‘Hans, are we the baddies?’
11AM Monday 21st February 2011.
Mitchell and Webb say it best, as usual:
Woe to the Wise
1AM Monday 21st February 2011.
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;
Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness.
Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes,
And prudent in their own sight!— Isaiah 5:20-21
Who defines what's good and what – or who – is evil? Here's a suggestion: ‘History is written by the victors.’α
I'm not saying good and evil can't be nailed down; not at all. What I am saying is that calling woe on ‘those who call evil good, and good evil’ is a fairly large barrier thrown in the way of those trying to figure out which is which.
In The Last Ringbearer, the events of The Lord of the Rings are re-told from the Mordor side of the fence, presuming Tolkien's books to be the history of the victors. Even considering the undeniable racist overtones and anti-industrial bent of the original, my first response to this retelling was a faint outrage. Good and evil seemed so self-evidently clear in Tolkien's Middle Earth.β
And yet. It's so easily told from a different perspective, and so convincingly that – especially given my own sympathies – it'd be easy to jump sides.γ
Or take the film 300, which sides you with a bunch of homophobic, racist, violent and generally unpleasant dudes who are bigger assholes than the army trying to invade their little nation, and tells you that they're good and righteous and noble.
‘Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil’ turns out to be a pretty revealing sort of accusation. It's the sort of thing said by people who already know they're in the wrong, but can't afford for anyone else to realise the truth. It's what The Last Ringbearer's Aragorn might say when people begin to suspect that he's just a puppet for the Elves, throwing the humans of Middle Earth back into the dark(er) ages. It's what Leonidas the Spartan king might say when the women and children of Sparta – and the queer, the disabled, the pacifists – start asking whether they might really be better off under the rule of Xerxes, whose camp is filled with people like them. Calling woe is how you kill dissent.
The mistake made by that millennia-ago biblical scribe was assuming an objectivity – a neutrality – that doesn't exist. The history was written by the victors, and no one ever casts themself as the villain. If you truly want to be on the side of the good and the right, you'll have to start by asking: which side is that, exactly?
(See also The Sword of Good, a short story with very similar ideas.)
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Said by Winston Churchill.
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…the author gets to create the whole social universe, and the readers are immersed in the hero's own internal perspective. And so anything the heroes do, which no character notices as wrong, won't be noticed by the readers as unheroic.
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I haven't entirely made up my mind on this yet (in part because I'm only a third of the way through the book.) I'm inclining towards ‘everyone's guilty when it comes to war,’ but I gotta say Gandalf is looking pretty bad at this point, and the Elves are just plain inhuman.
Take me back to the good old days
12PM Friday 18th February 2011.
Juliet Schor, in her book ‘The Overworked American’ has documented that 19th century industrialization represented the longest hours ever worked by any people, despite our overwhelming perception that farmwork is unnecessarily hard. The next most overworked people in history are us – we come right after the 19th century factory workers and coal miners, and well before any agrarian society.
…in ‘1066: The Year of the Conquest’ historian David Howarth notes that the average 11th century British serf worked one day a week to pay for his house, the land that he fed himself off of, his access to his lord's woodlot for heating fuel, and a host of other provisions, including a barrel of beer for him and his neighbor on each Saints day (and there were a lot of him). How many of us can earn our mortgage payment, our heat, and our beer on a single day's work?
— Sharon Astyk, How Expensive is Food, Really?
Like Giant Lego
6PM Thursday 17th February 2011.
This is fantastic. ‘The Global Village Construction Set is a set of 50 tools/technologies for building post-scarcity, resilient communities.’
It's all the mechanical tools your hypothetical post-crash community would need, made in your garage. The tools (currently including a miniature tractor, a brick-maker, and a tracked hydraulic lifter) are built from a set of shared modular components, and appear to be relatively simple to assemble for anyone handy with a welder. Watch the video:
Unicorn Power
5PM Thursday 17th February 2011.
This site is now running a new look and a new engine. Hopefully you won't notice the engine, but if you're reading this via the feed in Google Reader or somesuch, pop over to the site for a look. It has an exuberant unicorn, and also fancy backgrounds for those not using Ye Olde Internette Explorer.
Apple & Minerals
1PM Tuesday 15th February 2011.
Further to my run-down on rare earth elements, Apple has addressed their use in its latest Supplier Responsibility Report:
We mapped the use of potential conflict minerals in our supply chain. We identified 142 Apple suppliers that use tantalum, tin, tungsten, or gold to manufacture components for Apple products and the 109 smelters they source from. Apple is also at the forefront of a joint effort with the EICC and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) that will help our suppliers source conflict-free materials.
Apple also appears to closely regulate and audit underage labour, workplace safety, and excessive recruitment fees paid by foreign contract workers, and the report lists violations from 37 facilities of the 127 audited. It also commissioned a special independent investigation into the spate of suicides at Foxconn. Good on them, I guess.
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Chimera
11PM Monday 31st January 2011.
