aside at least some land from the reach of exploitation, if you do it with enough ecological knowledge and care, can mean the difference between a resilient ecosystem and total collapse.

Now, I don’t expect Friedman or that many other people writing in the early 1960s to have thought of this aspect of the problem. Rachel Carson was a lonely voice for a long time.

Even if you leave that critique to the side, there’s a blindness in Friedman’s thinking. It’s the blindness that anything in the world is only as good as its customer service value. No public service besides customer satisfaction.

That’s a world of incredible poverty. Maybe not poverty in terms of wealth and riches. But I mean poverty as a drab, trivial world. There’s too much of the human view in that way of thinking. Too much reduction. Too much humanity.

I think I’ll talk more about the problem of humanity tomorrow. It’s not like humanity doesn’t have plenty of problems.

The Value of Life Is Immanent, Jamming, 19/07/2014

When couples who don’t have children hang out with couples who do have children, there are occasionally those awkward moments when the children-havers ask why, and they are rarely satisfied with the answer that we just don’t want any. I anticipate these questions will arise fairly frequently over the course of my life, because my girlfriend and I don’t want kids.

I’m a writer, philosophical journalist, playwright, and whatever other creative endeavours will give me a paycheck of some kind. I don’t need children. My artworks will be my children — unlike children, art can never disappoint its creator.

Because an important element of environmental politics is a goal for an overall reduction in the human population by peaceful means, it’s important to encourage more people to decide not to have children. To do that, people have to live in such a way that they don’t need children to be happy in life. Yet an important concept in the image of reproduction as the validation of one’s present existence is in creating a heritage for the future. 

Well, to answer those concerns in this particular case, as an artist and creative figure, my artworks are that heritage. When my play, You Were My Friend, is produced, its script will be available in a Canadian database of theatre for other performers to produce in the future. My novella, Under the Trees, Eaten, will be available for purchase from Amazon for a long time. And if it ever goes out of print, ebooks will still be available. If Amazon ever discontinues the ebooks, I’ll seed it to piracy sites and sell copies by other means. The same goes for any other works of published art or philosophy I create.

Marry for love. Create for happiness. Or terror; whichever
you prefer.

Yet this question of heritage for the future is not even all that necessary. Back in April, I posted about my engagement with Lee Edelman’s No Future, a landmark work of queer theory that engendered some very strong reactions in me. If I can summarize my take on Edelman’s idea, he describes the queer as the living embodiment of the death drive. His Lacanian philosophical framework guides him to understand the only alternative to an uncritical embrace of heterosexual reproduction to safeguard the future to be an embrace of death. If children and the futurity they represent do not matter to you, says Edelman, then you can only be a walking spectre of annihilation.

Needless to say, I am not a fan. First, it’s a mutually exclusive (and alternative-exclusive) dualism, which I consider poor-quality thinking. Now, I do admire the gumption of Edelman embracing precisely the view of non-hetero sexualities that radical social conservatives share, and which motivates their desire to stamp such people out. But it still adds up to an embrace of death. 

There is a way to value one’s life, not because of the legacy you leave for the future, but for the effect you have in the present. One of the central ontological principles of my Ecophilosophy manuscript is that every process in the universe is ultimately interconnected because of their shared causal histories going back to the beginning of the universe and going forward into the future. Because every event has conditions that brought it about and effects that proliferate forward, every event leaves its imprint on the entire process of the universe’s development.

The effects of every event, in some small way, constitute the specifically singular character of the entire universe, throughout its duration. Each event itself is as only it can be, unique in its innate arrangement, singular in its essential nature. Its legacy is unimportant, both the past that led to it and the future that it conditions. The effects an event has on the world while it exists are most important to its value. 

On a personal perspective, that means what matters most in our lives are the effects we have on our co-workers, friends, families, and the wider world around us. Where we come from and our legacies don’t matter; only what we do counts as to the value of our lives. 

The Problem of Cutups and Continuity, Composing, 10/07/2013

Sometimes, you just stare at the screen and yell at it a little. Tuesday morning was one of those times. 

I’m currently working on some revisions to the first chapter of my dissertation to transform it into a seriously publishable manuscript I’ll be able to shop to university presses in the next year. The revisions to this chapter are probably the most radical in the dissertation text. It’s largely an examination of the concept of intrinsic value of nature, its benefits and limitations, and introducing my game change on the idea to make it viable again. While my original dissertation concentrated on Arne Næss’ approach, and I still consider him to have had the most potential in the intrinsic value of nature team, I think I have to give notice to approaches from more traditional analytic philosophy of the environment. Some press editors I’ve consulted with have recommended this (though that particular press didn’t accept the manuscript, I’m adding some material on Nicholas Agar and Paul W. Taylor in case an editor at a future press is concerned about intrinsic value of nature advocates in the properly analytic tradition). 

But shortly after weaving Agar’s valuation of all individual organisms into a passage that originally focussed on animal liberation, I’m a little stuck. I have a diagram on a piece of paper next to my computer showing how to weave the rest of the intrinsic value of nature context discussion into the established text, but I’m not totally sure how to incorporate the new material into the old and still have it flow smoothly.

This is where the difference between how I think and how most humans think starts to cause me problems. When I make a conceptual connection, it’s very clear to me and I jump straight through it, following the pattern I can see in ideas that most other folks don’t notice. This skill has served me very well, because I can spin an idea in different directions than most people, giving me a peculiar insight that makes my work a little remarkable. The problem is, all this jumping is normal to me. So most of the problems I’ve encountered in my writing career is that I’m not sure when another person is going to look at the pattern I’ve drawn and will have no idea why I’ve made the connections I have. This happens to me in social situations too, when I'm not sure if I understand what other people think, or if they understand what I think. 

My philosophical ideas are generally on target and insightful, but I’m never sure when I’ll have to put the hood up on my ideas and expose the underlying pattern rather than the reader just jumping with me. This chapter and its revisions are probably the toughest place in the whole project when it comes to this problem.

I've had some intriguing ideas for some kind of fiction
project about William Burroughs (who gets general credit
for the cut-up writing technique that I say I use in part) and
Joan Vollmer, his wife whose head he blew off.

What’s more, I tend to revise in a cutup style, which fits the slightly different wiring of my mind. If a sentence that works as an introduction shows up in the middle of a passage on a first draft, for the second draft, I’ll simply shift it to the beginning. Same with inserting new material. I’ll squeeze it in between two paragraphs, and work a little on the transitions to make it seem smooth. 

Imagine trying to describe an entire 360º view of a cityscape to someone. You can’t just dump the whole thing on them at once, because language only comes out one sentence at a time. But where do you start? In what direction does your explanation move? What aspects do you focus on first — little details or major landmarks or some intermediate feature? The answer depends on the priorities of the project, and while I have a sense of that in regard to what I already wrote as part of the dissertation, I’m still not 100% sure about how the new material fits those priorities.

This project has come together in fits and starts since I first started writing the dissertation in summer 2010. The middle third was written in Winter 2011. What turned out to be the concluding chapter came together at the end of that year. Revisions saw chapters merged, and some material ejected altogether. Sometimes, I have no idea how I managed to get a unified, quality dissertation with a clear argument arc finished inside the four years of a four year program.

I guess I’m just that good.