In seminar this week, we are discussing the following question: "Do animals have historical agency?" This strikes me as one of the great red herrings of environmental history (see also “commons, tragedy of the”). Agency carries so many different meanings in such different contexts that this question seems aimed at prompting knee-jerk opposition from a historiographical constituency that may not actually exist.
Let us try to unpack what this question might actually mean:
A. Do animals effect history? I think we would be hard pressed to find a contemporary historian who does not think that non-human actors can have a role in changing the course of events. Even the most anthropocentric must concede that horses had a role in the course of warfare, or that people care about national symbols like the bald eagle.
B. Do animals effect history (independent of humans)? Many historians have never particularly considered this question, and to me it seems a moot point. In the modern world, there are effectively no animals that exist independent of anthropogenic interventions. Everywhere, animals are interdependent in a web that includes humans. In the rare contexts where this is not the case, I am not sure that we (as historians) especially care what animals do.
C. Do animals effect history (in seemingly unpredictable ways)? This is how I would interpret Brett Walker (sometimes, especially in Toxic Archipelago) and Timothy Mitchell (in "Can the Mosquito Speak?"). It is a more productive phrasing of the above question, that avoids the problematic [modernist] assumption that factors can be manipulated independent of one another. The answer is yes, clearly animals display what might be mathematically termed “chaotic” or “nonlinear” behavior. Wolves that had coexisted peacefully with humans suddenly start attacking them. Or conversely, humans that had previously coexisted peacefully with wolves suddenly start attacking them. But if this type of agency extends beyond humans to other animals, surely it also extends to phenomena like weather, currency markets and machines. If we begin talking about all of these phenomena as having “agency” it lends them equivalence that harkens back to the days of ghost in the machine and money demons coexisting with gods and men. This may carry narrative power, but I do not think it is analytically coherent.
D. Do animals effect history (through their unique symbolic power)? This seems to be where Harriet Ritvo’s main argument lies. Animals do form powerful discursive symbols. And we know that symbols have sociohistorical power. But this still fails to differentiate animals from other powerful symbols like - again - weather, currency markets and machines.
E. Are animals psychosocial/moral actors? I think this is the provocative position that Walker aims at (in Lost Wolves). The most convincing answers to this question do not come from history, however, but from the zone where evolutionary biology melds into anthropology, and psychology. Walker does make interesting use of this, combined with his personal musings. I would argue, however, that the implications here lie more in the realm of moral philosophy than in history. Walker is making a normative case - that animals should be treated as moral actors - rather than a historical case - that the moral nature of non-human animals changes the way they function historically.
Questions:
1. Does the psychosocial/moral agency of non-human animals change the way they function as historical actors? To me, this is the position that must be demonstrated before animal agency becomes an interesting question. Walker takes aim at this, and succeeds to some degree in posing humans and wolves as part of the same continuum; but I do not think he succeeds in showing that animal agency E causes animal agency C or D, merely in conflating the three.
2. Why stop at animals? We have seen Mitchel suggest (perhaps) that plasmodia and bugs have agency, and Walker argue that chemicals do as well. McNeill pêre et fils have both written about the historical power of diseases. Elsewhere, Michael Pollan (in Botany of Desire [and see also]) has suggested that plants are agents. But why stop there? Complex machines, markets and weather are chaotic systems. Even abstract phenomena like ideas and evolution behave in ways that are predictable only in retrospect. They may not have type E agency, but it is not clear that type E agency effects the broader course of history. Maybe agency is a useful way of talking about complex phenomena.
3. If we talk about weather, markets, wolves, diseases, concepts and corn as all having agency - effecting events in seemingly unpredictable ways, being readily anthropomorphized, having symbolic power - aren't we back to a sort of polytheistic religion? And is is a problem if this takes us back to gods and demons? Contemporary theorists - Manuel de Landa and Bruno Latour, to name two - suggest that drawing clear epistemological division between natural and social processes obscures important commonalities and hybridities. This is not to say we should throw up our hands at complexity, or ascribe too much in the way of human characteristics to non-human processes - modern science and social science are not without successes. But it does suggest that we should not be so quick to look down our noses at premodern modes of thought.
