The healthseeker, health migrant, old lunger, or one “chasing the cure” were all names given to people who took to the road in search of healthier places. Where today when one becomes seriously ill they check into a hospital, the same could not be said of the earlier era. Finding better health was a search for a place where the person felt better. This idea of travel for health was an ancient tradition. Since the sixth century, when Greek and Roman physicians proscribed a sea voyage across the Mediterranean to North Africa for their patients with cardio-pulmonary conditions, the travel therapy remained one of the few options for invalids.

America of the 19th and early 20th centuries was a sickly place. Gastrointestinal ailments caused by bad food and bad water afflicted nearly everyone. Season fevers persisted, especially in humid, riverine locales; precisely the places where most Americans lived. The medical theory that fog and mist was miasma (bad air) persisted well into the 1900s. The major killer, however, was tuberculosis. The disease thrived in most places, especially in conditions of overcrowding, humidity and contaminated air. Mortality rates for TB ran ten to twenty percent overall, and as high as forty percent in urban areas.

Together with Josiah Gregg, two other notable personalities at the end of the century, Teddy Roosevelt and Mark Twain, expressed their own siren calls to “rough it”; that is obtain a tent to live in and pitch it in the forests, prairies and deserts of the American West. Billy Jones in his 1967 book, Healthseekers in the Southwest concluded that “the search for health was a factor second only to the desire for land in attracting permanent settlers to the Southwest; easily 20 percent of those who migrated to the region between 1870 and 1900 were hopeful invalids.” As late as 1904, the International Conference on Tuberculosis issued a declaration stating, “in the failure of any medication and therapy, travel remains the most effective method for combating the disease.”

Two schools of medical thought emerged to channel the healthseekers to certain locales. The heliotherapists, taking their lead from Swiss physician Auguste Rollier, sought places where the solar rays were superior and might be employed to kill bacteria. High mountain retreats offered in Switzerland and the U.S. Rockies competed with the low valley desert communities of southern Arizona and California. U.S. climatologists headquartered in Colorado Springs sought to match patient needs to climate conditions. Individuals in the incipient stage of disease might be directed to high altitudes where heart and lung function would be taxed with the beneficial result of white blood cell creation. Those in the acute stage were directed to low altitudes where weather conditions provided warmer days without extended periods of precipitation.

Both the heliotherapists and the climatologists took a page from the work of Dr. Edward Trudeau at his wilderness sanitarium in the Adirondack Mountains. Trudeau housed his patients in tents, affording them maximum exposure to clean, fresh air. Plenty of good food and absolute rest rounded out the therapy regimen.

Regardless of the intent of the medical practitioners, individual patients often took matters into their own hands and engaged in seasonal migration. Finding the heat of the deserts in summer as oppressive as snow in the highlands during winter, they moved about as need be, always in search of the illusive “maximum level of comfort.” In the absence of a mechanism that might cure their condition, they traveled in search of that place where they seemed to alleviate their ailments. Financial status was not a limiting factor among the minions traveling the west in search of better health. For those with financial means, an industry was rapidly growing throughout the West to compete for their dollars. Hotels, convalescent homes, sanatoria, rest camps, boarding houses; all were sprouting up in towns and villages along the railroad routes. For the indigent healthseeker shanty towns and tent cities had to make due.

This phenomenon was never more evident than in the aftermath of World War I when the federal government faced the daunting task of caring for some 300,000 veterans with a variety of conditions. Among these were victims of poison gas, survivors of the Spanish influenza who had developed secondary conditions, wounded soldiers from the war, and tuberculars. In the name of efficiency, the government concluded that regional treatment centers were the answer.

The veterans had other ideas. In the instance of the southwest regional center located at Livermore, California, some found the proximity to the Pacific Ocean’s damp and the salt air irritating. Levels of precipitation might be disagreeable along with a number of other factors. While technically assigned to the post, men took the initiative to move to more agreeable environs. Hence places like Tucson and Phoenix became inundated with gas victims and tuberculars. The search for comfort paralleled the impulse for survival.

However, not all local populations embraced the healthseekers who sought convalescence in their communities. In the early years, healthseekers that brought investment capital were welcome citizens. The legions of poor and working classes who followed were not. Healthseekers were soon ostracized by those fearful of the highly contagious diseases they carried. Denver, Colorado was an excellent example. Touting its climate as therapeutic, four tuberculosis hospitals opened in the city by the early 1890s. Within a decade, locals were incurring TB in dangerous numbers. Suddenly, the invalids were not longer as welcome. Those already in the Queen City were shunted off to isolated areas.

Some places sought to dissuade the arrival of tuberculars through quarantine or outright prohibition. States on the southern tier appealed to the Federal government to take action. They argued that they suffered an excessive financial burden in being forced to care for the large number of indigent invalids. In 1914, the Shafroth-Calloway Bill was proposed in Congress by nine Southwestern states. Among the bills’ provisions were the use of abandoned military reservations and other government property as tuberculosis sanitariums specifically for indigent patients. Western cities and states would receive financial aid for providing welfare to those arriving from the eastern part of the country without the assistance of their home state. Critics contended that the legislation included no provisions to prevent physicians and other welfare agencies from sending their indigent consumptives West, an argument that helped convince Congress to reject the bill.

Others took a different tact to convince invalids to remain in their home communities; they wrote reports and editorial comments that appeared in magazines and major eastern newspapers. Journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams, contributed several articles, including an influential piece that appeared in McClure’s Magazine in January 1905 in which he lambasted the western health movement, promoting instead the principal element of Dr. Trudeau’s therapy: fresh air. Adams pointed out that fresh air and building ventilation was not the sole purview of the West and argued that, “where a tent is unavailable, a roof or porch will do. . . . Climate, while it may be an aid in some cases, has much less influence on tuberculosis, except in the later stages, than is generally supposed.” Adams and others offered as an alternative to moving west; move out onto your porch. Thus was created the “porch cure.”

Writers in the West also contributed missives about migrating for health. Warner Watkins, a Phoenix physician contributed an article, “Ignorance or Malpractice,” to a 1909 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Watkins blasted Eastern doctors who sent “patients of meager means with advanced cases of consumption” to Arizona. He pointed out that “each winter the Associated Charities of this city [Phoenix] is swamped with such a class of patients and the county hospital is filled with them and our potter’s field is a veritable monument to the guilt of all practitioners who are guilty of such malpractice.” Consumption was a term used to describe the withering away of the body and the difficulty in maintaining weight that was common among tuberculars. However, given the limitations of medical diagnostics of the time, consumption was also used to describe a range of respiratory ailments including lung cancer, emphysema, asthma, chronic bronchitis and sinusitis.

Journalist and historian Sharlot Hall in her article, “The Burden of the Southwest” appearing in Out West (January1908), spoke of “a strangely careless disregard of details, an iridescent illusion” created about Arizona. She wrote of an all too familiar situation for the healthseeker. “He goes out, too often, with a light pocket to a strange place, to seek work which he is not able to do for the sake of a climate about which he knows nothing.” Hall was one of the very few to point out that conditions in the west were especially difficult for females. She advised women that bringing sufficient financial resources was a must to insure a good place to live and adequate fresh food. The most likely employment available to women was of the domestic variety, which was not likely to provide the rest necessary to recovery and recuperation.

As the 1920s commenced, many western communities sought to attract other migrants, just not indigent healthseekers. Thus Western writers re-inscribed their locales. Instead of being the place of last resort when a person had one foot in the grave, the West became a site of youthful vim and vigor. Instead of going out West to regain health, one traveled there to retain good health. The new marketing approach targeted the healthy tourist, rather than the sickly immigrant. The tourist and retiree took over as the seasonal migrants. The snowbirds had arrived.

Why did the healthseeker movement last so long and, by some accounts, continues on today? Science prior to the mid-twentieth century offered only personal observation to support the travel therapy, and the individual in most cases engaged in multiple relocations. In fact, a hard science discovery inadvertently led to greater dislocation of invalids. In 1882 when German physician Robert Koch discovered the tubercle bacteria as the cause of tuberculosis, he disproved the conventional wisdom that the disease was passed through heredity. Where a family might keep a loved one who suffered the disease as “God’s will,” they were more likely to evict one who incurred the disease through moral failings. Overwhelmingly, one started down the road to health and traveled to a specific location because they read a testimonial touting the life saving aspects of that place.

