Cutting to the Chase of Morality

Lots of loose talk about morality and culture - you see it in politcs of all sorts, so it's great to see somebody cut to the chase - in this case it's John Gray in reviewing 'The Quest for Meaning' by Tariq Ramadan...

Ramadan wants to replace this practice with a high-minded attitude of mutual respect. Each of us, he writes, must accept that "the presence of the other within my own conception of the world is both a fact and a necessity". I am not sure what this means – assuming it means anything and is not just hot air – but if Ramadan is suggesting that in order to tolerate repugnant views one must empathise with those who hold them, he is plainly wrong.There is a conventional view that says we can despise someone's beliefs while respecting them as individuals, but there are plenty of people who deserve contempt. If we tolerate the hateful views of Holocaust deniers, the reason is not that we think such people have any kind of moral worth. It is because free speech is much too important to be compromised for their sake.
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Mesmerised by this empty dream, he is scornful of talk of civilisation. "The definition of the term 'civilisation', he writes, "is very relative." But stoning women and gay people is an atrocity no matter how many cultures have sanctioned the practice. Torture is abhorrent whether it is inflicted by the Taliban or by Americans in Guantánamo. Civilisation comes in many forms, but barbarism is always the same.

Detriot: the first post-industrial US city

Brilliant, brilliant documentary about the US city of Detroit; famous for car production and Motown and now the first post-industrial US city. The city was built for 2 million people and run by the motor-Oligarchs like Henry Ford as a monoculture city. But when the motor industry failed, so the city failed - economic crashes, globalisation and dugs wars creating a 'slow motion Katrina'. Haunting images of factories being reclaimed by natures, burning cities and people turning the former factories back into farmland as the land goes into full circle:

Julien Temple's new film is a vivid evocation of an apocalyptic vision: a slow-motion Katrina that has had many more victims. Detroit was once America's fourth largest city.

Built by the car for the car, with its groundbreaking suburbs, freeways and shopping centres, it was the embodiment of the American dream.

But its intense race riots brought the army into the city. With violent union struggles against the fierce resistance of Henry Ford and the Big Three, it was also the scene of American nightmares.

Now it is truly a dystopic post-industrial city, in which 40 per cent of the land in the centre is returning to prairie. Greenery grows up through abandoned office blocks, houses and collapsing car plants, and swallows up street lights.

Police stations and post offices have been left with papers on the desks like the Marie Celeste. There is no more rush hour on what were the first freeways in America. Crime, vandalism, arson and dog fighting are the main activities in once the largest building in North America. But it's also a source of hope.

The Road - The film and the book...

I went to the the post-apocalyptic film 'The Road' on the weekend. I'd read the book when it came out and while it is one of the bleakest things I've ever read, the power and the beauty of the writing keeps you going. The film is the same - powerful yet bleak. When the book came out, George Monbiot was haunted by it and wrote about it's importance:

Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, "their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl." McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.

All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do?: the only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity’s time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change.

This is the book's power - when the sun is blotted out and the plants stop growing, everything begins to die. The film carries that same bleak vision - other than the few remaining people, you only see two other living things in the film. There is also small, but hugely significant scene where the father (Viggo Mortensen) is looking thought the tiny collection of bits and bobs his son carries with him - among them is a stone-age arrow head. A premonition of where our hubris may lead us. The rapid decent of humanity to utter barbarity also have echoes of John Gray's writings on politics - that human rights are not cumulative and must ever be defended. But the biggest message seared into your brain by the film is of a world where the environment is shattered utterly. Totally. The old man they encounter is a lost prophet, "I know this was coming. The signs were there." He declares, "But most people thought it was a hoax." The warning signs are there...

There is little to reassure us in a world where the future is going to be so unlike the past – indeed, we are now entering a new geological era, in which the major chemical cycles of carbon, water and nitrogen have all been altered immeasurably by human activity. How far will we have to push these planetary stresses for cracks to appear in our modern civilisation, and for the evil within us all to tear once more across the land? ... If we ever do push the planet so far that the majority of the human race is left without food or water in uninhabitable areas, what will it feel like to be one of the starving millions? Initially we might all come together in adversity, in a kind of global blitz spirit. McCarthy admits this possibility: at first, others had "come to help" the survivors. But "within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day, the dead impaled on spikes along the road." We won't stay united for long.

How can anyone prepare for this kind of outcome? Over the years, [Mark Lynas, author on global warming, has] received many emails from people asking where they might need to set up home if runaway global warming begins. New Zealand, perhaps? Norway? I'm sure all the questioners share the same survivalist fantasy, the one where they take their family into the hills and survive on a small farmstead, stockpiling rice and baked beans and keeping a loaded rifle by the well-guarded front door. The Road exposes even this limited comfort as being futile: sooner or later the ammunition will run out, the pounding on the door will begin to splinter away the hinges, and the ravening, faceless horde will pour in. If the worst happens the truth is that there is nowhere to hide, and the road itself will offer no comforts. Of that we can be certain.

The only thing the film missed was the narration of the last paragraph of the book - it's not a plot twist at all, but a hunting lament who's meaning is left to the reader to interpret...

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

John Gray Talk: Beware Fascism

I went along to see the political philosopher John Gray give a talk yesterday at the Watershed. It was a very illuminating talk with lots of interesting points. His main point is that regardless we admit it or not, many of us have an idea of political 'progress' as a cumulative thing. What he means is that science and technology are cumulative - as in, once we solve one issue or problem, we can build new knowledge and technology on the back of that. As our knowledge about the world gets greater and the technology we can develop also grows. For example, as our ability to understand micro-technology grows we have been able to progress that knowledge further and further so we can each have a personal PC that is many times more powerful than the one NASA used to send people to the moon in the 60s.

