This Is Progress? Research Time, 27/02/2014

The core of the Utopias project lies in the human relationship with time. It’s not about a categorical statement of the relationship itself, but how we conceive of our temporality. In this, Bruno Latour actually provides a central thesis, because We Have Never Been Modern considers a central element of so-called Modernity as an era of human history to be a conception of temporality that is bound up with progress.

Bruno Latour makes an argument. I do not know if he
succeeded.

Progress is an essential part of the rhetoric of modernity as a human epoch. This isn’t a result of a conceptual argument about modernity, but begins from simply looking at what people wrote and believed in Europe and America’s secular intellectual communities. Human history itself was conceived as a progressive drive, which Latour cites the poet Charles Péguy describing with the metaphor of time itself as a savings bank. The future will always be better than the past, goes this vision, as human science and technology improves the condition of our species and world. Any attempt to return to the past fetishizes archaism on this conception of temporality, because the march of time is a continual march of improvement. So goes the philosophical analysis of the rhetoric of progress that developed from the European Enlightenment period.

If you look back at the writings of intellectuals and influential people from the 18th to the 20th century, this rhetoric of progress appears everywhere. Latour gives a fascinating analysis of the concept of progress: it implies that every moment, or at least every point in time where a present can be divided from a past, where you can make even the most minor epochal distinction, contains a revolution. Latour, I think as part of his own rhetorical tendency, describes this as the creation of the past. 

Of course, this is not in a literal ontological sense of creating the past, but creating a particular relationship of present humanity with its history. Every technological shift brings about an improvement in the human condition, such that a return to the previous era would be a categorical loss. Before the Scientific Revolution, we lived in the Dark Ages; before the French Revolution,* we lived in chains. This was a place to which we should not return. This is the concept of time and human temporality that Latour says is the essence of Western secular Modernity, and it’s a concept that would make a fantastic framework of analysis (one of many) for the Utopias project.

* Or the American Revolution, or the Communist Revolution, or any other of your preference.

Although Latour writes of Western society as if it had made uniform social growth regarding these problems, such cultural uniformity is always an illusion. Any diagnosis of a particular problem of thought will never apply without exception to a society. Let me give you an example. Latour writes as if this conception of progressive time no longer applies to our society. He argues for this, in part, by briefly constructing a narrative of major streams of philosophy in France over the 20th century that illustrates a growing critique of the traditional value of progress from within the conceptual conditions of Modernity: he includes phenomenology, Heidegger’s mourning of Being, semiotics, Habermas’ theory of communicative discourse, and the despairing nihilism of the paradigm postmodernists Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Beaudrillard.

Latour’s book itself, coming out in France in 1991, would have begun an epoch of positive critique of the structure of Modernity that could achieve creative steps to think without the narrative of inevitable progress or the irredeemable collapse of progress. But in 1992, Luc Ferry’s The New Ecological Order was released. This book amounts to a culturally conservative critique of the ideas Latour would pursue in The Politics of Nature a decade early. 

"Your Honour, I call the plaintiffs to the stand."

In 1999, the original French-language version of this latter book described a model of politics that included nonhuman creatures as a means of approaching our global ecological crises. But Ferry had already argued in his own book that any attempt to include nonhumans in political procedures would destroy human freedom by subordinating our concerns to those of animals and plants. He introduced his book with reference to a Medieval canon law by which human farmers would sometimes have to pay restitution to rats, allowing them to eat some of their crops as compromises over territory disputes in their fields. Yes, it was pure rhetoric, but it was rhetoric that Latour had already said in 1991 would no longer be believable: referring back to a time before a particular democratic revolution, in this case against the legal power of the Church in daily life, as a Dark Age to which we would be horrified to return. Just a year after Latour declared it impossible, a major intellectual of his own country argued against environmentalist principles in the name of preserving a rationalist vision of progress.

I think it’s always a danger in philosophy of losing your arguments simply because we trade in universal statements. Whenever someone argues that society had reached a particular point that makes some particular perspective impossible to think, such a supposedly impossible thought will appear to criticize you.