And what of today? The U.S. West is still attractive as a location for retirees and seasonal migration. The climate, particularly during winter, has not changed. Some desire to live close to the Mexican border so as to access cheaper drugs, medical services, and therapies unavailable in the U.S. Some travel to places where folk remedies are more accessible (and less scrutinized). The medical industry has reached new heights in diagnostics, drug and physical therapies, new technology, and health maintenance mechanisms. At the same time, diseases like tuberculosis have mutated into drug resistant varieties, particularly among the HIV/AIDS community. The cost of conventional care is rising and some individuals are increasingly resistant to institutional and regulatory dictates. Are we merely connecting health and place in a newer, more technological fashion in the telecommunications era, or are we preparing for a return to the physically wandering healthseeker?

By Alex Jay Kimmelman | The post When the U.S. West was a Place to Find Health appeared first on The Public Sphere.

All the while I ask myself: what is a large eye? A small eye? What is a normal sized eye?

Two hundred years ago, a young Austrian medical student found himself with the same question. He was struggling in school, and he was jealous of those among his class who so easily excelled at memorization. In interminable lectures he watched these men trying to figure out what made them different from him, why it was so easy for them to remember and so difficult for him.

It was the eyes, he decided. They all seemed to have larger eyes.

This young medical student was Franz-Joseph Gall, and this simple, odd insight would within two decades bloom into an unstoppable cultural force. Convinced of this causal connection, Gall began to look for other correlations between mental attributes and physical appearance. “Proceeding from reflection to reflection,” he would later write, “from observation to observation, it occurred to me that, if memory were made evident by external signs, it might be so likewise with other talents or intellectual faculties.” Gall set out looking for other correspondences between physical appearance and personality, and from then on, “all the individuals who were distinguished by any quality or faculty, became the object of my special attention, and of systematic study as to the form of the head.”

Gall’s obsession drove him to search for a visible means of discovering the brain’s secrets: a process he called “cranioscopy”—what became colloquially known as “bump reading” and what his pupil Johann Spurzheim would rechristen “phrenology.” It was predicated on a few simple principles. First, Gall theorized that, all other things being equal, size determines propensity: A bigger brain implies a higher capacity for intelligence. This was, Gall asserted, equally true of different parts of the brain—if the segment of the brain devoted to memory was larger in one individual than in another, then it stood to reason that the former would have a higher capacity for memory. Second, it was well known that the skull, like all bones, is initially malleable upon birth, only gradually becoming more rigid. So it stood to reason, Gall theorized, that the ridges and folds of the brain might imprint themselves on the bone when it was still pliable and that one could come to know the brain by understanding these imprints. From this apparent insight Gall began to explore the possibility that the brain’s workings might be made visible by the patterns it made on the skull. Each part of the skull became assigned a different aspect of personality—mirthfulness in the temples, sexual propensity at the base of the skull, and so on. With precise measurements of the size of each of these areas, Gall theorized, you could develop an entire picture of an individual’s character.

One’s identity, in other words, was written in the bumps of one’s head.

The rest of the story of phrenology is well known enough: blossoming into full scale quackery, it became a juggernaut of an industry unto itself, even as it was more and more discredited by legitimate science. By the twentieth century it was all but abandoned, but in the nineteenth century it was perhaps the most popular mode of understanding the human brain. In his preface to Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman proclaimed, “the anatomist chemist astronomer geologist phrenologist spiritualist mathematician historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.” It seems odd that the one profession on this list that actually purports to deal with who we are, why we’re motivated to do what we do, and how we define ourselves, is the one profession that seems so startlingly out of place nowadays. But it makes some sense that the rest of the disciplines on Whitman’s list are hard sciences, since phrenology presents itself as the hard science of the mind, a system of objective measurements and offers, in its own way, a certain amount of rigor. Phrenology has none of the messiness of psychoanalysis or modern therapy; the phrenologist doesn’t care about your dreams, needs no narratives about your past, your abusive parents, your failed aspirations. Everything the phrenologist needs is right there, laid out in a perfect, analytic grid. Your mind revealed in the same topographic language the lexicographer would use.

For all the ridiculousness of such a premise, there is a simple elegance in such a map of identity, where everything is so neatly arranged, so perfectly knowable. I’m not the only one who’s drawn to the trappings of Gall’s pseudoscience—lately, phrenology charts have popped up everywhere, from CD covers to bicycle helmets. They’re a graphic designer’s dream: iconic, ironic, eye-catching, nostalgic. But as much as layout artists may fetishize Gall’s chart nowadays, no one is eager to revisit the science. I’m not bothered that phrenology—with its dubious method and explicit racism, sexism, and all the rest—has disappeared. Good riddance. But what intrigues me is that such a ubiquitous measure of personality has literally disappeared off the face of the earth in less than a century. Compare the number of people who can read Egyptian hieroglyphs or ancient Greek to the number of practicing phrenologists—there are dead languages and there are dead languages, and the language of phrenology is about as dead as it gets.

And this is where my problem begins. For the past year, I’ve been trying to teach myself phrenology, this now-dead art.  At first I assumed this would be a fairly easy task, far easier than reconstructing Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone. After all, the relics of phrenology are visible everywhere; libraries and online resources still preserve the literature. It’s everywhere in popular memory—the pseudoscience to end all pseudosciences, the template for every self-help scheme from The Secret to the Master Cleanse. How hard could it be to learn it?

It was easy enough to track down what I thought would have been the Holy Grail: Lorenzo Fowler’s “Self-Instructor in phrenology.” Lorenzo and his brother Orson did far more to popularize phrenology in the United States than anyone else, selling their now-iconic busts and performing thousands of readings out of their New York headquarters. The title says it all; who needs phrenological experts, when the book promises to let you teach yourself?

“To TEACH LEARNERS those organic conditions which indicate character is the first object of this manual,” the preface boldly proclaims. “And to render it accessible to all, it condenses facts and conditions, rather than elaborates arguments because to expound Phrenology is its highest proof states laws and results, and leaves them upon their naked merits; embodies recent discoveries, and crowds into the fewest words and pages just what learners need to know, and hence requires to be STUDIED rather than merely read. ‘Short, yet clear,’ is its motto. Its analysis of the faculties and numerous engravings embody the results of the very extensive observation and experience of the Authors.”

The library copy I acquired, an original from 1850, even has its first owner’s chart, filled out by Lorenzo Fowler himself, with each region given a number on a scale from 1 to 7. His pencil marks faint but still visible; I found myself wondering what a graphologist would make of them. But as tantalizing as Lorenzo’s presence in these pages is, it is also the problem: the book’s owner did not phrenologize himself. As the preface goes on to explain, the actual work is done by the examiner, in this case, Fowler: “The examiner will mark the power, absolute and relative, of each function and faculty, by placing a figure, dot, or dash on a line with the name of the organ marked, and in the column headed ‘large,’ or ‘small,’ according to the size of the organ marked, while the printed figure in the square thus marked refers to those pages in the book where, under the head ‘large,’ ‘small,’ etc., will be found description of the character of the one examined in respect to that organ….”

This is the problem—the Fowlers don’t teach you how to read heads, they teach you how to interpret their readings. And the bust they sold is great for learning where the various propensities of Amativeness, Philoprogenitiveness, Adhesiveness, Inhabitiveness, Alimentiveness, and all the rest are located, but it’s useless for separating a “3” from a “4.” You still need a phrenologist, one who knows how to classify the size of each bump.

In all the phrenological literature I’ve scoured, there’s not one description of bump size in objective terms, no measurements that can be applied to a contemporary head. How does one even objectively measure such bumps? In centimeters? In degrees? What is the “normal” shape of the head, from which one could single out a noteworthy bump? Once proprietary trade secrets, now these secrets of identity are likely lost for good. As with any dying language, without a living community practicing phrenology, its mysteries have disappeared from the storehouse of knowledge.