Showing posts with label random thoughts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label random thoughts. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 3
Wednesday, March 21
From Jevons to margarine: a conversation on conservation
The idea that “Nature is over” has been in general circulation since Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature in 1989; it has now attained truly mainstream currency, as evidenced by its recent inclusion in Time Magazine’s “10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life.” While the extreme right continues to dispute whether climate change is caused by human action, it is undeniable that we have never had a greater impact on our surroundings. Beyond the vagaries of weather, the majority of the planet is now directly affected by human habitation. How will we provide enough food, water and energy for a population that recently surged past seven billion? The obvious solution is to conserve resources. If we all drive hybrid cars, recycle aluminum and eat a more efficient vegetarian diet, our limited resources will go further.
But the obvious solution is not necessarily the best one. At the end of the nineteenth century, facing the similar question of how to make England’s coal resources last, a young economist named William Stanley Jevons suggested that conservation efforts are actually counterproductive. In his 1865 book The Coal Question, he wrote "It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth." So long as the demand for a good is elastic - if people use more when the price goes down - conservation paradoxically increases consumption.
Despite its importance, this concept lay dormant for a century before being effectively rediscovered in the 1970s by another English economist, Len Brookes. This time, it was a crisis in oil rather than coal that prompted the realization. Since then, the idea has resurfaced only occasionally in the mainstream press: a 2005 Wall Street Journal argument against conservationist energy policy; a MacLeans article on how energy efficient housing helped create McMansions. Some environmentalists have argued that the Jevons Paradox, also called the “rebound effect,” is small enough that efficiency gains matter; others have proposed that it could be diminished by adding a “green tax” to counteract its effects.
Regardless of the size of the rebound, the Jevons Paradox makes clear that not all “conservation” actually conserves. In many cases, conservation is still desirable from an ecological standpoint, even if it does not save energy overall. Recycling now saves energy (it previously did not), which may or may not lead to increased consumption of materials. But even if recycling does not reduce the need for new materials like aluminum and plastic, it at least prevents used ones from ending up in the dump, consuming space and polluting land and water. Energy-conserving buildings, vehicles and appliances are much less clear-cut wins for the planet. While more efficient cars, windows and air-conditioners conserve on a per-unit basis, they have almost certainly led to bigger engines, bigger houses, and nearly universal “climate control.” They are intimately linked to the growth of suburbs and exurbs at the expense of open space and longer, energy-consuming commutes. Here, “conservation” almost certainly cost more energy; it certainly did not conserve natural environments.
There is also widespread perception that meat and dairy consumption is less efficient than vegetarianism - PETA claims this in their publications, so does the United Nations. In a forthcoming paper in Ethics, Policy and the Environment, bioethicist S. Matthew Liao considers the possibility of engineering humans to be more climate-conscious through ideas like “pharmacologically induced meat intolerance” and genetic manipulation to make humans smaller. The central precept of these projects - from propaganda to bioengineering - is that meat is less efficient, as much as 90% less efficient. The idea that it takes ten pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat was first publicized in an essay by Shelly, the British poet who became a prominent vegetarian in 1813. Simon Fairlie, an English environmentalist and author of Meat: A Benign Extravagance, suggests that the ratio is around 7:1 on the worst American feedlots, and closer to 1.3:1 if cows are primarily pastured on grass. Fairlie and Michael Pollan have called into question other aspects of the dictum that eating beef is bad for the environment. They suggest that mono-crop systems - in the quest for “efficiency” - must substitute artificial fertilizer and pesticides for what animals provide naturally. Animals are also a powerful “micro-endowment” of capital; Heifer International has been quite successful helping farm families through gifts of animals.
Imperial China is a powerful demonstration of the hazards of promoting supposed efficiency at all costs. While Jevons’s England depended on extensive colonial landholdings and intensive use of coal to drive its economy, eighteenth and nineteenth century China featured the most land-efficient economy in the world. China fed a larger (and largely vegetarian) population on less land than was possible anywhere until the widespread use of petrolium-based fertilizer in the twentieth century. In fact, China (and neighboring Japan) pioneered the use of mono-cropping, complete with “artificial” fertilizer made from soybeans and fish, and pesticide made from whale oil. This left Chinese farmers subject to Jevons Paradox - with more food available due to efficient farming, the population simply increased. The efficiency in land use led to more demand for land, not less; it also made the system highly sensitive to change. The scholar Mike Davis has shown that shifts in the market and the climate led to widespread starvation; my own research shows that the famine was worst where people owned the fewest farm animals. This seems highly relevant in a world experiencing financial crisis and expecting climate change.
