futility work

Even before traffic stopped on the freeway on the drive up to Sacramento on Friday afternoon, I was in a funk. The entire route I could see nothing but the detritus of industrial capitalism, which is to say, the world in which we all live. I was thinking about all the concrete and steel everywhere, not only around me but worldwide. Not only is so much of the world built by industrial capitalism ugly, it’s been built by ruthlessly exploiting resources and labor. 

I suppose the horrible effects of industrial capitalism are familiar. We have lived our whole lives steeped in pollution, poison, and garbage. No one really has to read Marx to understand that working people are exploited. All of that is plain to anyone who just looks around and thinks. 

At times, what upsets me most is the futility of it. In that mood, when I consider what I do for a living, what it enables other people to do for a living, and how our lives intertwine socially and productively, none of it seems worthwhile. Some students of mine have told me that my classes have deeply changed their outlooks on the world, and that they feel benefitted by this. I appreciate that, but then I am sometimes struck by the fact that all of us are forced to live by means of the monstrous enterprise, and having a changed outlook on it does not seem helpful. Some faculty I have represented have told me that they were grateful I helped them through whatever jam they were in at the university. But my help is a way of assuring that they can continue to function in a system that destroys. 

I come to believe that people are committed irrevocably to a life of plunder, rushing to consume more, with the only possible end result making the world uninhabitable. I become suspicious of pleasure, not out of guilt but on the basis of understanding that our pleasures are disastrous. I think of the unfathomable quantities of liquor or cotton or paper we produce, how wide spread they are, how they are made, and what they ultimately do for us. It’s as if we have a psychotic notion that if we produce and consume ever more, we or our species will survive forever. 

Even if that were true, the logic of this form of civilization commands that our survival is at the expense of the planet as well as ourselves. We somehow trick ourselves into believing otherwise, but still have no way to respond to the question: what for? After all, it makes just as much sense to conclude that the ultimate goal of industrial capitalism is to make me stuck in traffic.

a brief interpretation of higher education, inspired by Georg Lukács

As long as higher education is construed through ideology, it will be impossible to develop the basis for overturning the social relations within. The ideology prevents us from confronting the contradictions of education in capitalist society.

1. Education provides access to socially produced goods—job security and income being the most commonly cited. The ideology tells us that this access is on the basis of merit earned by students’ academic and social-benefit work through the auspices of the institution. In fact, education is an institutional state apparatus that determines access to goods through sorting candidates, then subjecting those admitted to disciplines that produce a consciousness perfectly suited to the tasks of upholding and reproducing status quo predominant social relations. Power, wealth, and prestige are reproduced in a docile subject.

2. Education develops democratic citizenship. The ideology addresses democratic virtues of critical thinking, autonomy, and social responsibility. It develops these as the skills of individuals, in service to the prevailing social order. The possibilities of collective action are marginalized both by institutional policy and architecture, but also by the standards and protocols of evaluation. The democratic citizen produced by education is a individualist-bourgeois consciousness, prepared for fulfilling a role established by nationalist, capitalist aims. Meanwhile, this consciousness believes in individualist concepts of rights, merit, property, etc.—i.e., it does not believe in collectivism, cosmopolitanism, or the free ability to form social bonds through the collective will.

3. Education creates whole human beings through transformative experience. The ideology refers to the individual as a being whose transformation is needed and valuable. The self-regard of this form of consciousness further naturalizes individualism by producing a reality effect in which the individual is held up in opposition to the social whole. The cult of the fetishized individual makes it unintelligible that this effect is the result of being caught up in the social whole that is constructed through education (among other institutional state apparatuses). In fact, even the individualism worshipped in education is a false and mistaken one—individualism as the development of a “personality” composed of “lifestyle choices” which are nothing more than selections of consumer objects.

4. Education creates public good. The least tangible and plausible claim of the education ideology is that it benefits the social whole. Because education reproduces and recapitulates the class divisions in capitalist society, and naturalizes these along with the notions of merit, productivity, individual responsibility, etc., the product of education can only serve the class interests of capitalist society. The “public good” so named is an orderly (i.e. compliant) society where class divisions themselves can be occluded.

Yet these self-destructive, exploitative principles are marshaled in defense of education by “progressive” educators and their collaborators. Tax support of so-called public higher education is advocated on the grounds that education is the key to economic and social progress—for individuals, entry into the “middle class;” for society, creation of an army of professionals to provide ameliorations for various ills.

