In the wake of the horrendous attack in Norway, I've been hearing the term "extremism" thrown around a lot as a synonym for hatred and bigotry.
But in reality, while these terms can sometimes be accurately used to describe the same ideologies, they are not the same at all. And "extremism" is a word that does more to obscure the issues and dynamics at the root of violence than it does to clarify them.
Writing about the use of the word "terrorism" in the wake of 9/11, Colombian sociologist, Ricardo Vargas Meza, said:
"'Global terrorism' is a loaded term that both hides realities and legitimizes policy decisions. In fact, those decisions are often pre-determined by the term's very use. [ . .. ]To begin with, it hides the political motivations behind dramatic acts of terror. Global terrorism is so shocking that it causes most to ignore the particularities of the conflicts that engender it - conflicts which generally involve multiple actors, dissimilar positions and in general a complexity of relations. The term has a sense of 'the present' that ignores historical trajectories. Time is thrown out of order. . [ . . . ] It also confuses a means of irregular war, 'terror,' with an end in itself. It gives the appearance that there are no fundamental causes of conflict: what exist are terrorists, agents of insecurity, terrorist sanctuaries."
In a similar way, the word "extremist" lumps together people with widely disparate ideologies -- from white supremacists to Islamic fundamentalists to radical environmentalists -- based on the perceived distance between their views and societal norms. Implicit here is the assumption that society's norms are reasonable and morally correct -- and that there is a moral equivalency to all political positions that deviate from them.
But history tells us that societal norms are not always just or compassionate -- slavery, Jim Crow laws, apartheid, Nazism were all considered normal and right within the moral frameworks of the societies that spawned them. And strong opposition to them was considered extremist. In condemning extremism as such we lump together Ossama bin Laden and John Brown, David Duke and Nelson Mandela.
But the problem with the ideologies of Al Qaeda and the Ku Klux Klan is not that they are extreme -- its that they are hateful.
And this is more than just a matter of semantics.
For one thing, political discourses about "extremism" tend to lead toward demonizing all dissent, be it violent or non-violent, and giving the state the tools to persecute and prosecute those whose politics fall too far outside the "mainstream." Witness the historical example of the harassment, imprisonment, and murder of civil rights and anti-war activists under the FBI's COINTELPRO, or the current grand jury investigations of anti-war and solidarity activists in the U.S.
But more to the point, making "extremism" rather than hatred the issue prevents us from asking the difficult and essential questions about the relationship between white supremacist and Christian supremacist ideologies and the "mainstream" beliefs of European and European-American societies with long histories of institutional and societal racism. And it prevents us from looking in the painful mirror that reveals our own unexamined racism.
Instead of opposing "extremism" lets embrace love and its fierce challenge to the violence and hatred woven into the fabric of our culture.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
"Structural Adjustment" Comes Home
For the past several decades, caught in the vise of debt to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, poor countries around the world were subjected to "structural adjustment" agreements that required them to slash spending on health care, education, sanitation, and assistance to the poor while laying off government workers and raiding pension funds in order to pay their creditors. In most cases the debt was run up by militaries waging repressive wars (often against their own people) and corrupt governments that enriched a handful of wealthy families and foreign corporations at the expense of their nations' people. The poor who were the victims of these policies also paid their price.
I witnessed the effects of structural adjustment first hand in Nicaragua in 2005. Nicaragua's history is somewhat different than that of many other countries subject to structural adjustment. Throughout the 1980's, Nicaragua was governed by an initially popular socialist government that came to power through a revolution that overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza. The government made massive gains in improving the standard of living, including implementing innovative education reforms that brought the literacy rate above 90%. But a decade of a U.S.-orchestrated insurgency that ravaged the country wore the Nicaraguan people down and they voted a pro-U.S. government into power. That government began dismantling the public sector to finance the debt Somoza had run up. By 2005 the literacy rate had plummeted, with 35% of the population unable to read or write.
Writing for Counterpunch, in June of 2005, I described what I found in Managua:
I witnessed the effects of structural adjustment first hand in Nicaragua in 2005. Nicaragua's history is somewhat different than that of many other countries subject to structural adjustment. Throughout the 1980's, Nicaragua was governed by an initially popular socialist government that came to power through a revolution that overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza. The government made massive gains in improving the standard of living, including implementing innovative education reforms that brought the literacy rate above 90%. But a decade of a U.S.-orchestrated insurgency that ravaged the country wore the Nicaraguan people down and they voted a pro-U.S. government into power. That government began dismantling the public sector to finance the debt Somoza had run up. By 2005 the literacy rate had plummeted, with 35% of the population unable to read or write.
