Wednesday 17 March 2021

What I've Been Reading, February 2021

Links

Above the Fold

Usually I reserve this section for late breaking news. But this month I discovered a whole bunch of YouTube videos featuring David Gaeber, a notable anarchist scholar who passed away this past September. This isn't all of the videos I found, or even the best of them, it's just what I found time to watch.

  • Extinction and rebellion: the late David Graeber, by Peter Batt, YouTube
    "David argues that the political elite is 'useless', and could be easily dislodged by a rebellion with even vague aims."
  • David Graeber - The Bully's Pulpit: On the Elementary Structure of Domination, by David Graeber, YouTube—AudibleAnarchist
    "In this essay, Graeber links the psychological impulses of bullying—both of bullies and of passive observers of bullying—to structures of power inherent within hierarchical authority. He contends that from a young age, we are socialized to side with bullies and against victims, and we are socialized to see victims as either deserving their punishment or of having the same moral worth as the bullies themselves."
  • Where Did Money REALLY Come From? by David Graeber, YouTube—Deficit Owls
    "Professor David Graeber, anthropologist and author of 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years,' discussing the history of money and credit. The economics profession tends to teach that money arose from barter. However, anthropologists have been searching for 200 years and found absolutely no evidence for this. "
  • Graeber and Wengrow on the Myth of the Stupid Savage, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, YouTube
  • Graeber and Wengrow on the Myth of the Stupid Savage, by David Graeber, Jourtnal du Mauss
    "What if the kind of people we like to imagine so simple and innocent because they are free from rulers, governments, bureaucracies and ruling classes, were free not because they lack imagination, but because they are in fact more imaginative than us. We find it hard to imagine what a truly free society would look like; perhaps they do not have as much difficulty imagining what would be an arbitrary power and domination. Maybe they can not only imagine it, but also consciously organize their society in such a way that such things never happen."

Miscellaneous

The Lights Went Out in Texas

Structural Violence

  • Women Aren't Nags—We're Just Fed Up, by GEMMA HARTLEY, Harpers Bazaar
    "Emotional labor is the unpaid job men still don't understand."
    I found this on Facebook, read it, shared it and thought, yep, that's an example of structural violence against women. I was amazed that the men who commented were mainly apologists for the guy in the article. A guy who clearly didn't want to do his share of the relationship building work in his marriage.
  • Structural Violence, Wikipedia
  • Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, by David Graeber,
    In this book, David Graeber introduced me to this idea of structural violence in relationships between the oppressed and their oppressors. The following quote is to be found on pages 72 and 73 of the book:

"Such a theoretical emphasis opens the way to a theory of the relation of power not with knowledge, but with ignorance and stupidity. Because violence, particularly structural violence, where all the power is on one side, creates ignorance. If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state.

Contrary to popular belief, bureaucracies do not create stupidity. They are ways of managing situations that are already inherently stupid because they are, ultimately, based on the arbitrariness of force.

Ultimately this should lead to a theory of the relation of violence and the imagination. Why is it that the folks on the bottom (the victims of structural violence) are always imagining what it must be like for the folks on top (the beneficiaries of structural violence), but it almost never occurs to the folks on top to wonder what it might be like to be on the bottom? Human beings being the sympathetic creatures that they are this tends to become one of the main bastions of any system of inequality—the downtrodden actually care about their oppressors, at least, far more than their oppressors care about them—but this seems itself to be an effect of structural violence. "

Somewhere else (I haven't been about to find the quote), Graeber explains that a certain amount work is involved in any relationship that doesn't involve oppression, as those involved strive to understand each other. If you hear someone on one side of a relationship talking about how it is impossible to understand the other, it is a sure sign that they are "on top" and don't have to do the work because they can simply tell those on the other side to shut up and do what they are told. Those who are "on the bottom" develop, as a defense mechanism, a highly refined understanding on those who are above them. You see this between men and women, bosses and workers, masters and slaves, and so on.

