There are several easy critiques that Jensen leaves himself open to in the course of his writings. While I don't suggest that these are really problematic to his overall argument, I've come across them and want to point them out for the sake of completeness.
Jensen, in his nature-loving bias, occasionally misunderstands basic scientific understandings of the world. For instance, his concept of evolution is particularly flawed:
Endgame, p. 36: “Another way to put this is that any group of beings (human or nonhuman, plant or anmial) who take more from their surroundings than they give back will, obviously, deplete their surroundings, after which they will either have to move, or their population will crash (which, by the way, is a one sentence disproof of the notion that competition drives natural selection: if you hyper-exploit your surroundings you will deplete them and die; the only way to survive in the long run is to give back more than you take. Duh).”
The problem with this is that, even if cooperation and giving back to your environment is the thing that allows you to survive in the long run, it's still competition that's selecting for the individuals who do that the best. Jensen seems to have conflated the social-striving, rat-race connotations of the word 'competition' with the ecological one, which is nearly tautological - those individuals that survive best, for whatever reasons are most relevant to their situation, are the best competitors and therefore the fittest, the survivors.
Specific claims regarding indigenous peoples are misleading or entirely false.
Endgame: “Civilized wars are parodies of indigenous warfare, which is a relatively non-lethal and exhilarating form of play, meaning civilized warfare is a parody of play.”
While there may be instances of non-lethal, formalized warfare, it is also true that bitter, bloody warfare in some form is common at nearly all levels of social integration. The Mantaro highlanders of Peru built fortified towns and fought to take and keep good land (Earle, 1997). Chiefdoms in Bronze Age Thy, Denmark warred for prestige and livestock (Earle, 1997). Hawaiian kingdoms fought over good irrigable land (Earle, 1997). The Yanomamo are famously warlike, often destroying whole communities, gang-raping captured women, and, again, taking land (Earle and Johnson, 1987). The Central Enga of Highland New Guinea engage in “frequent and vicious warfare,” (Earle and Johnson, 1987). While these societies are all more integrated than the family level society, few of them meet Jensen's definition of civilized: they do not depend on imported resources (Jensen, 2006).
Derrick Jensen and more pronouncedly David Abram often suggest that indigenous communities, who spend so much of their cultural and intellectual life paying attention to their landbases, are much less likely to do things that will hurt those landbases; they are "sane and intelligent" inhabitants of the land. The stark contrasts between Alberta’s tar sands and literally any indigenous homeland make this a plausible argument. However, the situation is once again vastly more complicated than Jensen’s presentation lets on. While it's certainly true that native cultures understood/understand their environments intimately, there are plenty of counterexamples in which non-civilized groups have drastically altered their environments in ways they would likely not have done by choice. For instance, the Enga of New Guinea have “greatly diminished the former diversity of plants and animals” in their valleys, and created a situation of circumscribed resources and lowered dietary quality (Earle and Johnson 1987).
Native Americans did respect and understand their relationship with animals like deer and beavers, but were influenced by the attractive offers made by European traders. The autonomous decision made by Native groups to trade possibly over-harvested native plants and animals in exchange for trade goods of real value to them should not be slighted. While disease, imperialism, and alcohol were exogenous negative influences on native land ethics, they do not mean that native communities couldn't and didn't make decisions that hurt their landbases - the introduction of Europeans did not remove all agency from Native communities. One might also ask: what good is a strict conservation policy and culture if it cannot withstand a rigorous test like this.
This does not mean that indigenous peoples are “just as bad” as Exxon-Mobil, nor does it justify their exploitation. Had he been more honest, Jensen could have presented these ambiguities and outliers without harm to his argument. After all, indigenous communities don’t need to be perfect, and they don’t need to be uniformly sustainable, to provide many great examples of sustainable ways of living. As Jared Diamond pointed out, “[m]anaging environmental resources sustainably has always been difficult,” (Diamond, 2005) – and it’s neither fair nor realistic to hold indigenous peoples to a standard of land use for purely rhetorical purposes.
Premising his argument on the ecological wisdom of natives hurts Jensen's argument - it doesn't matter if all native peoples behaved the way he's advocating we act - just having some examples gives us the proof that it's possible and provides the light to guide us; making such blanket statements makes his argument superficially vulnerable to being undermined by counterexamples, even though his core argument remains valid.