Writing for Counterpunch, in June of 2005, I described what I found in Managua:
Achualinca sprawls out from the edge of the dump on the shores of Lake Managua, a barrio of improbably well cared for houses thrown together from whatever materials people could scavenge--tin, plywood, tar paper, cardboard, plywood. In the all but forgotten language of the first people who lived here, Achualinca means sunflower. Today scattered banana trees grow out of the mercury-laden soil, contaminated by a U.S. battery company that dumped its waste into the lake for decades.
This is the last stopping place for people with nowhere else to go in a country where farmers are losing their land as the prices for their crops fall on the global market and where massive unemployment creates fierce competition for a handful of jobs in textile factories that barely pay their workers enough money to feed a family a meager diet of rice, beans, tortillas, and the occasional vegetable. According to the United Nations Development Program, 79.9% of the population of Nicaragua lives on less than $2 a day. 45% live on less than $1 a day. Most of the residents of Acuhalinca are part of the informal economy--salvaging and washing plastic from the dump for recycling, washing windshields at stop lights, panhandling, selling fruit and water and pastries on the street.
This is the kind of community that the leaders of the G-8, the world's most powerful nations, say they are trying to help by writing off the debt that Nicaragua and the rest of the world's 18 poorest nations owe to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. But the devil is in the details, and the debt forgiveness plan will actually lock in place many of the conditions that created this poverty, and put conditions on the Nicaraguan government that will make it virtually impossible to use any of the savings from debt payments to help the poor.
For over a decade, Nicaragua has labored under "structural adjustment" plans imposed by the IMF and the World Bank designed to insure that it would pay off its debts. Nicaragua will have to continue to comply with IMF dictates to qualify for debt forgiveness. Under "structural adjustment" the government was pressured to cut spending across the board and privatize public services, leading to the collapse of the nation's public sector and a growing gap between rich and poor. According to sociologist Cirilo Otero "Structural adjustment has produced greater inequality in our society--there are less people with more wealth. In the 1970's there still existed in Nicaragua an upper class and a middle class, but effectively that whole section of the middle class has disappeared, so now there are a very few people in the upper class and a very large lower class. One of the elements that has determined this is that various sectors have lost their access to essentials--electricity, potable water, health care, and education."
Otero's words came back to me this week as I watched the Obama administration propose cuts to Head Start and to heating assistance for the poor in order to reduce the deficit and Wisconsin's Governor attempting to eliminate workers' right to collective bargaining for state and municipal workers in order to push through drastic cuts to social services.
This country's debt was not racked up by social spending, which makes up a tiny fraction of the federal budget -- it was racked up by 40 years of cold and hot wars and fiscal policies tailored toward benefiting a handful of very wealthy people at a time when the gap between rich and poor grew to proportions similar to that in . . . well, a country like Nicaragua.
But the poor are expected nonetheless to pay the brunt of the cost of servicing this debt -- just as they are in Nicaragua.
The only difference here is that the debt is owed not to the IMF or the World Bank but to a hodgepodge of banks, investors, and foreign governments -- with the largest share owned by China. And the austerity programs are being pushed not by the creditors themselves but by Wall Street and its allies in the leadership of the Democratic and Republican parties.
As a global economy guided by an absurd belief in the possibility and desirability of infinite economic growth comes up against its real world limits, it is collapsing inward, and the wealthy, in order to hold on to what they have a little longer, are implementing the same policies domestically that they impose on poorer nations. Structural adjustment has come home.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Are humans a cancer?
Edward Abbey famously wrote that growth for growth's sake is the ideology of a cancer cell -- a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree.
But lately I've been hearing a lot of people take that a step further -- suggesting that humans are a cancer on the Earth.
I don't know what Ed Abbey would have thought of that -- by all accounts he could be cantankerous and misanthropic and may well have echoed the sentiment. But to me it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem.
Cancer is a mutation of the DNA of formerly healthy cells that causes them to multiply out of control to the point where the organs and tissues that contain them can no longer perform their functions as part of a whole human body.
Human history is full of communities and people who functioned as what Aldo Leopold called plain members of the land-community. Nothing in the way of life of traditional nomadic hunter-gatherer communities resembles a cancer in any way, shape, or form. They provide us a picture of what "health cells" look like.
The true cancer is the idea of civilization -- the establishment of permanent settlements carved out from the rest of the world that feed on and spread into surrounding territories in order to perpetuate their existence at the expense of the species and the planet. The spread of this mutation of human survival instincts to formerly healthy communities speeds the devastation.
