I've moved my blog

geologuey.wordpress.com

There you'll find far more and better content.

Thanks for reading, cheers.

Story from Western Civilization

I'm writing this memo because I think there is more we can do that hasn't been tried. Levels of involvement in what is happening in the world that as a culture we haven't acknowledged that might help shift the frame out of which...

the: "no one cares or is trying except us"

the: "everyone is doing the best they can" (though somehow things are getting worse)

the: "few bad apples"

and

the: "Capitalism!"

explanations are the best we have.

This is a modified fragment of a much longer alternative to the story underlying our civilization's trajectory into oblivion. This post in particular concerns the roles of people's ideas of themselves in the violence we direct against each other and the planet, even people who consider themselves to be anti-racist and environmentalists. How can that be? Read on. If, at the end, you still don't see what I'm getting at watch the video that inspired the title. I also put down another link from Ishmael that does a neat job (6 minutes) of characterizing an often unseen dimension of our problems.

While the last post: ( http://thecurrentsintime.blogspot.com/2010/06/there-are-no-such-things-as-vegans.html )was more focused on the serious limitations of identity based politics, this entry deals more with how the fragile yet volatile self concepts, that our society's accepted metaphysical constructs and broken assumptions allow us to perceive them as real things, confine our perceptions of reality, and thus our potential for freedom, accountability, and essential adaptation--as a culture on a day to day basis.

First I will try to highlight the contours of the offending dimension of our perception of reality, then its effects.

The Abstract Ego

I / you . We / they . me / hippies . me / asians . me / nature . /

Definitions, names.

Our names are like the names of nations, words that suggest to us a unique and privileged destiny. We walk in different directions and all end up in the same place.

Our names and our faces, often our first ground of contact with the world around us, the labels for the files that people we meet and know keep on us, help constitute the continuous self concept we spend our lives working on behalf of, the little corporation we dutifully pilot knowing it is the only place we will ever be. Beyond our name and our face we are composed of the rest of our body, our hunger, our thirst, our pain, our literal point of view, and our thoughts. Our experience of these things is immediate, total, and private. We are the only things we know really exist; other people's experiences we only imagine.

Through this cosmic distance we are able to perceive each other as independent beings. Though we know, intellectually, that each of us has this visceral, though externally inaccessible experience, that we are removed from the experience of others constitutes the first rift among life-forms, out of which arises the ego, the little voice tethered to one's physical manifestation which defines itself or exists only in the contrast of what it is not.

That we only experience our needs creates a sort of priority towards satisfying them. The hierarchy of importance that emerges here is not without purpose. From an evolutionary perspective(if evolution was conscious(is it?)) an embodied experience serves to make sure one's appetites are pursued so that the organism can survive, breed, and its species can endure. Why do species, at a biophysical level insist on enduring? Really, whats the point? It is an internal drive that is preconscious and present in every living thing.

We do not, however, evolve and appear on earth with names, with mirrors to see our own faces. These additions infuse the ego with a greater sense of distinctness, and importantly, represent the first in the category of features that the ego uses to distinguish itself, but which don't pertain to differences in actual biological needs between it and other organisms.

This is the beginning of what I'm calling the abstract ego, the layer of awareness most humans are locked in; it relies on created lines, categories, between itself and others both for its sense of self and self worth, and to entitle its desires. It is the location of the process of falsely devaluing others relative to one's self, as well as the location of falsely valuing or devaluing one's self based on how one imagines one is seen by society. I say falsely because we do not have a magic variable inside of us that changes our value and thus who we are every time someone looks at, and categorizes, us; we imagine this variable, just as they--in only seeing a fraction of our experience and effects--are imagining the capacity to define our "worth".

Our attachment to the abstract ego, and all of the superficial distances(from the perceived outside) it requires to appear, are the chains holding our face to the mirror that prevents us from seeing our body, limits the sense of scale through which we would otherwise understand ourselves as Life, and thus our abstract ego makes us unable to fully contextualize self-preservation as being located in understanding and respecting connections.

The constant emphasis on applying different values to what the abstract ego sees as outside of itself conceptually breaks the deeper context, in which our experiences have their roots, into separate things in separate drawers, stacked by importance. Because everyone is working on a different imagined hierarchy, it is each ego's fight for space, a drawer at the top of the tiny fleeting world it lives in, and the entitlement to externalize consequences to others that that space affords, which paves the way for all of the evils we've seen in the world.