Coronavirus

  • We Hate You Now—The Hardest Problem of The Aftertimes, by Quinn Norton, Medium—Surviving COVID-19
  • The Differences Between the Vaccines Matter, by Hilda Bastian, The Atlantic
    "Yes, all of the COVID-19 vaccines are very good. No, they’re not all the same."
    "'The idea that people can’t handle nuance,' Jha tweeted at the end of February, 'it’s paternalistic. And untrue.' I couldn’t agree more. The principle of treating people like adults is fundamental. We don’t need to exaggerate. Talking about the trade-offs between different medicines and vaccines is often complicated, but we do it all the time—and we can do it with COVID-19 vaccines too."

Capitalism, Communism, Anarchy

The New Fascism, the Far-Right and Antifa

I hear a lot of well educated people saying that the people some of us are calling fascists don't meet all the criteria for being "real" fascists. Others have even accused us of calling anyone we disagree with a fascist. I predict that a few decades (maybe just a few years) from now those same people will be saying they wish they hadn't been quite so fussy with their definitions, and had acted sooner to oppose these "new fascists", even if they weren't identical to the fascists of the twentieth century.

Collapse

  • Overconsumption, Wikipedia
    "Overconsumption is a situation where resource use has outpaced the sustainable capacity of the ecosystem. A prolonged pattern of overconsumption leads to environmental degradation and the eventual loss of resource bases."
  • Human Overpopulation, Wikipedia
    "Human overpopulation (or particularly human population overshoot) refers to a human population being too large in a way that their society or environment cannot readily sustain them. It can be identified with regional human populations, but is generally discussed as an issue of world population. Overpopulation is caused by human population growth. In recent centuries, human population growth has become exponential, due to the green revolution and other changes in technology that reduce mortality. Experts concerned by overpopulation argue that overpopulation causes overconsumption and subsequently overshoot of natural resources. This leads to exceeding the carrying capacity of a geographical area (or Earth as a whole) and damages to the environment. Human overpopulation is often discussed as part of other population concerns such as demographic push, depopulation, or even ecological or societal collapse and human extinction."

Genetic Engineering

Before jumping to the erroneous conclusion that this section was paid for by Monsanto, stop for a moment and understand that organic agriculture/food is a multi-billion dollar per year industry that relies on fear to get people to buy its product. Millions of dollars are spent to convince you that non-organic food is dangerous. In fact both conventionally grown and organic foods are equally safe. Sadly neither method of agriculture is even remotely substainable.

  • Panic-free GMOs, A Grist Special Series by Nathanael Johnson
    "It’s easy to get information about genetically modified food. There are the dubious anti-GM horror stories that recirculate through social networks. On the other side, there’s the dismissive sighing, eye-rolling, and hand patting of pro-GM partisans. But if you just want a level-headed assessment of the evidence in plain English, that’s in pretty short supply. Fortunately, you’ve found the trove."
    A series of articles that does a pretty good job of presenting the facts about GMOs. I plan to include one article from this series here each month.
  • Golden apple or forbidden fruit? Following the money on GMOs, by Nathanael Johnson, Grist

Dancing on Graves

  • Rush Limbaugh Made America Worse, by Alex Shephard, The New Republic
    "The racist, sexist radio host played a pivotal role in injecting cruelty and conspiracy into conservative mass media."
    "He thrived on making people angrier and more alienated, on obscuring the truth, and rewarding meanness at every turn."

Debunking Resources

These are of such importance that I've decide to leave them here on an ongoing basis.

Science

Lacking an Owner's Manual

The human body"/mind/spirit doesn't come with an owner's manual, and we continually struggle to figure out how best to operate them.

  • Is the Western way of raising kids weird? by Kelly Oake, BBC—Weird West | Parenting
    From sleeping in separate beds to their children to transporting them in prams, Western parents have some unusual ideas about how to raise them.
    The key to thinking outside the Western box might be to remember that babies are not out to manipulate us, no matter how tempting it might be to see it that way at 3am. "What we really need with babies is to stop thinking about them as hard-to-please bosses," says Dutta. "They're helpless little beings that have come into this world, and we must look at them with empathy and compassion."
  • 15 Mini Things That Can Instantly Make You Less Likable, by John Roe, medium—Mind Cafe

    • Refugees and Migration

    Poverty, Homeless People, Minimum Wage, UBI, Health Care, Affordable Housing

    Education

    Humour

    Books

    Fiction

    I finally finished the Emberverse series this month, a total of 15 novels.