A coda: when chemical fertilizer did become available, the excess soybeans quickly found a market in “health” foods like margarine and meat replacements; these "health food" companies - generally the arms of major agribusiness corporations - have played a lead role in convincing the world their products are good for us and for the environment. This is ultimately a dangerous and unhealthy fallacy - bad for farmers, bad for consumers, and dangerous to the global climate.
But the obvious solution is not necessarily the best one. At the end of the nineteenth century, facing the similar question of how to make England’s coal resources last, a young economist named William Stanley Jevons suggested that conservation efforts are actually counterproductive. In his 1865 book The Coal Question, he wrote "It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth." So long as the demand for a good is elastic - if people use more when the price goes down - conservation paradoxically increases consumption.
Despite its importance, this concept lay dormant for a century before being effectively rediscovered in the 1970s by another English economist, Len Brookes. This time, it was a crisis in oil rather than coal that prompted the realization. Since then, the idea has resurfaced only occasionally in the mainstream press: a 2005 Wall Street Journal argument against conservationist energy policy; a MacLeans article on how energy efficient housing helped create McMansions. Some environmentalists have argued that the Jevons Paradox, also called the “rebound effect,” is small enough that efficiency gains matter; others have proposed that it could be diminished by adding a “green tax” to counteract its effects.
Regardless of the size of the rebound, the Jevons Paradox makes clear that not all “conservation” actually conserves. In many cases, conservation is still desirable from an ecological standpoint, even if it does not save energy overall. Recycling now saves energy (it previously did not), which may or may not lead to increased consumption of materials. But even if recycling does not reduce the need for new materials like aluminum and plastic, it at least prevents used ones from ending up in the dump, consuming space and polluting land and water. Energy-conserving buildings, vehicles and appliances are much less clear-cut wins for the planet. While more efficient cars, windows and air-conditioners conserve on a per-unit basis, they have almost certainly led to bigger engines, bigger houses, and nearly universal “climate control.” They are intimately linked to the growth of suburbs and exurbs at the expense of open space and longer, energy-consuming commutes. Here, “conservation” almost certainly cost more energy; it certainly did not conserve natural environments.
There is also widespread perception that meat and dairy consumption is less efficient than vegetarianism - PETA claims this in their publications, so does the United Nations. In a forthcoming paper in Ethics, Policy and the Environment, bioethicist S. Matthew Liao considers the possibility of engineering humans to be more climate-conscious through ideas like “pharmacologically induced meat intolerance” and genetic manipulation to make humans smaller. The central precept of these projects - from propaganda to bioengineering - is that meat is less efficient, as much as 90% less efficient. The idea that it takes ten pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat was first publicized in an essay by Shelly, the British poet who became a prominent vegetarian in 1813. Simon Fairlie, an English environmentalist and author of Meat: A Benign Extravagance, suggests that the ratio is around 7:1 on the worst American feedlots, and closer to 1.3:1 if cows are primarily pastured on grass. Fairlie and Michael Pollan have called into question other aspects of the dictum that eating beef is bad for the environment. They suggest that mono-crop systems - in the quest for “efficiency” - must substitute artificial fertilizer and pesticides for what animals provide naturally. Animals are also a powerful “micro-endowment” of capital; Heifer International has been quite successful helping farm families through gifts of animals.
Imperial China is a powerful demonstration of the hazards of promoting supposed efficiency at all costs. While Jevons’s England depended on extensive colonial landholdings and intensive use of coal to drive its economy, eighteenth and nineteenth century China featured the most land-efficient economy in the world. China fed a larger (and largely vegetarian) population on less land than was possible anywhere until the widespread use of petrolium-based fertilizer in the twentieth century. In fact, China (and neighboring Japan) pioneered the use of mono-cropping, complete with “artificial” fertilizer made from soybeans and fish, and pesticide made from whale oil. This left Chinese farmers subject to Jevons Paradox - with more food available due to efficient farming, the population simply increased. The efficiency in land use led to more demand for land, not less; it also made the system highly sensitive to change. The scholar Mike Davis has shown that shifts in the market and the climate led to widespread starvation; my own research shows that the famine was worst where people owned the fewest farm animals. This seems highly relevant in a world experiencing financial crisis and expecting climate change.
A coda: when chemical fertilizer did become available, the excess soybeans quickly found a market in “health” foods like margarine and meat replacements; these "health food" companies - generally the arms of major agribusiness corporations - have played a lead role in convincing the world their products are good for us and for the environment. This is ultimately a dangerous and unhealthy fallacy - bad for farmers, bad for consumers, and dangerous to the global climate.