Further, the usage histories of the terms civilized and indigenous are full of exploitative, misrepresentative, and out-right malicious arguments. As scholars, we can’t allow the backlash against such things to remove from consideration superficially similar intellectually responsible arguments. Any attempt to use facts about indigenous cultures and lifestyles to prove what is essentially a political argument must be held to a very high standard. Such arguments must be replete with carefully qualified statements and specific ethnographic citations. In this sense, Jensen’s argument fails even when its claims are true.
Friday, June 1, 2012
"Other Plans"
While Derrick, Aric, and Lierre are the activist authors nearest and dearest to my heart, they are by no means the only point of view on the issues they discuss. In "Other Plans," Lierre addresses many of the writers she perceives as her counterparts, many of them identified with the "Peak Oil Community." Our tutorial read a number of these authors - Ted Trainer, Lester Brown, John Michael Greer, Pat Murphy, etc. I was unprepared for the degree of repetition among these authors. They all seemed to be saying the same things: industrial civilization isn't that great (due to inequality, materialism, violence, etc) and it's also about to collapse (due to peak oil) and we should do something about that.
What we should do, in a mixture of preparation for post-collapse life and in order to prevent/soften the collapse, is prepare self-sufficient local food systems, sustainable local energy systems, local economies, control population growth, reduce inequality, spread democracy, etc. The authors differ primarily in their emphases and predilections: Brown favors policy solutions, since he's a policy adviser, while Trainer, Murphy and Jensen see government as part of the problem. Brown favors technological solutions like solar panels, while Jensen sees these as perpetuating the industrial system causing the problem. Brown favors market mechanisms, while Jensen and Trainer are firmly anti-capitalist.
While there are subtle differences in approach, none of these really matter: no author can control what activists do with the degree of specificity that would be required to prevent both high-tech and low-tech solutions from being implemented. The diverse group of activists has their own predilections and essentially everything will happen whether the authors like it or not. DGR is the exception to this: they are the only people pushing for violent direct action against the industrial system. It seems quite likely that their advocacy will have a strong effect on whether this kind of activism is carried out.
However, without evidence-based future projections, these authors differ more in the ideological predispositions or their readers (as well as their relative pessimism) than in their factually falsifiable hypotheses and arguments. While it could be a matter of academic debate whether or not we should engage in monkey-wrenching (though it's a complex question), the arguments, e.g. Lierre makes are more about ideology than about reality: if you believe capitalism is bunk, then her argument pleases you; if not, she never presents any evidence to sway you to her side. This is perhaps because she sees this debate as too large and complex to adequately address here, as well as too polarized and overdone to be worth rehashing. But this illustrates the problem in premising her argument on anti-capitalism: activists don't and won't agree on this question, and it is not as crucial to Lierre's point as she seems to think it is (presumably because anti-capitalism is both very important to her personally and because it was a key influence in bringing her to the position she advocates in DGR).
McBay seems to understand this when he points out that "even if you want humans to be able to use factories to build windmills and use tractors to help grow food over the next fifty years, forcing an immediate cut in fossil fuel consumption should be at the top of your to-do list." He is pointing out that it's not necessary for someone to accept his narrative in order to agree on the task at hand. That's not to say he doesn't fall into the same fallacy just as much as Lierre, however - he just seems to see past it for a moment of clarity here.
Thus, DGR's analysis does little to establish why it is more relevant and correct than any of its peers. Lierre attempts to do this in "Other Plans," but her critiques are often superficial and appeal to the emotional and ideological predilections of her readers rather than presenting some compelling facts. I happen to agree with her, but for that reason I think that her position needs to be defended and advocated with some better evidence, in order to distinguish it from competitors and defend the legitimacy of her plan in a more mainstream community. The evidence may not exist or may not have been organized and interpreted yet, but it seems clear that this must happen before DGR becomes something more than a fringe group motivated by eclectic emotional and ideological backgrounds.
Edit 5/24/2013: I've recently come across articles about psychological studies on worldview and ideology. It seems to be the case that, through whatever means, people have personalities and worldviews (like, deep worldviews) that differ fundamentally and make them predisposed to certain interpretations over others, and to certain responses over others. That is, you could say that there is a "moderate brain" and a "radical brain," (as Chris Mooney dichotomizes in his article on the Keystone XL fight - he poses Bill McKibben as his "radical" which is kind of funny here, where McKibben is juxtaposed against DGR's militancy) or even a "conspiracy theorist brain." The research shows only the faintest suggestions about what might make a person have one of these brain types, but once they have them, it's tough to get out. If the research is correct, then DGR readers like DGR because it tells them a narrative congruent with their worldview. The contrast between DGR and its competitors in the apocalypse activism arena is simply a matter of this, the predilection of their readers. While there is some sort of "objective" difference between the arguments, the intellect is not the force driving readers from one to the other.