Unlike the self/not self entitlement of needs in which an organism must prioritize its hunger or instinct to breed over a contemporary's to survive, the way we develop in this society, our abstract ego is constantly exalting or lamenting the aesthetic and imagined rifts through which it appears, because, like the name it is attached to, the abstract ego is only an idea a person has about themselves, a value imagined and expressed through how they are categorically distinguished and rated. It constantly searches for differences, a Here, a There, with regard to (species, favorite futbol team, race, country, hair style, etc.) to clarify itself and thus assert its existence.

What makes these supports for the idea of the self inevitably superficial, constructions with shifting societal meanings but no transcendent significance, is that, beyond reflecting, more, a person's normative exposure than any intrinsic virtue, a difference among any of the category signifiers doesn't correspond to a difference in an organism's physical needs/vulnerabilities. What makes these superficial differences, which the abstract ego uses to define itself, dangerous, is that, although they don't inherently entail the need for competition to meet physical needs, throughout history the self concept and the layers of distance it creates in maintaining these distinctions(to maintain itself) (ex. I am not mexican, I am not a woman, I am not a cow, I am not a Jew) has been exploited to divide, to dismiss empathetic inclinations, to justify harm.

A separation of being, constructing one's self or another as a different thing is a distortion of the biological locality of awareness that enables one expression of Life to privilege itself over another expression of Life for survival, the struggle that impels new shapes and forms and strategies, Life's mechanism for persisting and thus branching out and becoming more resilient. Used outside of a context of survival it works against survival, by artificially making expressions of Life into different, greater and lesser, things, lubricating the kind of escalation whereby blood fuels not merely need, but wants, luxury, entertainment. And thus the conform or die posture of our civilization decreases diversity and thus Life faces the mounting threats to its eternal branching with more people but less perspective, less variety.

No one can raise a tide of oppression against a person or people for being a certain 'type' if, as a culture, we abandon the notion that there can be types. Once we stop thinking of ourselves, of each other, through analogies, we will cease to simply be better or poorer copies of our societies expectations and simply be, and do, for reasons that arise out of the intersection of our experiences and the conditions in which we find ourselves, rather than being assigned for us to carry out by our sex, our skin color, advertisers, what Precedent says is possible. The alternative is, of course, that actions be judged for what they do instead of people being judged for what their actions imply they are.

Evolution, in social terms, is stifled by the impulse to immediately translate every thought, look, expression into some faction, holding the meanings and possibilities and reasons behind them prisoner to the prejudice for or against that faction, the narrow view of it that is taken when one's value and entitlement depends on that thing being different, and therefore less.

If we were not cut off from our greater self, we would not have to derive pleasure from unnecessary competition between ideas of each other, and we would have more opportunities to see how communities based on openness, solidarity, generosity, stewardship provide you with far more than systems based on competition.

To me, oneness represents an acknowledgement of connections, our common destiny that is tied to our common vulnerability and our collective role in creating the world we live in. How does seeing from the perspective that, though we have differences, we are not different, play out?

Life, if it were some pervading force, some spark waiting to be born into the world is where we all started. Of all the untold trillions of conceptions across time and species and place we were born into the human body, a certain language, a certain sex, a particular upbringing, a certain education, many things that would define us were given to us without our intent, many of the things that would restrict us were installed long before we would ever come across the fragile dreams of alternatives. As sums of matter, we forget that we could have been anyone, any thing, and that what is shared, again reflecting the connection that is more significant than any of the differences, is that we all need the same things.

The background noise we don't notice we are always hearing is that we are all separate. What are you going to do with your life, rather than what are we going to do with our world. Because our name, our face, our idea is something we are constantly seeking external validation for, it has little meaning aside from that granted it by our peers and society, and it has a shelf-life of one lifetime, though the effects of indulging it can last many times longer. Because of its narrow horizons, the abstract ego has difficulty in recognizing how the pattern and culture of separateness that created, and is reinforced by, it is ultimately detrimental to the 99% of little bubbles like itself that are not floating off by themselves somewhere around the apparent top of the world.

These are the currents of our time.