So I spend my time trying to reconstruct this data, taking my measurements, looking for enough statistical data to form a working knowledge of an elusive “average” by which to judge the remainder of humanity. Not unlike the work of the Egyptologist, there’s an archeological aspect to this work, a reconstitution of a forgotten discourse.  I have no dreams of spreading the bump-reading gospel. The question for me has never been: how do we resurrect phrenology? Rather, the question is: what does it say about our ideas of identity when a “science” (however dubious) can go from such importance to the dustbin of history, in such a short space of time? The disappearance of phrenology suggests that the study of identity isn’t like biology—it doesn’t necessarily move inexorably forward, building on past discoveries. Each age has its own ideas about identity, and its truths are always in flux.

By Colin Dickey | The post Bumps: Confessions of an Amateur Phrenologist appeared first on The Public Sphere.

The revolution”s generational consumption was completed in different stages. First, starting in June 1980, Marxists and political organizations with Marxist tendencies were massacred. Then the secular nationalists and moderate religious were banned and pressured. In 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini”s designated heir, Ayatollah Montazeri, was removed from power, and a few months after Khomeini”s death in the same year, the newly-elected government of Rafsanjani eradicated from parliament (the Majlis) those who were considered “leftist” inside the political establishment. During the 1990s there was a fight for power within the right wing of the Islamic Republic. For the first time elements of the traditional religious groups who had no revolutionary background found their way into the government and held key positions. The revolutionary left came to power again in June 1997, and the years between that date and today were the years of political struggle between the last of the revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s and the new generation of rulers trained not in the battle with the Shah”s regime but in the military camps of the Iranian Revolutionary Army. With the defeat of the Reformists in this recent “election,” and their arrest for supposedly inciting riots, the revolution is complete; all her children have been consumed.

In my Iranian childhood in the 1970s, the most memorable mouse and cat characters were not Tom and Jerry -whom I used to watch on the “American” channel- but the characters from a short story for children written by the fourteenth-century Iranian satirist poet, Ubaid Zakani. My sixteen-page book of “The Mice and the Cat” was a reproduction of an old lithograph print, which gave it a unique look among my other books.

Zakani, as is customary among the classics, began his story reminding the young readers that by the end of the book they should pay attention to the moral of the story: “Be smart and mind the story of the cat and the mice. You”ll be astonished about what the story might teach you. Even you, who are wise and prudent, listen to the tale and let it be like a jewel earring on your ear.” The playful language of the story and its funny unusual rhyme scheme made it easy to memorize and a joy to read. But the ending was not quite what one might expect from a children”s tale.

The story, as the name suggests, narrated the tale of mice, powerlessly oppressed before the paws of a brutal cat. At some point in the story, the cat”s conscience appears troubled by what he does to the mice. Taking refuge in a mosque, he prays, cries, regrets his viciousness towards the mice, and becomes a “man of god.” A mouse hidden under the “manbar” (pulpit) sees the repentant cat and takes the news to the other mice. The news about the cat”s spiritual change spreads among the mice. The joyful mice decide to show their appreciation by offering food to the cat. So they send their leaders to the cat to deliver him a message of friendship with trays of food. The message delivery, of course, gets interrupted; the new cat of god eats both the food and the messengers. This makes the mice extremely angry, unites them, and motivates them to change the course of their miserable life once and for all. They decide to fight back against the cat. The mice organize a revolution, defeat the army of the cats, and capture the cat that ate their leaders.

Up to this point, we have a regular Hollywood-style movie plot where the little guy rises up against an oppressive overlord and seemingly wins; the good and the meek defeat the evil and the cruel. The last few lines, though, undo such a happy ending. The mice take the cat to the stake to hang him. In the last minutes the cat frees himself from the ropes, kills the mice around him, and forces the army of mice to scatter. Brutality wins. Life goes back to “normal.” The “oppressed” remain powerless, and the winner is the one who uses hypocrisy, brutality, and ruthlessness.

I remember being nine years old and reading that story in 1977. Iran was pregnant with a revolution. The Shah was widely despised by the educated, secular intellectuals as well as many traditional Shiite clergy and their followers. For many members of the newly formed middle-class families of the 1960s and the 1970s, Islam was the alternative to reform Iran, a country supposedly corrupted by Western ideas. In those decades, many Iranian religious intellectuals tried to create a socialist and Marxist inspired Islam, a “modern” Islamic ideology. To many of them Shiite Islam was considered an authentic “Iranian” alternative to Western radical ideas. They believed a reinvigorated political Islam could be the revolutionary solution that makes Iranians independent of Marxism or any other Western ideology. Many of these intellectuals were more invested in the power of the idea than in their own faith in Islam. They believed political Islam would mobilize the masses against the Shah”s dictatorship. Others, perhaps more faithfully, viewed Islam as the true solution to any problem, even though they never could define how the religion would digest modern values. For the secular nationalists, liberals, and Marxists, it did not matter how Shiite Islam would become a modern political ideology.

The year 1978 began with the first serious anti-Shah demonstrations. Massive protests continued for the rest of the year. By January of 1979, the Shah left the country. In February of that same year the secular and Islamic revolutionaries, united under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, overthrew the Shah”s regime. The Shah”s army could not fight back.

On February 11, 1979, at the age eleven, I witnessed the collapse of one of the most brutal dictatorships of the century. I was elated that the mice had defeated the cat, that the oppressed could finally live free. The moral of Zakani’s story seemed to be wrong.

Things didn”t go the way the mice had intended. The next thirty years witnessed a Zakani-style victory of the cat. The king was gone but the kingdom reincarnated in the Islamic dictatorship called “Velayate Faqih.” In 1979 the first constitution of the newly-formed “Islamic” republic institutionalized a new position above the government and the president to overlook the acts of the republic and “guide” them according to Islamic Sharia: “Velayate Faqih,” meaning the Jurist Ruler, or as it is translated into English, the Supreme Leader. The story of post-revolutionary Iran became the struggle of a nation with its self-invented monster.

Today”s fight in Iran between the reformists and the hardliners is the result of a thirty-year struggle within the nation”s mind, a battle between those who finally recognize the face of the brutal cat in their self-made system and those who do not. No one knows if the story must ultimately end as Zakani would predict, the cat”s brutality triumphing, leaving a status quo of oppression on the mice. I still want to believe, as I did on February 11, 1979, that Zakani does not always have to be right.

By Mohammad Razi | The post On Iranian Cats, Mice, and Revolutions appeared first on The Public Sphere.

A group of well-meaning Christian students asked their mostly non-religious friends: “What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word ‘Christian’?” The answer: “Fear and hatred.” The non-religious friends did not hate Christians, but many of them did assume that Christians demand a litmus test of political, moral, and social beliefs and practices to reveal who deserves God’s love. These Christians’ non-religious friends view such a test as a gateway to bigotry. For their part, the Christians found that they, too, shared some of the same concerns about Christian litmus tests and bigotry. Their friends’ beliefs also raised another question for the Christian college students: what is the church doing that paints Christians as fearful and hateful? Perhaps, if they discovered the answer to this question, then they should apologize for 2,000 years of wrongs done by the church.

So, this group of mostly Protestant students decided to spend a year asking this question about millennia of church failures, a program that they jokingly called the “Mea Culpa campaign.” Their operation included a film series, focusing on “current church failures.” Fundamentalism topped their list of church failings, followed by anti-Semitism, racism and homophobia.

The campaign featured films for each topic, followed by an open-ended discussion, not contrived or controlled. The Christian college students were not interested in changing their friends’ minds. Rather, they wanted to give their non-religious friends a forum in which to express why they view Christians in such a negative light. And I, their college chaplain, watched as the conversation unfolded.

The students chose several films including Jesus Camp. One film they chose was Amen, which focused on a German SS officer and a Catholic priest, both of whom attempted to expose secret concentration camps to the Vatican. The Vatican, however, refused to speak out. The Protestant Christian students reacted with shock, horror, and grief to a part of church history of which most of them had never heard before that night. Also present at the film screening of Amen was a member of the newly formed Hillel chapter and members of the Catholic Newman club. These students nodded sadly at the Protestant students’ reaction, for they were aware of this particular church failure. “We had always blamed the Nazis,” said one Protestant, “but we did not understand the role the church played, or refused to play.”