When Can Comparing Something to Nazis Actually Make Sense? Research Time, 19/11/2013

Watching American politics over the last five years, I saw a lot of spurious comparisons of Barack Obama to Hitler and his policies to those of Nazi Germany. These comparisons, saying that a marginally social democratic set of domestic policies and doubling down on the surveillance state constituted genuine Nazism, and that his speaking style was Hitlerian, were utterly offensive nonsense that in most cases revealed the underlying racism of the accuser, or at least their woeful ignorance of what actual Nazism was. 

That said, when one actually investigates and explores the governmental structures of totalitarian regimes, then you can make legitimate comparisons to Nazism. Arendt discusses several features of Nazi German politics that have been mentioned in my other research. Focus on these features can, at least semi-plausibly, allow one to describe some facet of modern politics as Nazism and be technically correct.

One aspect of that is Nazi environmental policies and the underlying philosophy. Nazi philosophy conceived of the movement as thoroughly anti-humanist, abandoning the politics of humanitarianism and the need for human welfare (whether that welfare was provided by direct government intervention or through a smoothly functioning marketplace). 

Luc Ferry was minister of education in the government of
Jacques Chirac and Jean-Pierre Raffarin, 2002-4. My distrust
of philosophers who become electoral politicians is borne
out once again.

In its place was a notion that Nazi politics followed, as Arendt terms, “the laws of nature and life.” Practically, these were the race-based eugenics that scientifically justified their horrifying social policies. However, justifying political policy as conforming with nature’s laws does continue today in some facets of the environmentalist movement. The importance of following natural laws ranking above human concerns is a reason why the liberal humanist philosopher Luc Ferry wrote his book, The New Ecological Order in the 1990s about how environmentalism was inevitably fascist, and the environmentalist political movement should be destroyed. His idea was that to say human concerns should be, in many cases, subordinate to the overall health of ecosystems meant that humans would no longer be allowed to choose their paths in life. He thought the politics of ecosystems constituted a zero-sum game between humanity and nature, and that if you were a democrat, you had to side with humanity.

And the Nazi party used rhetoric about following the laws of nature to justify their destruction of democratic processes and ordinary social bonds. They instituted protected species policies, even if those species were only protected because their symbolism was important to their image of a triumphant German race. They certainly ignored those protections when they were losing the war and preparing to destroy all of Germany themselves, part of their own zero-sum politics of total victory or total annihilation. 

But there are key differences between environmentalist politics and Nazism. I can’t believe I actually had to write that sentence, but the mere existence of Ferry’s book means that I have to. The argument exists, can be found and read, and has the credibility of a leading French intellectual and politician having written it. Most adults in power today have the advantage of not having experienced actual totalitarian regimes. It means they’ve probably led less horrifying lives, but it also means that it’s more difficult to understand the true magnitude of totalitarian horror itself, which dwarfs any possibility of legitimate analogy with modern politics.

The most important difference, for me philosophically, is that environmentalism, at least the best environmentalism, doesn’t understand the humanity/nature conflict as a zero-sum game. My own ecophilosophy manuscript finds theorists who think this way, and I join them myself. Choosing, as a society, not to carry out certain activities that are ecologically harmful does not denigrate human freedom. It’s an articulation of human freedom, understanding that we have the power to change our own lives for the better. 

Not only that, but modern science is more effective. The Nazis based their race and natural preservation laws on eugenic theories: the superiority of the Aryan race and its natural springs in the Black Forest. But this is junk science, because race isn’t biological; it’s a social construction that gained political power when it was used to justify European imperialism overseas and the practice of enslaving African people. Social constructions have real effects, but they’re also within human power to change by will. 

When we start to think of race as ‘being racialized,’ being illegitimately treated as if you were defined by a series of stereotypical judgments connected with race, we begin that process of change. Our biological science today is based on the actual processes that constitute life, like metabolism, protein synthesis, DNA recombination, and the chaos mathematics that describe ecological dynamics. Environmentalism that embraces the principles of our much-improved science is a democratic movement. That Ferry’s screed of a book can still be cited as a source to disparage environmentalism as a new Nazism in disguise irks me profoundly.

