Guaranteed to be the best single ad that you will see for visualizing the extent and seriousness of climate change (aka global warming) and the planetary significance of the problem as it confronts us all as a species. As Asimov clearly articulates, a problem that affects a species necessitates a species-wide solution. This, if anything, and arguably more than anything, should unite the human species on this planet to work together in serious and concerted measure for the mitigation of the climate crisis.
Sunday, September 15, 2019
Isaac Asimov on Climate Change
Guaranteed to be the best single ad that you will see for visualizing the extent and seriousness of climate change (aka global warming) and the planetary significance of the problem as it confronts us all as a species. As Asimov clearly articulates, a problem that affects a species necessitates a species-wide solution. This, if anything, and arguably more than anything, should unite the human species on this planet to work together in serious and concerted measure for the mitigation of the climate crisis.
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
Social Morality, Empathic Anthropology: A Critical Review (2015)
Works Reviewed
Joao Biehl, 2004. Life of the mind: The interface of psychopharmaceuticals, domestic economies, and social abandonment. American Ethnologist 31.4: 475-96
Peter Redfield, 2005. Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis. Cultural Anthropology 20.3: 328-61.
C. Jason Throop, 2008. On the Problem of Empathy: The Case of Yap, Federated States of Micronesia. Ethos 36.4: 402-26.
“For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”
—Michel Foucault (1978)
This essay presents a critical review of socio-political formations of morality and an ethics of empathy—what might be understood as an empathic anthropology—as discussed in three ethnographic accounts, two of which explicitly address questions of bio-power, humanitarianism, and care (Biehl, “Life of the Mind” and Redfield, “Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis”), the other which focuses more on questions of empathy and social articulations and mediations of “shared feeling” and connections to a common or at least communally intelligible sense of self (Throop, “On the Problem of Empathy”). The main common thread that links these accounts is the matter of human value and worth as an ethical subject, how morality and empathy are socially felt and figured, and how ethics is reinforced or reified according to socio-political exigencies and economic imperatives.
Bio-power, Bare Life, and Networks of Care and Exclusion
Medicine can be economically defined as the application of science to the treatment of disease. Illness whether physical, psychological, neurological, whether somatic or social in origin, develops and manifests itself within structured networks of human-environmental interactions. To study any illness is to take account of its ecology. The study of illness necessitates a dynamic and ecological approach. Epidemiology is as much a matter for sociological and ethnographic analysis as it is for any other paradigm, particularly where human subjects—psychological, social, and moral personalities—are concerned. This is the perspective adopted by Joao Biehl in his (2004) account of the infirmary at Vita and specifically in the case of Catarina. Biehl’s ethnography can be understood as “thick description” in many senses of the term. It is in any case a detailed and sensitive work of sociological analysis. It is neither economical nor to the purpose of this essay to examine Biehl’s account in comprehensive detail. What is the primary point of concern here is the extent to which Biehl’s use of the concepts bio-power, bare life, morality and ethics, empathy and care cast light on the larger anthropological question of subjectivity and the social morality of the self at the intersection of the empathic “other.”
Biehl’s account places high premium on the embedded nature of subjectivity and the structured networks of power that mediate social experience and political placement and definition of medical patients in treatment scenarios. Such “treatment” as he observes in places like Vita, however, leaves much to be desired. His stated interest in this study is “in the place of psychopharmaceuticals in local ecologies of care and in the ways they affect changes in human values and subjectivity” (476).
Psychopharmaceuticals present for Biehl many problems, not the least of which being that their deployment leads all too often to negligence, mismanagement and malpractice. Because Catarina’s condition for so long goes unrecognized and improperly diagnosed—and therefore all but entirely untreated, and indeed if anything exacerbated—Biehl sees her outcome (“destiny” is the word he most often employs in this connection) as not only a medical failure but a “social death.” Catarina suffers abandonment in the worst way a human can—abandonment by her family, by her community, by the medical doctors and establishment such as it was, and ultimately by the entire political economy and society that fails to provide the infrastructure and appropriate channels for the proper diagnosis of illness and the administration of care.
Administration, in Biehl’s account, is figured as a term of opprobrium. The reduction of medical service to yet another crisis management scenario—a perpetual “triage” situation that can itself be factored as the manifestation of a social apparatus reduced to “bare life”—is in Biehl’s assessment yet another case of a neoliberalist reduction of human needs to impersonal and depersonalized “containments” at the basest clinical level. Pharmaceuticals, even the wrong pharmaceuticals, are applied and patients are pushed off to families or otherwise medically untrained and ill-equipped to provide the necessary care.
Places like Vita are in Biehl’s account themselves symptomatic of larger social, economic, and moral degradation. People like Catarina are rendered “ex-human” and treated accordingly by a system that has itself been stripped of its humanity and value for the dignity and care of the human person. The problem, in short, is social and systemic. Biehl writes:
Seen in this light, Vita is a social symptom, not a solution. It is an outcome of recent political and economic readjustments that have driven large segments of the population further into poverty and despair. This harshness is amplified by a malfunctioning universal health care system—a supposed democratic gain of the late 1980s—and complicated by new pharmaceutical possibilities. … The destinies of the useless, so to speak, are determined by a whole new array of networks, and as formal institutions either vanish or become nonfunctional and as government becomes increasingly remote from the citizenry, the household is further politicized. (Biehl 2004:484)
The household, one might add, is further rendered socially dysfunctional, as the case of Catarina makes clear.
Biehl expands on the point of personal devaluation and social abandonment in such a neoliberal economy:
That so many are regarded as socially and morally superfluous testifies to the further dissolution of the country’s moral fabric. The Brazilian middle class, for instance, has historically acted as a buffer between the elite and the most vulnerable, as both guardian of morality and advocate of progressive politics. In the wake of the country’s democratization and fast-paced neoliberalization, however, this vein of moral sensitivity and political responsibility has been largely replaced by sheer contempt, sociophobia, or sporadic acts of charity like the ones that sustain Vita. (484)
Thus, in the final analysis, the problem of Vita is the problem of a disintegrated society, a society in which the very concept of the social has been rendered meaningless outside of a narrowly circumscribed sphere of those considered to be worthy members of social life. The “human” is here valued to the extent that one can be factored and figured to be an economically productive member and not pose too much of an inconvenience to others as a result of illness or disability, whether that problem arises for genetic reasons or just a matter of bad environment situated within an even larger structural network of broken life and diseased relationships. The problem of Vita, as in the case of Catarina is a problem of abandonment at every level of social and economic life. Abandonment is at once seen to be symptom and cause of the larger and more pervasive disease of social dissolution in the wake of an increasingly fractured world.
The question of “care” in this configuration is a matter for morality, which is in Biehl’s account a matter for little optimism or hope at any level. Catarina’s condition is the condition of a “humankind” that is little in the way of “human” and even less in the way of “kind.” Biehl’s diagnosis is not encouraging. At least he sheds some light on the systematic scale and magnitude of the problem. This one can only conclude is better, perhaps, than nothing. Bio-power and bare life are in Biehl’s account simply the way the world…at least the way of the world in the place called Vita.
Bare Life and Crisis Management
In the case of Doctors without Borders, humanitarian action and care become figured as the application of the techniques of crisis management in matters of medical urgency. The politics and practice of Doctors without Borders (DWB) speak to a genuine human concern but without the commitment of long-term (medical or political) investment beyond addressing the basic, “bare life” concerns of the crisis situation. In Redfield’s account (2005), humanitarianism is treated not as an “absolute value” but is instead understood as “an array of particular embodied, situated practices emanating from the humanitarian desire to alleviate the suffering of others” (330).
DWB for Redfield can be understood as morally invested in the health and human dignity of the peoples served through their intervention, but ultimately uncommitted or not adequately committed to an amelioration of the large scale humanitarian needs, which amounts for Redfield in many ways to a maintenance of a perpetual state of crisis and crisis intervention. Redfield praises their humanitarian work but criticizes DWB for what he regards as a politics and philosophy of short-term interventionist solutions and a lack of an “overriding conceptual strategy of development or a political ideal” (338). To put it another way, DWB is too limited to efforts to address “bare life” and human concerns at the level of “zoology” (Agamben’s zoe over bios). The model of the “camp” illustrates this problem in Redfield’s account:
The camp arranges itself around an effective rationale of immediate concerns localized within biological necessity. There are bodies to cleanse, to shelter and protect from hunger and disease. There are children to weigh, inoculate, and categorize by the circumference of their upper arms. … Life itself is exposed beneath the language of rights invoked to defend it and the protest against conditions that produced the camp in the first place. In this setting, human zoology exceeds biography: those whose dignity and citizenship is most in question find their crucial measurements taken in calories rather than in their ability to voice individual opinions or perform acts of civic virtue. The species body, individually varied but fundamentally interchangeable, grows visible and becomes the focus of attention. (Redfield 2005:342)
Redfield further comments on an “ethic of refusal” on the part of DWB: refusal, that is, to commit to long-term political investment in the application of medical and humanitarian care. DWB “operates as a technical agency, alongside other NGOs, to administer a substitute for medical government amid what it identifies as a political failure.” “Yet,” Redfield continues, “this action rests squarely on a central, categorical paradox: the more successful MSF [DWB] is at protecting existence in the name of a politics of rights and dignity, the more this temporary response threatens to become the norm.” DWB, that is, “remains attached to the language of urgency” and it is this attachment to the language of urgency that, in Redfield’s view, prevents its organization from more serious and long-term political investments. The language of urgency establishes a particular ethos of care and treatment: “An established oppositional ethos takes shape within a definitional claim to humanitarian ethics. Therefore, in the face of continuing disaster, MSF responds with a defense of life that both recognizes and refuses politics” (Redfield 2005:343). All this is another way of saying, as Redfield claims on the following page, that DWB advances a “minimalist biopolitics” (344).
