[P2P-F] How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means

Tue May 31 05:33:33 CEST 2011

Hi Denis,

anything new on the psy-commons which I could publish in the 2nd week of
June?

Michel

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 5:02 AM, Denis Postle <d.postle at btinternet.com>wrote:

>
>
> On 30/05/2011 09:36, Michel Bauwens wrote:
>
> very useful Andy!
>
> Yes indeed, it was a strangely wonky film, no mention of capitalism as an
> influence on anything, and no mention of cybernetics originating, as I seem
> to recall, in second world war gun design, or biologists' intense interest,
> as far back as the 70's in morphogenetic discontinuities.
> Disappointing.
>
> Greetings
>
> Denis
>
>
> On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hiya,
>>
>> Oh, wonderful...  another Hobbesian critique of autonomy...  just what
>> the world needs :-(
>>
>> The theoretical error here is confusing the idea of self-organising
>> networks with the much more widespread, older, and more insidious idea
>> of a natural order.  The ideas are similar in that they both posit a
>> certain form of organisation which, if realised and then left to its
>> own devices, will be stable.  Where they differ, is that the old idea
>> of natural order implies some kind of equilibrium model.  In fact if
>> we want to trace this idea we have to go at least as far back as
>> Aristotle, who also believed that everything in the world has a
>> 'natural' function and if everything fulfilled its function, the world
>> would be a harmonious order.
>>
>> Of course this view is very helpful for the process known as
>> 'naturalisation' in discourse analysis: taking a contingent social
>> fact and insulating it from critique by declaring it to be 'natural'
>> (gender relations, heteronormativity, racial hierarchies, poverty,
>> class differences and so on).  The trick is that the 'natural'
>> situation still has to be actively socially constructed, and relies on
>> hierarchy and violence to keep it in place.  This is what's going on
>> in the South African case discussed.
>>
>> Hence the criticism is conflating self-organising networks with the
>> equilibrium model of natural order, and the use of naturalisation in
>> discourse.  A self-organising network is neither of these things for
>> two reasons: 1) by definition it does not require a hierarchy to keep
>> it in place, 2) it is a complex system and not a fixed order, ranking
>> or equilibrium.  (That's not to say that complexity theory doesn't
>> have its own skeletons in the closet - TBH I was expecting at least
>> some reference to the sins of cybernetics here - Curtis isn't doing
>> his research as well as he might).
>>
>> The 'Green movement = Romanticism' or 'Green movement = conservative
>> views of natural order' trick has been pulled many times before.
>> There was a certain love of the countryside and concern for
>> conservation in pro-peasant Romanticism and rural aristocratic
>> conservatism, but it's not much like Green thought, because the vision
>> of nature is radically different, so too is the politics, and anyway,
>> the main concern is with the virtues of peasants or aristocrats -
>> conservation is almost an afterthought, keeping the rural folk in
>> their 'natural environment'.  It's possible to write a history of
>> ecological concern in that direction, but it's also possible to write
>> one which goes through Morris, Kropotkin and other figures of the left
>> (even Marx talks about alienation from nature).
>>
>> Note also that if we're playing reductio ad hitlerum (South Africa
>> count as Nazi?), this author's stance can just as easily be debunked
>> the same way, i.e. people who believe nature is a Hobbesian chaos
>> quite often end up as control-freak eugenicists and ecocidal maniacs
>> (Herbert Spencer comes to mind); people who believe social movements
>> need strong organisation and leadership are repeating what the
>> Stalinists did in Russia, and are going to shoot us like partridges or
>> betray us like in Spain; the view of power as definitive in social
>> life is shared with Carl Schmitt, who of course is a Nazi, etc etc.
>> Seriously, an authoritarian Hobbesian does not want to start that
>> particular game, particularly when arguing with anarchists (who are
>> measurably the furthest possible one can be from Nazis on political
>> compass - guaranteeing that whoever is using the argument is closer).
>>
>> The part of the article on Biosphere is a grotesque misreading...  all
>> that it shows is that scientists don't (yet) know enough about how the
>> elements in an ecosystem interrelate to be able to build an ecosystem
>> at this level of complexity.  Maybe this is a case for further
>> scientific research, maybe it's a case for trusting local knowledge