Wednesday, December 7
The growing pains of a new rights regime
I have too much on my plate for this to be anything beyond a stray thought at the moment. I have been reading a lot on violence and unrest in historical China, on which a more complete post some time soon (I hope). In the meantime, it has me thinking quite a bit about the Occupy movement and the broader unrest of the past few decades.
Two relatively recent works coming out of the Tilly school have raised interesting questions on what we might call the early modern rights transition. Thomas Bouye's Manslaughter, Markets and Moral Economy and Ho-fung Hung's Protest With Chinese Characteristics are both attempts to make sense of the changing motivations for violence and mass protest in the mid-Qing Dynasty (18th century). Bouye splits these disputes into contractual - disputes caused by contract-based events like evictions and defaults - and non-contractual - disputes over things outside what is specified in contracts. Hung divides protests into state-engaging - seeking state assistance like famine relief - and state-resisting - avoiding state actions like tax collection. Both point to a shift, probably starting in the late Ming (late 16th/early 17th century), from a social and governmental regime founded on control over labor to one founded on control over capital (mainly land and silver). In other words, there was a shift in the most important sources of wealth and power, and both the state and society reacted by creating new means of control.
Prior to the shift, control of labor was relatively important. Labor was relatively scarce, and there was not enough liquid capital for capital-intensive techniques, or market-based control regimes. Because of this, gentry exerted their power through customary rights over bonded labor, and the state used corvee - mandated labor - as part of its tax regime. Control of land was important, but if it was not coupled with direct control over labor, it was ineffective.
The 16th and 17th centuries brought about two important shifts. First, population surged, decreasing the marginal value of labor. Second, an influx of silver decreased the frictional costs of market-based control mechanisms. Gentry began to focus more on exerting control of land, knowing that they could obtain labor on the market. The state commuted tax payments in kind (grain, textile) and in labor (corvee) to monetized payments (the so-called "Single Whip Reform"), confident in the transferability of capital. The result was the beginnings of the end of customary rights regimes with a dual focus on land and labor, and the transition to an early capitalist regime, where labor, produce, currency and land were all readily interchangeable - a regime in which control of land and currency began to trump control of land and labor. Increasingly, this control was marked contractually, rather than through customary rights.
This transition was slowed somewhat by the fall of the dynasty. Warfare, famine and epidemics reduced the population, increasing the marginal value of labor. Wartime markets were less efficient, and unrest made contracts hard to enforce. But once the Qing Dynasty was stabilized, it continued. The mid-Qing was marked by unrest and violence, demarcating the still-ragged edge of the contractual, capitalist rights regime. Initially, most unrest was directed toward resisting the new rights regime - advocating for "traditional" customary rights, resisting the new taxes, laws and contracts. Eventually, there was a transition to where unrest was largely directed toward hashing out rights within the new regime. Instead of resisting the idea of contractual labor, tenants advocated for more or better contractual rights. Instead of resisting state programs, people protests specifics of how they were implemented. Disputes were increasingly contained within the new rights regime rather than resisting its imposition and advocating for the more traditional formulation of rights.
It appears to me that we have gone through several transitions since then, from the industrial revolution's focus on light and then heavy industry, to the further capitalization of agriculture during the green revolution, to the shift from goods to services. And we are going through a similar transition now. With the rise of intellectual property and digitization, rights to traditional capital forms are changing. Capital markets have become hyper-fluid, and focus largely on profiting from the borders of outdated regulatory regimes that are now outpaced by the rate of transactions. Sectors like arts and entertainment, information technology, finance, education and services now dominate traditional productive sectors in durable and non-durable goods, let alone even more "traditional" sectors like agriculture and mining (see the chart at xkcd). Even in the "traditional" productive sectors, intellectual property has become more and more important. Agribusiness is increasingly about patenting drugs, genes and even species - bringing this most traditional of sectors into the information rights regime. Even all of these sectors put together are completely dominated by the market in derivatives. Rights and transactions in nearly pure information are replacing all the old forms of capital - land, labor, goods, services...even currency.
Through all of these innovations, most people and even the government is being left behind. In the Ming and Qing, tenants were lost until they learned to assert their rights within the new regime. The strength of the Qing at its height was in part through its embrace of the land-capital power base - taxes were denominated primarily in land, and collected in silver. It fell in part because it failed to transition to a power base in industrial capital, with the appropriate social and governmental controls.