DWB, in Redfield’s critique, despite its best efforts and intentions, maintains and operates within a business of bare life management. Thus, Redfield concludes, “the problem before us is not crisis per se but the very codification of crisis into a state, a condition of action, and the subsequent limiting of emergency to within these borders” (347).
Empathic Acts and Moral Performance
Throop’s (2008) analysis of the cultural and phenomenological mediations and conditions for the emergence of “empathetic acts” and what he describes as “empathetic attunements” bears much relevance on the foregoing and is especially applicable to the larger question of the ways in which ethical subjects become constituted cross-culturally.
It is a recognized truth in the science of ethics (morality) and philosophical anthropology that a precondition for ethical treatment is recognition of the other a priori as a valuable moral agent. Such recognition is rooted in a common humanity and a sense of the value of the life of another. Ethics is rendered impossible without the recognition of the value of the other. Throop makes this point in his article in various ways.
Ethical recognition among the Yap of Micronesia arises from a bodily engagement with the world, cultural and otherwise, and a cultivated empathic awareness (the “empathetic attunement”) as a result of “ongoing acts” of one’s “embodied stream of awareness” (Throop 2008:404). This emergence of empathetic awareness and attunement not only brings into being a recognition of ethical value but provides and enforces the conditions for any practice of care within the society. To recognize the other as an ethical subject who is worthy of moral treatment not only implies but in a very real sense necessitates care as a matter of course. The very notion of “care” is inconceivable outside of an awareness of the other as an ethical being and moral subject—in other words, as a human equal at least in the sense of equal potential for the development of health in all senses.
To see another as ethically important is to see that other as valuable and entitled to good treatment as one would expect in a social order of shared values and responsibility. One is responsible for another because one is a moral agent and recognizes the other as a moral agent. This is at the most basic and vital level the theoretical beginnings for any engaged sociality, which is a precondition for care of any kind.
Throop’s account of empathetic awareness and practices among the Yap brings to the fore the recognition that empathy does not emerge necessarily and in all situations with equal force or assurance. Empathy, Throop explains, “is configured culturally” and it arises and is affirmed under particular conditions (406). The contingent and configurational nature of empathy is an important anthropological reality and is central to any serious understanding of ethics and particularly as ethics informs conditions for care.
Joao Biehl, 2004. Life of the mind: The interface of psychopharmaceuticals, domestic economies, and social abandonment. American Ethnologist 31.4: 475-96
Peter Redfield, 2005. Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis. Cultural Anthropology 20.3: 328-61.
C. Jason Throop, 2008. On the Problem of Empathy: The Case of Yap, Federated States of Micronesia. Ethos 36.4: 402-26.
“For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”
—Michel Foucault (1978)
This essay presents a critical review of socio-political formations of morality and an ethics of empathy—what might be understood as an empathic anthropology—as discussed in three ethnographic accounts, two of which explicitly address questions of bio-power, humanitarianism, and care (Biehl, “Life of the Mind” and Redfield, “Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis”), the other which focuses more on questions of empathy and social articulations and mediations of “shared feeling” and connections to a common or at least communally intelligible sense of self (Throop, “On the Problem of Empathy”). The main common thread that links these accounts is the matter of human value and worth as an ethical subject, how morality and empathy are socially felt and figured, and how ethics is reinforced or reified according to socio-political exigencies and economic imperatives.
Bio-power, Bare Life, and Networks of Care and Exclusion
Medicine can be economically defined as the application of science to the treatment of disease. Illness whether physical, psychological, neurological, whether somatic or social in origin, develops and manifests itself within structured networks of human-environmental interactions. To study any illness is to take account of its ecology. The study of illness necessitates a dynamic and ecological approach. Epidemiology is as much a matter for sociological and ethnographic analysis as it is for any other paradigm, particularly where human subjects—psychological, social, and moral personalities—are concerned. This is the perspective adopted by Joao Biehl in his (2004) account of the infirmary at Vita and specifically in the case of Catarina. Biehl’s ethnography can be understood as “thick description” in many senses of the term. It is in any case a detailed and sensitive work of sociological analysis. It is neither economical nor to the purpose of this essay to examine Biehl’s account in comprehensive detail. What is the primary point of concern here is the extent to which Biehl’s use of the concepts bio-power, bare life, morality and ethics, empathy and care cast light on the larger anthropological question of subjectivity and the social morality of the self at the intersection of the empathic “other.”
Biehl’s account places high premium on the embedded nature of subjectivity and the structured networks of power that mediate social experience and political placement and definition of medical patients in treatment scenarios. Such “treatment” as he observes in places like Vita, however, leaves much to be desired. His stated interest in this study is “in the place of psychopharmaceuticals in local ecologies of care and in the ways they affect changes in human values and subjectivity” (476).
Psychopharmaceuticals present for Biehl many problems, not the least of which being that their deployment leads all too often to negligence, mismanagement and malpractice. Because Catarina’s condition for so long goes unrecognized and improperly diagnosed—and therefore all but entirely untreated, and indeed if anything exacerbated—Biehl sees her outcome (“destiny” is the word he most often employs in this connection) as not only a medical failure but a “social death.” Catarina suffers abandonment in the worst way a human can—abandonment by her family, by her community, by the medical doctors and establishment such as it was, and ultimately by the entire political economy and society that fails to provide the infrastructure and appropriate channels for the proper diagnosis of illness and the administration of care.
Administration, in Biehl’s account, is figured as a term of opprobrium. The reduction of medical service to yet another crisis management scenario—a perpetual “triage” situation that can itself be factored as the manifestation of a social apparatus reduced to “bare life”—is in Biehl’s assessment yet another case of a neoliberalist reduction of human needs to impersonal and depersonalized “containments” at the basest clinical level. Pharmaceuticals, even the wrong pharmaceuticals, are applied and patients are pushed off to families or otherwise medically untrained and ill-equipped to provide the necessary care.
Places like Vita are in Biehl’s account themselves symptomatic of larger social, economic, and moral degradation. People like Catarina are rendered “ex-human” and treated accordingly by a system that has itself been stripped of its humanity and value for the dignity and care of the human person. The problem, in short, is social and systemic. Biehl writes:
Seen in this light, Vita is a social symptom, not a solution. It is an outcome of recent political and economic readjustments that have driven large segments of the population further into poverty and despair. This harshness is amplified by a malfunctioning universal health care system—a supposed democratic gain of the late 1980s—and complicated by new pharmaceutical possibilities. … The destinies of the useless, so to speak, are determined by a whole new array of networks, and as formal institutions either vanish or become nonfunctional and as government becomes increasingly remote from the citizenry, the household is further politicized. (Biehl 2004:484)
The household, one might add, is further rendered socially dysfunctional, as the case of Catarina makes clear.
Biehl expands on the point of personal devaluation and social abandonment in such a neoliberal economy:
That so many are regarded as socially and morally superfluous testifies to the further dissolution of the country’s moral fabric. The Brazilian middle class, for instance, has historically acted as a buffer between the elite and the most vulnerable, as both guardian of morality and advocate of progressive politics. In the wake of the country’s democratization and fast-paced neoliberalization, however, this vein of moral sensitivity and political responsibility has been largely replaced by sheer contempt, sociophobia, or sporadic acts of charity like the ones that sustain Vita. (484)
Thus, in the final analysis, the problem of Vita is the problem of a disintegrated society, a society in which the very concept of the social has been rendered meaningless outside of a narrowly circumscribed sphere of those considered to be worthy members of social life. The “human” is here valued to the extent that one can be factored and figured to be an economically productive member and not pose too much of an inconvenience to others as a result of illness or disability, whether that problem arises for genetic reasons or just a matter of bad environment situated within an even larger structural network of broken life and diseased relationships. The problem of Vita, as in the case of Catarina is a problem of abandonment at every level of social and economic life. Abandonment is at once seen to be symptom and cause of the larger and more pervasive disease of social dissolution in the wake of an increasingly fractured world.
The question of “care” in this configuration is a matter for morality, which is in Biehl’s account a matter for little optimism or hope at any level. Catarina’s condition is the condition of a “humankind” that is little in the way of “human” and even less in the way of “kind.” Biehl’s diagnosis is not encouraging. At least he sheds some light on the systematic scale and magnitude of the problem. This one can only conclude is better, perhaps, than nothing. Bio-power and bare life are in Biehl’s account simply the way the world…at least the way of the world in the place called Vita.