There is a very well-defined narrative here, and I literally have read dozens of books that make my brain light up in the reading of it. It may hold lots of elements of truth - and indeed, a major part of what I like about the narrative is that it must be presented with copious peer reviewed evidence, to "prove" the story is correct and make me feel intelligent for following.
What we should do, in a mixture of preparation for post-collapse life and in order to prevent/soften the collapse, is prepare self-sufficient local food systems, sustainable local energy systems, local economies, control population growth, reduce inequality, spread democracy, etc. The authors differ primarily in their emphases and predilections: Brown favors policy solutions, since he's a policy adviser, while Trainer, Murphy and Jensen see government as part of the problem. Brown favors technological solutions like solar panels, while Jensen sees these as perpetuating the industrial system causing the problem. Brown favors market mechanisms, while Jensen and Trainer are firmly anti-capitalist.
While there are subtle differences in approach, none of these really matter: no author can control what activists do with the degree of specificity that would be required to prevent both high-tech and low-tech solutions from being implemented. The diverse group of activists has their own predilections and essentially everything will happen whether the authors like it or not. DGR is the exception to this: they are the only people pushing for violent direct action against the industrial system. It seems quite likely that their advocacy will have a strong effect on whether this kind of activism is carried out.
However, without evidence-based future projections, these authors differ more in the ideological predispositions or their readers (as well as their relative pessimism) than in their factually falsifiable hypotheses and arguments. While it could be a matter of academic debate whether or not we should engage in monkey-wrenching (though it's a complex question), the arguments, e.g. Lierre makes are more about ideology than about reality: if you believe capitalism is bunk, then her argument pleases you; if not, she never presents any evidence to sway you to her side. This is perhaps because she sees this debate as too large and complex to adequately address here, as well as too polarized and overdone to be worth rehashing. But this illustrates the problem in premising her argument on anti-capitalism: activists don't and won't agree on this question, and it is not as crucial to Lierre's point as she seems to think it is (presumably because anti-capitalism is both very important to her personally and because it was a key influence in bringing her to the position she advocates in DGR).
McBay seems to understand this when he points out that "even if you want humans to be able to use factories to build windmills and use tractors to help grow food over the next fifty years, forcing an immediate cut in fossil fuel consumption should be at the top of your to-do list." He is pointing out that it's not necessary for someone to accept his narrative in order to agree on the task at hand. That's not to say he doesn't fall into the same fallacy just as much as Lierre, however - he just seems to see past it for a moment of clarity here.
Thus, DGR's analysis does little to establish why it is more relevant and correct than any of its peers. Lierre attempts to do this in "Other Plans," but her critiques are often superficial and appeal to the emotional and ideological predilections of her readers rather than presenting some compelling facts. I happen to agree with her, but for that reason I think that her position needs to be defended and advocated with some better evidence, in order to distinguish it from competitors and defend the legitimacy of her plan in a more mainstream community. The evidence may not exist or may not have been organized and interpreted yet, but it seems clear that this must happen before DGR becomes something more than a fringe group motivated by eclectic emotional and ideological backgrounds.
Edit 5/24/2013: I've recently come across articles about psychological studies on worldview and ideology. It seems to be the case that, through whatever means, people have personalities and worldviews (like, deep worldviews) that differ fundamentally and make them predisposed to certain interpretations over others, and to certain responses over others. That is, you could say that there is a "moderate brain" and a "radical brain," (as Chris Mooney dichotomizes in his article on the Keystone XL fight - he poses Bill McKibben as his "radical" which is kind of funny here, where McKibben is juxtaposed against DGR's militancy) or even a "conspiracy theorist brain." The research shows only the faintest suggestions about what might make a person have one of these brain types, but once they have them, it's tough to get out. If the research is correct, then DGR readers like DGR because it tells them a narrative congruent with their worldview. The contrast between DGR and its competitors in the apocalypse activism arena is simply a matter of this, the predilection of their readers. While there is some sort of "objective" difference between the arguments, the intellect is not the force driving readers from one to the other.
There is a very well-defined narrative here, and I literally have read dozens of books that make my brain light up in the reading of it. It may hold lots of elements of truth - and indeed, a major part of what I like about the narrative is that it must be presented with copious peer reviewed evidence, to "prove" the story is correct and make me feel intelligent for following.