The current unrest, at the popular level, is because individuals have not yet figured out how to assert their rights under the new regime. The way IP works now privileges giant corporations with massive legal teams. The negative outcomes of this system are felt from the web, to pharmaceuticals to agriculture and consumables, where bigger corporate entities have the advantage. Open source, creative commons and such concepts seem to be early attempts for consumers and more diffuse production groups to exert their rights under the intellectual property system. To this point, these attempts to reform within the system are most effective in the more abstract forms of information - IT and software. Because consumers are in less direct contact with producers of other goods - drugs, food, etc - it has been harder for them to recognize the links in those systems. So far, reform attempts have been largely confined to the outdated rights regime or to resistance to the new system.
Many governments are also failing, to varying degrees, because they have not adjusted their tax systems or their forms of sovereignty to account for these changes in rights regimes. Tax codes are still focused on income and corporate taxes. These made sense during the industrial period, when these were the most important factors producing profits. This is not how profits are produced today. Most people are more important as consumers than producers. Financial transactions are inadequately taxed, as are profits obtained through control of intellectual property. Media, the direct control of information, has become even more important for elections, and a combination of finance and media corporations are able to dominate these processes. Sovereignty is still theoretically defined around the individual, but it functions around the unit of information. Government ends up underfunded for critical programs, and elections are travesties of financial escalation and media domination.
Again, with the exception of a few key sectors, individuals have been unsuccessful in asserting their economic or political rights as the rights regime changes. I would argue that this is largely because resistance to the excesses of the new system are stuck in modes of resistance based in an outdated system. It is tempting to demand a return of old rights and responsibilities, but history shows that this mode of engagement will ultimately fail. If the 99% is to be recognized in the 21st century, we must advocate for ourselves within the new rights regime. This means we must continue to fight for open-source, copy-left protections - of both "traditional" goods and methods, and of new ones that are developed though a more diffuse community. We must develop awareness linking producers to consumers of goods whose chain of production is more obscure. We must convince our governments to tax the most profitable sectors of the economy, both to ensure the government remains solvent, and to put more controls on these sectors. Politically, the new rights regime strikes me as a bigger challenge. How can the diffuse masses assert control of political information against better-organized, centralized industry lobbing? How can individuals continue to assert sovereignty in a context where control of liquid capital and media is more important than social organization. For now, I will leave this question to others, because I am out of ideas.
But in short, we must recognize that individual voters, consumers and small-scale diffuse producers are being left behind by centralizing, aggrandizing control of information-capital. To resist this and reclaim power for ourselves, we must meet the new rights regime on its own terms.
Two relatively recent works coming out of the Tilly school have raised interesting questions on what we might call the early modern rights transition. Thomas Bouye's Manslaughter, Markets and Moral Economy and Ho-fung Hung's Protest With Chinese Characteristics are both attempts to make sense of the changing motivations for violence and mass protest in the mid-Qing Dynasty (18th century). Bouye splits these disputes into contractual - disputes caused by contract-based events like evictions and defaults - and non-contractual - disputes over things outside what is specified in contracts. Hung divides protests into state-engaging - seeking state assistance like famine relief - and state-resisting - avoiding state actions like tax collection. Both point to a shift, probably starting in the late Ming (late 16th/early 17th century), from a social and governmental regime founded on control over labor to one founded on control over capital (mainly land and silver). In other words, there was a shift in the most important sources of wealth and power, and both the state and society reacted by creating new means of control.
Prior to the shift, control of labor was relatively important. Labor was relatively scarce, and there was not enough liquid capital for capital-intensive techniques, or market-based control regimes. Because of this, gentry exerted their power through customary rights over bonded labor, and the state used corvee - mandated labor - as part of its tax regime. Control of land was important, but if it was not coupled with direct control over labor, it was ineffective.
The 16th and 17th centuries brought about two important shifts. First, population surged, decreasing the marginal value of labor. Second, an influx of silver decreased the frictional costs of market-based control mechanisms. Gentry began to focus more on exerting control of land, knowing that they could obtain labor on the market. The state commuted tax payments in kind (grain, textile) and in labor (corvee) to monetized payments (the so-called "Single Whip Reform"), confident in the transferability of capital. The result was the beginnings of the end of customary rights regimes with a dual focus on land and labor, and the transition to an early capitalist regime, where labor, produce, currency and land were all readily interchangeable - a regime in which control of land and currency began to trump control of land and labor. Increasingly, this control was marked contractually, rather than through customary rights.
