Bush v. Gore and climate change

In 2000, the majority of Americans voted for Al Gore, a staunch environmentalist who had written in Earth in the Balance that the car was the most destructive invention of all time. A significant number of Americans also believed that Gore did not go far enough and voted for Ralph Nader, the Green Party nominee. At this point, there were many Republicans who admitted the existence of anthrophogenic climate change. Had Gore won the Electoral College vote — and I’m one of those bitter dead-enders who will maintain till my dying day that Bush ultimately received Florida’s electoral votes due to deliberate fraud — it seems to me that it’s a near-certainty that major action on climate change would have taken place, most likely a “cap and trade” plan.

It would’ve been bad enough if the inauguration of Bush put that on hold. In reality, though, the Bush administration, representing the interest of the fossil fuel industry, aggressively pushed back against the consensus on global warming. Suddenly it became Republican orthodoxy to adopt a kind of “kettle logic” on climate change: global warming isn’t happening, and we aren’t causing it, and anyway it would be ruinously expensive for us to reverse it. Idiotic policies like tax breaks for SUVs were pushed through. Self-styled centrist Democrats found that climate change was suddenly a strictly “partisan” issue and refused to lend their support when Obama pushed for climate change legislation. And now Democrats appear to view climate change as a toxic issue, such that Obama has scarcely mentioned it.

And of course now we’re starting to see irreversable “vicious cycle” type of phenomena like the melting of frozen methane in Siberia, etc., and precisely the kind of bizarre weather disruptions (i.e., “snow hurricanes”) that have been predicted.

So in conclusion, I’m pretty sure that future historians — assuming there even are any! — will look back at Bush v. Gore as the moment we irretrievably fucked up. What do you think, readers?

What will we do with all those cows?

Whenever people discuss issues like vegetarianism, my tendency is always to think in terms of how one could systematize or universalize it. For instance, granted that veganism is the most desirable diet (due to environmental sustainability, ethical concerns, better health, or whatever other reason), what would it look like if we made it mandatory and redesigned the entire food production system around it?

The first question I have is what ideas people have put forth in terms of “winding down” animal domestication. For instance, there are some breeds of various domesticated animals that simply cannot survive in the wild — they’re bred to produce the maximum amount of meat or milk and they can’t do much else. Would they be subject to further breeding or genetic modification to make them viable in the wild, would that breed be allowed to die out, or what other solution would there be? Similarly, would it be a realistic goal for all of these breeds of animals to return to their pre-human forms and live in the wild, or would we instead be obligated to continue caring for them insofar as we in a certain way “created” them in their current form?

Many readers know much more about these topics and debates than me — what are the basic proposals out there, if any? Do any seem to you to be more workable, desirable, etc.?

A hypothesis for discussion

The hypothesis is as follows: The Chinese Communist Party is still engaged in a recognizably communist project and meeting with success in some respects, perhaps most notably on ecological matters. Hence, those on the left should seriously consider supporting China and holding it up as a model.

What do you think?

Recycling and the limits of ethical consumerism

I am not a very pious recycler. In fact, if I didn’t live with The Girlfriend, I might not even bother with recycling in my home. I understand that this makes me a bad person to a certain extent, but every time I sort recycling, I think, “This cannot possibly be even remotely the best way to implement this.” The system is so obviously a clunky add-on to our manufacturing process that I can barely stand to think about the inefficiencies involved.

One way of looking at global warming

I’m sure many of you have heard the news of the methane gas being released from melting Arctic ice. It seems to me that this is an appropriate time to pause and reflect on the basic sequence of events that led us to this catastrophic point.

What happened was that we found an extremely powerful energy source buried in the ground, a source so powerful that it made all kinds of previously impossible things possible. That energy source is what allowed us to put a man on the moon, for instance — an amazing feat! But what we mostly used that energy source for — other than to fight wars — was to build suburbs, fuel little boxes for us to be stuck in traffic in, and pointlessly ship goods around the world so that companies could take advantage of lower labor costs.

And when it became clear that the side-effects of wasting so much of this precious fuel for stupid shit were threatening to throw off the equilibrium of the entire planet, what we did was build even more suburbs requiring even longer commutes and ship even more goods pointlessly around the world, until the whole thing collapsed into a self-induced catastrophe that has so disrupted human societies that the thought of focusing on the long-term threat of global warming doesn’t even seem to occur to our leaders anymore.

Surely we are the prodigal son of species! We wanted our inheritance as quickly as possible, and we used it up — but there’s no father for us to go home to, no one to fix our mess for us.

What is Creaturely Theology?

First, just a “thanks” to aufs for hosting the livestream of our divinanimality conference at Drew this past weekend. While the event is still fresh, I also thought I might pose a couple of questions that began to gestate over the course of this four day conference. My ears are selectively attentive. So whatever I report will (naturally) be told a bit slant. But, nonetheless, I’m interested in broad questions, about how religious studies and theology might infect/intersect with the ever-expanding storehouse of scholarship in animal studies.