    Non-Fiction

    Still reading A People's History of the United States. Still highly recommended.

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    Monday 8 March 2021

    Collapse you Say? Part 7, Needs and Wants, Human Nature, Politics

    Reflection
    Tree on the South Pier
    Kincardine Harbour

    In my last post we looked at two major problems facing mankind: overpopulation and overconsumption. I used the I=PAT equation (Impact=Population X Affluence X Technology) as a framework to hang this discussion on.

    For a long lived species such as ours, there is a lengthy delay between reducing the rate at which our population grows, and any actually reduction of the population. At best, if the demographic transition keeps spreading in the developing world, it will be many decades before our population stops growing. During that time our impact will exceed the carrying capacity of the planet by a much greater extent than it does at present. In all likelihood this will result in at least a parftial dieoff of the human population. We need to take action to mitigate such a dieoff. I believe we should still do everything we can to reduce population growth (excepting morally abhorrent things), but we also need to look elsewhere for something that can be done to reduce our impact in the short run.

    Many have turned to technology as the most promising way to reduce our impact. Sadly, no real solutions have been forth coming. The oft promised "decoupling" hasn't happened, and there is good reason to think that it won't, ever. The only remaining alternative to reduce our impact would be to reduce consumption (affluence). And this would be especially effective if applied first to the richest segtments of our global society. It's clear that the people who are most seriously overconsuming don't want to change, but I believe that we must, and that we can, do so.

    Before we can take a close look at what drives consumption, and the continuous growth of consumption, I think we need to look at several touchy subjects—human needs and wants, human nature, and politics. So that's what I'll be talking about today.

    Needs and Wants

    If we are proposing a reduction in consumption, it seems natural to talk about needs versus wants. The idea being that overconsumption results from people trying to satisfy desires that are not actually needs even in the most generous definition of the word. The resulting consumption being something which they can perfectly well do without.

    Often when I hear discussion of this subject, it's part of a criticism of poor folks' money management skills, by someone who knows little or nothing of what it's like to be poor. What I want to do here is just the opposite—to criticize rich people, who are champion overconsumers and drive the rest of us to consume more in order to support their efforts to amass more wealth.

    Figure 1, Consumption versus Income

    I've included this diagram in several posts in this series, and I'll probably use it again in the future, because it is so central to our overconsumption problem. Keep in mind that all the people represented in this diagram—poor, rich and in between—have the same basic needs.

    It seems to me that the bottom decile, maybe the bottom two, are not having even their most basic needs met—many are suffering from malnutrition and don't have access to clean water. They are in need of some help from the rest of us, and their situation is so dire that even a small amount of help would make a big difference. At the other end of the scale, it also seems clear that those in the top decile are overconsuming by a large amount, and that they could significantly reduce their consumption while still satisfying all their needs and even some of their wants.

    We must realize that people legitimately do have many needs. These have often been portrayed in Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, illustrated as a pyramid:

    Figure 2: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

    I'd advise reading the Wikipedia article on this before taking it as gospel, as many refinements have been suggested since the mid-twentieth century when Maslow originally came out with this. It turns out that the pyramid representation isn't even his. Others have suggested this might be a better representation of our needs:

    Figure 3: Alternative graphic to the Pyramid of Needs

    I hear many people talking about needs as things like water, food, warmth, rest, and safety, while discounting needs higher on the pyramid as luxuries. But those higher needs are just as real, though perhaps of less concern in the very short run. In the long run, if they aren't met, it will cause problems just as certainly as not satisfying the more basic needs. It seems to me that the reason for having a society in the first place is to provide a way for people to satisfy all their needs. Any society that doesn't do so is failing in a major way. Note that I didn't say society should provide peoples' needs, but rather provide a way for them to provide their own needs.