The Legendary Roots Crew, A History Boy, 07/10/2013

Today continues from Friday’s post about how Michel Serres conceives of how humans engage with the conditions of their origin, their roots. I deal with the concept of roots in my ecophilosophy manuscript, sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly. Environmentalist rhetoric sometimes focusses on roots; less so today, but more frequently in the past. The idea of this rhetoric is that in becoming technological, humanity has forgotten its roots in the natural world, thinking we can use our scientific knowledge to disconnect from nature. But this is a lie, goes the rhetoric, and the only authentic place for humanity is to be rooted in their ecosystems, acting only to maintain delicate ecological balances.

That’s a pretty loaded passage. So I’ll let you know, in short form, where I stand on these ideas as I wrap the ecophilosophy manuscript’s edits this week. I agree with the environmentalist idea that we humans have no idea of the cascading effects our technologies cause on the world in which we still live. And I’m not even talking about climate change. Take the example of our monoculture farming system: it’s had enormous effects on the ecosystems of regions that surround it, and on the honeybee populations that we need as the lowest-cost way to fertilize crops. Even aside from our pesticide and fungicide use, the changes to the ecosystems where monoculture farming is implemented cause complicated effects on the whole region.

I sometimes think of Heidegger as the brilliant thinker
and influential writer whose fundamental mistakes
ruined a lot of good enterprises.

But the talk about authenticity and rootedness becomes dangerous. I discussed Luc Ferry’s critique of environmentalism as inherently totalitarian on Friday, and I presented a paper on it at the 2010 Canadian Philosophical Association meetings in Montréal. His argument definitely has some straw in its joints, as he uses Nazi propaganda about the authentic place of a people in its soil and their pre-war policies of protecting aesthetically pleasing threatened species to tar all environmentalism as fascist. But his earlier book about Heidegger’s philosophy helps give some actual weight to his arguments that, if not openly fascist, then environmentalism is anti-Enlightenment. Heidegger’s thinking about the nature of authenticity (and even what that term meant, depending on what period of his writings you approach, 1927’s Being and Time, the Beitrage era of the 1930s, or his explicit critiques of technology in the 1950s-60s) isn’t something I can encapsulate in a few hundred words of a blog post. But as far as the relevant discussion goes, Heidegger could be said to have advocated leaving Enlightenment humanism behind.

Basically, this means he considered humanism to have popularized the idea that humanity was separate from nature or being, that a human could define themselves entirely on their own power and their own terms. According to Ferry, this attitude revealed a deep truth about human beings, the core of our creative abilities that democratic political institutions, in part, exist to protect. In contrast, Heidegger said such an attitude caused horrible effects, where we stopped paying attention to the genuine complexity of our world, and saw everything in existence only as a resource to exploit. The only antidote to this rapacious behaviour is to re-orient our thinking away from the humanist perspectives that would deny the complexity and value of nature. Ferry said that turning away from humanism means turning away from our freedom.

Though they’re both right, the proper path for thinking on this problem isn’t just splitting the difference. One of my goals in the ecophilosophy manuscript is to figure out how to think in a way that what appears in one framework of reasoning as irreconcilable contradictories can instead be ported into a different framework of reasoning where they can co-exist. In tension, perhaps, but they would co-exist.

Even today, I feel a strange pressure from the way my friends
who still live in Newfoundland revere every word that
tumbles out of Allan Hawco's mouth. While I'm glad my
friend Krystin has had solid work for the past few years, I
find Hawco popularizes the minstrel-like "Goofy Newfie"
stereotypes that have always offended me.

It’s a matter of distinguishing between ecological relationships and personal histories. The ability of humans to emancipate themselves from the conditions of their birth is a relation of an individual to her personal history, at heart an ethical issue. I’m reminded of the complicated relationship I have with my own home province of Newfoundland. Growing up, and especially during the province’s oil boom in the 2000s, I was constantly reminded by the culture that surrounded me that I had a duty, as a Newfoundlander, to be true to my roots and always want to live there. But for personal and professional reasons, I wanted to pursue my writing and university career in Ontario. When I visit St. John’s, I’m even admonished for not having a noticeable Newfoundland accent. I never had one. My distaste for the nationalism of my home was, honestly, one of the factors that pushed me away. 