Bare Life and Crisis Management
In the case of Doctors without Borders, humanitarian action and care become figured as the application of the techniques of crisis management in matters of medical urgency. The politics and practice of Doctors without Borders (DWB) speak to a genuine human concern but without the commitment of long-term (medical or political) investment beyond addressing the basic, “bare life” concerns of the crisis situation. In Redfield’s account (2005), humanitarianism is treated not as an “absolute value” but is instead understood as “an array of particular embodied, situated practices emanating from the humanitarian desire to alleviate the suffering of others” (330).
DWB for Redfield can be understood as morally invested in the health and human dignity of the peoples served through their intervention, but ultimately uncommitted or not adequately committed to an amelioration of the large scale humanitarian needs, which amounts for Redfield in many ways to a maintenance of a perpetual state of crisis and crisis intervention. Redfield praises their humanitarian work but criticizes DWB for what he regards as a politics and philosophy of short-term interventionist solutions and a lack of an “overriding conceptual strategy of development or a political ideal” (338). To put it another way, DWB is too limited to efforts to address “bare life” and human concerns at the level of “zoology” (Agamben’s zoe over bios). The model of the “camp” illustrates this problem in Redfield’s account:
The camp arranges itself around an effective rationale of immediate concerns localized within biological necessity. There are bodies to cleanse, to shelter and protect from hunger and disease. There are children to weigh, inoculate, and categorize by the circumference of their upper arms. … Life itself is exposed beneath the language of rights invoked to defend it and the protest against conditions that produced the camp in the first place. In this setting, human zoology exceeds biography: those whose dignity and citizenship is most in question find their crucial measurements taken in calories rather than in their ability to voice individual opinions or perform acts of civic virtue. The species body, individually varied but fundamentally interchangeable, grows visible and becomes the focus of attention. (Redfield 2005:342)
Redfield further comments on an “ethic of refusal” on the part of DWB: refusal, that is, to commit to long-term political investment in the application of medical and humanitarian care. DWB “operates as a technical agency, alongside other NGOs, to administer a substitute for medical government amid what it identifies as a political failure.” “Yet,” Redfield continues, “this action rests squarely on a central, categorical paradox: the more successful MSF [DWB] is at protecting existence in the name of a politics of rights and dignity, the more this temporary response threatens to become the norm.” DWB, that is, “remains attached to the language of urgency” and it is this attachment to the language of urgency that, in Redfield’s view, prevents its organization from more serious and long-term political investments. The language of urgency establishes a particular ethos of care and treatment: “An established oppositional ethos takes shape within a definitional claim to humanitarian ethics. Therefore, in the face of continuing disaster, MSF responds with a defense of life that both recognizes and refuses politics” (Redfield 2005:343). All this is another way of saying, as Redfield claims on the following page, that DWB advances a “minimalist biopolitics” (344).
DWB, in Redfield’s critique, despite its best efforts and intentions, maintains and operates within a business of bare life management. Thus, Redfield concludes, “the problem before us is not crisis per se but the very codification of crisis into a state, a condition of action, and the subsequent limiting of emergency to within these borders” (347).
Empathic Acts and Moral Performance
Throop’s (2008) analysis of the cultural and phenomenological mediations and conditions for the emergence of “empathetic acts” and what he describes as “empathetic attunements” bears much relevance on the foregoing and is especially applicable to the larger question of the ways in which ethical subjects become constituted cross-culturally.
It is a recognized truth in the science of ethics (morality) and philosophical anthropology that a precondition for ethical treatment is recognition of the other a priori as a valuable moral agent. Such recognition is rooted in a common humanity and a sense of the value of the life of another. Ethics is rendered impossible without the recognition of the value of the other. Throop makes this point in his article in various ways.
Ethical recognition among the Yap of Micronesia arises from a bodily engagement with the world, cultural and otherwise, and a cultivated empathic awareness (the “empathetic attunement”) as a result of “ongoing acts” of one’s “embodied stream of awareness” (Throop 2008:404). This emergence of empathetic awareness and attunement not only brings into being a recognition of ethical value but provides and enforces the conditions for any practice of care within the society. To recognize the other as an ethical subject who is worthy of moral treatment not only implies but in a very real sense necessitates care as a matter of course. The very notion of “care” is inconceivable outside of an awareness of the other as an ethical being and moral subject—in other words, as a human equal at least in the sense of equal potential for the development of health in all senses.
To see another as ethically important is to see that other as valuable and entitled to good treatment as one would expect in a social order of shared values and responsibility. One is responsible for another because one is a moral agent and recognizes the other as a moral agent. This is at the most basic and vital level the theoretical beginnings for any engaged sociality, which is a precondition for care of any kind.
Throop’s account of empathetic awareness and practices among the Yap brings to the fore the recognition that empathy does not emerge necessarily and in all situations with equal force or assurance. Empathy, Throop explains, “is configured culturally” and it arises and is affirmed under particular conditions (406). The contingent and configurational nature of empathy is an important anthropological reality and is central to any serious understanding of ethics and particularly as ethics informs conditions for care.
Trouillot and the 'Savage Slot': A Short Review (2015)
Trouillot (1991) identifies a crisis of epistemology and disciplinary legitimation in anthropology as a social science and academic discipline. Such a crisis is by no means limited to anthropology, though in many ways it is most acutely located and pronounced in the epistemological domain assumed by its objects and methods of inquiry, or rather its putative ‘object’ of inquiry—namely, the savage ‘Other.’ This crisis of course is nothing other than the crisis of the postmodern condition, a condition of knowledge ruptures and “an ongoing collapse of metanarratives in a world where reason and reality have become fundamentally destabilized” (20). Trouillot’s purpose here is to historicize anthropology and specifically with respect to the causes and conditions of its formation as an academic discipline.
According to Trouillot’s analysis, anthropology arose in response to ongoing colonization projects which began in force during the early modern period and continued into the 19th century and of course, in some corners of the world, on into the present day. Anthropology developed its disciplinary scope and apparatus by exploring and cataloging the conditions of the ‘savage’ or ‘native’ other, the non-Western ‘other’ who became an object equally of fascination and revulsion according to various colonialist agendas. This is Trouillot’s account—although of course it is not entirely accurate and does shortchange much of the good that anthropologists have done in the interest of preserving the cultures and languages and lifeways of the rapidly disappearing natives whether due to colonialist expansion projects or simply cultural disintegration or destabilization from, as it were, the ‘inside.’ Setting such concerns aside, Trouillot is quite reasonable to suggest that within the discipline of anthropology, there is great need to reexamine epistemological premises and methodological assumptions about the nature of the science and the ‘objects’ of study (and what points of significance and grounds for legitimation exist for carrying forward a research program, and one which would take anthropology into more productive purpose and beyond the ‘savage slot’).
Trouillot suggests a redirection of disciplinary focus both in terms of epistemology and in terms of semiology (that is to say, in knowledge systems and symbolic structures). The postmodern crisis is in many ways at its core a crisis of the very nature of knowledge and the very nature of what it means to be human, and how the human has been conceived and constructed and deployed in various rhetorical contexts to myriad political purposes over the centuries—and indeed, from the very beginnings of all of human evolution. Anthropologists will need to take this situation much more seriously and will need to reevaluate their position vis-à-vis systems of knowledge production and political networks of power, however situated in contemporary terms or constructed from an historical perspective.
Trouillot calls for a critical re-envisioning of the scientific, sociopolitical, and historical project that anthropology by definition and in every term of practice is (as “the most humanistic of sciences and most scientific of the humanities,” a characterization hopefully not altogether out of fashion to our postmodern ears). This, in short, is what Trouillot means by conducting a critical reassessment, “an archaeology of the discipline” (17). To this purpose, Trouillot implores anthropologists “to find better anchor for an anthropology of the present, an anthropology of the changing world and its irreducible histories” (40).
Much indeed has changed in the discipline and in the world since 1991. The critique that Trouillot advanced, and a more carefully examined epistemological basis for anthropological work, is if anything more necessary now than ever. Trouillot at least points the direction to possibly productive lines of inquiry towards this effort.
The crisis of legitimation remains. What anthropology can hope to bring to the crisis will depend in large measure on how clearly it is able to understand its own position within that crisis, and how well it can articulate a reasonable solution, however limited by its approach and circumscribed by conditions of the times. Anthropology should be well poised to address matters of history and matters of epistemology. In a real and vital sense, these are the very bedrock issues in any human social science.
References
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness. In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard G. Fox. School of American Research Press.
According to Trouillot’s analysis, anthropology arose in response to ongoing colonization projects which began in force during the early modern period and continued into the 19th century and of course, in some corners of the world, on into the present day. Anthropology developed its disciplinary scope and apparatus by exploring and cataloging the conditions of the ‘savage’ or ‘native’ other, the non-Western ‘other’ who became an object equally of fascination and revulsion according to various colonialist agendas. This is Trouillot’s account—although of course it is not entirely accurate and does shortchange much of the good that anthropologists have done in the interest of preserving the cultures and languages and lifeways of the rapidly disappearing natives whether due to colonialist expansion projects or simply cultural disintegration or destabilization from, as it were, the ‘inside.’ Setting such concerns aside, Trouillot is quite reasonable to suggest that within the discipline of anthropology, there is great need to reexamine epistemological premises and methodological assumptions about the nature of the science and the ‘objects’ of study (and what points of significance and grounds for legitimation exist for carrying forward a research program, and one which would take anthropology into more productive purpose and beyond the ‘savage slot’).
