Archive for category Mother Culture
Notice Your Culture
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Mother Culture on July 1st, 2010
I talk about things like the Myth of Progress, and I wonder whether it all sounds very conceptual to you who aren’t inside my head. But I see examples of what I’m talking about all around me, and I thought it might be time to start pointing them out, in a series I’ll call “Notice Your Culture.” Issa wrote about this in a post she titled, “Step One: Notice.”
The first one comes from Engadget’s review of the Motorola Droid X phone:
Motorola’s success as a competitive phone manufacturer is ultimately going to depend not on its ability to produce a single hit, but to produce a never-ending string of hits, each better than the one before it.
This is an example of the Myth of Progress in action. Success or progress is defined as continual improvement and expansion. Everything must be up, up, up and out, out, out at all time. Recession or contraction is viewed as failure or death, not a natural and essential part of any healthy system.
The remaining examples will come from a copy of The Economist magazine, which unfortunately means that there won’t be links to the articles. You’ll just have to take my word for it.
An ad for Shell Oil reads:
Japan, like many other countries, needs a reliable source of energy. Not just for tonight’s bowl of warming noodles, but for years to come. Let’s build a better energy future.
The first question I had when I read that was, “Many other countries? Like whom?” Which countries need a reliable source of energy, specifically? Countries who are outstripping their available energy reserves, that’s who. People who are living sustainably off of their landbase don’t need a reliable source of energy; they have one! Their landbase! The only reason that Japan is not able to meet its own energy needs is because its population and the lifestyle they expect has outgrown the energy that its landbase is capable of providing. This is a hallmark of civilization. Societies grow to the point where they must import energy and other resources from outside of their landbase, making them inherently unsustainable.
What will happen in years to come, according to this ad? Future generations will need energy from afar? Notice how the tone of the ad is not, “Future generations will have security because they will have reduced their population and lifestyle to fit within the energy that can be provided by their landbase.” Nope. Contraction and recession is not an option. Consuming less is not an option. This is the expansionist drive and the Myth of Progress at work.
An article about the Deepwater Horizon disaster reads:
Meanwhile, the Obama administration appealed against a judge’s decision to overturn its moratorium on drilling in deep waters, which was introduced after the explosion on the rig that caused the disaster in the gulf. Several oil-services companies and politicians in Louisiana have challenged the drilling ban on the grounds that it is arbitrary and has a negative economic impact on the region.
This makes me think of several of Derrick Jensen’s Premises:
Premise Nineteen: The culture’s problem lies above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.
Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.
If we did not believe that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable, then we would not even consider continuing drilling in the Gulf, given the obvious risks. But economics is the driving force, and anything that causes economic harm is resisted, no matter what else might come of it.
An article about China’s monetary policy reads:
China’s slightly freer currency would be all the more welcome if it spurred moves to boost consumption.
This is the Myth of Progress again. Pardon me if I beat that drum all the time; it’s a big one. The premise of the headline is that anything that boosts consumption is good. But think about it. If increasing consumption is always good, what is the inevitable outcome? Is it physically possible to always consume more? And why isn’t anyone ever asking whether the level of consumption that we are currently at is appropriate?
An article about an industrial accident in India reads:
The plumes of poison gas that leaked from the plant killed thousands within minutes. Three years later, Union Carbide agreed to pay the Indian government $470m in compensation, far short of an original $3 billion-wort of claims. But it was not until this year, on June 7th, that a court finally ruled on culpability for the accident. A district court in Bhopal convicted seven former Union Carbide executives of causing death by negligence and sentenced them each to two years in jail.
The article goes on to say that as many as 25,000 to 100,000 people may have ultimately died from the leak. Although there is public outcry in India over the lenience of the sentences, nothing has yet been changed, and the convicted people have not yet been extradited from America.
This is an example of Jensen’s Premises:
Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
Premise Five: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.
The article closes with a paragraph that hearkens back to the Shell Oil comment that opened this post.
Energy-starved, India wants American companies to help expand its nuclear power, but they are deterred by the lack of protection from big compensation claims.
Why is India energy-starved? Is it because its capability to generate energy has been reduced? No. It is producing more energy today than it ever has. It is because its hunger for energy has outgrown its ability to produce it. This is a hallmark of civilization, and is one reason why civilization is unsustainable. The irony of India’s situation is that it is simultaneously civilized enough to need energy, and primitive enough to be abused by those who are higher than it in the hierarchy of violence. Why can’t India have as much energy as it needs without having to accept violence from the American (or other) companies that provide the energy?
Premise Three: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.