This transition was slowed somewhat by the fall of the dynasty. Warfare, famine and epidemics reduced the population, increasing the marginal value of labor. Wartime markets were less efficient, and unrest made contracts hard to enforce. But once the Qing Dynasty was stabilized, it continued. The mid-Qing was marked by unrest and violence, demarcating the still-ragged edge of the contractual, capitalist rights regime. Initially, most unrest was directed toward resisting the new rights regime - advocating for "traditional" customary rights, resisting the new taxes, laws and contracts. Eventually, there was a transition to where unrest was largely directed toward hashing out rights within the new regime. Instead of resisting the idea of contractual labor, tenants advocated for more or better contractual rights. Instead of resisting state programs, people protests specifics of how they were implemented. Disputes were increasingly contained within the new rights regime rather than resisting its imposition and advocating for the more traditional formulation of rights.
It appears to me that we have gone through several transitions since then, from the industrial revolution's focus on light and then heavy industry, to the further capitalization of agriculture during the green revolution, to the shift from goods to services. And we are going through a similar transition now. With the rise of intellectual property and digitization, rights to traditional capital forms are changing. Capital markets have become hyper-fluid, and focus largely on profiting from the borders of outdated regulatory regimes that are now outpaced by the rate of transactions. Sectors like arts and entertainment, information technology, finance, education and services now dominate traditional productive sectors in durable and non-durable goods, let alone even more "traditional" sectors like agriculture and mining (see the chart at xkcd). Even in the "traditional" productive sectors, intellectual property has become more and more important. Agribusiness is increasingly about patenting drugs, genes and even species - bringing this most traditional of sectors into the information rights regime. Even all of these sectors put together are completely dominated by the market in derivatives. Rights and transactions in nearly pure information are replacing all the old forms of capital - land, labor, goods, services...even currency.
Through all of these innovations, most people and even the government is being left behind. In the Ming and Qing, tenants were lost until they learned to assert their rights within the new regime. The strength of the Qing at its height was in part through its embrace of the land-capital power base - taxes were denominated primarily in land, and collected in silver. It fell in part because it failed to transition to a power base in industrial capital, with the appropriate social and governmental controls.
The current unrest, at the popular level, is because individuals have not yet figured out how to assert their rights under the new regime. The way IP works now privileges giant corporations with massive legal teams. The negative outcomes of this system are felt from the web, to pharmaceuticals to agriculture and consumables, where bigger corporate entities have the advantage. Open source, creative commons and such concepts seem to be early attempts for consumers and more diffuse production groups to exert their rights under the intellectual property system. To this point, these attempts to reform within the system are most effective in the more abstract forms of information - IT and software. Because consumers are in less direct contact with producers of other goods - drugs, food, etc - it has been harder for them to recognize the links in those systems. So far, reform attempts have been largely confined to the outdated rights regime or to resistance to the new system.
Many governments are also failing, to varying degrees, because they have not adjusted their tax systems or their forms of sovereignty to account for these changes in rights regimes. Tax codes are still focused on income and corporate taxes. These made sense during the industrial period, when these were the most important factors producing profits. This is not how profits are produced today. Most people are more important as consumers than producers. Financial transactions are inadequately taxed, as are profits obtained through control of intellectual property. Media, the direct control of information, has become even more important for elections, and a combination of finance and media corporations are able to dominate these processes. Sovereignty is still theoretically defined around the individual, but it functions around the unit of information. Government ends up underfunded for critical programs, and elections are travesties of financial escalation and media domination.
Again, with the exception of a few key sectors, individuals have been unsuccessful in asserting their economic or political rights as the rights regime changes. I would argue that this is largely because resistance to the excesses of the new system are stuck in modes of resistance based in an outdated system. It is tempting to demand a return of old rights and responsibilities, but history shows that this mode of engagement will ultimately fail. If the 99% is to be recognized in the 21st century, we must advocate for ourselves within the new rights regime. This means we must continue to fight for open-source, copy-left protections - of both "traditional" goods and methods, and of new ones that are developed though a more diffuse community. We must develop awareness linking producers to consumers of goods whose chain of production is more obscure. We must convince our governments to tax the most profitable sectors of the economy, both to ensure the government remains solvent, and to put more controls on these sectors. Politically, the new rights regime strikes me as a bigger challenge. How can the diffuse masses assert control of political information against better-organized, centralized industry lobbing? How can individuals continue to assert sovereignty in a context where control of liquid capital and media is more important than social organization. For now, I will leave this question to others, because I am out of ideas.
