Baboons

(An explanation of why this blog)

TL;DR VERSION: I've set up a new blog because I've basically just got a bit fed up with some of the silliness out there.

It will be a place where I dump my thoughts at the crossroads of general leftyness, science, technology, medicine, agriculture, climate, energy, logic, reason, evidence, and optimism.

This means the sort of thing that doesn't really fit in with my normal straight-up science reporting and definitely isn't related to my EU affairs journalism. But it will be very much committed to recovering and uncovering a Left that looks to the future, not the past for inspiration, and is more solidly grounded in what historian Jonathan Israel describes as the Radical Enlightenment.

In short, the idea is to put my shoulder to the wheel of what Jurgen Habermas calls the unfinished project of modernity.

--

LONG VERSION:

However much of a dynamic, wealth-expanding improvement that capitalism may have been over all previously existing human arrangements (and we are certainly purblind and foolish if we do not at least acknowledge this manifest vitality), the current political and economic structure of human society produces vast and unnecessary misery for the majority of the species due to inequality, under-democratic decision-making, and restrictions on individual freedom.

So much, so self-evident.

But it is also the case that the entirety of the species, not merely the immiserated, subjugated majority, lies impoverished as compared to what could be.

The maximum extent of human flourishing -- the maximum progress -- that is possible at any particular moment remains restricted as a result of unnecessary duplication of effort, proprietary knowledge, lack of planning, production in the service of profit rather than the general interest, and the conservative paucity of ambition required by the market.

The lives of even the wealthiest of people are diminished due to the foreclosure of other possibilities.

In one example, the unprofitability of antibiotics and consequent 30-year refusal on the part of private pharmaceutical companies to invest in research and development into new classes of antibiotic leaves much of modern medicine under threat, potentially returning us a pre-antibiotic era. Yet drug-resistant staphylococcus bacteria do not care how wealthy you are.

In another, in recent decades we have learnt that the services that the rest of nature provides all of humanity have become profoundly jeopardised. It is my contention that potential solutions to climate change and parallel radically detrimental environmental transformations that threaten everybody are hindered by same obsolete political economy.

But there are other, wondrous unknown unknowns of what humanity could otherwise achieve. Has manned deep space exploration essentially stalled since the end of the Cold War because it is simply too expensive for the market to manage?

The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once wrote: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” It is of course a tragedy for every would-be Einstein to experience such a life of drudgery and limit, but what has all the world lost by such a waste? 

The shackling of the bulk of humanity thus shackles all of humanity. Conversely, the historic task of the self-emancipation of the majority delivers, as part of the same process, complete human emancipation.

The construction of another, superior arrangement of our political economy - the building of a genuinely cooperative, equal and democratic society, of socialism - remains urgent and possible.

Unfortunately, a great many of the wearied battalions against injustice, those architect-soldiers that have been known since the French Revolution as 'the Left', have in recent decades set themselves against progress and human emancipation. "We have gone too far!" they declare. "We have too much! We are playing gods! We must learn to be humble again; return to simpler ways of life."

Many others have simultaneously left to rust by the side of the road some of our greatest weapons in the centuries-old fight for liberation. They now spurn the scientific method, technology, medicine, logic, reason and truth as eurocentric, imperialist. Data, evidence, statistics and mathematics are viewed as masculinist. Industry, civilisation and even humanity itself are regularly described as poison, parasites, a cancer on the planet.

In place of all this colossal majesty that humanity has wrought, the romanticist, 'small is beautiful' Left prefers its humble clutch of twigs that could have been collected by a child: magical thinking, pseudoscience, conspiracies, relativism, identity, and a reactionary, sentimental preference for a lost rural idyll that in fact never existed, a superstitious devotion to a Mother Nature/Gaia/Pachamama who is in fact callously, murderously indifferent to her hair-shirted disciples, red in tooth and claw as Tennyson wrote.

I do not think these irrationalist, misanthropic - ultimately anti-socialist and defeatist - developments have emerged sui generis, but are rather somehow intertwined with the material circumstance of the advent of neoliberalism, the slow death of social democracy, and the collapse of the Soviet Union (although there are many examples of anti-Enlightenment thinking that pre-date this period and I am guessing that this tension between reason and romance has long been with us).

I will say up front that I am still trying to work my way through my thinking on precisely why all of this has happened and am groping toward a rough intellectual history of this phenomenon for which I don't yet have a real name.

Marx called the Reverend Thomas Malthus a 'baboon', and many of these sort of folks have an acknowledged or unacknowledged affinity for Malthus's anti-humanism, so perhaps we shall stick with that for now: the 'Baboon Left'.

But once we get away from the question of where these people come from and head toward why they are wrong, I find I am on much sounder footing. That sort of thing will comprise the bulk of the posts here, a blog I've put up to intermittently talk about these issues because they don't really fit with my other blog on European austerity and post-democracy, or on my site that collects the rest of my science writing and EU affairs journalism for different publications.

That is to say, I don't know what exactly to call this topic, or what to name the stance that I'm taking. Promethean Environmentalism perhaps? Scientific Socialism? (I think that last one's already been taken and handily traduced) But I know I'm not the only one on the Left these days who is fed up with this nonsense, and most of what I intend to put up here will be my very best effort to thwack these hand-woven, organic compost-toilet-bothering baboons in the arse with a carpetbeater.

Despite its mis-steps though, I'll not abandon the Left. It has done and continues to do so much good. Almost everything that remains fundamentally just about society has come from this side of the political spectrum.

As Springsteen via John Ford via John Steinbeck said Tom Joad said:
Mom, wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there's a fight 'gainst the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me Mom I'll be there
Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand
Or decent job or a helpin' hand
Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free
Look in their eyes Mom you'll see me.
As long as there is injustice, there'll be a Left. It could just do a better job on the evidence and optimism front these days.


Leigh Phillips - Bastille Day, July 2014





No comments:

Post a Comment