The lessons of environmentalism and its philosophies could more correctly be called ontological, a matter of the relationships and forces that constitute the physical world itself. I explained the idea above. Ecological science reveals that many of the physical systems we take for granted as stable and unchanging are in fact generated and sustained by ongoing dynamic processes. These processes are resilient most of the time, but can be disrupted catastrophically if some degree of uncommon disturbance pushes them over a threshold. And ecological scientists are incredibly far away from mapping all the critical thresholds that could possibly occur in all the different and various ecosystems on Earth. This labour may take so long, and require such detail of observation that it will never finish. The message of environmentalism is that, where we now know our world to be potentially very fragile and we’re nowhere near comprehensive knowledge of how those fragilities function, we have to be really fucking careful. And in most industrial technology, we’re giants who barely know how to tie our shoelaces.

Stated this way, you can plainly see that these are different problems. But Heidegger’s philosophy merges the ethical with the ontological (his distrust of science as an aspect of technological attitudes toward the world as resources to be managed certainly didn’t help him see the problem with this). Human authenticity is defined as fidelity to an origin. Ferry depicts this as denying that humans should have the power to define themselves as individuals, or rebel against conformity to a society that constricts them. Neither understood that these are separate domains of thought and utterly different problems. 

Working out the solutions to both is the task of contemporary environmental philosophy.

Roots Bloody Roots, Research Time, 04/10/2013

So today, I picked up a copy of Michel Serres’ Le Tiers-Instruit from my campus mailbox. Well, the English title is The Troubadour of Knowledge, but the subtleties of translation are difficult with Serres. I wasn’t kidding when I compared him to Marcel Proust and Albert Camus last time I wrote about him. Lately, Serres’ writing style reminds me of Nietzsche, particularly the Nietzsche of Also Sprach Zarathustra; difficult to translate, idiosyncratic, philosophical analysis through methods of narrative, allegory, and symbolism, all of which is underlaid with a profound understanding of scientific and mathematical principles and concepts. 

I picked up this book as a result of a small crisis of confidence as I was preparing my ecophilosophy book manuscript. My original composition had referred to Serres’ 1990 book Le Contrat Naturel (English translation 1995 as The Natural Contract), and this peculiar figure of Le Tiers-Instruit, literally translated as The Instructed Third or 3rd-Instructed. He described this figure using contrary terms that were difficult to parse. I included him in my own analysis of the ecologically/ecocentrically virtuous person as a starting point, but concluded that the tension of contradictions in the concept made it difficult to put into practice. I made a terrible facepalm when I discovered, during my revisions, that he had written a follow-up book that specifically explored that concept. Had Serres beaten me to a description of ecological virtue by two decades?

The more eccentric images I find of Serres on the internet,
the more I want to see how he crafts his public image in his
own country. I have a feeling he must have to compete with
Alain Badiou. If he does, I'm definitely Team Michel.

It seems that he hasn’t, happily for me. Le Tiers-Instruit seems, at least after reading the first third of the book as of this writing, seems a reiteration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, a philosophy of education that includes some elements of his earlier ecological thinking, but also moves toward the ideas he’d develop over the 1990s in philosophy of science. 

He has a very interesting analysis in the book so far, though, which I may incorporate into various parts of the ecophilosophy manuscript anyway. He discusses the human relationship with origins, which is very important to my own analyses in the utopias project. The more of Serres that I read, I’m increasingly convinced that if part of my philosophy career can include translating, or perhaps I should say transmogrifying his ideas to North American debates in ecology, ethics, politics, and theory of science, I’ll have done some good work.