The Jewish student talked a lot about how the Holocaust affected her family. At first, the others listened, and then the discussion went off on several tangents. The meeting ended on a positive note of shared horror and new friendships. At the end of the evening, I thought the viewing of Amen and the discussion was a success. But then, I realized that this film’s focus on genocide made it too easy to agree with the church’s failure. Clearly, the murder of six million people is wrong, whether the players were passive observers or active participants.

Overt evil is easy to discuss. It’s banal evil that is hard to acknowledge. And you can’t confess to a sin until that sin has been acknowledged. Churches spent the rest of the twentieth century acknowledging the sins of genocide. However, in her writings, Hannah Arendt, who witnessed the trials against the Nazis, wrote about how the Nazi war criminals resisted acknowledging that their boring, nine-to-five office jobs of record keeping or laboratory work on the use of chemicals in the gas chambers had actually been evil. In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt chronicles the wartime activities and trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, who claimed that he was only doing his bureaucratic job as a transportation logician. But his “job” led to the death of millions in the Shoah. Likewise, in a scene from the movie, Amen, the German SS officer explained the ratio between the amounts of chemicals needed and how the right combination of chemicals would quickly kill a certain number of people. In making this explanation, the SS officer was doing his job. However, the precision and efficiency required by his task masked the reality of how the ratio of chemicals he calculated meant the physical death of millions and the moral death of twentieth-century Christianity. While we know that gassing millions is wrong, the horrors of the genocide and the road to hell are often masked by dull organizational details like chemical ratios, and by the seemingly good intentions of clergy who look the other way to avoid the cargo trains and the stench from the gas chambers.

When I reflect on the sins of the church in events like the Shoah, sometimes I think we should apologize, not for being evil, but for being pathetically inert. The church leaders (not all, of course, but many) acted as if all were well while evil lurked beneath the surface of banal actions, like those of Nazi Christians. The church claims to represent love, but sometimes it does something in the name of love that seems evil (like baptizing slaves before they are sold). Even in the church’s exercise of evil, though, its greatest sin often occurs when it is simply being pathetic, being passive and complacent, unwilling to take action beyond a quiet moan.

The pathetic villains of the church are often not cast as passionate people with a cause. As in the case of Amen, Christian villains folded their hands, bowed gracefully, and looked in the other direction. Who would love the pathetic church member? Give us the passion-filled, albeit evil, witches of old! The recent success of the Broadway musical, Wicked, shows that society still loves the epic villains, like the wicked witch of the west, Drusilla, or Boris and Natasha. The obviously evil character is not pathetic—only passionate and misguided. The evil villain puts his or her entire heart and being into a cause, even if people get hurt in the process.

The pathetic villain, by contrast, follows orders, keeps the accounting straight, and does so with very little thought or passion. The evil villain accomplishes something intentionally. The pathetic villain accomplishes nothing on purpose. Perhaps by accident, the pathetic villain does some damage, like blowing the seeds off a dandelion, only to find, like in Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!, that a civilization could be destroyed by a simple puff. Except for his or her cause, the evil villain almost looks like a brave soul. The pathetic villain is ultimately a coward.

This cowardice of the church was explored in the third installment of the “Mea Culpa campaign,” an independent documentary, Traces of the Trade. It looked at how one family received its wealth and privilege from the nineteenth-century North-American slave trade. The lucrative slave trade strategy of rum traded for slaves who were used to harvest sugar to make molasses used to make rum to be traded for slaves was skilled and successful commerce in its era. The banal, but carefully executed trade of rum, slaves, and molasses, however, also led to the torture of millions of human beings, and undermined the long-term economic advancement of generations of African American families.

In the documentary, family members of the slave trader were horrified and heartbroken over the revelation of the sources of their family’s wealth. Many attempted to rectify the wrong of slavery through social action or consciousness-raising activities. While I admire them for this, I still have to get up every morning and sort through how much of this legacy of slavery still affects my family and me. I think of how many of my family members are still in poverty, even though they may have attended college. The dandelion seeds have been blow away, and generations of slavery cannot be undone, especially if present action is still undertaken with pathetic cowardice. At best, I have always viewed civil-rights advances, not so much as overcoming one of history’s greatest evils, but more as stripping away the illusion of white superiority from the emperor’s back and declaring him to be a naked, pathetic fool.

Although the family profiled in Traces of the Trade tried to discuss reparations, or compensation for slavery to the descendants of African American slaves, the old conversation faltered in the face of a staggeringly long legacy. In the film, the family members asked the lone African American who was in their midst, about her feelings. She was actually one of the filmmakers, and had not planned on appearing in the film. When the white family members asked her what she thought about racism, she said that she saw that many of her friends, including members of this privileged family, were good people. But many whites, she said, were cowards for not wanting to address the issue of racism.

While the film is less than two years old, the filmmaker’s thoughts about cowardice bear a striking similarity to US attorney general Eric Holder’s recent comments. “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards,” Holder said. “We, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.” His accusation seemed to have cleverly and thankfully stopped the old conversation on race, a conversation that has decayed from a struggle for gains in civil rights to the pathetic, self-congratulatory exercise it has been for the past twenty years. The old conversation on race has become an exercise in back-slapping, high-fiving, cheers against the racist white man and applause at liberal whites helping poor little brown children. We are in a new era; where majority culture advocates realize that justice must be more than just humanitarian aid. Perhaps Holder’s comment will move us away from the conversation on programs that put bandages on racism to a new dialogue about making real gains against racism in this twenty-first-century multicultural milieu.

I have spent years in discussions among Christians about the failures of the church to speak out against racism. Often, the participants in these conversations are well meaning. OK, now we all agree, racism is wrong, the emperor is naked. After that admission, however, nothing seems to change. I suspect this inertia is due to the fact that it’s more comfortable to call racism an overt evil; then, overt actions and overt villains can be blamed, but most of us never have to face the relationship between the minutiae of our daily lives and racism. Perhaps we will actually start rectifying the damage of racism if we address it as a banal or pathetic evil.

We all know evil when we see it, but pathetic-ness masquerades so well as quality, excellence, piety and holiness. Too often, some well-meaning person approaches us with a plan or a cause, and we even though we smell the scent of banality, we are convinced that the intent of the project is what makes it good. This allows us to ignore the damage that these pathetic actions cause to others. If racism is really going to be conquered, it will take more than a mantra of “we will overcome.” Perhaps we need a new mantra, something like “I will be transformed.”

To this end, the church will need a new confession. The church needs not to confess our sins as if we were as evil as Hitler, but to admit that our sins are as banal and cowardly as Eichmann’s. We should admit that, in our cowardice, we pass laws so that we can avoid the real change that should come to our hearts. We need to confess that all we do when we change laws in order to legislate being nice to everyone. Our conversations must pass beyond a mere gaping at racism’s damage. But before this happens, our nation’s collective heart needs to ache for the damage done by racism. Otherwise, we are doomed to do more damage while hiding behind the good liberal shield of acknowledging racism only when it is overt.

For the solution to racism, anti-Semitism, and all of the church’s failures is rooted in embracing the part of the Christian message that claims that love transforms the heart and makes it able to love one’s neighbor, family member, and enemy with the same passion. For if the church had been doing this, it would have avoided committing most of its sins over the past two millennia. And until the hearts of Christians are transformed through the process of confessing to racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, or whatever “ism” that is fueled by the passive sins of omission, all the church will ever be is a bunch of cowards. Until people’s hearts are transformed through the process of confessing and acknowledging racism, nothing will change.

By Valerie Bailey | The post The Church Needs a New Confession: Pathetic-ness as Moral Failing appeared first on The Public Sphere.