Why can't we resolve our environmental and social crises? Our incentive structure is directed at our abstract ego, and so people are busy following capricious social meanings, being Green, Vegan, Progressive, Radical, Black, Queer, Not-a Hippy, Not-Gay, Conservative, a Man, Successful, A Good Person, whatever it is good to be where they live, all airs that are reached through symbols which only imply doing or being good, or, alternately, nobler or inferior actions and qualities. These qualities are sufficient to define essentialized ideals or caricatures, but are insufficient as ways of discussing real people, or as the basis for an essential cultural transformation which will require cooperation among much greater numbers than any of these categories can marshall from out of their current constituencies.

The knowledge system that suffuses the culture from which these categories emerge translates: doing something, or looking a certain way, or saying certain things into you being something else each something else existing in opposition to somebody else's being and the good person concept that they depend on. This relates to how the abstract ego, and the identities it is composed of, actually works against diversity, by tacitly demanding an "in or out" via every expression that is appropriated by or assigned to an identity.

Its very easy to be a "good person", all it requires is that when you do things to, or say things about, others that you wouldn't want done to, or said about, yourself, those others are a different or lesser type. This is easy to accomplish, all it takes is distance(ignorance) and language. So everyone steps up onto their imaginary pedestal and pours their poisons downhill, and you get the world we have today.

What we are dealing with is a framework that helps us determine when someone is a certain thing, and how to tell when other people are the same so they can be mutually thought of through each other. Establishing what something or someone "is", is not necessarily the same as establishing their value, but it establishes a place for value to be assigned, for meanings to be invested in. That knowledge about one person can translate into knowledge about someone else is the offshoot of these attempts to organize reality by category, which depends on the assumption that entities distinct enough to be cross-referenced can still be the same. A life form then goes from being its own specific expression to merely being a metaphor, a profile that encompasses all other forms that, your culture's signifiers for that category tell you, make it the same.

Ever wonder how you can go to a place and people can hate you without ever having met you before? It has nothing to do with you but their idea of you, your supposed membership in a sociological category that contains certain notions of causality, and has been valued or devalued accordingly.

This is how identity based or laden social movements stall and or reinforce the issues they are trying to overcome, by formally or informally emphasizing a relationship between certain attributes and a type of being. Meanwhile not being that type, because of the stigmas invested in it, is propping up someone else's idea-self. As was pointed out before, the is, the are, depend on superficial differences which result in idea distance, and so the shift(the return) to seeing ourselves as a part of the continuum of Life will be a supreme accomplishment for at least three reasons.

1. Unlike creating an identity based on hair color or what type of fruit you like, Life is substantive, and is consistent in terms of what things are entailed by being a Life form (what are the laws that have always applied to life forms that humans recently decided don't apply to them*). Thinking about how things effect Life or the capacity for Life to dynamically interact and persist provides a solid baseline for evaluating actions whereas currently standards reflect extreme biases towards one's perceived group.

2. Without being culturally supported in basing your orientations on what someone "Is", you have to look to see what actually happened, what was caused, and whether it benefits Life or destroys it or does neither, and evaluate accordingly.

3. Seeing yourself, as Life, in everything removes what is the principal justification for violence or exploitation, namely "____ is only a ___"

Our culture is riding the notion of "___ is only a ____" rapidly toward the end of a very short stay on this planet. Nature is selecting against, not humans, but this worldview through which we see ourselves as above all other life, and Nature as but a stockpile of resources that are there for our use and waste. It is only our belief in money, and the insulation concentrations of it afford certain swaths of the population, that has kept the steady degradation of our global life support systems a remote concern to so many. Through money, people are able to push the consequences of their lifestyles onto others, but only temporarily.

This is about evolution, survival, life attempting to spread its wings, moving past the temporary all important me, and the distance required to maintain it. To test this perspective, practice seeing yourself in everyone, every person, every creature, every tree, every rock, as life; not what you would have done if you were them, but who you could have been, who you are at the most important level. As the barriers fall away, as you gather an assessment of what events, processes, systems you are the sum of, and what makes you possible, the abstract ego loses its reign and you can observe it when it tries to create a separation, an attachment located in its sense of time rather than earth time/Life time. When you see yourself as Life, waking after four billion years of evolution to stare at a tree and recognize itself you approach a freedom, and a depth, that a self concept scheduled for only 80 years cannot imagine.

