Well, happy christmas, hanukkah, kwanzuh and festivus everyone. Hope it's been swell for everyone.
Some interesting and challenging posts over at Ted's page. Most recently, he asks whether GA/primitivist folks are too serious or not serious enough in thinking about the coming 'end of the world' or whatever you call it or it ends up being.
It's funny- the reason I got mixed up in the anti-civ blog folks I'm most interested in now is because I felt the anarcho-primitivist folks I had been reading were too serious. These past few days, I was looking through old 'Species Traitor' issues, and they are definitely very serious. Now, I certainly understand why and I think a big part of why that is is because writing in these contexts is supposed to be iconoclastic and infuriating and inspire readers to move, to act. But that didn't do it for me. I mean, Derrick Jensen inspires me to act out of love and rage, but I don't think I can ever be militant. And the beauty of what he says is, I, personally, don't have to. There are talents and proclivities unique to me that I can use. The militant actions are probably important and probably need to (or at least likely will) happen, but only a very small subset of people are going to do that. His main point is diversity of tactics- our only responsibility is not to condemn those people or to abandon them. That's maybe uncomfortable for some people- I don't know. Maybe some can condemn them- good cop, bad cop sort of thing. Whatever.
But really, I think the idea of openness and diversity is so important. I know Frank Black really emphasizes dropping out, whatever that may mean. Aaron and Sara address the importance of child-rearing in raising beautiful human beings able to express and experience compassion and empathy, and who will be the trailblazers of the post-civilized world. Ran and Dan I think both deal with mental decolonization and helping us free our minds so our bodies may follow. (And I don't mean to pigeonhole anyone- apologies to anyone offended by these characterizations). The point is- there's room enough for all of this, and lots of ideas and expressions and paths. Obviously. People say that a lot, but maybe it bears repeating.
I feel like my mental space has been so much more comfortable since I stopped trying to find the answer, and stopped looking for the thing everyone out to be doing. The Kantian 'Categorical Imperative' is so foolish and such a civilized vice: act as if what you were doing were to be done by everyone, and thereby determine its ethical nature. Slipped in there is the idea that one's actions can or should be universally repeated. I used to get upset and think that when people advocated different courses of action or different ethical values for different people or circumstances, that they were using a 'double standard.' Nonsense, because there's no double. Situations, obviously are unique and particular, and needn't have hard and fast rules of decorum.
I think that there are certain things that are abhorrent, that are good and bad, as well as good and evil, but I know them when I see them, and don't think too much about them, out of recognition that this ends up being just word games and intellectual masturbation, and I trust myself enough to know I'm able to make judgments and assessments as they come up, and I don't need a blueprint devised earlier for navigating unseen water (sorry-mixed metaphor).
Anyway, that's something that makes sense to me- diversity and acceptance.
Going back to 'Species Traitor' for a minute, it dawned on me just how contracted my thinking was when I first was introduced to it. I think I really felt like I had just found the answer, the new right perspective, and that was what was up. It was challenging and radical, but I didn't realize, still just substitutive, maintaining the infrastructure. I read Omnivore's Dilemma, recently, and in one part, he's talking about 'big organic' versus 'little organic.' With 'big organic,' that is, industrial, massified organic agriculture, they do 'substitutive' farming, simply replacing the inputs of industrial non-organic farms with organic inputs. So, rather than natural gas based fertilizer, they use manure shipped in from hundreds of miles away often. Or, instead of a banned pesticide, they use a non-banned pesticide, or what have you. Little organic, though, the real small farmers, and the ones we like to think are providing us with most of our food, but who probably aren't unless we're very active about making it so, the farmers who really do integrate themselves to their ecosystems, and even in some cases, leave the land more fertile, more repaired, more healed than before, to these farmers the input-output model is irrelevent. They're not simply substituting ingredients and seeing the land simplistically and as a machine. They're rebuilding an ecosystem and a self-managed, almost permaculture-like area of food generation. I think this land is just about always less diverse than what was grazed over to make it, but it's a step away from monoculture in the right direction. And to return to the analogy- I like to think that my thinking is more like the little organic farmer now, for whom simply substituting the appropriate thoughts into the existing framework is insufficient. I like to think that I'm interested in moving beyond that now, and expanding my worldview and all of that.
In all of college, I had two or three 'wow' moments, in which my mind was blown. I mean, legitimately new ideas were offered to me, ones that i never could have come to within the existing logical framework that I'd been operating under. In the past maybe four months or so, particularly reading Ran, I had a half dozen or more of those. That's what's up for me. Just having my mind blown and thinking not so mechanistically. That's inspiring. That's moving.
I still get caught up a lot being resistant to new ideas sometimes, but I try to be more open to them. It helps that, after a while being recalcitrant and being proved wrong by people close to me, I've had to stop being quite so pushy and insistent about my right ideas. But it's also helped me to find people who can both challenge some of the ideas I'm drawn to, and acknowledge the logic of others. It helps show me that anti-civ ideas, in particular, aren't monolithic and that someone can disagree in ways that aren't dismissive. (See also Jason's post about David Abram's 'In the Spell of the Sensuous.')
Some interesting and challenging posts over at Ted's page. Most recently, he asks whether GA/primitivist folks are too serious or not serious enough in thinking about the coming 'end of the world' or whatever you call it or it ends up being.