The vicious debates surrounding California’s Proposition 8 this election season again evoke the right-wing stranglehold on the discourse of (gay) marriage. Aside from recycling the perpetual imagery of torch-wielding savages clamoring at the gates of Purity, Goodness, and Moral Restraint (indeed, the “defense” of marriage remains the primary grounds upon which the right opposes gay marriage), those discussing this issue continue to argue for two sides and two groups: those who support gay marriage as an indicator of strengthened civil rights for the gay and lesbian communities, and those who oppose gay marriage because of its threat to tradition, religion, and the pillars of heterosexuality. The missing piece here, of course, is the somewhat-amorphous third group: those (gay and straight) who oppose gay marriage because it assimilates queer people into a problematic, sexist, patriarchal, classist, and homophobic institution. Perhaps in their efforts to avoid the stereotype of being “anti-family-values,” left-wing folks have failed formally to ask these questions: Why marriage at all? Why not work collectively to end marriage, or at least divorce marriage from the conferral of rights, for both queers and heterosexuals? If marriage tangibly institutionalizes the supremacy of heterosexual kinship structures, as Judith Butler has argued, why should anyone get married?

In March 2004, Oregon’s Benton County did something extraordinary: it banned all marriages as a response to our nation’s heterosexist definition of marriage as “between one man and one woman.” County commissioner Linda Modrell told Reuters, “It may seem odd, but we need to treat everyone in our county equally.” Odd indeed. This action asks us to consider the nearly-universally-accepted principle that gay marriage = gay rights by posing: Do gay people get “rights” if they become more like heterosexuals? What would happen if we instead demanded that heterosexuals–those with mainstream, religious, and cultural power–change their relationship to marriage? What if heterosexuals could no longer (or, in the interim, chose not to) marry?

The call to end marriage as an institution does not fall far from trends found in recent demography studies. In 2005, numbers of non-nuclear families surpassed nuclear families for the first time in U.S. history. ((Williams, B., Sawyer, S. C., & Wahlstrom, C. M. (2005). Marriages, families, and intimate relationships. Boston, MA: Pearson.)) Studies asking, “Why?” (often with much hand-wringing about the rising divorce rates as a sign of the apocalypse) point out that marriage has increasingly less relevance for heterosexual couples. We have seen dramatic increases in opposite-sex couples living together before marriage, or avoiding marriage altogether, along with spiking divorce rates, increases in same-sex families, trends toward more intergenerational families, and more step-families and adoptions nationwide. Studies also show huge increases in young people reporting that they do not have a religious affiliation, do not attend church, and generally see religion as irrelevant to their lives. I mention this data because if those who care about gay rights worked to harness some of the anti-marriage/altered-kinship-structure/anti-religious energies within the heterosexual community, we might find ourselves with an unexpected tidal wave of support for formally revising the cultural meaning of marriage.

After all, marriage consistently has negative consequences both for women and the culture at large. For instance, the astonishingly disturbing property implications can overwhelm: fathers “giving away” their daughters like mules (or, more accurately, paying someone to take their daughters off of their hands), the bride’s parents paying for the wedding as a way to reinvent the dowry system, wives changing their names and adopting their husbands’ names, grooms asking permission of the bride’s father (owner) to marry his daughter (property), being pronounced “man and wife” (subject and his property) at the ceremony, women wearing engagement rings as a marker of their taken status, and the like. These customs, while perhaps somewhat on the decline and certainly steeped in notions of tradition and ceremony, have real consequences for women’s lives. They imply that husbands own and possess their wives, which leads to a host of social problems based on this fundamental inequity, even for the more “enlightened” couples who imagine they can distance themselves from this paradigm. For example, because marriage presumes that husbands should have sexual access to their wives, spousal rape did not become a legally recognized crime until the late 1970s, and the first-ever recorded charge of spousal rape did not occur until 1949(!). Even with this “progress,” successful prosecutions for spousal rape remain extraordinarily low in comparison to other rape trials. Further, other problems also arise from the property implications of marriage: women earn less of their own money and therefore cannot leave unhappy marriages; women receive little institutional support for fleeing their husbands; women still inherit property at lower rates than men; and cultural divisions between legitimate and illegitimate families gain momentum. In short, despite the improvements made to the packaging of marriage in recent years, this repackaging does not undermine marriage’s patriarchal attributes and implications.

Social science data also reveals the ways that marriage privileges the nuclear family over all other kinship relationships while it specifically harms women. For example, married women tend to have more negative physical and mental health outcomes than single women, while men show the opposite trends. Women in caretaking roles—whether taking care of husbands, children, elderly parents, etc.—show far worse health outcomes than their non-caretaking counterparts. ((Gove, W. R. (1984). Gender differences in mental and physical illness: The effects of fixed roles and nurturant roles. Social Science & Medicine, 19, 77-84.)) With regard to divorce, women’s incomes take a far more intense beating following divorce than do men’s incomes, and women more often take on child-rearing responsibilities, thereby dropping their incomes even further. Women even face social consequences as single parents that differ from men’s experiences as single parents: compared to single fathers, portrayed as generous, kind, and attractive, single mothers are constructed more often as overworked, neglectful, and unattractive. Moreover, institutional marriage reveals twisted kinship values. For example, health care coverage values the married couple but not other familial ties; one cannot give one’s elderly mother one’s employer-paid health care plan, just as one cannot give a sibling or a friend one’s coverage.

Marriage also makes it much more difficult for people to disentangle themselves from each other. Aside from the social validation provided by marriage (e.g., others recognize the couple as “legitimate”), the legal contract of marriage does little to predict longer relationships or more egalitarian unions, even while it promises to bind people together “until death do they part.” In practice, the artifice of the marital union often serves as a costly, ineffective, and exclusionary means of unifying people. The marriage contract does not specify the rights and burdens it enables, yet we accept this in the name of sentimentality; come time to divorce, many wish they had read the fine print. In short, marriage is a losing proposition, particularly for women.

And still, we have spent a great deal of time over the past several years framing marriage as The Answer to full civil rights for gay people, while simultaneously requiring that they legitimize their desire to marry. This has resulted in some disastrous discursive problems. First, these assumptions raise questions about whether gay identity is about who one has sex with (and how), or why one has sex with them (and with what consequences). We are severely ahistorical on this point because we too often forget that we once divided people’s sexual identities based on why they had sex–either for procreation (the normative) or for pleasure (the sinners, degenerates, bohemians)–without any concern for whom they had sex with. In other words, modern-day heterosexuals who liked oral sex, anal sex, sex for pleasure (etc.) would have historically been lumped together with homosexuals as sexual deviants. While these terms have shifted–in that we’re almost okay with heterosexual sex for pleasure as long as it’s not too blatant, raunchy, overly-accessorized, or public–this historical anti-pleasure campaign still seeps into our cultural consciousness today. For example, right-wing fear of gay people often stems from the fact that gay people blatantly have sex for pleasure and not for reproduction. Gay people directly contradict the bourgeois value system that leads to kinship systems based on reproduction; they openly and purposefully have sex solely for pleasure. In this sense, gay identity has stood outside of the Puritanical, capitalistic (“be productive and produce productive products!”) model of productive kinship for quite some time. Assimilation efforts like the pro-gay-marriage campaigns, therefore, have to spend a great deal of time reassuring everyone that being gay is about “love” and “family” rather than, say, unadulterated sexual pleasure. While pitching gay people as less “scary” and more “normal” to jittery Middle America is an unfortunately necessary part of the pro-gay-marriage game plan, this effort distances us from the reverence gay culture has for sexual pleasure and non-reproductive sex.

Second, by asking gay people to legitimize their desire to marry, the debate about gay identity as either biological or a choice has raged on, splitting the “experts” and the public into two camps. First, the pro-gay-marriage people who argue that gay = biological claim that gay people cannot help being gay because they were “born that way,” so they should therefore receive the same rights as heterosexuals. They forget that these arguments pave the way for eugenicists to simply “fix” the gay gene and “repair” the dysfunction of gayness. Gay identity in this model becomes something that happens to us, something that we do not consciously choose. (Also, remember that mainstream media then tends to apply the biology argument more intensely to gay men rather than lesbians, thereby recycling the same old “men have uncontrollable urges for sex” argument feminists have rejected for years now). Conversely, other proponents of gay marriage instead argue that being gay is a choice, and therefore gay people and straight people are biologically equal and thus deserve equal rights. One can easily deconstruct the absurdity of this argument by imagining the implications of having, say, a civil rights movement arguing for equality between white people and people of color solely on the basis of biology. The problem here is simple: we are asking the wrong question.