The Myth of Ideological Consistency
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Mother Culture on June 22nd, 2010
In a previous post, I gave a particular definition of “culture,” described the expansionist drive that is one of our cultural myths, and concluded that:
The correct place to direct your outrage, therefore, is not just at the individual actors who created this particular situation, but at your culture, itself, for lying to you and everyone else about the value and necessity of expansion. Without a cultural shift away from this message, we will continue to manufacture these disasters until we have done so much damage to our landbase and extracted so many resources that continued expansion is simply impossible. And, as horrific as these disasters are, you should save your outrage for truly aberrant situations. In this culture, horrific environmental damage is an accepted and inevitable outcome of extracting resources from the earth so as to sustain “progress,” growth, and expansion.
If culture is, “The things we tell ourselves about ourselves,” then when I talk about a cultural shift, what I mean is that we change the things we tell ourselves about ourselves. For example, we could replace the cultural myth of, “growth is progress; stasis or contraction is death,” with, “living in balance with one’s environment is life; over- or under-consuming and over- or under-populating is death.”
This is not an easy task. Our culture is incredibly resistant to fundamental changes. Your first thought may be to disagree with that claim. After all, the world has been through some drastic changes in just the last few hundred years. Surely some of them count as a fundamental cultural shift? No. I’m talking about really fundamental cultural myths: the ones that are buried so deep that you usually can’t even see them.
By way of example, the expansionist drive seems like one of these fundamental myths to me. For as long as our culture has existed, we have striven for: growth of our population; increased land-base under our control; increased consumption of resources; and increased technological complexity. No matter what other cultural changes you can point to over the 10,000 years or so that the dominant culture of the world has been developing, this one has remained steadfast. At different times and in different locations, the expression of the expansionist drive has waxed and waned, but it has never wavered.
I think of the ways that culture resists the changing of its myths as cultural defense mechanisms. One of those is the myth of ideological consistency. It goes like this: “Total ideological consistency is morally superior to ideological inconsistency. People whose ideals are in any way inconsistent are at best hypocrites, and at worst liars. Either way, their ideas are dismissable.”
Let’s say that I believe that the petroleum economy is fundamentally immoral and that the world would be better off if petroleum use was dramatically curtailed or even eliminated. But I also drive a car. “A ha!” the myth of ideological consistency shouts at me. “You don’t really believe that crap! If you really believed that crap, you wouldn’t drive your car! You’re a hypocrite! You’re a fake!” Now I’m faced with three choices:
- Stop driving my car.
- Maintain my belief and keep driving my car. Live in a state of constant cognitive dissonance.
- Ignore or abandon my belief about petroleum being immoral.
Option one amounts to martyrdom. Remember that culture defines how we meet our basic human needs. If “driving a car” is a fundamental aspect of my culture, and “not driving a car” represents a meaningful challenge to that culture, then “not driving a car” means threatening my access to food, shelter, sex, social interaction, and so forth. Even if I take the step of not driving a car, my ideas are still open to challenge under the myth of ideological consistency. Do I have electricity at my house? Does it come from petroleum in some way? Do I eat food that was harvested and transported using tractors and trucks? If I have a belief that is inconsistent with my culture’s myths, I have to totally excise myself from my own culture in order for my actions to be totally consistent with that belief.
Option two is very difficult for most people. Not only is cognitive dissonance psychologically painful, but others may quickly dismiss your ideas due to your “hypocrisy.” Additionally, because you have been programmed with the myth of ideological consistency, you view yourself as morally inferior to those whose actions appear to be consistent with their beliefs (cultural myths).
Option three, of course, is the easiest out. Forget the challenging belief and go with the flow. Who can blame a person for doing the only thing they know how to do in order to get access to food, shelter, sex, social interaction, and so forth? And this is how the myth of ideological consistency helps to preserve the existing cultural myths.
As long as you buy into the myth of ideological consistency, you cannot fully participate in changing cultural myths that you disagree with. The cultural myths that you wish to promote do not yet exist within your society, so you cannot practice them within your society. If you choose to act in a way that is totally consistent with your beliefs, you must excise yourself from your own culture. I think that there is a very valid question as to whether this is even possible. First, to do so would very likely deprive you of all of the mechanisms that allow you to meet your basic survival needs. Second, the pervasiveness of our culture means that there may, literally, not be anywhere on earth you could go to escape it.
There is a fourth option: abandon the myth of ideological consistency. This doesn’t mean that you stop evaluating whether a person’s (or your own) actions are consistent with their stated values, just that you understand that people (and yourself) can be in a position where they (you) hold values that are in conflict with each other and where they (you) care about all of the values too much to abandon any of them.
