Creation

Human life is complex.  It stands the test of time.  And any attempt at a systematic construction of thought about human life is also a deconstruction too.  Whatever magnificent structure we construct to occlude the slow slide into ruin that is the unyielding process of time on our minds, bodies and the soul of our civilization, those structures will be subject to the same rules that govern the slow passing away that all parts of the universe undergo.  In other words, time passes.  But the bulwark against time's destruction is memory, creation, innovation, and all the other things we human beings are so good at.  If you can implant one thought into the mind of another human being, where it takes root, then time hasn't passed at all, merely slid around that though like a rock in a stream unmoving.  In other words, we human beings are good at conquering the ravages of time.  If you wonder what will last after you are gone as a human being, rest assured it will be in something that you have created. 

The generality of this moment

Taking in the generality of the moment

November 24, 2022

In this moment, there is so much reality to see so long as you can stay beneath the surface, which is full of illusion.  Continuing from the previous, consider this, for instance: with this whole Trump thing, whether we're talking about the latest or any in the long line of people who have tried to check him by legal means, the problem has always been that his opponents on the prosecutorial side have almost always had a checkered past of going after people who haven't deserved it, or not going after people who did deserve it.  The latest prosecutor has brought enormous prosecutorial power to bear on the New York Times in an effort to get them to disclose confidential sources.  Which prompts the question: will this prosecutor be equally aggressive against Trump?  The Trump paradigm is full of people whom normally you wouldn't say did much wrong, sitting on the sidelines where they have been put, baffled as to why they were deemed enemies of the state so forcefully before, while Trump can't be got.  This should be a signpost pointing to what is really in contention during the Trump era. 

This is also a story about the tragedy of the commons

This Is Also A Story About The Tragedy Of The Commons. 

November 23, 2022

Nobody can live up to the ideal of moral purity held by any group.  The point of having ideals is to act as correct as possible in every situation, not only when it's convenient.  When it comes to animal rights for example, the point is not to start all being vegan and liberate all animals held in captivity.  It's not false that it's from owning livestock and domesticated animals that the notion of death being a part of life entered human consciousness in the long ago.  Some uncomfortable but true philosophical arguments place the origin of executive authority theories in the politics of the sheep-fold and the slaughterhouse.  The point of animal rights discourses is to improve the conditions of life for domesticated animals.  There's a lot of weird facts about animal domestication that problematize our discourse about nature and our relationship with the natural world.  Several species of rabbit were transplanted to Australia to be hunted in the wild, but having no natural predators, outran their bounds and denuded the landscape.  Parts of Australia were made a desert by these imported rabbits.  The comparison between European rabbits and the European settlers is besides the point I am making now.  No amount of hunting could control the imported rabbit population, and now the government tries to control the rabbit population thru' their infection with rare and novel diseases.  It was a thoughtless sort of quasi-domestication that caused Australia's rabbit problem in the first place.  But now there's a paradox.  It would be thoughtless to allow the population of imported European rabbits to multiply unchecked (and it's thoughtless to imagine that that would be some sort of idyll or Eden for rabbits), but, it is equally thoughtless to be infecting them with diseases just to control their population.  And it's not beside the point that germ warfare as is now used against the rabbits was introduced to the region by the germ warfare used by belligerents in the Pacific Theater of WWII.  It was reported many times to have been used by the Japanese against Chinese cities, but the use of germ warfare against the European rabbits of Australia corroborates reports that the Allies used germ warfare too.  A common refrain that you will hear when you look into things is that the facts of the world are complicated. Australia's rabbits tell a story about the ecological consequences of transplanting ideologies.  But they tell a story about simple human thoughtlessness, too.  This is also a story about the tragedy of the commons. 