Thanks for reading. Please share your thoughts. Sorry about the dry form, every additional word decreases the chance people will read the whole thing and so there is a tricky balance between writing as comprehensively as possible and not overloading the reader with words.

If this was too hard to follow check out the other blog post, which though it contains many overlapping considerations has a somewhat different flow and emphasis.

The video that inspired the title:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms2klX-puUU

A reading of a few pages from Ishmael that focuses on beliefs about reality that we don't see from our cultural location:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssyD7Sjw7i8

* Read Ishmael pgs 124-133 (actually read the whole thing). If you want I will transcribe the text from these pages.

There are no such things as Vegans

I started this page because there are a lot of things I feel I need to express that I never do, responses and clarifications compelled by what, in many conversations, is an overlooked or unseen web of considerations that often fails to coalesce, for me, into a vaguely linear order until minutes, hours, or days after the events or discussions to which I felt them applicable.

If you are wondering how this might be relevant, it is sort of pointed at the heart of a complacency about being, about identity, what things are, how we know and how we rely on what we learn from our particular, and largely invisible to us, ways of knowing. If you know me, and ever create or share knowledge about me, or any other person really, then this is of the utmost relevance because here you will find a lot of the context that is missing in such attempts, and a meditation on the consequences for revolutionary politics of our culture's particular ontological and epistemological frames.

The build up toward this particular attempt to try to take a more rigorous stab at, what I see as, a sort of prevailing cognitive lapse consisted of moments of sharing time with various combinations of friends, and friends of friends, often around meals in different places around our beloved San Francisco bay area. Its pretty remarkable, the frequency with which this happened and the similarity in terms of how it happened but a food would be passed around, pretty much always meatless, and sometimes I would wave it away or decline and then one of my friends would say "He's a Vegan!" in a loud yet ever so subtly sneery tone, as if to preempt my explanation--which, for the record, I was not like to provide anyhow. And this was, and I suppose has been, the reason why I eat some things and not others, not my reason mind you but the one that, thanks to interventions like these, resides in the minds of the people I cross paths with.

And?

Before I get into why this is significant, and in fact dangerous, I want to emphasize that this is not intended as an argument for animal rights, environmental protection, and or shifts in consumption habits. I'm not going to get into the specifics of my own explanation but may need to list some basic priorities so I can illustrate how the aforementioned ontological explanation results in a drift between what are the desired consequences of my choices and how things tend to play out. In doing so, a reader may inevitably recognize what could be reasons for certain practices, however I think an argument over the relative quality of one approach as opposed to another is impossible when everyone is looking at a dramatically different picture.

This is an attempt to build context, a common basis for communication, which will be a basis for transformation.

When I refer to things I think or do, try to see these statements as a reflection of a perspective that is out there in the air where anyone can take it in, put it on, like a pair of shades, and not a line I am trying to draw between myself and other people.

To begin, nothing I do is because I "am", or am trying to "be" or not be, something. This is a very important feature of my world. People will say "You can't eat this its Not Vegan" or "He can't eat this he is Vegan." Its not: "I choose not to eat that because of the circumstances of its production and those consequences." it sounds like a sort of condition, something I have that prevents me from eating certain kinds of food. Check your pulse, how many fingers am I holding up? Not vegan? good, chow down. It ends up Not being a distinction between the items, the entailments of their respective production, but a distinction between the identities, the idea selves of the people at the meal. The emphasis is taken away from the whole reason a person might have changed their consumption habits and is explained by the infamous condition of Veganism.

For those sympathetic to concerns about animal suffering or maintaining a healthy environment, by explaining things through being, through a sort of ontological determinism one further imperils the environment by taking certain food-related actions and or preferences, which often have specific, to each individual whom umbrella terms like vegan seek to encompass, condition - response - effect - analyses behind them, and locating them as signifiers of a rare type of being.

Call your mom, double check to make sure you don't have veganism.

all clear?

another BLT please.