It's funny- the reason I got mixed up in the anti-civ blog folks I'm most interested in now is because I felt the anarcho-primitivist folks I had been reading were too serious. These past few days, I was looking through old 'Species Traitor' issues, and they are definitely very serious. Now, I certainly understand why and I think a big part of why that is is because writing in these contexts is supposed to be iconoclastic and infuriating and inspire readers to move, to act. But that didn't do it for me. I mean, Derrick Jensen inspires me to act out of love and rage, but I don't think I can ever be militant. And the beauty of what he says is, I, personally, don't have to. There are talents and proclivities unique to me that I can use. The militant actions are probably important and probably need to (or at least likely will) happen, but only a very small subset of people are going to do that. His main point is diversity of tactics- our only responsibility is not to condemn those people or to abandon them. That's maybe uncomfortable for some people- I don't know. Maybe some can condemn them- good cop, bad cop sort of thing. Whatever.
But really, I think the idea of openness and diversity is so important. I know Frank Black really emphasizes dropping out, whatever that may mean. Aaron and Sara address the importance of child-rearing in raising beautiful human beings able to express and experience compassion and empathy, and who will be the trailblazers of the post-civilized world. Ran and Dan I think both deal with mental decolonization and helping us free our minds so our bodies may follow. (And I don't mean to pigeonhole anyone- apologies to anyone offended by these characterizations). The point is- there's room enough for all of this, and lots of ideas and expressions and paths. Obviously. People say that a lot, but maybe it bears repeating.
I feel like my mental space has been so much more comfortable since I stopped trying to find the answer, and stopped looking for the thing everyone out to be doing. The Kantian 'Categorical Imperative' is so foolish and such a civilized vice: act as if what you were doing were to be done by everyone, and thereby determine its ethical nature. Slipped in there is the idea that one's actions can or should be universally repeated. I used to get upset and think that when people advocated different courses of action or different ethical values for different people or circumstances, that they were using a 'double standard.' Nonsense, because there's no double. Situations, obviously are unique and particular, and needn't have hard and fast rules of decorum.
I think that there are certain things that are abhorrent, that are good and bad, as well as good and evil, but I know them when I see them, and don't think too much about them, out of recognition that this ends up being just word games and intellectual masturbation, and I trust myself enough to know I'm able to make judgments and assessments as they come up, and I don't need a blueprint devised earlier for navigating unseen water (sorry-mixed metaphor).
Anyway, that's something that makes sense to me- diversity and acceptance.
Going back to 'Species Traitor' for a minute, it dawned on me just how contracted my thinking was when I first was introduced to it. I think I really felt like I had just found the answer, the new right perspective, and that was what was up. It was challenging and radical, but I didn't realize, still just substitutive, maintaining the infrastructure. I read Omnivore's Dilemma, recently, and in one part, he's talking about 'big organic' versus 'little organic.' With 'big organic,' that is, industrial, massified organic agriculture, they do 'substitutive' farming, simply replacing the inputs of industrial non-organic farms with organic inputs. So, rather than natural gas based fertilizer, they use manure shipped in from hundreds of miles away often. Or, instead of a banned pesticide, they use a non-banned pesticide, or what have you. Little organic, though, the real small farmers, and the ones we like to think are providing us with most of our food, but who probably aren't unless we're very active about making it so, the farmers who really do integrate themselves to their ecosystems, and even in some cases, leave the land more fertile, more repaired, more healed than before, to these farmers the input-output model is irrelevent. They're not simply substituting ingredients and seeing the land simplistically and as a machine. They're rebuilding an ecosystem and a self-managed, almost permaculture-like area of food generation. I think this land is just about always less diverse than what was grazed over to make it, but it's a step away from monoculture in the right direction. And to return to the analogy- I like to think that my thinking is more like the little organic farmer now, for whom simply substituting the appropriate thoughts into the existing framework is insufficient. I like to think that I'm interested in moving beyond that now, and expanding my worldview and all of that.
In all of college, I had two or three 'wow' moments, in which my mind was blown. I mean, legitimately new ideas were offered to me, ones that i never could have come to within the existing logical framework that I'd been operating under. In the past maybe four months or so, particularly reading Ran, I had a half dozen or more of those. That's what's up for me. Just having my mind blown and thinking not so mechanistically. That's inspiring. That's moving.
I still get caught up a lot being resistant to new ideas sometimes, but I try to be more open to them. It helps that, after a while being recalcitrant and being proved wrong by people close to me, I've had to stop being quite so pushy and insistent about my right ideas. But it's also helped me to find people who can both challenge some of the ideas I'm drawn to, and acknowledge the logic of others. It helps show me that anti-civ ideas, in particular, aren't monolithic and that someone can disagree in ways that aren't dismissive. (See also Jason's post about David Abram's 'In the Spell of the Sensuous.')
posted by Archangel at 4:47 PM
1 Comments:
If I've learned anything in my life it is to listen to someone's point of view and then stew on it a bit. I won't always agree, but I do try to at least think it over. I am always up for learning something new. The only negative thing I have to say about learning new things is that I am wary about "new and improved" or "newly discovered" or "new information" type new things. In order to stand out from the herd or to gain a marketing advantage, you have to be "new". That stuff makes me gag. Apart from that, I'm up for anything.
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