When I say that the right-wing has a stranglehold on the discourse of (gay) marriage, what I specifically mean is that they have managed to convince reasonably intelligent folks on the left that this debate between biology and choice stands in for the question of whether gay people deserve rights. We forget that no possible answer to this question serves the interests of gay rights. The biology/choice debate not only goes against nearly all reputable scientific research that shows an integration between the nature/nurture positions, but it also demands that gay people account for themselves in the eyes of heterosexuals. It positions heterosexuals as the ones evaluating gay people, rather than situating gay people as themselves aligned with heterosexuals in the struggle for full civil rights and equality for all. When we ask, “Is being gay biological or a choice?,” we essentially force gay people to submit to the evaluative will of heterosexuals. In my own research on women’s sexuality, the absurdity of accounting for oneself in this way appeared when I (slightly sadistically) asked heterosexual-identified women how they became heterosexual or discovered their heterosexuality. After bumbling around for a few seconds, these women typically looked me straight in the eye and said, “That’s a ridiculous question.” We should take a cue from them and do the same.

Returning to the original dilemma of what to do with marriage itself, I propose a different set of solutions: first, let’s remember and celebrate the fact that gay identity is in part based on its blatant, sometimes flamboyant and in-your-face, opposition to heteronormativity. While gay people may choose to reproduce, raise children, and imitate heterosexist norms of kinship, gay people have also consciously valued sexual pleasure and reimagined notions of family. That’s a good thing. Second, marriage is a deeply flawed institution, and as such, not only promotes sexist and heterosexist values, but stands in as the primary way that the State confers rights upon us. We should look carefully at how other countries reconcile these problems by, for example, divorcing marriage from the conferral of rights and, as such, rendering marriage strictly a religious ceremony. It is entirely unacceptable that we attach rights as basic as health care (which, contrary to what John McCain has argued, is not a “privilege”), hospital visitation, and the ability to adopt children to an institution that shamelessly and flagrantly promotes the conflation of Church and State. These rights should not be conferred via marital status. If we separate rights from marriage, this would benefit both gay couples and unmarried heterosexual couples. Heterosexuals must serve at the forefront of this battle by demanding an end to marriage as we currently define it. Third, we must reprioritize our goals for gay rights, first by demanding that heterosexual allies take a more personal role in the struggle, ideally by either not marrying or working to strip marriage of its legal power, and then by recognizing that gay marriage is not synonymous with gay rights. Let’s seriously consider: Is gay marriage really the kind of change we want for our country? Marriage is not a building-block for challenging oppression; it is oppression. If we spend our time and energy fighting for gay marriage, and we end up winning, we might find ourselves irreversibly wedded to marriage as a religiously-based institution. The joining of heterosexuals and queers in the battle to separate marriage from rights will reinvigorate the overly dichotomous gay marriage debates while challenging one of the most backward, sexist, and regressive institutions of our time.

* Image: Allusion aux Agences matrimoniales, Croquis californien par Cham. Wood engraving from the New York Public Library collection. Created by Cham (1819-1879), originally published in Le Charivari magazine.

By Breanne Fahs | The post Would You Prefer Gay Marriage or No Marriage? appeared first on The Public Sphere.

“The goal or object of practice is pleasure.”
(The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (Columbia University Press, 1990), 272.)  Gilles Deleuze

Permaculture farm

The majority of the citizens of the industrialized world and even a large number of inhabitants of the United States have come to recognize global warming as a significant problem posed to the continued existence of the species homo sapiens. However, a tremendous political and social inertia remains regarding just what needs to be done about this problem and how to do it. In other words, there is a clear disconnect between our cognitive understanding of the dilemmas posed by global warming and our apparent inability to address those dilemmas practically. This gap between what we know about global warming and what we are actually doing about it can be read as a sign that there is something about our framing of the issue that is itself a part of the problem.

Finding a “solution” to global warming is not just a matter of developing new technologies and the political mandate to implement them. If we are to address the issue seriously, then what needs to be fundamentally reconceived is nothing else and nothing less than the entire relationship between our species and the natural environment. At the heart of the relationship between organism and environment is the experience of pleasure as it arises in co-determining action. In nature, there is nothing more absolutely necessary than the superfluous (e.g., the feathers on a peacock, the spots on a bird, the vibrant colors of a flower, etc.). The activity of pleasure is the exclusive means by which all forms of biological life reproduce themselves. Accordingly, from the properly biological perspective, to say that humanity is in danger of ceasing to exist is really to say that humans are forgetting how to have pleasure.

In order to further examine the practicality and necessity of pleasure for the present moment, I would like to compare two recent approaches taken to the problem of global warming. One finds an interesting juxtaposition between the respective ways in which Al Gore and Michael Pollan address the problem in their lectures posted on the TED website. According to their website, “TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds.” Now it stands as a place on the Internet where ideas are spread through posted recorded talks.   Though these lectures appeared in the same forum, Pollan”s simple perspectival-practice approach contrasts starkly with Gore”s hero-citizen-market approach. Examining the contrast between these strategies allows us to appreciate how the very approach to a problem is itself a part of the problem. This examination also extends our notion of the problem of global warming into the realms of practice, play, and pleasure.

Al Gore”s New Thinking on the Climate Crisis portrays the problem of global warming as a problem of political will. According to Gore, the fact that the media are not adequately conveying the seriousness of the problem stands as a major barrier to action. In particular, political candidates need to be confronted with respect to what they are doing or not doing about the issue. As a response to the mainstream media”s inattentiveness, Gore advocates public organizing efforts to raise awareness in support of policies such as renewable energy, conservation efficiency, and a global transition to a low-carbon economy. Gore”s solutions are political and economic. His approach implies that, while it was our technology that helped to create the problem of global warming, we can take steps to reverse that problem by using technology in a politically and socially unified way.

As a rhetorical supplement to this political strategy, Gore conjures the creation of another hero generation.   According to Gore, we must recognize that with the problem of global warming, “history has presented us with a choice-a planet emergency, a generational mission.” Developing this theme, Gore evokes a series of images: World War II, the end of slavery, women”s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and landing a man on the moon. He says we should receive our opportunity to respond to global warming with profound joy and gratitude-it is an opportunity for us to rise to the challenge, to fight a war… to be heroes. In addition, if we succeed, then “we are the generation about which philharmonic orchestras, and poets and singers, will celebrate by saying they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and to lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future.” Gore concludes: “We need a higher level of consciousness… and that is coming.”

In contrast to Gore”s approach, Pollan advocates a shift in human thinking about the evolutionary location of the species; for Pollan, consciousness is just another tool used for getting along within co-evolutionary species systems. Pollan develops this point by beginning with a “simple” story about the practice of gardening:  

What did the bumble bee and I (as gardener) have in common… both of us were disseminating the genes of one species and not another… and both of us-if I can imagine the bee”s point of view-probably thought we were calling the shots… I had decided what potato I wanted to plant… I had picked my Yukon Gold or Yellow Fin or whatever it was… and that bee no doubt, assumed that it had decided I am going for that apple tree, I am going for that blossom…We have a grammar that suggests that”s who we are-we are sovereign subjects in nature, the bee as well as me… I plant… I weed… but what if that grammar is nothing more than a self-serving conceit? … The bee thinks he or she is in charge but we know better… The bee has been manipulated by that flower-I mean in the Darwinian sense… it (the flower) has evolved a very specific set of traits-color, scent-that has lured that bee in…The bee has been cleverly fooled into taking the nectar, getting some powder on his legs and then off to the next blossom… The bee is not calling the shots…   I realized then that I was not either… I have been seduced by that potato and not another into spreading its genes… what if we looked at us from this point of view… these other species that are working on us… agriculture appeared to me not as an invention, not as a technology but as a co-evolutionary development…

He goes on to add that viewing us and the world from the plants” and animals” points of view:  

…helps us to understand this weird anomaly:
We had this Darwinian revolution: we are just one species among many… evolution is just working on us the same way its working on all the others, we are acted upon as well as acting, we are really in the fabric of life… the weird thing is we have not absorbed this lesson 150 years later-none of us really believes this… we are still Cartesians… We are the children of Descartes, who believe that subjectivity, consciousness sets us apart-that the world is divided into subjects and objects.