Of course there were theological questions, calling attention to the sticky relations between creatures, creators, creations. But I think one of the most fruitful conversations—one that kept coming up over the course of the weekend—was the ontological distinction between the “animal” and the “creaturely.” While the conference intended to foreground the challenges that animals and divinities pose to humanist orthodoxies, many pointed to the “creaturely” as a plane of engagement that seems to do something different. I’ve actually given a lot of thought to this question (and have a forthcoming piece about it, in the volume resulting from the “Metaphysics & Things” conference at the Claremont Graduate University last December). But it was interesting to hear this conversation broadening. Kate Rigby suggested that the creaturely is a more “democratic” conceptual space—inclusive of both humans and animals, as well as plants, monsters. Perhaps even machines. This space isn’t unlike that given to “actors” in Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, Alfred North Whitehead’s “actual entities” or even OOO’s objects. But, of course, the creaturely has a theological genealogy. Which makes it easier to explore this concept in the field of religious ideas. In spite of the generic, egalitarian potential of the creaturely, however,

Hey Teacher, Play Your Part!

I remember once, when I was a graduate student, speaking to some other graduate students who insisted that “you just can’t teach (fill in the blank) philosopher to ungrads.” At the time, I thought, no way. If you can’t teach something it’s because you don’t know it well enough; if you’re truly inside a thinker, then you can make that thinker speak to anyone, at whatever level. 

A Life Worthy of the Idea and the Appearence of Trees

Alain Badiou is always a pleasure a read even if, like me, one isn’t convinced by or a disciple of his philosophy. The first full book in French I read was Badiou’s Manifeste pour la philosophie, which was in many ways a short summary of Being and Event. He has repeated this gesture with his (recently translated) Second Manifesto for Philosophy, which is a summary of the main ideas present in Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. LoW contains an interesting development of his theory of fidelity, which most readers will be familiar with from his St Paul: The Foundation of Universalism where St. Paul is an instance of one being faithful to an event. Another way of saying this is that St. Paul, like all faithful subjects, “lived a life worthy of the Idea”. In LoW he expands this to a general theory of “subjectivation” or different relational decisions regarding an event are different ways of being a subject. So in addition to a faithful subject, there is also a reactionary subject (who rejects the event) and an obscure subject (who tries to turn the event, founded on the void, into some transcendent body like the Nation, or God, or Race, or Nature, or what have you). I was really taken with this and so Daniel Whistler and me used it in our editorial introduction to After the Postsecular and the Postmodern (Amazon: US, UK; Book Depository) when writing about the different ways theologians, theorists, and philosophers related to the post-secular event.

The So-Called Dualism between Nature and Culture

I’ve expressed my disappointment with the majority of theological engagements with ecology and that disappointment has come up again as I’ve been preparing my lectures for Environmental Ethics and Religious Thought. It seems that a lot of theologians focus in on the “split between nature and culture” as the underlying idea driving the ecological crisis. It isn’t just the high-church orthodox ones either. Lynn White’s famous essay that locats the “psychic foundation” for the ecological crisis in the turn from paganism to monotheism is really about what more contemporary thinkers refer to as the split between nature and culture. For White sees in Christianity the enthroning of humanity over and above nature. You then have Northcott responding to this claim with the counter that it was “the wrong kind of Christianity” that created this split. So, rather than dealing head on with the charge (which could be spurious anyway), Northcott moves around it, all the while leaving the underlying thesis regarding nature and culture in place.

This so-called dualism really doesn’t bother me though. I don’t think that positing distinctions in reality lead to the ecological crisis. Nor do I think that a nature/culture split leads automatically to viewing the earth as just a collection of things to be used. I know you get this in Heidegger, the change from a river into the power that a river can provide, but that is part of the river. Even from a phenomenological perspective we don’t find any foundation for the rampant nostalgia present in the theologians’ insincere lamentations for a bygone era. I’m not the biggest fan of Latour’s work, but his theory of nature/culture hybrids does reveal something. Essentially, neither nature-as-that-which-is-but-is-not-human and culture-as-that-which-is-human-and-part-of-nature have priority. There is something univocal at work underlying nature and culture (with these definitions, since they are slippery terms). We can call that Nature’s character as One. But positing a dualism helps us to think the real immanence of Nature-as-One, for it is a formal and abstract separation, rather than a real one.

I think if theologians could get to grips with the truth of immanence they would be less terrified by death, by nature, by genes, and the like. It may help them get past their psychopathic ethics; the kind where you say things like “there is no death outside the church” or you’re living in fear that you don’t know what life is. For the truth of immanence is not naturalism, scientists don’t even believe in naturalism now days, but gnosis. Rather than thinking it is all occluded, all a paradoxical mystery supported by the hand of the Creator who humiliates his creatures, you just know.

Some Thoughts on the Politics of “Suburbs”

The place I grew up was not exactly the suburbs, more like some post-industrial small city out of a Springsteen song.  Nonetheless, there’s something about Arcade Fire’s new album that I find affectively striking.  This is because the titular “suburbs” are not an actual place—though, sadly, they are also that—but something like the condition of possibility for contemporary North American existence.   It is in this sense, I think, that we can speak of the political character of The Suburbs.  They have made an album that is not “realist” so much as an encounter with that which enables what we call reality—the feelings, the patterns of thought, the capacities of sense that one cannot avoid encountering.