Narratives
In the process of investigating Derrick Jensen's intellectual forebears, our tutorial read a few classic anarchist texts from the turn of the century - Voltairine de Cleyre's "Direct Action" and Petr Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread." These works are of course spiritually and often literally in line with Derrick's analysis and his feelings - though they just as often seem anachronistic and irrelevant. However, the most striking relationship between the two was their reliance on narrative. They seemed to agree that no activist plan could be established without a clear schematic idea of what caused the relevant problems. The analyses provided, especially that of Kropotkin, offer a sort of cautionary tale about relying on such narratives, since they are based on anachronistic ideas about progress, history, class relationships, among other things. They gave a narrative of the history of the world in simple, moralistic terms. Technical progress and hard work developed raw materials into riches but the greedy powerful people monopolized the riches and stole what rightfully belongs to all. They move on to a solution that seems obvious and easy in the light of their narrative: take the stuff back from the rich. The narratives ignore the vast complexity of the world and impose an artificial simplicity that precludes practical work.
In DGR, Lierre critiques millenarian cultists who believe "the end is near." But is DGR not just another one of those groups, believing, without substantial scientific evidence, that civilization will collapse within a century or two? Jensen's analysis lines up uncannily with the archetypal story of Christianity, as John Michael Greer points out in "The Long Descent." To illustrate: before the Original Sin of civilization, there was an indigenous Eden. Civilization emerged, nigh-miraculously, through the hubris of greedy men, and has caused all human suffering ever since. One day civilization will Collapse, those in power will be deposed and brought to justice. An indigenous lifestyle will again prevail and all the wounds of civilization will be healed.
Of course, Jensen's claims and the things he advocates don't become false simply by fitting the criteria Greer lays out. However, Jensen's overly simplistic historical narrative and understanding of anthropology reveal at least that part of his narrative is flawed, which calls into question the other claims he makes. What consequences does the narrative have for Jensen's factuality?
In general, there is a substantial amount of ambiguity about collapse in DGR writings. It is never specified just what politic system is going to collapse and how, and there are many possible paths provided that apparently all lead to the same end. While there are substantial ambiguities inherent in prognosticating the potential futures of a very complex system, it seems important to discuss specific possibilities. Instead, McBay merely offers a list of possible avenues to what one infers must be essentially the same collapse. McBay’s imprecision is both understandable and necessary (criticism would be much harsher had he claimed to know the fate of industrial civilization in detail!), but it should be clarified with a caveat: collapse is not an apocalypse. Further, a more realistic and less mythological approach to collapse would inform an effort to constrain the specifics of possible collapses. This would in turn aid efforts from all sides to influence the course of collapse. In our tutorial, we imagined an "Intergovernmental Panel on Global Collapse," to parallel the IPCC in collecting and interpreting data about the possible routes to collapse and which systems were most vulnerable, as well as how we might go about preventing and/or guiding and encouraging such processes.
The only acute oversight introduced by this apocalyptic scenario regards time: McBay's scenarios play out suddenly – the collapse could be dated at least to a year, if not a day, and its consequences involve an immediate shift to a new stable state. The changes are drastic and very much noticeable to people in their everyday lives. Yet this is by no means the only possibility, and it is certainly rare in the historical record. Most of the examples used by, for instance Tainter, take place over the course of centuries. (Tainter, 1985) John Greer uses this evidence to assert that collapse is already occurring (perhaps beginning with the global peak in per capita energy usage in the 1970's) and that the process will take centuries, so long that the changes will be imperceptible to any given individual. This possibility is never even entertained by the DGR authors. If collapse is in fact already occurring, then the role of activists may change in ways they don't account for. It should also be perceptible in many social metrics for which there exists reliable data, so the same program of information gathering suggested above would theoretically also investigate this question and its implications.
Greer's alternative to Jensen's simplistic narrative is, if nothing else, a bit more humble. He doesn't claim that we as activists can change the course of civilization - he believes it is collapsing, and will do so over hundreds of years in a complex way as fossil fuels gradually run out. He sees it is a predicament we need to deal with, like death, rather than a problem we are capable of solving - in any direction. This makes sense, since the whole process is big and complex and we are small and don't understand very much - the IPGC does not exist, after all. His alternative is appealing in its calm demeanor - yes, everything's going hell in handbasket and we're killing the planet &tc, but there's no reason to freak out about it because there's nothing we can do about it. This is true for many of the same reasons Jensen and co. so often bring up to discredit the exclusive use of traditional routes of activism. To Greer, they just fail to mention that their model won't work either, for a variety of reasons - no one will actually do it, it would be too little too late, and the system is too large, complex, and full of inertia to be swayed by such a program.