    People have a very strong need to be part of a community that function of the basis of mutual aid, where we can contribute by helping others and be sure that we will get help when we need it. This provides for the needs on top three levels of the pyramid as well as the bottom two. And satisfying the needs on the higher levels of the pyramid can often be done without increasing the consumption of material goods, or our impact on the planet.

    But in the developed world, especially in North America, where physiological needs are often very well met, our society is failing to provide for those higher needs. Individualism is over emphasized, and we are left with a feeling that we are missing something. Capitalistic marketing efforts take advantage of this, generating artificial desires for consumer goods and services. These should be viewed not as needs or wants, but as things that are being forced on us for the benefit of others.

    Human Nature

    A little thought brings me to the conclusion that when we are talking about needs and wants, we are really discussing human nature. Very frequently, I am told that you can't change human nature and that some aspects of this unchangeable nature are the source of both our population and consumption problems.

    I don't agree—humans can adapt to live in many different cultures, and much of what people see as aspects of human nature are actually adaptations to the culture we are living in. If we were living in a different culture, those adaptations would be different and people looking at us would get different ideas about what human nature really is.

    As I said in my last post, I don't see that the amount of food available to people directly determines population growth rates, especially reductions in growth. It seems that various cultural and economic factors determine the desired family size and are currently causing a decrease in the growth rate, albeit not quickly enough.

    It's the same with overconsumption—greed, materialism, toxic individualism and so forth are adaptations to modern consumer culture. Basic human nature is not the main reason for growing consumption, at least not in the straight forward way that many people imagine.

    If I was asked to identify the essential, underlying elements of human nature, I would point to our adaptability and our skill at working together co-operatively.

    At some point early in our evolution as human beings, our ancestors developed a resistance to primate-style sexual and political dominance and took up communistic and assertively egalitarian social arrangements. The term usually applied to this lifestyle is primitive communism. We lived like this for most of the 2 million years since we became recognizably human.

    If you grew up in a highly individualistic modern society, this must seem odd. Why would our ancestors have chosen such a lifestyle? There must have been some evolutionary advantage, but evolution works on individuals. That is, changes happen at the individual level, and changes that benefit the individual, so that they are are better able to survive and reproduce, will accumulate in the population. How could such a lifestyle do so? It was focused, after all, on the success of the group and actively discouraged single individuals from attaining a preferred position. That's what "assertively egalitarian" means.

    Well, it turns out that this kind of an approach does lead to better outcomes for the individuals in the group as well as the group as a whole. Individual human beings do much better in groups based on mutual aid than we do as isolated individuals. Even if those idividuals are strong enough and capable enough to get by on their own. And in the course of living in this way for so long, we evolved strong skills in areas such as empathy, communication and co-operation which made the lifestyle work even better. We also came to need the closeness and comradery found in such groups. Knowing that we are needed and can rely on having our own needs met is important to human beings.

    Someone, I am sure, will accuse me of romanticizing the life of hunter gatherers. I am well aware of the hardships of that life and have no desire to go back to it. Especially since there are few habitats left on this planet where hunting and gathering could be pursued successfully. Certainly not by eight billion people, probably not by more than a very few million.

    Nor am I indulging in the "appeal to nature" fallacy. But there is something called an "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" where you consider the circumstances in which a species has evolved in order to generate hypotheses about what might be best for that species today. Of course, a hypothesis is only valid if it can be tested and proven correct. From what I've read, most of what I am saying here about human nature is part of the accepted scientific consensus.

    Small, close knit, egalitarian communistic groups were our evolutionary environment. Outside of that environment, you may see dysfunction or evolutionary mismatch. Now, humans are nothing if not adaptable and we can survive in environments wildly different from those where we evolved, but that does not mean we will thrive. You see people behaving badly all the time, but I suspect that in most cases it's because they are struggling to adapt to bad situations. Which our society provides in abundance.