But in short, we must recognize that individual voters, consumers and small-scale diffuse producers are being left behind by centralizing, aggrandizing control of information-capital. To resist this and reclaim power for ourselves, we must meet the new rights regime on its own terms.
Tuesday, November 22
Fixed Ontologies and Authority Creep
I've been having a recurring conversation recently about what humanists can offer to the world at large. How can we get out of the ivory tower and offer something that goes beyond a community of specialists. Some academics complain that policy-makers etc don't listen to the humanist perspective. In large part, this is due to the way we cloister ourselves into disciplinary echo-chambers, writing papers that are incomprehensible without years of specialist training. Ironically, moves to interdisciplinary and digital collaboration have only hardened the divisions between areas of specialty (at least according to comments by Katy Borner at IPAM last summer) - it's now easier than ever to collaborate with people who do exactly the same things you do. In any case, my answer has been that humanists need to actively engage with the outside world. Not to wait for them to come to us; to go to them.
What do advanced scholars of the humanities have to offer? We understand media, interpretation, and realms of meaning better than anyone else. We put in the time to learn languages (often dead ones), theories (often obscure ones) and develop a strong sense of context. Advanced scholarship in the sciences and technology involves intensive training in a particular paradigm. The power of this is the ability to think in depth and in detail within a particular ontology. The weakness is it builds in a type of blindness to the limitations of this particular disciplinary brand of knowledge.
By example - the medical profession. Doctors are highly trained, regulated and institutionalized. As a result, they are very good at certain things. However, there is a sort of mission creep - or perhaps "authority creep" - that comes with this level of expertise. Biomedical doctors are very good at treating acute injuries and many kinds of (bacterial) infections; they are generally not good at treating pain and other (viral) infections. But because viral infections look a lot like bacterial infections and pain often accompanies injury, these are also assigned to doctors' area of expertise. Frequently, for no particularly good reason, products will instruct you to "consult your doctor before using." This itself is the result of another profession's "authority creep" - lawyers.
But the big problem is not that doctors are bad at treating things like pain, obesity and the common cold. The problem is that most doctors do not recognize or admit that they are bad at them. This is a problem of operating within a fixed ontology without seeing its limits. Doctors are trained to look for a chain of causal factors that can be identified either in the laboratory or through double-blind experiments. This is very good at revealing certain types of causalities. We manifest symptoms of a cold when we are infected by certain viruses. At some level, the cold is "caused" by the virus. Therefore, the best solution is assumed to be preventing or curing viral infections. At some level, this understanding is useful. Things like hand-washing and other means of preventing exposure help us avoid infection by understanding the vector of transmission. But the overwhelming focus on the proximate vector of infection keeps us from recognizing other causal factors - stress, weather change, and so on - and from taking preventative or curative action at this level.
Obesity is an even stronger example of medical authority creep that distracts from more meaningful causes, and perhaps more meaningful solutions. Doctors deal with obesity because it is itself a physical ailment, and it leads to many more serious physical ailments - cardiovascular disease, diabetes, even cancer - that are more clearly within the medical realm (although these are generally things that bio-medicine treats decently - not badly, but not particularly well). The thing is, even as medical knowledge advances, people keep getting fatter.
This is because of the mechanistic view of the body that is omnipresent in bio-medicine. When you break it into individual mechanisms, it is clear why we get fat. We get fat because we eat food that is not used for energy or released as waste. Doctors have ever more fine-grained understanding of the mechanisms by which we put on weight. Ultimately, it reduces to some pretty simple points - if you eat too much - particularly of certain things like sugar (and maybe fat), and you don't exercise enough, you get fat. Thousands of diets have been based around this fundamental realization - instructing people to eat less of certain things, or less at certain times, or just less in general. And these diets have failure rates of essentially 100%. The proximate causes of obesity do not reveal the right way to treat it.
The thing is, obesity has other causal mechanisms - ones that are not easily incorporated into the biomedical ontology. Obesity has a strong spatial dimension:
and a strong social dimension. Some people have suggested these factors should be taken into account in fighting obesity, but most of the medical community remains focused on changing diet, exercise, or using drugs to target certain metabolic pathways. These approaches fail, and are fundamentally wrongheaded.