Cancer is stopped by stopping the growth of cancer cells and encouraging the regrowth of the various types of healthy cells that once made up the damaged tissues and organs.
The cancer of civilization can be stopped in the same way -- by reversing the spread of the philosophy of unlimited growth, reproducing healthy cultural models, and restoring other species in the areas we inhabit.
Will it be fast enough? I don't know. The outcomes are seldom clear when dealing with cancer. But the prognosis is grim if we don't begin treatment. And its equally grim if we administer a treatment that destroys the healthy cells along with the cancer cells. We need to be clear in our analysis and intent. And we need to get to work now.
But lately I've been hearing a lot of people take that a step further -- suggesting that humans are a cancer on the Earth.
I don't know what Ed Abbey would have thought of that -- by all accounts he could be cantankerous and misanthropic and may well have echoed the sentiment. But to me it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem.
Cancer is a mutation of the DNA of formerly healthy cells that causes them to multiply out of control to the point where the organs and tissues that contain them can no longer perform their functions as part of a whole human body.
Human history is full of communities and people who functioned as what Aldo Leopold called plain members of the land-community. Nothing in the way of life of traditional nomadic hunter-gatherer communities resembles a cancer in any way, shape, or form. They provide us a picture of what "health cells" look like.
The true cancer is the idea of civilization -- the establishment of permanent settlements carved out from the rest of the world that feed on and spread into surrounding territories in order to perpetuate their existence at the expense of the species and the planet. The spread of this mutation of human survival instincts to formerly healthy communities speeds the devastation.
Cancer is stopped by stopping the growth of cancer cells and encouraging the regrowth of the various types of healthy cells that once made up the damaged tissues and organs.
The cancer of civilization can be stopped in the same way -- by reversing the spread of the philosophy of unlimited growth, reproducing healthy cultural models, and restoring other species in the areas we inhabit.
Will it be fast enough? I don't know. The outcomes are seldom clear when dealing with cancer. But the prognosis is grim if we don't begin treatment. And its equally grim if we administer a treatment that destroys the healthy cells along with the cancer cells. We need to be clear in our analysis and intent. And we need to get to work now.
Signs in the waters, signs in the skies
Portions of this post are derived from earlier writings of mine.
"If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star."
-- William Stafford
What sense can we make from clouds of birds falling from the sky and masses of fish washing up on the shores?
The world is indeed alive and speaking to us always, but the messages we read in All Things get filtered through the lens of a lifetime of stories of who we are and what our relationship is to the world. In interpreting those messages its essential to unpack our cultural baggage.
Living in a culture that views time in a linear way, as something with a beginning and an end, its easy to find apocalyptic meaning in these horrific events, to read them as a sign that the Earth is dying or that the Earth is getting ready to wipe out humanity in retribution for collective sins.
There is in these readings an awakening of the dormant sense of the Earth as alive. But there is simultaneously a repetition of the lie that we are separate from the Earth, separate from the wild, separate from the divine. And its that lie that enables us to continue ignoring the consequences of our actions and to continue a way of life that is based on the delusional, insane, and abusive premise that unlimited growth is possible, desirable, and morally justifiable.
In Greek, the word apocalypse means a revelation, a lifting of the veil.
What then is revealed by these apocalyptic horrors?
The cognitive dissonance of these seemingly unexplainable deaths is shaking many people into the recognition that other species feel and suffer in a way that the images of oil soaked pelicans in the Gulf of Mexico failed to. And with it comes the sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with a way of life that is based on the assumption that the world is an inert storehouse of resources put here for our consumption. And an awakening to the consequences of that way of life.
But, still, for many, the idea persists that this is the only way humans have lived and the only way humans can live, that our species is somehow an evolutionary mistake, and that a wrathful Gaia or a wrathful God needs to wipe us from the Earth and start anew.
But global warming, nuclear waste, the mass extinction of plant and animal species, slavery, genocide, deforestation, and warfare are are not the inevitable consequences of our human existence.
They are the consequences of civilization.
To be civilized originally meant to be "of the cities." Civilization is a way of life based around permanent human settlement and the attempt to physically and psychologically separate daily life from the ecosystems in which we are embedded and from forces outside human control.
Nomadic peoples were and are able to hunt, gather, and practice limited small scale agriculture without creating disruptions to their ecosystems substantially larger than those created by other species or other natural forces. To be sure, overhunting and over gathering occurred, but their were natural limits -- people would be forced to change their behavior or lose their food sources. Like our bodies, ecosystems are resilient, they are able to deal with a certain level of disruption.