Nature and self-nature

Nature and self-nature

November 22, 2022

An interesting thought was uncovered in the 12/8/22 edition of the NYRB. Martha Nussbaum wrote that wilderness and wild spaces "offer people a genuine good that has vanished elsewhere." And the appropriate response is to ask why is that? - and what is that good? It is undoubtable that Nature offers people a consolation. In fact, that might be why people seek it out these days, through these wild spaces. I am also reminded of a certain American professor who cheekily mentions that "religion is the opium of the people," which is the famous phrase of Marx, is no longer true, because "opium is the opium of the people. It works better." I am reminded of this because to Americans, Nature stands in for what to Europeans is religion. American philosophy, in its earliest form, is Nature philosophy. Emerson and Thoreau are examples. Nature is to Americans, what is still there even when you are totally alone, and what you can assimilate into yourself at the most basic level, to grow in your own self-nature. It's the origin of a verdant, and not a desert, philosophy. It's this expansive destiny from the vaster interstices connecting our society, originating from the verdant ecosystem out of which American civilization sprouted, that allows Nature to take root in the in-between places of our way of life, and give rise to our thought. In this period of intense challenges to our ways of life, it is natural to turn to Nature again, to fill the void in our understanding. But do we turn to Nature now to find answers, or to find the unknown mystery, the sense that we don't have the answers? Is this a revanchism, an attempt to return to a mental state of nihilism, which means, a beginning point? This is the origin of the dark suspicions of our age. It is now that we have to cut a fine line of distinction on this paradigm. To seek Nature for a sense of mystery, can also be for the purpose, the objective, of explaining the world and way we live in it, in terms of mysteries, directly to our subconscious.

The mirror of the built environment, part two

Our built environment never makes as much sense as it does on a suddenly warm day in November, during a snow-melt.

The mirror of the built environment

November 16, 2022

Our built environment, says a lot about our innermost, thoughts and feelings.

One of the subjects that has to be broached, tho' with the utmost delicacy in the face of climate change, and geopolitical instability, in order to secure the future we want, and not the mess we have, is to rethink our built environment for a new era. 

In Ancient Rome, before Cicero's time, there was a ritual stone over which water was ceremonially poured on some occasions. After Cicero's time, the same word for that stone had become the word for a stone that sat at the bottom of a deep well in the ground, that was used for storing the grain harvests, where its role was to mediate between the insides of the earth and out, even, between life and death. The same word, had completely become a different meaning, in the span of about one lifetime. 

We are staring down a short path to a completely different relationship to the built environment too. Climate and technological change will bring with a huge changes to what we make with our hands in our tools in this new modern age.

Art, also, has changed. Art has a fundamental and inseparable connection to architecture. A recent and very interesting notion has been floating around academia, especially in the writings of Slavoj Zizek, that the age of modernist art was really the linchpin, holding diametrically Leftist and Rightist politics in opposition to the other. The keystone of this discourse is that architecture can profoundly change our perceptions of both our inner and outer worlds. As the modernists used architecture to further political tension in a period of ideological warfare, we could nowadays use architecture to further establish consciousness about the natural world and climate change. Architecture, of course, has always been to some degree about mimicking the architecture of the natural world, but we could more consciously, through living buildings, and other eco-conscious art and architecture, inspire a new mental age of Climate and Nature-consciousness in the human condition. Some of this work is already starting, but, wouldn't it be wonderful, if, during our own lifetimes, we could see the change in the way we think, mirrored in the very environment we walk around in?

Elon Musk, the nightmare scenario of.

November 14, 2022

I want to level for a second about Elon musk.

There's no more conflicted figure in modern society, I don't think, especially at this moment.

On the one hand, nearly everything that we expect a future society to require, he's trying to do, from electric cars to the whole Internet of things, thing. The neural stuff seems a bit out there, but if you've read contemporary Neal Stephenson books, and so on, it's not that far from what Futurists seem to expect us to focus on in the coming decades, like it or believe it, or not.

On the other hand, everything that he seems to be creating, seems to require the same labor conditions that are emblematic of what got us into a dire environmental situation in the first place.

It did used to be that making and manufacturing an electric or hybrid car required more CO2 emissions, than would justify having the car just on the basis of the CO2 emissions alone. Now that isn't so much the case, but it seems like Tesla has gotten there pretty much at the expense of making working conditions at their plants practically inhuman in the fatigue their workers are required to endure. 

I want to pull back a bit from asserting that Elon Musk’s voracious appetite for new stuff has exceeded the boundaries of what's necessary to be assembled, into a proof of concept, for what society would need in "a future."

In many ways, Elon Musk is absolute proof that the future can be made. He's a hopeful figure if you're a capitalist.

But simultaneously he's gotten us started down the path of least resistance, when it comes to the means for which a future will be required. If all it takes is forcing the human body to work through immense fatigue, "powering through," as if it were a personal trainer prescribing the future to us, that leaves little room for the finesse required to make the future work for everybody. 

As is, there isn't a proof of concept that the future is possible for everybody, but only proof that the future is now, if you are wealthy enough to be a consistent consumer of Elon Musk's creations.

Musk isn't the only creator of future technologies who plays this role - of concierge to the rich. The technological divide is becoming a class issue.

What happens when these largely unaffordable technologies become basic requirements for a decent life?