The specifics of this are somewhat of a side point (albeit an important one). It actually looks like things like zoning laws may be more important in fighting obesity than diet-and-exercise plans. This does not sit well with most doctors, because there is little room in their ontology of disease for spatial and social factors. This is one of the revelations that humanists and social scientists have to offer the world - a recognition of the limits of usefulness of disciplinary paradigms. Americans are getting shorter, something that is generally a good measure of general falling health and standards of living. This happened before, at other times when we were ostensibly progressing (such as the industrial revolution). If "better" understandings of obesity still lead to more of it, that seems like an occasion to reexamine what exactly "better" understanding means. And examining the boundaries of understanding is a job for humanists.
What do advanced scholars of the humanities have to offer? We understand media, interpretation, and realms of meaning better than anyone else. We put in the time to learn languages (often dead ones), theories (often obscure ones) and develop a strong sense of context. Advanced scholarship in the sciences and technology involves intensive training in a particular paradigm. The power of this is the ability to think in depth and in detail within a particular ontology. The weakness is it builds in a type of blindness to the limitations of this particular disciplinary brand of knowledge.
By example - the medical profession. Doctors are highly trained, regulated and institutionalized. As a result, they are very good at certain things. However, there is a sort of mission creep - or perhaps "authority creep" - that comes with this level of expertise. Biomedical doctors are very good at treating acute injuries and many kinds of (bacterial) infections; they are generally not good at treating pain and other (viral) infections. But because viral infections look a lot like bacterial infections and pain often accompanies injury, these are also assigned to doctors' area of expertise. Frequently, for no particularly good reason, products will instruct you to "consult your doctor before using." This itself is the result of another profession's "authority creep" - lawyers.
But the big problem is not that doctors are bad at treating things like pain, obesity and the common cold. The problem is that most doctors do not recognize or admit that they are bad at them. This is a problem of operating within a fixed ontology without seeing its limits. Doctors are trained to look for a chain of causal factors that can be identified either in the laboratory or through double-blind experiments. This is very good at revealing certain types of causalities. We manifest symptoms of a cold when we are infected by certain viruses. At some level, the cold is "caused" by the virus. Therefore, the best solution is assumed to be preventing or curing viral infections. At some level, this understanding is useful. Things like hand-washing and other means of preventing exposure help us avoid infection by understanding the vector of transmission. But the overwhelming focus on the proximate vector of infection keeps us from recognizing other causal factors - stress, weather change, and so on - and from taking preventative or curative action at this level.
Obesity is an even stronger example of medical authority creep that distracts from more meaningful causes, and perhaps more meaningful solutions. Doctors deal with obesity because it is itself a physical ailment, and it leads to many more serious physical ailments - cardiovascular disease, diabetes, even cancer - that are more clearly within the medical realm (although these are generally things that bio-medicine treats decently - not badly, but not particularly well). The thing is, even as medical knowledge advances, people keep getting fatter.
This is because of the mechanistic view of the body that is omnipresent in bio-medicine. When you break it into individual mechanisms, it is clear why we get fat. We get fat because we eat food that is not used for energy or released as waste. Doctors have ever more fine-grained understanding of the mechanisms by which we put on weight. Ultimately, it reduces to some pretty simple points - if you eat too much - particularly of certain things like sugar (and maybe fat), and you don't exercise enough, you get fat. Thousands of diets have been based around this fundamental realization - instructing people to eat less of certain things, or less at certain times, or just less in general. And these diets have failure rates of essentially 100%. The proximate causes of obesity do not reveal the right way to treat it.
The thing is, obesity has other causal mechanisms - ones that are not easily incorporated into the biomedical ontology. Obesity has a strong spatial dimension:
and a strong social dimension. Some people have suggested these factors should be taken into account in fighting obesity, but most of the medical community remains focused on changing diet, exercise, or using drugs to target certain metabolic pathways. These approaches fail, and are fundamentally wrongheaded.
The specifics of this are somewhat of a side point (albeit an important one). It actually looks like things like zoning laws may be more important in fighting obesity than diet-and-exercise plans. This does not sit well with most doctors, because there is little room in their ontology of disease for spatial and social factors. This is one of the revelations that humanists and social scientists have to offer the world - a recognition of the limits of usefulness of disciplinary paradigms. Americans are getting shorter, something that is generally a good measure of general falling health and standards of living. This happened before, at other times when we were ostensibly progressing (such as the industrial revolution). If "better" understandings of obesity still lead to more of it, that seems like an occasion to reexamine what exactly "better" understanding means. And examining the boundaries of understanding is a job for humanists.
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