While Greer's analysis has appealing aspects, Jensen's of course does as well, and the point I'm trying to make is that, without more specific information, we can't know which makes more sense - they are really more appeals to variations in personality and ideology. This is a problem throughout writing on collapse, as I'll detail in a later post.
In DGR, Lierre critiques millenarian cultists who believe "the end is near." But is DGR not just another one of those groups, believing, without substantial scientific evidence, that civilization will collapse within a century or two? Jensen's analysis lines up uncannily with the archetypal story of Christianity, as John Michael Greer points out in "The Long Descent." To illustrate: before the Original Sin of civilization, there was an indigenous Eden. Civilization emerged, nigh-miraculously, through the hubris of greedy men, and has caused all human suffering ever since. One day civilization will Collapse, those in power will be deposed and brought to justice. An indigenous lifestyle will again prevail and all the wounds of civilization will be healed.
Of course, Jensen's claims and the things he advocates don't become false simply by fitting the criteria Greer lays out. However, Jensen's overly simplistic historical narrative and understanding of anthropology reveal at least that part of his narrative is flawed, which calls into question the other claims he makes. What consequences does the narrative have for Jensen's factuality?
In general, there is a substantial amount of ambiguity about collapse in DGR writings. It is never specified just what politic system is going to collapse and how, and there are many possible paths provided that apparently all lead to the same end. While there are substantial ambiguities inherent in prognosticating the potential futures of a very complex system, it seems important to discuss specific possibilities. Instead, McBay merely offers a list of possible avenues to what one infers must be essentially the same collapse. McBay’s imprecision is both understandable and necessary (criticism would be much harsher had he claimed to know the fate of industrial civilization in detail!), but it should be clarified with a caveat: collapse is not an apocalypse. Further, a more realistic and less mythological approach to collapse would inform an effort to constrain the specifics of possible collapses. This would in turn aid efforts from all sides to influence the course of collapse. In our tutorial, we imagined an "Intergovernmental Panel on Global Collapse," to parallel the IPCC in collecting and interpreting data about the possible routes to collapse and which systems were most vulnerable, as well as how we might go about preventing and/or guiding and encouraging such processes.
The only acute oversight introduced by this apocalyptic scenario regards time: McBay's scenarios play out suddenly – the collapse could be dated at least to a year, if not a day, and its consequences involve an immediate shift to a new stable state. The changes are drastic and very much noticeable to people in their everyday lives. Yet this is by no means the only possibility, and it is certainly rare in the historical record. Most of the examples used by, for instance Tainter, take place over the course of centuries. (Tainter, 1985) John Greer uses this evidence to assert that collapse is already occurring (perhaps beginning with the global peak in per capita energy usage in the 1970's) and that the process will take centuries, so long that the changes will be imperceptible to any given individual. This possibility is never even entertained by the DGR authors. If collapse is in fact already occurring, then the role of activists may change in ways they don't account for. It should also be perceptible in many social metrics for which there exists reliable data, so the same program of information gathering suggested above would theoretically also investigate this question and its implications.
Greer's alternative to Jensen's simplistic narrative is, if nothing else, a bit more humble. He doesn't claim that we as activists can change the course of civilization - he believes it is collapsing, and will do so over hundreds of years in a complex way as fossil fuels gradually run out. He sees it is a predicament we need to deal with, like death, rather than a problem we are capable of solving - in any direction. This makes sense, since the whole process is big and complex and we are small and don't understand very much - the IPGC does not exist, after all. His alternative is appealing in its calm demeanor - yes, everything's going hell in handbasket and we're killing the planet &tc, but there's no reason to freak out about it because there's nothing we can do about it. This is true for many of the same reasons Jensen and co. so often bring up to discredit the exclusive use of traditional routes of activism. To Greer, they just fail to mention that their model won't work either, for a variety of reasons - no one will actually do it, it would be too little too late, and the system is too large, complex, and full of inertia to be swayed by such a program.
While Greer's analysis has appealing aspects, Jensen's of course does as well, and the point I'm trying to make is that, without more specific information, we can't know which makes more sense - they are really more appeals to variations in personality and ideology. This is a problem throughout writing on collapse, as I'll detail in a later post.
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