Gray says we all tend to fall into the trap of applying the same ideals to political progress. There these is a big narrative to history; be it religious or secular - that we think history has a direction. So once universal suffrage is gained, that's democracy sorted and we can progress to exporting it (e.g. Iraq). Those (like the Neocons) who aims for impossible gains (spreading democracy via the gun) always end up sacrificing other people's lives on their alter of progress. He suggests this is foolish, that while the progress made is a good thing (he cited women's rights, ending slavery etc as good things we should protect) that when the sit hits the fan these can(and do) get reversed very quickly.

In his 2003 book 'Al Queda and What it Means to Be Modern' he does predict the economic collapse. In the talk he pointed out that tens of thousands of practising economists failed to. What does that say about the system? It says reverses can and do happen and the happen fast. Prior to this fall he suggests the hubris was that we thought we could control risk. We could not. He now predicts that we are in the first stages of a longer collapse and that reverses will happen - that groups of humans will blame other groups of humans and turn on each other. He also predicts the return of the racist right as part of this.

Looking at the predicted gains of the BNP, even the Evening Post's acquiesce to casual racism against travellers, it seems his predictions are coming to pass. Gray suggests things like resisting ID cards are worthy because while the government may claim benign reasons for it, almost all knowledge and technology can be used for ill, and as reveres happen fast, we should not empower the state with this data.

Denial Watch: The Bible Says Climate Change Can't Happen

I re-checked the date of this post to see if it was the 1st April, but no, it seems it is not. You could not make this shit up; Climate change can't be real because it would contradict the Bible:

When God finished His creation, "God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). Do you think he would have judged a fragile system biased by unidirectional feedbacks toward destruction that way? No, He would not. Indeed, the global destruction of the Flood required His supernatural intervention (Genesis 6-8), after which He promised Himself, "I will never again curse the ground on account of man ...; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease" (Genesis 8:21-22)-the repeated pairs of opposites being the poetic device called merism, implying that God had committed Himself to ensuring that all the cycles needed for human (and other) thriving would continue.

It is so wrong I don't know where to start. Wow; now we have already seen points in the Earth's where life nearly died, that were not Noah's flood. But it also commits the basic fallacy of thinking the planet is designed for us and that climate change threatens the planet - it does not, life and the planet will continue; just not in this form.

Still this does give a single bight spot in the huge dark could of climate change; that when it happens, the Bible is proved wrong. Hurah!

The Power of Nature

As humans we are all too often human-centric in our world-view. We see ourselves as the be-all and end-all of history. But are we really? Our all too often arrogant religions place us at the centre of the universe and its time, but the probability is that we may well be nothing but the brief flowering on hyper-active sentience on a planet that existed before us and will carry on happily after us, thank you very much. Taking a passage from an old New Scientist article (which was reprinted in the excellent journal 'Do or Die' and replacing 'London' with 'Bristol' we get;

“But what would really happen if Bristol went back to to nature? Let's suppose that this weekend Bristolians flee after a Chernobyl-style accident. Or that tonight's news reveals that a genetically-engineered virus has been set loose, as in the film Twelve Monkeys. Or that Bristolains suddenly all get so sick of city life that they take Shelley's advice to flee "to the wild wood and the downs". How long before abandoned Bristol turned back to a rural paradise?”

Passing though the Bear-Pit today, there was a remarkable view of that vision; a wild flower paradise in the centre of the concrete jungle! It was amazing too see and I stopped to snap it I noticed many other fellow Bristolians doing the same.



There is something in the power of nature that speaks directly to us and beyond us. The hyper-complex system we have built may be far more unstable that we like to think;

“The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different? Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic. Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later? A few researchers have been making such claims for years. Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as complexity theory suggest that they are right...”

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System Collapse

Reading in the paper about how plastic made from corn-starch is having a detrimental impact on the climate and global food prices just goes to show how we can't consume our way out the problems we face. Perhaps this is why environmental writers like Paul Kingsnorth are sanguine about global warming, arguing it is too late to change the massive momentum of the capital-consumption machine. It is also compounded with the recent strike by the Grangemouth refinery workers about how the 'just-in-time' system is so vulnerable that the temporary closure of one plant threatens the whole UK system - there is no resilience in the system - and now it looks like it is inevitable;

DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different?....Lester Brown [of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC] thinks we are fast running out of time. “The world can no longer afford to waste a day. We need a Great Mobilisation, as we had in wartime,” he says. “There has been tremendous progress in just the past few years. For the first time, I am starting to see how an alternative economy might emerge. But it’s now a race between tipping points – which will come first, a switch to sustainable technology, or collapse?”

Tainter is not convinced that even new technology will save civilisation in the long run. “I sometimes think of this as a ‘faith- based’ approach to the future,” he says. Even a society reinvigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually face the problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits.

Couple of other links worth reading;

- Who to Vote for by the Green's Charile Bolton, a study in why our political system is crap and full of lying politicians.
- The Pointy Heads, Ian Bone's attack on those who preach while not doing.
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Jensen/Zerzan Interview

Interesting Interview with with John Zerzan & Derrick Jensen on Mental Health. Sample;

"RD Lang talked about the dynamics that abusive families [have] so they can maintain themselves. He has the three rules of a dysfunctional family, which are also the three rules of dysfunctional culture. Rule A 1. Is don‘t. Rule A.2 is rule A.1 does not exist, and rule A.3 is never discuss the existence of rules A, A.1, or A.2. The point is that, that is crazy making. That’s true in an abusive family and it’s true on a larger scale. And another thing that’s really important, is that everything within an abusive dynamic is set up to protect the abuser. Once again, that makes craziness."