Derrick Jensen laments the salmon populations that have been destroyed by dams that block access to their spawning grounds. He knows where the dams are, and he hasn’t blown any of them up. Does that make him a hypocrite? Or does it just mean that he values not-being-in-prison and not-being-dead as much or more than he values removing the dams? Who can blame him? Prison has been constructed to be as awful as possible specifically for that reason!
Would I like to live in a world where I could eat food that was raised totally without chemical pesticides and fertilizers? Absolutely. Am I willing to stop eating anything except that food, today? No. Does that make me a hypocrite? Or does it just mean that I value access to food as highly or more highly than I value pesticide- and fertilizer-free food. Read that sentence again: “I value access to food.” Well, shit. Who doesn’t, when you put it that way?
The myth of ideological consistency is a sham, and you should work to excise it from your reasoning as thoroughly as possible.
Sex Trumps Age
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Mother Culture on June 21st, 2010
The choice of subject and object in a sentence colors the interpretation of the information being presented. The effect has specifically been studied in journalism. Note the different impressions given by the following sentences:
“The police officer unintentionally discharged his pistol, injuring a bystander.”
“The gun went off accidentally, injuring a bystander.”
“A bystander was injured by a stray bullet.”
All three of these sentences are accurate descriptions of the situation. In the first sentence, the police officer is clearly presented as responsible for the injury, even though the action is described as unintentional. In the second sentence, there may not have even been a police officer present. By the time we get to the third sentence, even the gun has been erased from the situation.
I was reminded of this topic today while reading a story about the making of the film Rebel Without A Cause. The director of that film divorced his second wife after discovering her “in bed with” (his quote) his 13-year-old son from his first wife. BoingBoing wrote about the topic, saying:
They approached B-movie director Nicholas Ray, who had become fascinated with adolescent angst ever since he had caught his 13-year-old son Tony screwing his wife, Gloria Grahame.
When an adult has sex with a thirteen-year-old, who should be portrayed as the actor, and who the acted-upon? The answer is obvious, right? But that’s not the language that this author chooses. The child is described as “screwing” the adult. What other choices might the author have made?
“He caught his son and his wife screwing each other.”
“He caught his wife screwing his son.”
Oh, and let’s not forget what might, arguably, be the most accurate wording:
“He caught his wife sexually molesting his son.” Some would even say “raping.”
What’s going on here isn’t hard to explain. Because adults are assumed to have moral authority, and children are not, adults are by default described as acting upon children. Because we live in a patriarchy, when it comes to sex, men are by default described as acting upon their sexual partners. When these two conventions come into conflict, however, the winner is often surprising: sex trumps age. The male child is described as acting upon the female adult.
So, when it comes down to it, we would rather grant moral authority to a child than grant sexual dominion to a female.
Who To Blame For Deepwater Horizon: Our Culture
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Mother Culture on June 21st, 2010
I had some good conversations with friends this weekend, in which we discussed the outrage and horror that people are feeling over the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I’m horrified too, at the scope of the environmental disaster, but I find it hard to muster up too much outrage.
It’d be one thing if I believed that this was an aberration—that something had gone wrong in the system to allow this to happen—but as near as I can tell, the system was working exactly as intended. The oil rig was cutting every corner they reasonably could to boost the profits on the oil. The Minerals Management Service was pretending to regulate the oil companies, while actually letting them do whatever the hell they wanted. The politicians were maintaining plausible deniability on the lack of oversight, while accepting massive donations from oil companies so as to grease the wheels that make the whole thing possible. And Joe Public was shouting, “Drill Here! Drill Now!” and complaining to said politicians when gas got near $3 a gallon. We were all doing our part to ensure that, eventually, a disaster like this would happen. And “eventually” isn’t even the right word, because this is far from the first time a disaster like this has happened. It’s just the first time it happened close to Americans’ home. When thousands of leaks from decrepit pipelines pollute land and water in the Niger Delta, it doesn’t merit a mention, but when it threatens our economy, suddenly, people get mad.
To understand situations like this, I think it’s helpful to examine the role that our culture plays in our relationship to the earth and the resources we extract from it. When I say culture, I don’t mean art, music, or snooty restaurants. I mean the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. For example, here are some of the things are said by many (all?) modern cultures:
Progress and success is defined as growth and expansion. Growth and expansion are associated with life and vitality. Lack of growth and expansion is a failure, and is associated with death. Things that support growth and expansion are good and things that hinder growth and expansion are bad.
The culture in which you exist (civilization) is the only way that you can have food, shelter, safety, comfort, and entertainment. People who lived outside of your culture lived an a brutish, dangerous, scary, barbaric world that you wouldn’t want anything to do with.