    Politics

    I believe our level of consumption, and of economic growth, has to do with the way our society is organized. To a large extent that amounts to economics and politics.

    It is only fair, I suppose, to warn you up front about my own politics. I am what people these days are calling an "ancom", an anarcho-communist or anarchist-communist. Both of those words are likely to provoke a negative reaction, but bear with me. It is my opinion that these sort of political/economic relationship are best suited to human nature.

    The primitive communism I mentioned in the last section was so successful that it wasn't until a few thousand years after we switched over from hunting-gathering to agriculture and about 1000 years after we started to live in cities that we began to create hierarchies and develop the concept of property. In the moment, this no doubt seemed like a reasonable response to the challenges of living together in larger groups. Especially to those at the tops of the hierarchies and in possession of the property. For everybody else, probably not so much. But by the time the disadvantages were clear, the lower classes were no longer in control of the situation.

    It is my opinion that this is a dead end that humanity has pursued for the last few thousand years, and which has lead to many of the problems we are facing today. Eventually—soon it is to be hoped—we will give up on it and return to some form of anarcho-communism, the lifestyle to which we are best suited. I'll have more to say about that in my next post.

    It is interesting to note that even inside the most capitalistic of enterprises, when people work together in teams they usually behave in a cooperative, egalitarian, one would almost say "communistic" way. I mention this from personal experience. For many years I worked as a "power maintenance electrician" for the grid company here in Ontario. We worked in small teams of tradesmen, and while our relationships with supervision and management were often fraught, the workers got along well for the most part and enjoyed working together.

    I do know you've been taught that anarchists and communists are the worst sorts of people.

    But is that really so? To quote the late David Graeber, an anthropologist and notable anarchist scholar, "Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order and organization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everything up. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But it’s one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous."

    That quote is from a short essay by Graeber that is really worth reading. You may find that you are already an anarchist without knowing it. Of course, many people today are libertarians, (capitalist-anarchists), which involves caring very little for one's fellow man, and a great deal for one's own success. That's why I think it is important to add communism into the mix.

    Many people have the wrong idea about communism too, based on the 20th century totalitarian regimes who called themselves communists, but who, for the most part, never managed to achieve anything close to it.

    The goal of a communistic society is to provide for the needs of all its members by having them work together, to the best of their abilities, to achieve that goal. From everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their needs. All this with no one being exploited or oppressed, and no one doing any exploiting or oppressing. Large scale productive properties are owned by the community and there is no private property (property owned for the purpose of making a profit). There is personal property—things like clothing, shoes, toothbrushes, etc., and depending on what the community decides is best, perhaps even things like tools, housing and garden plots. Anarcho-communism does this without a state, decisions being made by consensus among the members of the community.

    While there certainly are "large A" anarchists who would advocate violent revolution to achieve these ends, I am "small a" anarchist. We just want to be left alone by the state so we can get on with developing the sort of society that we consider ideal.

    I do realize that this will not be easy. It will involve a much more horizontal and direct type of democracy, with decisions made by consensus, which can be quite challenging if you've never done it before. The feminist movement has done a lot of work on teaching people how to succeed at this. There are all kinds of good books on consensus decision making and courses are available to help you get started at it or hone your already existing skills. It will also involve something closer to living and working communally than most people are accustomed to today. This can be a trial for those who didn't grow up doing it, but it can be learned, even by people from nuclear families or those who have spent much of their lives as isolated individuals. Both consensus decision making and community life can very rewarding.

    Having covered these issues in some detail, I think I am finally ready to look at over-consumption, growth, capitalism and hierarchies in my next post.

    I'll wrap up today's post with a comment on collapse, the subject of this series of posts. Both overpopulation and overconsumption are real problems, of such magnitute and severity that a successful solution is unlikely. It would be smart while working on such a solution to also be preparing for collapse, getting ready to adapt to what most of us will see as continually worsening conditions. The goods news is that reducing consumption at the personal level will also be a good start at adapting to collapse.


    Links to the rest of this series of posts: Collapse, you say?

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