Pollan then describes the practice of permaculture at the Polyface Farm in Virginia. Permaculture uses polyculture, the cultivation of multiple species in the same space, in reproduction of the diversity of natural ecosystems. There is a web of intricate connections that allow a diverse population of plant life and animals to survive by giving them food and protection. This practice understands the physiology of species, and by playing into the demands and desires of plants and animals, an abundance of food is created, while healing the earth at the same time. With little more than the technology of fences and the perspectival shift of “looking at us and the world from the plants” or the animals” point of view,” Pollan points to a practice (one of many approaches) that actually heals the earth and creates food by animating nature through playing into the pleasures of species. In Marxist terms, this is a practice to repair “the metabolic rift.” ((Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance¦ disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil¦” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin, 1992), 637-638.))

In his talk, Gore attempts to use rhetoric to manipulate his audience, and thereby to inspire them into action. He presents an unfinished series of heroic images, and he puts the audience in the position of completing that series. Gore wants the present generation to write another chapter in so-called “culture” by fighting and winning another war. Should this combat succeed, the rewards will be more cultural products-such as hero worship in the form of philharmonic symphonies. By contrast, Pollan conceives of ecological practice as being a simple shift in perspective. Pollan proposes that we simply feel the insights of Darwin in a direct and sensual way and thereby come to understand the earth as it can be animated with little or no technology. This conception of practice does nothing more than reconcile what we say and what we do-in the practice, play, and pleasure of physics, ethics, and hedonism.

Gore is simply reanimating Cartesian thinking, while Pollan is pleading with us to understand desire as a productive force within a symbiotic relationship. There is, quite simply, a fundamental dissimilarity in these approaches that hinges upon the question of how we relate to nature. Are we the self-important species, or do we instead consider our implicit place within diverse ecological systems? ((See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 10, “¦the aparallel evolution of heterogeneous species or transcoding in the becoming wasp of the orchid and the becoming orchid of the wasp.” “¦each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritoralization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further.)) How can we use notions of pleasure in recognizing the difference between necessity and ambition? Nature is a violent, imbalanced, and opportunistic connection of eco-systems, but where in nature do we find avarice? Is it desire that seduces us, that moves us to follow pleasure unique to humans? Is desire part of the “evolutionary manipulation” that we should accept? What does our relation to nature say about subjectivity? Pollan is quite clear here-his aim is to cure humans of the disease of self-importance and to appreciate desire as ecologically productive. ((See Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Columbia University Press, 2007), 93 “No more subjects, but dynamic individuations without subjects, which constitute collective assemblages.))

In order to understand the implications of this shift in our perspective concerning our relationship to nature, it is helpful to recall some of the concepts of Epicurean philosophy. For Epicurus, time seems to be integral to his notion of pleasure-the ability to sustain life without anxiety.   The philosopher offers two types of pleasure: kinetic and katastematic. ((Don Fowler and Peta Fowler, “Introduction,” Lucretius: On the Nature of the Universe, Oxford”s World Classics (Oxford University Press, 1999), xxii.))   Katastematic pleasure is sustainable, pleasure at rest. Kinetic pleasure is the movement of fulfilling a desire. Epicurus advocates the katastematic pleasure of equilibrium-enjoyed when desire is satisfied and pain is absent- over the kinetic pleasure of a stimulus. Thus, pleasure is involved in moving from the sensible to the thinkable in the briefest manner of time. This aesthetics moves away from the judgment of good or bad and towards the valuation of intensities. The goal of this practice is the animation of life, the animation of pleasure for the satisfying of desire. Pleasure is not a gratuitous stopgap measure of the fulfilling of lack, but the counter actualization of mixtures and movements of sense and thought that resist myth and moral code. ((See Appendix, The Logic of Sense, “Lucretius and the Simulacrum,” an article by Gilles Deleuze originally titled “Lucretius and Naturalism” and published in 1960, eight years prior to Logic of Sense.))

It is also worth recalling that Lucretius, the later Epicurean, makes no distinction between living things in his discussions of will. Voluntas (will) for Lucretius is the freedom of all living beings to follow where pleasure leads. ((On the Nature of the Nature of Things,” lines 251-292, trans. Don Fowler in Don Fowler, Lucretius On Atomic Motion: A Commentary on De Rerum Natura Book II Lines 1-332 (Oxford University Press, 2002).)) For humanity to enter into these systems at the same level of all living beings, humanity will have to accept consciousness in the Pollanian sense, as a co-evolutionary tool. To understand things from, not only the bee”s point of view, but the apple tree”s as well.

What are the implications of declaring the pleasure of a sustainable state superior to that of the pleasure of a stimulus? We arrive at an awareness of natural motion and the cycle of deviation-which is connected to an Epicurean ethical theory-in that human beings see that they themselves are a part of this motion. Human pleasure is then no longer thought to require being apart from nature, but only acting in, through, and as nature. The Epicureans went the furthest in exposing false infinities as myth, to posit a cleavage in the cause/effect relation and to expound on these notions as naturalism. The Epicurean thinking of plurality arranges Epicurus” absence of pain as pleasure-not asceticism but an active production of the absence of pain. How does this Epicurean concept of pleasure relate to current approaches toward the ecological crisis?

At first glance, permaculture and symbiotic farming seem to be limitations upon what we conventionally think of as the pursuit of pleasure, because these systems of farming are based upon the idea that animals are hardwired to follow their pleasure. This dimension of necessity in the following of pleasure has no place within the post-Cartesian, subjective understanding of the word. However, the Epicurean conception of pleasure values chiefly a resistance to over-pleasure or the voluntary action not to move. Lucretius implies that nine times out of ten, a living being will act according to the living being that he is-but that tenth instance is the voluntary action not to move. ((Fowler, Lucretius On Atomic Motion, 418-419.)) Thus, in Epicurean philosophy, the necessary and the voluntary are not opposed but are simply different aspects of the same movement. If the ecological crisis is one of behavior, then the very inertia of humanity that we bemoan with respect to our inability to confront the ecological crisis should instead be reconceived as a form of resistance to the destructive practices that created the crisis in the first place. This inertia presents us with the possibility for a pause-a hesitation-in our action. Such a pause in action might very well be the most immediately practical thing that we can do.

To enact such a pause in our actions would be to use human consciousness as Pollan suggests-in a manner entirely similar to the way the lima bean releases bio-chemicals to summon other mites to defend against spider mites. In this view, a plant”s biochemistry and human consciousness are both posited as co-evolutionary tools and neither is superior to the other.

Pollan claims that his goal is to tell stories that help us to feel Darwin”s insights viscerally. Pollan recognizes the troublesome nature of the separation of sensible pleasure from political discourse. By pausing to pursue (or not pursue) our natural desires, we simultaneously move away from the largely ineffectual political practice of merely repeating what everyone already knows. The Epicurean notion of the pause helps us to understand that actions should not be opposed to politics-growing a garden becomes just as important as starting a blog.  

In an editorial for The New York Times, Michael Pollan has provocatively asked “Why Bother” addressing global warming? In response to this question, he writes, “But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen.” ((Michael Pollan, “Why Bother?” The New York Times Magazine, April 20, 2008; Michael Pollan, “Why Bother?” Internet; available from http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=92; accessed 10 September, 2008.)) Pollan”s approach to global warming is that of reconciling gardening, physics, and ethics within an apolitical practice of sustainable hedonism.

By John Cochran | The post Sustainable Hedonism appeared first on The Public Sphere.