Trouillot suggests a redirection of disciplinary focus both in terms of epistemology and in terms of semiology (that is to say, in knowledge systems and symbolic structures). The postmodern crisis is in many ways at its core a crisis of the very nature of knowledge and the very nature of what it means to be human, and how the human has been conceived and constructed and deployed in various rhetorical contexts to myriad political purposes over the centuries—and indeed, from the very beginnings of all of human evolution. Anthropologists will need to take this situation much more seriously and will need to reevaluate their position vis-à-vis systems of knowledge production and political networks of power, however situated in contemporary terms or constructed from an historical perspective.
Trouillot calls for a critical re-envisioning of the scientific, sociopolitical, and historical project that anthropology by definition and in every term of practice is (as “the most humanistic of sciences and most scientific of the humanities,” a characterization hopefully not altogether out of fashion to our postmodern ears). This, in short, is what Trouillot means by conducting a critical reassessment, “an archaeology of the discipline” (17). To this purpose, Trouillot implores anthropologists “to find better anchor for an anthropology of the present, an anthropology of the changing world and its irreducible histories” (40).
Much indeed has changed in the discipline and in the world since 1991. The critique that Trouillot advanced, and a more carefully examined epistemological basis for anthropological work, is if anything more necessary now than ever. Trouillot at least points the direction to possibly productive lines of inquiry towards this effort.
The crisis of legitimation remains. What anthropology can hope to bring to the crisis will depend in large measure on how clearly it is able to understand its own position within that crisis, and how well it can articulate a reasonable solution, however limited by its approach and circumscribed by conditions of the times. Anthropology should be well poised to address matters of history and matters of epistemology. In a real and vital sense, these are the very bedrock issues in any human social science.
References
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness. In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard G. Fox. School of American Research Press.
Agamben, Hutchinson, Waquant: Human Valuation and Agency in a Neoliberal Economy
The readings from Agamben, Hutchinson, and Waquant address the matter of human value and the constitution of human agency, and its limits, within systems of sovereignty and structures of power. All of this bears relevance to Graeber’s project concerning the cultural logic of debt and its links to violence and power.
For Agamben, the question of human value and political agency is factored in terms of the distinction between zoe and bios. Agamben derives these terms from Aristotle (Politics) and draws on Foucault’s work on bio-power. The key point that Agamben seems to be making is that human agency reduced to the level of “bare life” (as opposed to meaningful political participation) is what characterizes political systems, including modern democracies, that work to exercise power and control over the very conditions of human existence at every level of social and political life. All politics becomes biopolitics, the politics of bare life (Agamben 1998:3). Moreover, this “politicization of bare life as such,” Agamben argues, “constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought” (4). Agamben advances the idea that “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (6). It is not difficult to see how these ideas inform the theoretical structure of Graeber’s debt analysis.
Hutchinson observes how “government structures everywhere are… dependent on the enforced ‘forgetting’ of the violence that inevitably upholds them” (69). I am not sure to what extent such a claim can be applied in any absolute sense to all types and forms of government whether in Sudan or any other nation. However, it is a pointed observation and very much connects with Graeber’s observations about how structures of power work to foster violence and naturalize assumptions about the proper role of debt in human relations and every level of social life. Perhaps this could also apply to matters of bio-power and bare life. I am not entirely sure about the connection, but perhaps it is one worth considering.
Waquant tries to connect the rise of a neoliberal economy with a specific cultural logic (much as in Graeber’s account) that not only disregards but explicitly punishes and disempowers the poor and other marginal groups to a position of perpetual bare life under the administration of techniques of bio-power and economic control. Her intellectual project in Punishing the Poor is, as she describes it, “intended as a contribution to the historical anthropology of the state and of the transnational transformations of the field of power in the age of ascending neoliberalism” (Wacquant 2009:xviii). The cultural logic of a neoliberal economy supported by an unregulated penal state, in which poverty is the crime and it is the poor who are punished for being poor, is in Wacquant’s account at root the result of a kind of neo-Darwinian emphasis on competition that valorizes individual acquisition and personal responsibility while it pushes the burdens of the state essentially onto the backs and shoulders of the poor.
Debt in Wacquant’s critique is configured not so much as political punishment (though it is, de facto, that) as it is the abandonment of all sense of social responsibility. It is on the basis of this critique that bare life is structured as an economically basic and politically enforced state of affairs. Neoliberalism, Wacquant argues, “is constitutionally corrosive of democracy” (313). Again, Graeber’s analysis applies in this connection, particularly on the link between debt and violence, and politics and power—the codification of a politics of bare life (in which almost all are mostly barely getting by) and the reduction of the human being to the animal body. Debt is business and business is booming.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
--. State of Exception. 2005. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Graeber, David. 2014. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing.
Hutchinson, Sharon Elaine. 1998. "Death, Memory and the Politics of Legitimation: Nuer Experiences of the Continuing Second Sudanese Civil War." In Richard Werbner, ed. Memory and the Podtcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power. London: Zed Books, pp. 58-70.
Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press.
For Agamben, the question of human value and political agency is factored in terms of the distinction between zoe and bios. Agamben derives these terms from Aristotle (Politics) and draws on Foucault’s work on bio-power. The key point that Agamben seems to be making is that human agency reduced to the level of “bare life” (as opposed to meaningful political participation) is what characterizes political systems, including modern democracies, that work to exercise power and control over the very conditions of human existence at every level of social and political life. All politics becomes biopolitics, the politics of bare life (Agamben 1998:3). Moreover, this “politicization of bare life as such,” Agamben argues, “constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought” (4). Agamben advances the idea that “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (6). It is not difficult to see how these ideas inform the theoretical structure of Graeber’s debt analysis.
Hutchinson observes how “government structures everywhere are… dependent on the enforced ‘forgetting’ of the violence that inevitably upholds them” (69). I am not sure to what extent such a claim can be applied in any absolute sense to all types and forms of government whether in Sudan or any other nation. However, it is a pointed observation and very much connects with Graeber’s observations about how structures of power work to foster violence and naturalize assumptions about the proper role of debt in human relations and every level of social life. Perhaps this could also apply to matters of bio-power and bare life. I am not entirely sure about the connection, but perhaps it is one worth considering.
Waquant tries to connect the rise of a neoliberal economy with a specific cultural logic (much as in Graeber’s account) that not only disregards but explicitly punishes and disempowers the poor and other marginal groups to a position of perpetual bare life under the administration of techniques of bio-power and economic control. Her intellectual project in Punishing the Poor is, as she describes it, “intended as a contribution to the historical anthropology of the state and of the transnational transformations of the field of power in the age of ascending neoliberalism” (Wacquant 2009:xviii). The cultural logic of a neoliberal economy supported by an unregulated penal state, in which poverty is the crime and it is the poor who are punished for being poor, is in Wacquant’s account at root the result of a kind of neo-Darwinian emphasis on competition that valorizes individual acquisition and personal responsibility while it pushes the burdens of the state essentially onto the backs and shoulders of the poor.
Debt in Wacquant’s critique is configured not so much as political punishment (though it is, de facto, that) as it is the abandonment of all sense of social responsibility. It is on the basis of this critique that bare life is structured as an economically basic and politically enforced state of affairs. Neoliberalism, Wacquant argues, “is constitutionally corrosive of democracy” (313). Again, Graeber’s analysis applies in this connection, particularly on the link between debt and violence, and politics and power—the codification of a politics of bare life (in which almost all are mostly barely getting by) and the reduction of the human being to the animal body. Debt is business and business is booming.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
--. State of Exception. 2005. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Graeber, David. 2014. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing.
Hutchinson, Sharon Elaine. 1998. "Death, Memory and the Politics of Legitimation: Nuer Experiences of the Continuing Second Sudanese Civil War." In Richard Werbner, ed. Memory and the Podtcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power. London: Zed Books, pp. 58-70.
Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Graeber 'Debt' analysis II (Greiner 2015)
A key part of Graeber’s analysis of debt is the extent to which violence has been linked to debt and effectively encoded at the most basic level of organizational logic that structures and defines the way in which humans live and have lived for most of human history (the past 5,000 years). Debt is linked to violence due to structural forms of unequal relationships between otherwise at least potentially equal human beings. Violence works by the exercise of power by one person over another, and it is through networks of exchange, based on structured inequality, that power is formed and violence in turn forced and enforced. This “legacy of violence,” as Graeber terms it, “has twisted everything around us.” Violence—epistemic and social violence—due to the logic of debt, as expressed socially in terms of the “language of the business deal” and the culture of calculation, has corroded sociality at every level of human experience. This violence is pervasive and has in many ways been rendered largely invisible. The cultural logic of debt and the forms of social violence that enforce it have become normalized and go for the most part unnoticed and unquestioned. This legacy of violence has come to define social existence in a fundamental way. Every institution has been affected by and largely organized and defined by the logic of debt and the legacy of violence that supports and is in turn supported by it. This is central to Graeber’s argument and illustrated in all of his examples. Graeber writes:
It’s not just that war, conquest, and slavery played such a central role in converting human economies into market ones; there is literally no institution in our society that has not been to some degree affected. The story told at the end of Chapter Seven, of how even our conceptions of “freedom” itself came to be transformed, through the Roman institution of slavery, from the ability to make friends, to enter into moral relations with others, into incoherent dreams of absolute power, is only perhaps the most dramatic instance—and most insidious, because it leaves it very hard to imagine what meaningful human freedom would even be like. (Graeber 2014:385-86)
This passage may be profitably compared with the following remarks about how slavery works by abstracting people from their social networks and relationships with others—all the organizing factors that define social existence and personal identity for any person as a moral being worthy of rights and respect. Slavery is in Graeber’s account a process of extracting individuals from meaningful networks of social identity—one term he uses in this connection is human economies (which is in turn contrasted with the marketplace economies that operate according to the logic of calculation and business deal language). Slavery in whatever form it takes is for Graeber social disempowerment, and it can be understood as “that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable—that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt.” “Slavery,” Graeber continues, “is just the logical end-point, the most extreme form of such disentanglement” (163). Slavery converts free human beings into indentured servants. It does this through a structured economy enforced through violence and maintained through war. Graeber says this is “a practice as old as civilization,” and it is a hard claim to refute. Yet it is a practice as old as a certain model of civilization, one that has unfortunately come to define human civilizations over such a long and pervasive span of time that one can be excused for thinking that this is the way that humans simply are and that there is no hope for any other possible economic system or sociocultural way of life. Graeber as an anthropologist, however, knows as well as anyone that this is not the way that all human societies have ordered their existence or structured their affairs.
It is not human nature but rather the perpetuation of certain models of human behavior and certain codes of language and law and institutional enforcement over time that has placed debt and slavery as the seemingly normal and natural definition for what is sadly and not without irony called “the human condition.” If debt is the perversion of a promise and if slavery is the abstraction of a human being from meaningful networks of exchange, then it certainly stands to reason that these are conditions that can change. Civilization can in every sense of the word always advance and evolve. The next 5,000 years need not come to affirm the legacy of violence that has characterized human life on the planet from bad mistakes in the past. Debt need not be destiny. And slavery should not in any society or meaningful human culture come to be seen by any thinking person as simply the way that things are.
It’s not just that war, conquest, and slavery played such a central role in converting human economies into market ones; there is literally no institution in our society that has not been to some degree affected. The story told at the end of Chapter Seven, of how even our conceptions of “freedom” itself came to be transformed, through the Roman institution of slavery, from the ability to make friends, to enter into moral relations with others, into incoherent dreams of absolute power, is only perhaps the most dramatic instance—and most insidious, because it leaves it very hard to imagine what meaningful human freedom would even be like. (Graeber 2014:385-86)
This passage may be profitably compared with the following remarks about how slavery works by abstracting people from their social networks and relationships with others—all the organizing factors that define social existence and personal identity for any person as a moral being worthy of rights and respect. Slavery is in Graeber’s account a process of extracting individuals from meaningful networks of social identity—one term he uses in this connection is human economies (which is in turn contrasted with the marketplace economies that operate according to the logic of calculation and business deal language). Slavery in whatever form it takes is for Graeber social disempowerment, and it can be understood as “that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable—that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt.” “Slavery,” Graeber continues, “is just the logical end-point, the most extreme form of such disentanglement” (163). Slavery converts free human beings into indentured servants. It does this through a structured economy enforced through violence and maintained through war. Graeber says this is “a practice as old as civilization,” and it is a hard claim to refute. Yet it is a practice as old as a certain model of civilization, one that has unfortunately come to define human civilizations over such a long and pervasive span of time that one can be excused for thinking that this is the way that humans simply are and that there is no hope for any other possible economic system or sociocultural way of life. Graeber as an anthropologist, however, knows as well as anyone that this is not the way that all human societies have ordered their existence or structured their affairs.
It is not human nature but rather the perpetuation of certain models of human behavior and certain codes of language and law and institutional enforcement over time that has placed debt and slavery as the seemingly normal and natural definition for what is sadly and not without irony called “the human condition.” If debt is the perversion of a promise and if slavery is the abstraction of a human being from meaningful networks of exchange, then it certainly stands to reason that these are conditions that can change. Civilization can in every sense of the word always advance and evolve. The next 5,000 years need not come to affirm the legacy of violence that has characterized human life on the planet from bad mistakes in the past. Debt need not be destiny. And slavery should not in any society or meaningful human culture come to be seen by any thinking person as simply the way that things are.
Review of Graeber: Part I (Greiner 2015)
‘Debt’ as Social Value and Moral Force: An Analysis of Graeber
The social arrangements by which humans organize their lives require common codes—such as language and law—and mechanisms for the preservation of culture and the maintenance of order. According to David Graeber, the concept of debt as a matter of social morality, by no means limited to the sphere of economics, has for the past 5,000 years served such an organizing function for most societies. In Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011; 2014), Graeber presents a sweeping ethno-historical account of the ways in which ‘debt’ has been culturally encoded and socially constructed, that is to say, normalized, as one of the primary means of ordering social relations and the very meaning of morality. Debt becomes, to borrow a term from Althusser, a kind of ideological state apparatus. Debt sets the terms and conditions for not only economics but ‘exchange’ at every level of human interaction and sociality. Debt is, in Graeber’s account, a kind of zero-sum barometer by which all of human social life and cultural existence is measured, counted, and conducted in every sense of the terms. The language and logic of debt set the standards for the ordering and enforcement of social, political, economic, and cultural organization. Debt is seen as the logic of social life—period.Far from a product of amicable cultural consensus, this logic of debt as the main ordering apparatus for the whole of socioeconomic and political life is in Graeber’s book a matter of systematic, achieved social violence. That is to say, it is by violence and the ongoing and pervasive threat of violence that the apparatus of debt as an ordering force maintains a stranglehold on the rights and dignity of all of humankind. This is not for Graeber hyperbole: The logic of debt maintains absolute rule by violence and force at every level of social organization—through various forms and formations of slavery, conquest, and war.
This essay examines some of Graeber’s key claims in detail and it especially explores the ways in which a cultural logic of debt maintained by structures of language and morality are in Graeber’s account rendered at once problematic and in fact the source of much social unrest and disorder. Graeber’s intellectual project depends on a certain conception of violence and power in sustaining systems of subjugation in terms of debt. Language, morality, and questions of sociality and social contract figure heavily in this account.
The Language of Debt
Language, literally and in almost every other sense, sets the terms and conditions for social interaction and cultural exchange. Human society is unimaginable without a clear and mutually intelligible means for exchanging ideas and maintaining relationships whether economic or interpersonal. From this fact it follows that much of the value that a society places on certain activities and the meaning it ascribes to various types and forms of exchange can be seen to be reflected in language use, even if not especially at the basic level of everyday, ‘ordinary’, communication. Graeber’s book is very much informed by this phenomenological and materialist understanding of language. Because language is the means of the transmission of cultural values, Graeber argues that it is essential to look at debt primarily as a matter of language, and moreover in terms of its historical use and encoding over time. Most people, Graeber argues, have a rather ill-defined sense of what debt in fact actually is, what debt is, and what is means to exist in a state and condition of ‘debt’:
The very fact that we don’t know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power. If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong. (5)
And the victim, as Graeber’s account makes clear, is more often than not a person who is in some way economically disempowered (e.g., racial or ethnic minorities, women, slaves, etc.) and thus placed on unequal footing in terms of any business arrangement. For this reason, a considerable portion of Graeber’s analysis deals directly with matters of language—the social construction of debt as a legitimating moral force, a force that lends credence to the notion that all of human economy is a matter of calculation and monetary exchange. Graeber’s book is in many fundamental ways an elucidation of the concept of debt as a cultural imaginary, a sociohistorical analysis of the construction of the term in the ordering of human affairs. A debt according to such logic is a matter for marketplace values and precisely quantified accounts. Human economies become transformed into an economy of the market. Under social conditions structured and informed by marketplace logic, the primary language becomes not so much the language of human relations but the “language of the business deal” Graeber 2014:13). Such language leads to all manner of problems in the moral arena.
This, for Graeber, is the central question in the book: “What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts?” (13) Morality is for Graeber the central matter in understanding human constructions of debt as the force of economic and social organization. It is not so much the matter of economics as such that Graeber finds problematic. Economics is a necessary and vital part of any ordered (as opposed to chaotic) human society. Even capitalism has its redeeming qualities in the critique advanced in the book. What Graeber is taking issue with is the reduction of all of human social life to a matter of money, “money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene” (14). It is not so much money as such that is in Graeber’s view the source of all evil, but rather the reduction of all basic human affairs and social relations to a question of currency values and quantifiable exchange, established by rules and enforced by violence. Graeber sees a direct link between violence and quantification and he advances this link as the “source of the moral confusion that seems to float around everything surrounding the topic of debt” (14). Graeber’s analysis of debt is concerned at every level with the matter of morality and why our understanding, or misunderstanding, of the nature of debt and its place in human relations is responsible for so much if not all of the disarray and upheaval that characterizes the state of life now and over the course of the past 5,000 years.