I’ll discuss one aspect of these ideas abut origins so far today, and perhaps another aspect on Monday. One stereotype of French philosophy, at least still prevalent in North American philosophy/theory departments and programs, is that it’s dominated by voices, figures, and styles like Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Serres. But while these figures may have been influential in North America, during the 1980s, their works were totally renounced in France. The rise of socially conservative liberals* in the French intellectual scene (I’m thinking of Bernard Henri-Levy, Maurice Clavel, André Glucksmann, and most importantly for this post, Luc Ferry) vilified and repressed the country’s radical thinkers. The goal of the socially conservative liberals was to take back French universities for old-school enlightenment humanism. The radicals, they said, had hijacked the tradition of French philosophy to endorse moral relativism and defend totalitarianism on the grounds of preserving cultural differences. The only way to preserve democracy against this theoretical attack was to return to universalism and the image of one true unified reason.

* Yes, this is a thing that makes sense, at least conceptually. 

The French radical philosophers were incredibly complex and multifaceted in their thought. But the ideas that defined them, according to the socially conservative liberals, was that the Enlightenment tradition contained a hidden imperialism, the suspicion of anyone who was so convinced that they had discovered the truth that their mission was to spread this truth to all others, and that views which diverged from that truth had no value. Essentially, the idea was that Enlightenment humanism was a philosophy of a secular missionary. The socially conservative liberal response was not to respond to this critique intelligently, but to bury it. 

Serres’ The Natural Contract explored how to change our perspective so that our concerns grew beyond care for humans, and to care for nature, and followed this program to very ontologically deep and complex territory. Luc Ferry (Minister of Education for the conservative Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and President Jacques Chirac 2002-4) responded with The New Ecological Order. This book literally denounced all philosophies of environmentalism as totalitarianism, and environmental activists as fascists who would return humanity to medieval conditions by elevating the rights of insects, plants, and ecosystems to equal standing with humans.

As much as I dislike Luc Ferry as a philosopher, I have to
respect his frankly fantastic hair.

Ferry’s book was a remarkable critique insofar as people actually took it seriously. His attack on environmentalism was based on a ridiculous mistake. Bear in mind, I am simplifying his argument. The book was a well-researched documentation of the earliest self-identified ecologists, a group of German life scientists and geographers working during the Nazi era: one among them Walther Schoenichen, mangled their research into propaganda. Ecology's basic idea is that living organisms interact in deeply integrated relationships where destabilizing events could unpredictably cause cascading catastrophes. Nazis could make use of it for their romanticizing propaganda about the purity and authenticity of our Black Forest. Therefore, environmentalism (ecology's discoveries turned into activism) is an inherently fascist belief.

Ferry conceived of himself this way. He wrote as a defender of humanity along the classical Enlightenment model: humans are the only free creatures, the only creatures that can escape being determined by our birthplace and heritage, that can define themselves. He saw environmentalists as trying to root humanity in a specific place from which we should have no ambition to leave.

There are some environmentalists who have thought like this. But they’re the retrogrades of the philosophy. Serres picks up the matter in Le Tiers-Instruit, which I can conceive as a response to Ferry’s critique. Aside from The Natural Contract's more profound concern of redefining what humanity can be (which is the focus of my own ecophilosophy project), in the later book, Serres discusses how humans relate to their roots. We are born in a place, and we have no control over the initial conditions of our existence. We can depart from these initial conditions, but that genesis will always be a part of us. Even after we've left, we are still departing in reaction to the conditions of our origin. So even the Enlightenment vision of the man who can emancipate himself from his roots depends on those roots. They’re the launchpad from which he springs into his new life. We won’t have a complete understanding of human nature if we don’t include the potential for free self-development alongside our dependence on our conditions of origin. 

One of my favourite films is Five Easy Pieces. Jack Nicholson stars as a man who’s spent his entire life running away from his past and his current obligations. Even as he succeeds in starting multiple new lives with no reference to his origin (a Las Vegas pianoman for a showgirls revue, a roughneck oilman of the California interior) his birthplace and family history remains a part of him, the world whose gravity he’s trying to escape. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he’s drawn back. But the ability to free himself from his past depends on the nature of the past from which he runs.