An acquaintance of mine claims to have 258 friends. That number could be larger, actually; the figure only represents the number of boon companions who show up on her MySpace page and not those additional pals who might appear in real time but avoid online social networking. Among this tight-knit group are celebrities, a personified representation of the university she attended, people with whom she’s shared neither the same physical space nor an actual conversation, and an assortment of random human beings who actually do spend time with her in the non-virtual world. Admittedly, this gal is more outgoing than I am, and is far more in tune with the latest social trends. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something oddI even want to say “disturbingabout this densely populated area of her life.

It’s not the numbers in themselves that bother me; rather, it’s the fact that all of the inhabitants of this e-community share the same label: “friend. OK, fine, what else should you call them, on a site not devoted to business, school, or any other “work-related organization? After all, this sort of acquaintance wasn’t even conceivable only twenty years ago. Pen pal? Not exactly. Associate? That sounds so Wal-Mart. Webfriend? More accurate, perhaps, but we don’t want to get too techno-geek on everyone. The point is that, whatever we think we’re describing with this new sort of relationship, “friend” seems to be the easiest, least confining identifier to use, end of story; don’t take your semantics so seriously.

But I do take semanticsas well as friendshipvery seriously. After all, without friendsthose anchors who stand by you, stave off loneliness, keep you accountable, save you from your own egoexistence would be exceptionally dull. And so, when you can gain or lose a friend in the microsecond it takes to click a mouse, should we worry about the fact that the rich phenomenon that is friendship might be losing some of its complexity?

Let’s take a look at this new realm of cheery community formation. Whatever your preferred site, the routine is more or less the same. You present as much or little, as far-fetched or honest, a public face as you want. You ask the people you know from “real life” to declare publicly that they’re willing to be associated with you, and then you either wait around for something to happen, or you get assertive, depending on your personality. If you choose the latter option, chances are, you browse other members’ profiles, check out their favorite TV shows and music, their pictures, the comments their friends have posted to their siteand if you like what you see, you have another couple of options open to you.

If you’d like to know more about this person than is contained within a few blurbs on the screen, you send a message to say hi and to try and get a conversation going. If, on the other hand, you don’t feel that such a time-intensive step is necessary, you just up and invite that person to be your friend. In this case, you ask a complete stranger to agree publicly to link himself, and all that goes along with him, to you, and all the accompanying baggage that you carry. Somehow, this action is not thought to be as creepy as mailing a personal letter of devotion to a celebrity.

Even if you find something overly hasty about this process of instant and ill-informed amity, though, and refrain from immediate e-bonding with avatars, there will always be some stranger who pops up out of the blue and requests your friendship. The lack of an introductory message in this instance is perhaps less disturbing than the fact that this type of individual often doesn’t even appear to have looked at your profile. So, for example, when a self-proclaimed redneck (and Proud! Kiss my red white & blue ass, terrorists!) solicits the friendship of a Code Pink organizer who enjoys dancing with her coven in Berkeley, you have to wonder what’s going on. It gets even more puzzling, though, because often, you don’t even have that minimal information to guide you; sometimes, potential pals ask you to join up on their team without even allowing you to view their profiles or pictures. In other words, you are asked to claim these unknowns as friends before you’re granted the privilege of knowing anything about them.

And then, for some old-fashioned curmudgeons, a strange thing often ensues out of what should be a ridiculously easy dilemma: instead of officially declining the friend request KrazEE8s has made, you become so anxious about not hurting this person’s feelings that, in spite of being ignorant even of hisor her?true identity that you just ignore the request, hoping that KrazeEE8s will soon forget about having contacted you.

Odds are, however, that were a stranger to come up to you in a public place and ask you to be her friend, you’d pack up and move away in a slightly creeped-out fashion. When the situation happens online, though, why does such a presumptuous approach suddenly become, if not welcome, at least socially acceptable? I’ll wager that it’s got something to do with the safety of the entire process. In spite of the much-discussed dangers of placing ourselves under public scrutiny, when it comes to the work and investment required of an online networking relationship, the risks just can’t compete with those required in the physical realm.

Consider the very un-anonymous peril that someone in the flesh takes when introducing herself to a stranger. If things go well, she’s passed the first of many hurdles; more work lies ahead in order to convince the object of her interest that she’s worthy of sustained attention, of becoming and remaining a “friend.” If rejected, however, she’s markedvisiblyand there’s really no satisfactory remedy to getting out of the situation; leaving will point up her shame and weakness; hanging around will prove that she’s even more socially inept than she demonstrated in her initial approach. The whole prospect is scary. If you don’t have to see the expression on another person’s face, though, whether you’ve been accepted or rejected, well then, one level of anxiety, at least, has been removed.

And then break-ups, never easy to manage, are so easy in the virtual universe that, technically, they don’t really have to occur. If you’re no longer satisfied with your friend, well, just remove him from your friends’ list; there’s no need to inform him that the relationship is over. Unless he happens to scroll carefully through his 300 friends, in fact, he may not even notice you’re gone. And if you’re overwhelmed with the developments that could ensue even from that action, don’t worry; you can just block your ex-pal from contacting you. Easy, clean, no explanation required.

The problem here is that friendship, at least as we’ve experienced it over the last few millienniain the fleshrequires communication and commitmentnot only to respect a friend enough to tell her if you need to go your separate ways, but to be actively involved in her life, throughout the duration of that relationship. Isn’t there some sort of understanding that the two of you will see each other through good and bad, put up with each others’ complaints and relationship troubles and bouts of depression, will attend a concert one of you really doesn’t want to attend? Doesn’t friendship involve, in addition to good times together and common interests, risk and disappointment and accountability, misunderstandings and post-argument reconciliation and a resulting understanding and valuing of each other that are stronger than they were before?

I’m not claiming that good discussion, personal growth, and, dare I say it, lasting friendships, do not or cannot happen on Facebook. I do, however, wonder how this commitment-free realm of existence affects the manner in which we behave in the “real” world, especially the ways in which it shapes our ability, not only to understand and interact with those closest to us, but with people in generalmaybe even our capacity to understand ourselves. It takes something much more complex than a glowing screen of words to help us appreciate the intricacy and nuance that are part of the human experienceand so, to assist us in becoming mature, thoughtful individuals.

Lists of hobbies and favorite music are simply not enough to know a person, and don’t even begin to allow you to describe yourself to others. Heck, Charles Manson might have loved, loved, loved the Beatles just as much as any of their self-proclaimed biggest fans. I’m guessing, thoughhopingthat his physical presenceincluding the quirks that were only perceivable when you stood next to himwould dissuade most people from pursuing an acquaintance, much less friendship, with him. It seems, though, that on these sites of free information exchange, friends are constituted by the facts you know about them; realizing that they like the same movies you do, and prefer green to red, must mean that, were you to meet in the real world, you’d get on swimmingly.

I’m not advocating turning the clock back to rotary phones and card catalogues. And the phenomenon I describe is hardly the most serious social ill we face. Maybe, though, it could warrant a small mention in the lists of things to keep in mind as we move on in our quest for the best of all possible worlds. Because if this trend starts to influence how we treat our “traditional” palsif we don’t have toor worse, don’t want toconnect with other human beings on any sort of profound level, the implications could be terrifying. It’s bad enough to be lonely, or to feel misunderstood, or to misinterpret what another is saying. Becoming accustomed, though, to treating friends as if they were both disposable and easily replaceable makes me wonder with how much less concern we would begin to treat strangers or enemies. Because if our friends don’t matter that much, then those who don’t share our interests or our opinions begin to matter even less. And in a world where we already take so little account of the poor and the marginalized, stopping in our tracks and asking ourselves what friendship means to us might just keep us from expanding that realm of undesirables who are already so unjustly treated. One would hope, too, that it would even lead us to talk to those we’ve eliminated from our consciousnessbecause even those who look and think differently than we do mightamazing suggestion!have much more to offer us than we ever thought possible. That recognition, though, will require a little more than an exchange of favorite TV shows and flattering pictures.

I’m not asking us all, then, to ditch Facebook and the entertainment we might be able to find there. At the very least, though, demand of the people you meet in this new-fangled community something more than a soundbite or a catch phraseat least before you decide to become friends.

By Katy Scrogin | The post Your 258 Closest Friends appeared first on The Public Sphere.