What you "are"--as if we're all made of different stuff and suffering and environmental degradation applies to some of us and not to others--is not relevant. There is no such thing as a Vegan, and for all practical purposes, there is no such thing as Vegan food and non-vegan food. Just because something does not have animal products in it does not mean its harmless. Just because you are "not Vegan" does not mean that your actions don't have consequences that effect the world we all live in. And so the practical question is not, "are you vegan, is that vegan?" but maybe where did that come from, what are its consequences, because vegan and not-vegan are just proxies ostensibly attached to material meanings but which in circulation often guide us far from the goal of increasing happiness and decreasing harm.

To make an identity out of a perspective or practice obscures peoples individual relationships to their choices and creates a metaphysical location to invest causality, virtue, and stigma which are applied to people who "fit the category" as if everyone who exhibits the defining feature is the same. Instead of being an idea that anyone can practice at any time it becomes a type of person, and the reputation of this "type" becomes a factor that weighs heavily upon how people relate to practices.

One might assert, "Vegan, this is what it means, someone who doesn't eat animal products, lets keep the term." It easily lets people know what you eat, or what people "can or cant" eat. Why, though, is the emphasis here, on food that is assumed to be less harmful, on the conscious attempt to reduce harm. Why is pizza or ice cream simply considered food but other combinations of foods are called Vegan? Why is it not the other way around, why are foods derived from cruel and unsustainable factory farming considered the default? Is there some othering word for someone who doesn't spit in your face when you walk down the street?

For any who believe it is important to preserve the ecological relationships that make life possible, which are threatened foremost by animal agriculture, it may be strategically useful to de-exotify the orientation toward practices that could result in a more sustainable culture. A problem with bundling every action, preference, and certain arbitrary phenotypical features into social categories is that, related to the false determinism and homogeneity that each category exudes, people focus on, and steer their course based on who they perceive other people "are", based on what they will "be" if they do or don't do something, following social meanings/valuations rather than paying attention to material consequences. Is it not interesting that we have laws to shield animals from abuse, and that to abuse an animal bears great public shame, and yet people often gloatingly emphasize that they are Not Vegan or that what they are eating is Not Vegan, and say it with a sort of pride. This is the sort of dissonance that results from thinking through the abstract realm of being, of the value of whatever 'Is' one tries to 'be' or not 'to be'--good person, bad person syndrome. If you 'are' Vegan, you are bad in our society, and this has a direct impact on the opportunity of earth-oriented ideas and practices to catch. If there is no word for what you are doing, no "who you are" that is invoked, there is no place for stigma to be attached and the actions have to be evaluated for their specific merits.

Inevitably a politics based on being (radical, vegan, queer, etc.) is limited by normative biases, or: "these people are all the same in this negative way". The more you reify a category, the bulls-eye that creates a location for oppression to happen, the more you emphasize whatever stigmas accompany people's idea of that category and ideas and change stalls, because people are not seeing the analyses or the practical considerations, the individual motivations, but seeing and acting in response to the distance between who they "are" and who they think the person speaking or doing X "is".

To identify, to locate yourself, in the world through these types of abstracts, validates the false associations between general attributes(ex. skin color, sexuality, a certain idea) and the causally disconnected virtues and stigmas that social categories emanate--disparately--across the consciousnesses of societies. Whether there is more virtue or stigma in any given category/identity/abstract depends on the point of view of the person participating in it, the cultural foundation, the time, and place, and the contemporary narratives that create a window through which it appears. Staking "who you are" on something so polymorphic is like trying to make your house out of a cloud, making yourself out of an analogy of yourself, rather than simply paying attention to what you are doing.

To think about race, historically oppressed people often identify through the category that was created and used to justify their exclusion/oppression. What does it mean to be of a certain "race"? Your question will get different answers depending on how old the respondent is, what time period, what place (what continent) they are from. Ways of speaking, dress, musical taste are not genetic, all of our ideas about what black is or white is or latino is are imaginary, things we saw or heard in a specific cultural historical context and extrapolated into transcendent laws that people feel bound by and bind other people by. We could have been born into any skin color, not surprisingly the one we inhabit(like our given nation, or religion) is the best, and lumps us into a 'race' to be compared with and contest 'other races', with our abstract ego's well-being depending on our 'race's' performance/reputation. We roll our eyes at others because of their clothing style or because of where they are from, living vicariously through stories of how our identity is better than their identity. This is the moral standard that x = 'category a' rather than x = 'effect a' leaves to us. The moral question is: what does having a look or doing something make you and thus any action or attribute can be good or bad regardless of its effects.