Here yet another contradiction is hidden: the ills for which the “middle class” needs amelioration are created by “middle class” consumption. Indeed, the ills of the society as a whole, and of the planet, are created by religious devotion to consumption. That consumption further drives worldwide exploitation of people and planet that enriches capitalists while it impoverishes everyone else. While those in the “middle class” perceive themselves to be beneficiaries of consumer society because they live among technological means, it is nearly impossible to discover, and really impossible to perceive the real effects and costs of consumption.

Education provides the ways and means of consumption: consumers and consumer objects. And of course, the amelioration of the ills of consumption is brought about by more consumption. For alienation from other people, consume “communications media” devices! For physiological and psychological malaise, consume medicine!

Meanwhile, real power and wealth not only remain in the hands of capitalists, but they accumulate still more. Their own false consciousness prevents understanding that their own power and wealth is dependent upon a fatal addiction to consumption and is destined to end. A despoiled, smoldering planet uninhabitable by humans is also uninhabitable by capitalists.

To the extent that any of this is true, education as it is currently formulated can not benefit anyone. The only form of education that could, would be a thoroughly critical education, aiming not to contribute to the prevailing social order but to bring about its destruction. This critical education could not promise any individual a better life, because the destruction needed will be costly and painful, and the conclusion of the revolutionary period is in an unknowably distant future. Critical education could not promise any kind of advance in the power or wealth of individuals—on the contrary, it would lead them to be ill-suited to the labor routines and compliance demanded by every workplace. Critical education could promise pain and suffering. It could promise exposure to forms of thinking that are unrecognizable in bourgeois culture. It could promise exposure to severe disciplinary tactics and state violence.

intentional consuming

Jackson asked me what my ethical position is, in relation to the practice of consuming the flesh of non-human animals. I realized that it wasn't something I'd taken up and thought about in a while, so I asked my loveliest why it's okay for us to eat animal flesh. She laid out what we regard as our position, and I think she's more accepting of it than I am on the whole.

It goes like this.

Humans evolved as omnivores, and we continue to live, as a species, as omnivores. Obviously, we're not biologically determined to eat animal flesh any more than to eat, I don't know, rutabagas. Just as obviously, when there were a few thousand humans trying desperately to avoid starving to death, being an omnivore was useful, rather than the problem it has become. Yet this evolutionary history has predisposed us to be delighted by the taste of meaty things.

That's important because we believe that living well, happily, and pleasurably is practically a commandment (if there were commandments). Lauren often articulates this as a form of responsible hedonism. Not to enjoy life, for the sake of an abstract moral commitment or political aim, seems wrong to her. As she put it this afternoon, if you mean to live in a completely unharmful way in our society, you must run naked and eat nothing, and that won't last long or be very enjoyable.

We limit how much animal flesh we consume, because we recognize that its primary role in our lives is for delectation, rather than sustenance. We tend, as far as possible, to eat the flesh of animals that have lived better lives than many in the US food chain. We avoid eating feedlot beef or caged chickens, for instance. (We also think this meat is healthier for us, and firmly believe that it's more delicious, so it better serves our hedonistic mission, and our intentional ingestion of meat for the purpose of delight instead of mere sustenance.) We literally never buy chicken that is not free range. Until recently we only ate range-fed, grass-fed beef.

We're concerned about the sustainability of our consumption habits, and try to find more-sustainable options, which is another factor driving our limited consumption of animal flesh. We eat fish and seafood that is more sustainable and really strictly avoid poorly fished, over-fished, or poorly farmed fish (like that disgusting stuff they call Atlantic salmon).

After talking about it, we realized we have slipped in our habits, and we've decided to be more conscientious about what we consume.

I notice that I haven't said anything about sentience, and only alluded to suffering. Here, our positions definitely differ. My position, for now, is that sentience and suffering are important ethical considerations for any decision, but that they aren't the final and absolute considerations. I can't say it's immoral for lions to eat a yak, even though the yak is sentient, and the method of killing the yak employed by lions is probably going to cause the yak to suffer. It probably doesn't enter the minds of lions to be concerned about it, and it does enter my mind, and so it's a consideration. That's why the way animals that I eat are raised matters to me.