Marketplace Morality
Graeber’s project, then, is really at root an ethical project. Graeber writes as an anthropologist and as an historian. It is not difficult to understand that Graeber’s frame of analysis is concerned with the structures of human economies and the conditions for moral relations, what Graeber and other anthropologists figure in terms of mutuality and sociality. Chapter five is a core chapter that sets forth Graeber’s moral argument and ties it back to the questions of language and the cultural encoding of debt as an absolute value and ordering mechanism in human relations. “To tell the history of debt, then,” Graeber explains, “is also necessarily to reconstruct how the language of the marketplace has come to pervade every aspect of human life—even to provide the terminology for the moral and religious voices raised against it” (Graeber 2014:89). After delineating three systems or modalities of “moral accounting” (communism, exchange, and hierarchy), and the ways in which people order their economic relations differently according to the logic inherent to each modality, Graeber arrives at the core of his analysis which is a definition of debt. Debt, Graeber writes:
is a very specific thing and it arises from very specific situations. It first requires a relationship between two people who do not consider each other fundamentally different sorts of being, who are at least potential equals, who are equals in those ways that are really important, and who are not currently in a state of equality—but for whom there is some way to set matters straight. (120)
Key to this description of debt is its conditional nature and the possibility of settling an account, of balancing an otherwise unequal relationship between two or more people. It is not so much in Graeber’s account that a debt is something that can or should be simply quantified and precisely calculated and that one a debtor should repay a creditor exactly a sum that is owed. Such logic, again, is the language of the “business deal.” What makes a debt a divisive and potentially destructive and morally corrosive arrangement is the way in which a debt can be not just maintained but enforced, especially through slavery, conquest, and war. Debt and obligation are for Graeber two different matters, the first a matter of social violence and the other a potentially productive force in the advancement of sociality and good moral relations. A society based on debt, as Graeber’s book argues, is a society predicated on the logic of calculation, an all but exclusively impersonal exchange of credits and debits in the interest of honoring that which one owes to another, not so much as a matter of morality and maintaining good relations as a matter of paying that which is due, or paying with one’s life (social violence and social death in one form or another).
So intrinsically interwoven is the language of debt with the logic of our lives that, in Graeber’s view, it has become almost impossible for people to imagine a society based on any other terms. Graeber argues that the only way to regain a sense of social control and indeed sanity in terms of human relations is to begin to think of other ways of living and connecting to structures and networks of exchange that can foster more balanced and equal partnerships in the interest of individual satisfaction and the integrity of the greater good. Is his vision for a more human economy perhaps a touch idealistic, even utopian? Perhaps. Leaving aside the question of whether idealism or utopian visions are by nature thoughts best forgotten or disregarded as ridiculous, or at best just not worth thinking too seriously about, I would like to observe that Graeber’s book does add value to the matter of advancing serious critical thought about the nature of economics and the cultural force that mediates this reality. There is certainly nothing absolute about economic orders and it is always possible for humans to decide to arrange their lives and societies differently as interests change and environmental circumstances necessitate intelligent adaptations.
I do not think it is at all reasonable to suppose that any society now or possible world in the future can ever hope to do without debt—or without economics, for that matter. Who can say what the future might hold for money? Perhaps one day, on this world or another, humans will manage to do without it. At this point, it is well to consider seriously what the matter of debt means for humans as a society and as a species that depends on mutual exchange in the interest of personal satisfaction and the maintenance of a greater good—in other words, a commons, however one wishes to conceive the term. If a debt is truly the “perversion of a promise,” then perhaps the more healthy world of the future that any reasonable human could hope to achieve is one where every person does the best that he or she can, and systematic slavery on the basis of unequal exchange becomes a matter for the history books. Who knows what kind of world might be written about by historians and anthropologists in the next 5,000 years? With any luck, it will be a world a little less obsessed with accounts and a little more focused on doing one’s best for the greater good.
Academic politics and savage minds
How David Graeber Cancelled a Colleague
by Claire Lehmann
https://quillette.com/2019/09/09/the-anarchist-and-the-anthropology-journal/
The scandal centers on the open-access journal HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau
Apparently, the journal has been undergoing some editorial and structural changes, changes which have upset David Graeber and respecting which Graeber has made cause to fabricate all kinds of allegations to destroy the journal's founder's reputation and professional standing. (Graeber, let it be said, knows quite a bit about the old "tit-for-tat" in economic and social relations: i.e., the art, let's say, of paying "debts." He, quite literally, wrote a book on the topic.)
This is all very unfortunate, not least because David Graeber has actually proven himself quite capable of producing meaningful and provocative historical and anthropological analysis. Perhaps he might think about redirecting his energies toward the more profitable ends of legitimate scholarship. Just a thought.
Will return to this matter soon with more detailed commentary. This kind of character assassination is the new norm and its effects on scholarship and scientific credibility have been quite deleterious. It really is a very serious problem.
Has been so for much longer than I had been aware. Its effects are chilling and very reminiscent of Soviet purges in the 1930s and 40s. One does begin to wonder just how bad things might get. Answer: very bad, almost always worse.
To be continued...
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
Stephen Jay Gould on Humility in Scientific Discovery
Thought for Today (Via Wordsmith):
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. -Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, biologist, author (10 Sep 1941-2002)
A very fine thought for today from Stephen Jay Gould.
Carl Sagan often said very much the same thing.
Any true scientist admits as much eventually.
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. -Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, biologist, author (10 Sep 1941-2002)
A very fine thought for today from Stephen Jay Gould.
Carl Sagan often said very much the same thing.
Any true scientist admits as much eventually.
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
The Religious Impulse and the Origins of Language
The religious impulse has been with man since at least the beginnings of language. Monotheistic conceptions of the sacred and divine have come to dominate humanity's consciousness and practices at large. Prior to monotheistic and particularly Judeo-Christian hegemony, the diverse cultures and peoples of the human race acknowledged many gods and goddesses and other beings of supernatural power. This is not a revelation, of course, but I think it is not as commonly known or understood as many imagine.
For the overwhelming majority of the history of religion, human conceptions of the sacred have been by all accounts shamanistic, animistic, nature-centered, polytheistic, pantheistic, and quite frankly, in a word, magical. One might look to the ancient Celts, the Germanic and Norse pagans, the Sumerians, the Slavs, or any number of indigenous peoples from the Amazonian rainforest to the wide Siberian tundra--all such peoples venerated nature as a living creative force and all measured their being in relation to the cosmos. The monotheistic notion that sets a single and all-powerful (almost invariably male) God at the crown and source of creation--this was alien to the understanding of most of the peoples on the planet for literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years. To believe their worldview and cosmology to be the naive and misguided product of savage ignorance or pagan superstition was as inconceivable to their minds as the sense and reality of their views have come to be seen by the majority of humans who walk in the world today.
To see this proven relativity of religious conceptions among the diverse peoples of the world both in the current and ancient worlds is the privilege of an anthropologically and historically trained mind. There is in fact nothing at first glance obvious about this relativity of religious perspective. For the mind and view of the monotheistic believer, any alternative religion must seem not only strange and other but wrong and in need of rectification and conversion. Indeed, it is due to the fervent missionary activities of the past two thousand years that such pre-Christian pagan and magical worldviews have been suppressed and silenced when not outright destroyed. Much of what has survived of the worldview and cosmology of the ancient, pre-Christian world has come to us through oral tradition and what scholars have come to call "folklore." In addition, it should be noted that a significant part of this cultural recovery process has the painstaking work of scholars and particularly philologists and literary historians to thank for it.[1] Much as is the case in the matter of anthropologists who have worked to "salvage" what they could of the dying languages and folkways of the Native Americans (and other aboriginal and First-Nations peoples), so too in the realm of folkloric research has much of what otherwise would surely have disappeared forever been preserved and passed on in some (albeit less than culturally pure) capacity. Storytelling traditions, too, have played their part in keeping some meaningful sense of the ancient worldviews, religions, and cosmological conceptions alive.
The origin of language is thus intimately and inextricably tied to the origin of religion, and to any and all conceptions of the sacred and divine. This, in short, is very largely why storytelling is of such ancient and vital and perennial importance, particularly at the level of myth and ritual, which are the most ancient and universal origins for any storytelling tradition proper. Storytelling and religious ritual are and have always been part and parcel of the human experience, and arguably the most sacred and vital of human symbolic expression.
Notes
[1] It is also very much the case that so much of the knowledge that has been preserved over the past two thousand years, both literate and oral traditions, has the painstaking work of scribes and monks, a great many Catholic, to thank for it. The history of religion, and all history, is by no means a simple or uncomplicated, one-dimensional matter. Politics is one thing, scholarship is always tuned to other purposes, particularly when the prime motivation is the search for understanding and the preservation of knowledge, wheresoever discovered.