But permanent human settlement involves the large scale disruption of ecosystems on a continuing basis. The landscape is altered to allow for large scale agriculture. And unlike other landscape alterations (such as the burning of underbrush in the forests of eastern North America by the indigenous peoples here) large scale agriculture linked to human settlement involves the continuing depletion of the soil and overtaxing of natural systems over a long period of time without any respite for regeneration.
In order to sustain itself, a culture of permanent settlement needs to expand its control over a larger and larger land base. This requires the regimentation of labor, which breeds hierarchy and control. Getting cooperation with this kind of system requires organized violence. And it also depends on theologies that declare that people were intended to live this way, allowing the members of a culture to pass off responsibility for the consequences of their actions to distant gods (whether they call them "God" or "the market" or "progress.")
People are no longer making choices based on their own needs and feelings and experiences at this point. They are making choices for the sake of continuing their civilization. Not even for the sake of benefiting each other -- but for the sake of continuing the systems they have established.
Technologies are developed to more efficiently alter the land and to more efficiently coerce human cooperation.
Eventually, the expansion of the civilization brings it into conflict with other cultures. Once those cultures are physically subjugated, they are inculcated with the theology of civilization. They then become hosts and vectors for its propagation. Civilization is inherently expansionist and evangelical.
We are brought up to believe that this is the way things have always been, but this is not true. That's just another version of the myth of original sin, designed to absolve us from both individual and collective responsibility for our participation in this way of life.
The reality is that every one of us is the descendant cultures that lived and evolved in conversation with the other beings who made up the living systems in which they were enmeshed. Some of those cultures developed permanent settlements and large scale agriculture and became colonizers. Some other cultures were so completely subjugated by their colonizers that they became colonizers themselves, exporting terror.
But still others resisted more strongly and continue to resist today even under varying degrees of occupation. We can't just adopt their cultures -- that's the colonizer's way of taking what we want from other people and calling it ours. But we can engage and learn from them in a respectful way, and support their struggles.
Even within the colonizer cultures, there are memories and remnants of older ways of being and knowing that have been passed down either secretly or hidden in plain sight.
And even without access to these traditions, each of us have the capacity to question what we've been taught and to reengage ourselves with the living systems around us and allow them to begin revealing to us other ways we can live. Developing new cultures is a harder process than sustaining or recovering a culture, but it can be done, every culture begins somewhere.
Can we move beyond civilization?
I don't know for certain.
But to dismiss it as impossible just because it is the only way of life most of us have experienced seems to me to be a denigration of the amazing intelligence and creativity we humans are gifted with -- an intelligence that is unique not in its magnitude but in its particular form.
Let me be clear -- I am not advocating a return to the Paleolithic. Not every fruit of civilization is inherently poison. I'm speaking instead of changing the organizing principles on which we base our society.
It begins with rejecting the idea that the way we live now is the way things have to be.
And with engaging the living world directly, with an understanding that we are of the Earth as much as a Maple or a Grizzly Bear is, and that the memory of our true nature exists within us, mirrored by the wildness around us.
When the human part of us engages the wild part of us, we remember our sacredness and divinity and our indestructible connection to All Things.
From this place we can take responsibility for the worlds we shape.
And free from our slavery to the idea of continuing civilization, we can dream something else into being.
And the message I read in the masses of dead fish and falling birds is that it is long past time for us to start making conscious choices about the way we live.
"If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star."
-- William Stafford
What sense can we make from clouds of birds falling from the sky and masses of fish washing up on the shores?
The world is indeed alive and speaking to us always, but the messages we read in All Things get filtered through the lens of a lifetime of stories of who we are and what our relationship is to the world. In interpreting those messages its essential to unpack our cultural baggage.
Living in a culture that views time in a linear way, as something with a beginning and an end, its easy to find apocalyptic meaning in these horrific events, to read them as a sign that the Earth is dying or that the Earth is getting ready to wipe out humanity in retribution for collective sins.
There is in these readings an awakening of the dormant sense of the Earth as alive. But there is simultaneously a repetition of the lie that we are separate from the Earth, separate from the wild, separate from the divine. And its that lie that enables us to continue ignoring the consequences of our actions and to continue a way of life that is based on the delusional, insane, and abusive premise that unlimited growth is possible, desirable, and morally justifiable.
In Greek, the word apocalypse means a revelation, a lifting of the veil.
What then is revealed by these apocalyptic horrors?