When I think about the the framework of choices and values that made the Deepwater Horizon disaster inevitable, it seems obvious that there’s a link back to the expansionist drive that is one of our cultural myths. If lack of growth and expansion equates to cultural, national, and ultimately individual death, then it makes sense that corners would be cut in order to acquire the ever-scarcer petroleum that fuels, literally, our growth and expansion. No matter what the damage done by a leak, it’s better than dying!
It’s really hard to challenge these cultural myths, because we have had them whispered into our minds every day of our life, and also because the very existence of the culture that provides us with the necessities of life depends on belief in the myths. But the veracity of the myths is easy to challenge. For example, it should be obvious from examination of nature that few, if any, species expand and grow for any length of time without a corresponding contraction. Species that expand and grow excessively, such as the rabbits that were introduced to Australia, create enormous problems, both for themselves and for the other species that have to share an ecosystem with them. So, the idea that contraction equates to death and expansion equates to success is easily falsified. And yet you show me one public company who wants to announce that its profits have dropped. You show me one government official who will cheerfully report that the GDP is down, not up. You show me one financial analyst who’s happy that the stock market is down. Nope. Up, up, up. All the time. Forever. Or it’s bad news. That’s the power of the cultural myth of the expansionist drive. Even though it’s demonstrably false, or at least incomplete.
Where should we direct our horror and outrage at the disaster that’s occurring in the Gulf right now? BP? Minerals Management Service? Politicians? All of these and more share some part of the blame. But focusing solely on those actors is just playing whack-a-mole. Deepwater Horizon is the most prominent (to people in the USA anyway) example of the inevitable outcome of the collection of stories that our culture tells us about our relationship to the environment and the resources it contains. The really scary thing is that every other system that’s operating within that culture is operating under the same premises. While some rigs are certainly safer than Deepwater was, at the end of the day, all rigs and pipelines and other facilities operate within the cultural myth that supporting the continued expansion of civilization is, literally, life-or-death. They have historically also cut corners and taken risks, with resulting environmental damage (thankfully, only to brown-skinned people who don’t really matter because they are far away and also poor). They will continue to do so as long as our shared culture contains the myth of the expansionist drive.
The correct place to direct your outrage, therefore, is not just at the individual actors who created this particular situation, but at your culture, itself, for lying to you and everyone else about the value and necessity of expansion. Without a cultural shift away from this message, we will continue to manufacture these disasters until we have done so much damage to our landbase and extracted so many resources that continued expansion is simply impossible. And, as horrific as these disasters are, you should save your outrage for truly aberrant situations. In this culture, horrific environmental damage is an accepted and inevitable outcome of extracting resources from the earth so as to sustain “progress,” growth, and expansion.
Saving The Environment
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Mother Culture on June 19th, 2010
In honor of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, I’d like to share with you some tips for saving the environment that I found in a magazine.
Yay! Everything is going to be okay now!
But of course it’s not. No matter how many of your electronic devices you unplug, mountains in West Virginia are still going to be strip-mined for coal to put the electricity on the wires. No matter how often you turn off your car instead of idling it, there have already been thousands of spills in the Niger Delta (just to name one place). All of these tips might be meaningful ways to conserve a resource that was being obtained in an environmentally sound way, but when environmental damage is built into the system, focusing on conservation is cold comfort.
Environmental damage is not occurring because you and every other American left your car idling; it’s occurring because we’ve built a society in which nearly everyone must have a car in order to survive above the poverty line.
Environmental damage is not occurring because you left your cell phone charger plugged in; it’s occurring because we build houses with no thought towards natural heating or cooling, and then the only option is to run 3000 watt air conditioning units every day of the year to keep the temperature at 68-72 degrees.
Environmental damage is not occurring because you eat too much cow and not enough fish; it’s occurring because we expect to have strawberries in December and mango and pineapple in Detroit, and so airliners deliver them from Hawaii and Chile every fucking morning.
These are the things that would have to change in order to “save” the environment. You cannot “save” the environment by doing the things on that list, because those things are not what is harming the environment.
When I see lists like this, I wonder whether their real effect is to distract me. If I think that I’m doing something meaningful by turning off my engine when I get out of the car, I will be derailed from thinking about actually meaningful actions that I might perform.
Just to be clear, I still think there are good reasons to conserve, I just don’t think that “saving the environment” is one of them. For one thing, conservation may make you less personally dependent on the energy that is being derived in a harmful way. This makes you more open to actions that reduce the availability of that energy, which many non-harmful options do.
For your enjoyment, here is a funny video from Derrick Jensen, talking about meaningful environmental actions.
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