For the overwhelming majority of the history of religion, human conceptions of the sacred have been by all accounts shamanistic, animistic, nature-centered, polytheistic, pantheistic, and quite frankly, in a word, magical. One might look to the ancient Celts, the Germanic and Norse pagans, the Sumerians, the Slavs, or any number of indigenous peoples from the Amazonian rainforest to the wide Siberian tundra--all such peoples venerated nature as a living creative force and all measured their being in relation to the cosmos. The monotheistic notion that sets a single and all-powerful (almost invariably male) God at the crown and source of creation--this was alien to the understanding of most of the peoples on the planet for literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years. To believe their worldview and cosmology to be the naive and misguided product of savage ignorance or pagan superstition was as inconceivable to their minds as the sense and reality of their views have come to be seen by the majority of humans who walk in the world today.
To see this proven relativity of religious conceptions among the diverse peoples of the world both in the current and ancient worlds is the privilege of an anthropologically and historically trained mind. There is in fact nothing at first glance obvious about this relativity of religious perspective. For the mind and view of the monotheistic believer, any alternative religion must seem not only strange and other but wrong and in need of rectification and conversion. Indeed, it is due to the fervent missionary activities of the past two thousand years that such pre-Christian pagan and magical worldviews have been suppressed and silenced when not outright destroyed. Much of what has survived of the worldview and cosmology of the ancient, pre-Christian world has come to us through oral tradition and what scholars have come to call "folklore." In addition, it should be noted that a significant part of this cultural recovery process has the painstaking work of scholars and particularly philologists and literary historians to thank for it.[1] Much as is the case in the matter of anthropologists who have worked to "salvage" what they could of the dying languages and folkways of the Native Americans (and other aboriginal and First-Nations peoples), so too in the realm of folkloric research has much of what otherwise would surely have disappeared forever been preserved and passed on in some (albeit less than culturally pure) capacity. Storytelling traditions, too, have played their part in keeping some meaningful sense of the ancient worldviews, religions, and cosmological conceptions alive.
The origin of language is thus intimately and inextricably tied to the origin of religion, and to any and all conceptions of the sacred and divine. This, in short, is very largely why storytelling is of such ancient and vital and perennial importance, particularly at the level of myth and ritual, which are the most ancient and universal origins for any storytelling tradition proper. Storytelling and religious ritual are and have always been part and parcel of the human experience, and arguably the most sacred and vital of human symbolic expression.
Notes
[1] It is also very much the case that so much of the knowledge that has been preserved over the past two thousand years, both literate and oral traditions, has the painstaking work of scribes and monks, a great many Catholic, to thank for it. The history of religion, and all history, is by no means a simple or uncomplicated, one-dimensional matter. Politics is one thing, scholarship is always tuned to other purposes, particularly when the prime motivation is the search for understanding and the preservation of knowledge, wheresoever discovered.
Saturday, August 24, 2019
The Writer's Call and Covenant
A writer, if he has anything of true value to communicate, will write not so much from an act of personal choice (though it is, certainly, a choice). He will write because he must, because he observes and honors a calling.
The writer's calling is nothing less than a covenant of the soul. This is not hyperbole or self-aggrandizement; it is a vital existential and cosmic truth. To ignore the calling or to refuse the charge that is placed upon the writer is simply at the point of true recognition an impossibility. The writer must write. He must find a way to communicate the vision and understanding of the life he has known, the insight earned and entrusted to him. For writing, as any vocation, is indeed a truth and a trust. Perhaps he will speak to the whole of humanity. Perhaps he will speak to an audience of few or of one. But if he is true to his vision and vocation, he will take up the mantle and write.
To write is not simply to exercise the crafting of words (however rhetorically or artistically practiced). Less so is it pure "self-expression." To write, as a writer, is to give truth to the voice and the vision of the soul. So it is with painting. So it is with music. So it is with dance. Writing is a matter of necessity. It is a creative act of acceptance and surrender. It is not conceived in the womb of contingency, governed by the tides of chance.
The recognition of the writer's call and covenant--this, and this alone, is the moment of the birth of the word. The rest is revision, a fine-tuning of the music first heard in the depths of the stillness of the soul.
The writer's calling is nothing less than a covenant of the soul. This is not hyperbole or self-aggrandizement; it is a vital existential and cosmic truth. To ignore the calling or to refuse the charge that is placed upon the writer is simply at the point of true recognition an impossibility. The writer must write. He must find a way to communicate the vision and understanding of the life he has known, the insight earned and entrusted to him. For writing, as any vocation, is indeed a truth and a trust. Perhaps he will speak to the whole of humanity. Perhaps he will speak to an audience of few or of one. But if he is true to his vision and vocation, he will take up the mantle and write.
To write is not simply to exercise the crafting of words (however rhetorically or artistically practiced). Less so is it pure "self-expression." To write, as a writer, is to give truth to the voice and the vision of the soul. So it is with painting. So it is with music. So it is with dance. Writing is a matter of necessity. It is a creative act of acceptance and surrender. It is not conceived in the womb of contingency, governed by the tides of chance.
The recognition of the writer's call and covenant--this, and this alone, is the moment of the birth of the word. The rest is revision, a fine-tuning of the music first heard in the depths of the stillness of the soul.
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
The Unbearable Lightness of Awkward Analogies
I don't know if I'm to make this a regular thing, but there is another thought posted at Wordsmith.org to which I thought I might attempt a sensible contribution. Today there is a thought from Roger Ebert, who, though presumably valiant in intention, draws an at least inaccurate moral equivalence between a justification for capital punishment and acceptance of the Holocaust. I think he goes a step too far. I explain why below.
Re: A Thought for Today, 6/18/19 (Wordsmith.org)
"The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?" -Roger Ebert, film-critic (18 Jun 1942-2013)
Regardless of the degree to which "so many Europeans" were or were not okay with the Holocaust (a debatable point), an absolutely critical distinction to be drawn between capital punishment (as a matter of law and principle) and the state-sanctioned, systematic extermination of the Jewish people (as a total act of genocide) is that in the former case there is the understanding of a crime committed by an individual (presuming of course actual guilt), the retribution for which is execution. In the case of the Holocaust, the "crime" so regarded was an "infection" of the gene pool and body politic by those of Hebrew extraction and Judaic faith. Humanity at large has rightly come to see the Holocaust for the inhuman and insane horror that it was. A crime against humanity, and of the highest and sickest order, to be sure; but it was an organized genocide born in hate and fear and advanced by a propagandistically conditioned and socially anchored ethos (not simply by the authoritarian order of a thoroughly depraved man, i.e. Hitler).
Capital punishment, whatever one's position on this very complex moral issue, would not in any responsible evaluation be so analogously (and causally) linked to the genocide of the Holocaust. To justify capital punishment, whether as a general principle or restricted to a specific case, is by no means to breach the slippery slope toward Auschwitz and Dachau. "Halfway there," the film critic says. I think we are rather in a different moral universe--at least a different country of concern. (This itself being an unsettling analogy or awkward link in the larger semantic chain.)
Re: A Thought for Today, 6/18/19 (Wordsmith.org)
"The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?" -Roger Ebert, film-critic (18 Jun 1942-2013)
Regardless of the degree to which "so many Europeans" were or were not okay with the Holocaust (a debatable point), an absolutely critical distinction to be drawn between capital punishment (as a matter of law and principle) and the state-sanctioned, systematic extermination of the Jewish people (as a total act of genocide) is that in the former case there is the understanding of a crime committed by an individual (presuming of course actual guilt), the retribution for which is execution. In the case of the Holocaust, the "crime" so regarded was an "infection" of the gene pool and body politic by those of Hebrew extraction and Judaic faith. Humanity at large has rightly come to see the Holocaust for the inhuman and insane horror that it was. A crime against humanity, and of the highest and sickest order, to be sure; but it was an organized genocide born in hate and fear and advanced by a propagandistically conditioned and socially anchored ethos (not simply by the authoritarian order of a thoroughly depraved man, i.e. Hitler).
Capital punishment, whatever one's position on this very complex moral issue, would not in any responsible evaluation be so analogously (and causally) linked to the genocide of the Holocaust. To justify capital punishment, whether as a general principle or restricted to a specific case, is by no means to breach the slippery slope toward Auschwitz and Dachau. "Halfway there," the film critic says. I think we are rather in a different moral universe--at least a different country of concern. (This itself being an unsettling analogy or awkward link in the larger semantic chain.)
Monday, June 17, 2019
Human Cultural Diversity and the Vision of the "World Community"
Re: A Thought for Today, 6/17/19 (wordsmith.org):
The ultimate sense of security will be when we come to recognize that we are all part of one human race. Our primary allegiance is to the human race and not to one particular color or border. I think the sooner we renounce the sanctity of these many identities and try to identify ourselves with the human race the sooner we will get a better world and a safer world. -Mohamed ElBaradei, diplomat, Nobel laureate (b. 17 Jun 1942)
A noble thought. The thing is, humans are cultural beings. Tribal identity is woven into the core of the DNA. Tribal bonds as such are not destructive nor should they be entirely discouraged in the name of some transnational, supra-human identity. The notion that, deep down, "we are all one" may sound nice and foster warm and fuzzy feelings, but in point of fact we are not all one: there is much diversity in terms of culture and language and worldview, and despite many of the popular ideas about human origins, the fact is that there is much diversity at the genetic level as well.