This may seem like a strange analogy, but I feel about eating animal flesh somewhat the same way I do about driving a car. Driving a car makes a lot of things much more comfortable and feasible, and in that way makes life more pleasant for us. Clearly, the US consumption of gasoline, like the US consumption of most kinds of food, is not ultimately sustainable, for the planet or for us. We two can't do a lot to change that, but we can choose to reduce how much we consume, and to be attentive to how and why we consume. I'm calling that "intentional consuming," to imply that the consuming I do is still self-conscious and reflected-upon.

That means, it's always open to change. I said earlier I'm less accepting of our current practice and thought about eating animal flesh than Lauren is. It's fraught. I'm not satisfied with our reasoning. But I think it's good that we do reason about it.

home alone

My loveliest is off at some sort of bridal brunch kinda thing, so I'm here with the monster kittens (as of this writing, Arthur is in the middle of a freakout session; Alexander is eating us out of house and home) and a stack of papers to grade. I haven't quite started yet.

I'm listening to Winterpills, which I rarely do when Lauren is around, for some reason. My musical tendencies swing toward the mopey alternative, especially in mid-morning, and that's not as often her thing, I think. How that might affect my students' grades, I don't know.

Lately, we've been thinking about having green kittens. This turns out to be difficult to get solid information about, and in some ways difficult to achieve. The main thing we're concerned about, obviously enough, is kitten waste. It's startling how much waste two 3-pound kittens generate in a day (which I realize is hardly breakfast conversation), and for the most part, our options are to flush or to bag this waste. The State of California officially discourages flushing, but bagging means tossing away a plastic bag of kitten poop every day. Lauren looked up composting, and it does seem like it's feasible, given about a half-acre or so of land to give yourself some distance, and appropriate composting techniques. (Even given that, there's dispute about the presence of a toxin in kitten waste, if they've been eating mice or other wildlife.)

An article in the anthology I use for Contemporary Moral Issues cites the statistic that people in the US and the EU spend $3 billion more annually on pet food than it would cost to feed hungry people worldwide. I don't know whether that's true, or if true, a distortion, but in any case, a simple glance around your local big-box pet supplies store should give you a perspective on the amount of resources we do expend on pets. It's all gotta come from somewhere and go somewhere, but just like Target, the Pet Extreme (or whatever) doesn't at all show you what place in the resources-and-wastes chain you and Fluffy or Xerxes occupy.

On the other hand, there've been some incredibly idiotic eco-pets ideas, like turning your cats on to a vegetarian diet. As much as we'd like to have green kittens, there are few ideas we've found so far that aren't impractical for us or totally hare-brained.

hungry

I'm not hungry. Lots of people are. In fact, Reuters is reporting that the UN is concerned 100 million more people are deprived of necessary food as a result of shortages worldwide, the shift to growing crops for biofuels, and market shenanigans (i.e., profiteering, hoarding, manipulating markets, restricting exports).

The hunger is spread across all continents. And even here, food rationing is taking place at places like Costco. We're actually thinking of buying large sacks of beans and rice to store away, just in case, you know, things get even worse.

Up til now, the only real impact on our lives from all this has been the rationing of hops. Yep, farmers worldwide are switching from hops to our good friend #2 field corn to make ethanol. For those of us who enjoy massive doses of irony, here's a fun fact: to grow the #2 corn that is used to create ethanol, farmers use large quantities of fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide, mainly derived from, uh, petroleum; they use great quantities of diesel to run machines to sow, reap, and move crops around; the mills use petroleum to run machines to process the corn.

That this is all driven by a policy (especially in Europe, where the EU has imposed targets for ethanol production) that is justified on basis of concern for the environment is another ginormous dose of irony. I suppose it demonstrates the ultimate folly of trying to produce and consume our way out of environmental destruction caused by production and consumption. Rather than work toward reducing reliance on the fantastic and utterly unsustainable use of resources, we're trying to make changes in which resources we exploit.

Michael Pollan notes, in Omnivore's Dilemma, that from a certain ecological interpretation of matters, we haven't domesticated and come to exploit #2 field corn. The situation is the reverse: it's exploiting us. (It's sort of like the relationship between humans and cats in most of the affluent parts of the world. I'm not sure, at this point, whether biofuel consumption or kitten consumption creates more pollution.)