>> over modern science when dealing with complex local systems.  I'd add
>> that scientists *have* created homeostatic ecosystems in jars
>> involving only a handful of species (I've seen one on display in a
>> science centre).  Here we are:
>> http://www.mlms.logan.k12.ut.us/science/BioJar.html  Hence very bad
>> attempt to discredit a concept.
>>
>> Old leftists are very twitchy about the newest wave of social
>> movements - if not downright hostile, and it's always attached to this
>> same kind of suspicion that 1) they don't realise the need for
>> discipline/authority/strong organisations and 2) they're really
>> Thatcherites in disguise, too caught-up in self-expression to do
>> 'serious' politics'.  It's really the same as the objections of old
>> rightists, which far more explicitly whine about lost authority and
>> the breakdown of values and how 'selfish' people are and 'in my day
>> they'd all have been hung from the railings by their gonads'.  The
>> leftist version is an echo of the same discourse, with the same
>> objections to contemporary society and its social movements.  I think
>> it's partly a psychological problem and partly a generational problem.
>>  In fact there was a characteristic of the old pre-60s 'consensus'
>> which has broken down, a kind of unquestioning acceptance of authority
>> and discipline, and to someone who still believes in this lost world
>> of proto-fascism which was shattered by the 60s rebellions, the New
>> Left and New Right look strangely similar.  Hence the tropes we see
>> here: new social movements = irresponsible individualism and refusal
>> of normativity, autonomy = managerialism, social movements need
>> discipline to be effective (instrumentalism vs expressionism), and a
>> world without a strong boss to tell everyone what to do isn't going to
>> work because the world just doesn't work that way goddamnit it'd be
>> anarchy.
>>
>> It's a product of a desire for a strong 'trunk' and arborescent
>> structures which is either a psychological disposition (think either
>> 'Authoritarian Personality' and 'Fear of Freedom', or else maybe
>> certain Myers-Briggs types), or a learnt cultural disposition which
>> these people are having trouble unlearning (this is what they were
>> socialised into, they were 'good subjects' then, and they hate the
>> fact that they're not 'good subjects' any more, even though they've
>> always just about played by the rules they were socialised into, that
>> for them are 'just the way it is').  I've seen it a thousand times, it
>> comes up whenever networked protest groups or direct action or the
>> Black Bloc or subcultural deviance or any freedom vs collectivism
>> dispute comes up, and it's almost identical in structure every single
>> time.  It's not a good idea to take it too seriously, because these
>> types seem pre-programmed to be unreflexive about the origins of their
>> own assumptions, and therefore are unable to justify their selection
>> of this particular set of assumptions - it isn't a conscious choice,
>> it's a reflex.
>>
>> The real struggle now is not within the old industrial economy (old
>> right vs old left) but within the new
>> creative/informational/precarious economy (new right / new Third Way
>> vs new left / newest social movements), and the way these kinds who
>> want to go back to the old industrial economy relate to this struggle
>> is invariably reactionary: their 'need' for greater order is met by
>> the right-wing side of the current struggle, and they're therefore
>> drawn into it on the 'wrong' side, even if precariously so.
>>
>> bw
>> Andy
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 6:40 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Sam,
>> >
>> > I hope you survived the tornado?
>> >
>> > I hope some of our participants can react to this very interesting
>> challenge
>> > from Adam Curtis in the Guardian,
>> >
>> > Michel
>> >
>> > On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 9:50 PM, Kevin Flanagan <kev.flanagan at gmail.com
>> >
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means - Adam
>> >> Curtis - Guardian
>> >>
>> >> When, in the 1920s, a botanist and a field marshal dreamed up rival
>> >> theories of nature and society, no one could have guessed their ideas
>> >> would influence the worldview of 70s hippies and 21st-century protest
>> >> movements. But their faith in self-regulating systems has a sinister
>> >> history
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/adam-curtis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts
>> >>
>> >> Episode 1 of his current documentary is up on youtube
>> >>
>> >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5jImWRREc
>> >>
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