"Is" is not what's at stake. "Causes", "effects" are what are at stake and these, at least, are quantifiable.

I find myself often hating being around my friends because it feels like I'm being dragged along behind one of those arcade shooter games where baddies pop up out from behind trash cans and you have to shoot them down as fast as possible. It will often be some totally innocuous feature/look/statement that someone in our culture here sees and then BANG! label-stigma, invalid lesser person. Its demoralizing to imagine so many people outside of one's group of friends all doing the same thing, shutting down opportunities, erasing the potential for expanding communities or movements, only seeing caricatures because of all the things they have been conditioned to link to "lesser people".

Its epistemologically indistinguishable from racism, and, in fact, the imagining that "we are better than them" throughout time has been and remains foundational to oppression. This instinct to label is contributing to the culture of belief in categories and category causality and in doing so reinforces the ontological and epistemological basis for racism and homophobia.

Among people I know, there is a shared normative backdrop that puts race outside of this causality generator, but this is not the default in other circles and so by reinforcing "this person is this ergo.. blah blah blah" one acts like the jingo unable to see the violence coming from their own camp yet constantly lamenting the evil of others.

Because people's ideas of themselves are propped up by these imagined sides (I am conservative, you are liberal) ideas are not often addressed for their actual potential impacts but are dismissed for being radical, extremist, hippy, right-wing. You don't lose any additional information by not classifying ideas and practices, you do, however, lose the ability to dismiss through analogy, identity, or based on what is only your vague understanding, with its inevitable bias, against an idea or strategy. Because of our normative valuations of different 'types' of people, we are currently steered from genuinely engaging with actions and ideas for the broader contexts across which their effects can be registered, and instead our thought bubbles, because we attach our mutually exclusive analogies to them, function like bumper cars. This is how separating people into categories removes the possibility for communication(expanding considerations) and instead we can only argue, try and replace someone else's conclusion with ours.

For example, we tend to argue over whether or not someone Is racist, rather than simply discussing how certain statements might function and what missing considerations make those statements possible. Racist is a negative 'type' value in our society but the stakes in 'proving'(as if) whether or not someone Is racist only amount to publicly registering a value that they, and others with similar conclusions, will not think fits them; and because our attention was on constructing someone, we forgot to share the effects of actions, and the information present and lacking that makes those views real to people.

By working under the assumption that doing or saying or considering a certain thing makes you into something different, we tend to argue at the level of establishing what someone is or is not, assigning a value, rather than pointing out the effects of specific actions. This approach tacitly assumes that stigmatizing people who say certain things will result in people not saying those things. There is no attempt to bridge understandings because that person Is this category in our minds, rather than someone who, like us, has in some way been cultivated within a certain identity struggle.

If you leave behind the labels, and find out the motivations, the stories, the history, you start to get a sense of the context, causality, and factors in play, allowing events to be read for their effects, for their origins, instead of for whose side the label determines we should be on. These are things you cannot know at a glance, things you cannot see through the silhouette of appearances and motions, things you cannot repair by forging sides. Any discourse that reduces another life-form to a type or lower order, results in putting that life-form on the other side of, and beneath, the conceptual location of people's idea selves. There is nothing more than this perception that is required to instigate ego competition, to justify violence, exploitation. I sensed something very familiar, years ago when I started avoiding animal products and began to hear the justifications. They are just...

niggers. Swap the word for any other in history, the process of instituting a hierarchy, where none exists in nature, is the same. The boundless potential for cruelty that such ontological distinctions permit is the same. And then or now, none of the differences supplied as evidence can erase the fact that we all have the same capacity to feel pain, we all need the same things. So when I hear someone explaining, or justifying, through some metaphysical invention it makes me a bit uncomfortable, because people in our culture still haven't learned to see through the classifications and see themselves as they might be elsewhere in the world, if only from a different starting point.

Our bodies, our actions, don't make us different things. Our bodies, our actions, Make different things. Lets take the emphasis to actions and their effects, and leave these imaginary tiers of being out it. We have one world, and we're accountable to what we put into the currents that carry us.

Thanks for reading.