The cognitive dissonance of these seemingly unexplainable deaths is shaking many people into the recognition that other species feel and suffer in a way that the images of oil soaked pelicans in the Gulf of Mexico failed to. And with it comes the sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with a way of life that is based on the assumption that the world is an inert storehouse of resources put here for our consumption. And an awakening to the consequences of that way of life.
But, still, for many, the idea persists that this is the only way humans have lived and the only way humans can live, that our species is somehow an evolutionary mistake, and that a wrathful Gaia or a wrathful God needs to wipe us from the Earth and start anew.
But global warming, nuclear waste, the mass extinction of plant and animal species, slavery, genocide, deforestation, and warfare are are not the inevitable consequences of our human existence.
They are the consequences of civilization.
To be civilized originally meant to be "of the cities." Civilization is a way of life based around permanent human settlement and the attempt to physically and psychologically separate daily life from the ecosystems in which we are embedded and from forces outside human control.
Nomadic peoples were and are able to hunt, gather, and practice limited small scale agriculture without creating disruptions to their ecosystems substantially larger than those created by other species or other natural forces. To be sure, overhunting and over gathering occurred, but their were natural limits -- people would be forced to change their behavior or lose their food sources. Like our bodies, ecosystems are resilient, they are able to deal with a certain level of disruption.
But permanent human settlement involves the large scale disruption of ecosystems on a continuing basis. The landscape is altered to allow for large scale agriculture. And unlike other landscape alterations (such as the burning of underbrush in the forests of eastern North America by the indigenous peoples here) large scale agriculture linked to human settlement involves the continuing depletion of the soil and overtaxing of natural systems over a long period of time without any respite for regeneration.
In order to sustain itself, a culture of permanent settlement needs to expand its control over a larger and larger land base. This requires the regimentation of labor, which breeds hierarchy and control. Getting cooperation with this kind of system requires organized violence. And it also depends on theologies that declare that people were intended to live this way, allowing the members of a culture to pass off responsibility for the consequences of their actions to distant gods (whether they call them "God" or "the market" or "progress.")
People are no longer making choices based on their own needs and feelings and experiences at this point. They are making choices for the sake of continuing their civilization. Not even for the sake of benefiting each other -- but for the sake of continuing the systems they have established.
Technologies are developed to more efficiently alter the land and to more efficiently coerce human cooperation.
Eventually, the expansion of the civilization brings it into conflict with other cultures. Once those cultures are physically subjugated, they are inculcated with the theology of civilization. They then become hosts and vectors for its propagation. Civilization is inherently expansionist and evangelical.
We are brought up to believe that this is the way things have always been, but this is not true. That's just another version of the myth of original sin, designed to absolve us from both individual and collective responsibility for our participation in this way of life.
The reality is that every one of us is the descendant cultures that lived and evolved in conversation with the other beings who made up the living systems in which they were enmeshed. Some of those cultures developed permanent settlements and large scale agriculture and became colonizers. Some other cultures were so completely subjugated by their colonizers that they became colonizers themselves, exporting terror.
But still others resisted more strongly and continue to resist today even under varying degrees of occupation. We can't just adopt their cultures -- that's the colonizer's way of taking what we want from other people and calling it ours. But we can engage and learn from them in a respectful way, and support their struggles.
Even within the colonizer cultures, there are memories and remnants of older ways of being and knowing that have been passed down either secretly or hidden in plain sight.
And even without access to these traditions, each of us have the capacity to question what we've been taught and to reengage ourselves with the living systems around us and allow them to begin revealing to us other ways we can live. Developing new cultures is a harder process than sustaining or recovering a culture, but it can be done, every culture begins somewhere.
Can we move beyond civilization?
I don't know for certain.
But to dismiss it as impossible just because it is the only way of life most of us have experienced seems to me to be a denigration of the amazing intelligence and creativity we humans are gifted with -- an intelligence that is unique not in its magnitude but in its particular form.
Let me be clear -- I am not advocating a return to the Paleolithic. Not every fruit of civilization is inherently poison. I'm speaking instead of changing the organizing principles on which we base our society.
It begins with rejecting the idea that the way we live now is the way things have to be.
And with engaging the living world directly, with an understanding that we are of the Earth as much as a Maple or a Grizzly Bear is, and that the memory of our true nature exists within us, mirrored by the wildness around us.
When the human part of us engages the wild part of us, we remember our sacredness and divinity and our indestructible connection to All Things.
From this place we can take responsibility for the worlds we shape.
And free from our slavery to the idea of continuing civilization, we can dream something else into being.
And the message I read in the masses of dead fish and falling birds is that it is long past time for us to start making conscious choices about the way we live.
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