"Ethnic diversity" is not an empty phrase, and "culture" is infinitely more than a convenient social construct. Any real and meaningful effort to promote a unifying vision around which to structure human action will need to take much more seriously into account the anthropological questions, which have everything to do with cultural identity, language, tradition, and worldview. It will do no humanist vision any favors to advocate that "we renounce the sanctity of these many identities." These many identities have been forged and fostered over thousands if not millions of years. All people who identify with a certain cultural or tribal identity are not simply prepared to "renounce" that identity in favor of some abstract affiliation that we call "the human race." What, really, is all that to be taken to mean, anyway? I am not so sure that many who advocate this have any clear or definite idea in mind. It is all well to seek to find commonalities and points of connection, and I am all for cross-cultural human cooperation in the interest of productive and peaceful outcomes. I am less than confident that such purposes can be realized by minimizing cultural differences or renouncing identities that have been in gestation since humans first learned to come together in the first place (which, again, had everything to do with cultural bonds, language, religion, and all the rest of it).
What's the solution, then? I think the start of a solution is to understand the problem of human conflict as a fundamentally anthropological problem, at the core of which remains the matter of culture. Margaret Mead has addressed this matter to some productive purpose throughout her writings and in clear, digestible summary in her essay on 'World Culture' (1947). [The essay is included in Anthropology: A Human Science. Selected Papers 1939-1960, pp. 134-45.] Mead in her summary observes the following:
"In summary it may be said that world community seems more likely to be attained by working toward certain over-all abstract and inclusive values, within which the different people of the world, who now see one another as separate, competitive, or unrelated, will be able to feel themselves a part, the cultures of each regularly related to the whole to which all give allegiance in different ways congruent with their own cultural values. Thus we would be working toward the type of multi-dimensional world culture, within which there would be interdependence of diverse values rather than a world in which any one interest or function so dominated the others that single value scales, competition, and destruction were the concomitants." (Mead 1964: 144.)
Key to Mead's analysis here is the notion of a "multi-dimensional world culture," that is, one in which the diversity and plurality of cultures is preserved though participatorily structured toward a common culture and a common goal. Such a common culture we can call "the human race," or something more semantically refined, but the common goal has got to be something higher and more inspiring than the zero-sum game of material acquisition and the maximization of all possible sources of wealth. Yes, economic vitality is and always has been crucial to survival. It is also the case that sustainability and ecological integrity are vital, for the survival of all life on any planet. The humans on planet Earth, by any reasonably honest assessment, face many points of needed improvements in all these areas of interest. An ecological ethic will of necessity guide future human actions and all cultural configurations. Failing this, all notions of "humanity" will be rendered null and void and tragically absurd.
Humans need now more than ever new visions for their humanity and place on the planet, not vague notions about how they are all "connected" or "related." What kinds of models can inspire the forces of action and the change of vision that will be needed? The kinds of models that place "culture" in the foreground, not those that try to minimize its importance or relegate its value to the dustbin of history. Culture has always united human action (for better or worse). At this most critical evolutionary juncture, culture and culture reenvisioned alone will prove the species' salvation. Or its doom.
Part of the reason for recognizing the importance of cultural diversity (rather than renouncing all traditional tribal allegiances and identities) is that there is much that many cultures, and many all but unknown, or little known, can potentially contribute toward the fostering of the environmental ethic and the expansion of vision that alone will ensure our survival as a species and connect us all to a higher and more inclusive picture of humanity. Without their critical cultural knowledge, to say nothing of their natural ability to make others reflect relatively on the merits of their own, we are left with singleminded conceptions for the structuring of human interests and for moving the species forward (and not always in the most profitable, or sanest, of directions). This 'totalizing' impulse, to consume and subsume, has resulted in no shortage of human conflict and suffering. One is right to be wary of all calls, however grand, for a 'unification' of all cultures and ways of living. Few proposals have promised so much good yet yielded so much destruction to cultures in the name of "a common humanity."
It is a very good and even necessary thing that other cultures exist, that other thought patterns and concepts of living obtain, and remain. And every one of them has much indeed to teach and learn from one another about the ways to live and think and see, to express and experience their humanity. To get us all to "a better world and a safer world," we might start by learning a bit more about that larger world, the world that exists quite independently from our own limited view of it.
The ultimate sense of security will be when we come to recognize that we are all part of one human race. Our primary allegiance is to the human race and not to one particular color or border. I think the sooner we renounce the sanctity of these many identities and try to identify ourselves with the human race the sooner we will get a better world and a safer world. -Mohamed ElBaradei, diplomat, Nobel laureate (b. 17 Jun 1942)
A noble thought. The thing is, humans are cultural beings. Tribal identity is woven into the core of the DNA. Tribal bonds as such are not destructive nor should they be entirely discouraged in the name of some transnational, supra-human identity. The notion that, deep down, "we are all one" may sound nice and foster warm and fuzzy feelings, but in point of fact we are not all one: there is much diversity in terms of culture and language and worldview, and despite many of the popular ideas about human origins, the fact is that there is much diversity at the genetic level as well.
"Ethnic diversity" is not an empty phrase, and "culture" is infinitely more than a convenient social construct. Any real and meaningful effort to promote a unifying vision around which to structure human action will need to take much more seriously into account the anthropological questions, which have everything to do with cultural identity, language, tradition, and worldview. It will do no humanist vision any favors to advocate that "we renounce the sanctity of these many identities." These many identities have been forged and fostered over thousands if not millions of years. All people who identify with a certain cultural or tribal identity are not simply prepared to "renounce" that identity in favor of some abstract affiliation that we call "the human race." What, really, is all that to be taken to mean, anyway? I am not so sure that many who advocate this have any clear or definite idea in mind. It is all well to seek to find commonalities and points of connection, and I am all for cross-cultural human cooperation in the interest of productive and peaceful outcomes. I am less than confident that such purposes can be realized by minimizing cultural differences or renouncing identities that have been in gestation since humans first learned to come together in the first place (which, again, had everything to do with cultural bonds, language, religion, and all the rest of it).
What's the solution, then? I think the start of a solution is to understand the problem of human conflict as a fundamentally anthropological problem, at the core of which remains the matter of culture. Margaret Mead has addressed this matter to some productive purpose throughout her writings and in clear, digestible summary in her essay on 'World Culture' (1947). [The essay is included in Anthropology: A Human Science. Selected Papers 1939-1960, pp. 134-45.] Mead in her summary observes the following:
"In summary it may be said that world community seems more likely to be attained by working toward certain over-all abstract and inclusive values, within which the different people of the world, who now see one another as separate, competitive, or unrelated, will be able to feel themselves a part, the cultures of each regularly related to the whole to which all give allegiance in different ways congruent with their own cultural values. Thus we would be working toward the type of multi-dimensional world culture, within which there would be interdependence of diverse values rather than a world in which any one interest or function so dominated the others that single value scales, competition, and destruction were the concomitants." (Mead 1964: 144.)
Key to Mead's analysis here is the notion of a "multi-dimensional world culture," that is, one in which the diversity and plurality of cultures is preserved though participatorily structured toward a common culture and a common goal. Such a common culture we can call "the human race," or something more semantically refined, but the common goal has got to be something higher and more inspiring than the zero-sum game of material acquisition and the maximization of all possible sources of wealth. Yes, economic vitality is and always has been crucial to survival. It is also the case that sustainability and ecological integrity are vital, for the survival of all life on any planet. The humans on planet Earth, by any reasonably honest assessment, face many points of needed improvements in all these areas of interest. An ecological ethic will of necessity guide future human actions and all cultural configurations. Failing this, all notions of "humanity" will be rendered null and void and tragically absurd.
Humans need now more than ever new visions for their humanity and place on the planet, not vague notions about how they are all "connected" or "related." What kinds of models can inspire the forces of action and the change of vision that will be needed? The kinds of models that place "culture" in the foreground, not those that try to minimize its importance or relegate its value to the dustbin of history. Culture has always united human action (for better or worse). At this most critical evolutionary juncture, culture and culture reenvisioned alone will prove the species' salvation. Or its doom.
Part of the reason for recognizing the importance of cultural diversity (rather than renouncing all traditional tribal allegiances and identities) is that there is much that many cultures, and many all but unknown, or little known, can potentially contribute toward the fostering of the environmental ethic and the expansion of vision that alone will ensure our survival as a species and connect us all to a higher and more inclusive picture of humanity. Without their critical cultural knowledge, to say nothing of their natural ability to make others reflect relatively on the merits of their own, we are left with singleminded conceptions for the structuring of human interests and for moving the species forward (and not always in the most profitable, or sanest, of directions). This 'totalizing' impulse, to consume and subsume, has resulted in no shortage of human conflict and suffering. One is right to be wary of all calls, however grand, for a 'unification' of all cultures and ways of living. Few proposals have promised so much good yet yielded so much destruction to cultures in the name of "a common humanity."
It is a very good and even necessary thing that other cultures exist, that other thought patterns and concepts of living obtain, and remain. And every one of them has much indeed to teach and learn from one another about the ways to live and think and see, to express and experience their humanity. To get us all to "a better world and a safer world," we might start by learning a bit more about that larger world, the world that exists quite independently from our own limited view of it.
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