As a counterpoint to the last post (emphasis mine):
…a plan to sow the oceans with iron to trigger plankton blooms, which would absorb carbon dioxide, die, and settle to the sea floor. A plan to send a trillion mirrors into orbit to deflect incoming sunlight. A plan to launch a fleet of robotic ships to whip up sea spray and whiten the clouds. A plan to mimic the planet-cooling sulfur-dioxide miasmas of explosive volcanoes, either by an artillery barrage of sulfur-dioxide aerosol rounds fired into the stratosphere or by high-altitude blimps hauling up 18-mile hoses.
None of these projects will happen, fortunately. They promise side effects, backfirings, and unintended consequences on a scale unknown in history, and we lack the financial and political wherewithal, and the international comity, to accomplish them anyway. What is disquieting is not their likelihood, but what they reveal about the persistence of belief in the technological fix. The notion that science will save us is the chimera that allows the present generation to consume all the resources it wants, as if no generations will follow. It is the sedative that allows civilization to march so steadfastly toward environmental catastrophe. It forestalls the real solution, which will be in the hard, nontechnical work of changing human behavior.
— The Danger of Cosmic Genius, Atlantic Magazine.
Drat.
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Hairshirt
5PM Sunday 23rd January 2011.
I have linked (and quoted) Bruce Sterling's Last Viridian Note before, but it's still good stuff. On useful possessions:
The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal, boring goods that don’t seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones. They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects. It’s in your time most, it’s in your space most.
On less useful possessions:
It may belong to you, but it does not belong with you. You weren’t born with it. You won’t be buried with it. It needs to be out of the space-time vicinity. You are not its archivist or quartermaster. Stop serving that unpaid role.
These ideas emerge from a different kind of ‘green’ thinking (the ‘viridian’ of the title):
Another major change came through my consumption habits. It pains me to see certain people still trying to live in hairshirt-green fashion – purportedly mindful, and thrifty and modest. I used to tolerate this eccentricity, but now that panicked bankers and venture capitalists are also trying to cling like leeches to every last shred of their wealth, I can finally see it as actively pernicious.
Hairshirt-green is the simple-minded inverse of 20th-century consumerism. Like the New Age mystic echo of Judaeo-Christianity, hairshirt-green simply changes the polarity of the dominant culture, without truly challenging it in any effective way. It doesn't do or say anything conceptually novel – nor is it practical, or a working path to a better life.
Sterling argues that consumerism itself is not the problem, but planned obsolescence – we should search for things that last.
I sympathise more with this than I used to. I'm beginning to see how nostalgic (and, arguably, regressive) so many contemporary green movements are. Ideas like ‘back to the land,’ ‘closer to nature,’ – all of Daniel Quinn's Ishmael books – these all look backwards, assuming and asserting that our present is an unsalvageable dead-end.
I swing wildly between optimism and pessimism on that point, it must be said. Some days I think technology can solve all our problems, other days I look at the damage we do to the planet and I'm not so sure. We're probably a few years away from solving the plastic bag landfill problem, for instance, but we still couldn't stop the Deepwater Horizon spewing oil everywhere and doing serious long-term damage to the Gulf of Mexico. So, you know, ups and downs.
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Nomads
11AM Friday 14th January 2011.
City of Sound (on the Australian floods):
Speaking of which, it's times like this that reinforce the rationale for nomadism, as practiced by most Aboriginal Australians. Australia's weather is so fierce it makes perfect sense. Why indeed would you settle in a lands which flood like this? Or, at the other end of the country, say Victoria or South Australia, which are often bone dry and prone to devastating bushfires (wildfires)?
Indeed. So much of the trouble caused by natural events – ‘disasters’ – is directly linked to our insistence on permanence. Most of these troubles would vanish if we were less attached to our houses (and cities), and allowed ourselves to just move on as necessary.
Of course, this is not entirely compatible with our love of private property (particularly ownership of land), nor with our currently heavily-populated planet; there are not always new and empty places to go. (And I shall stop before we find ourselves debating immigration policy.)
Elemental
7PM Wednesday 12th January 2011.
Rare earth elements are increasingly important to modern life. They're required for metal alloys, for microwave ovens, for specialist glass, lenses, batteries, cleaning compounds, magnets, lasers, computer memory, x-ray machinery, fluorescent lamps, and basically every other piece of contemporary technology.
They're scattered in the ground, hard to get at, and in limited quantities. There are obvious financial incentives for controlling them. This puts them at the center of some rather nasty conflicts.
On the demand side of the equation, not only has China managed to corner 97% of global production, but they're now stalling exports elsewhere – the US, Europe, and most particularly Japan have all seen shipments from China held up.
Of course, China isn't just hoarding all of these supplies; its ever-growing manufacturing sector is consuming them at increasing rates. And the control it has now allows it to put pressure on the manufacturing sectors of other countries.
On the upside, this has forced at least Japan and Germany to begin taking recycling far more seriously. Recycling hasn't previously been considered practical because it would push prices up – but those prices are rising anyway, and there's no longer any real choice.
There is a significant dark side to all this economic activity. These minerals all come from somewhere.
Many of China's own mines are in Inner Mongolia but it, Europe, and the US still rely on imports of cassiterite, wolframite, and coltan from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The DRC's mining industries – and China itself – have been linked to funding the kind of militia and armies who use mass-rape as a weapon (in one case, at least 150 women and children were raped over several nights), all in the name of controlling mineral resources. Margot Wallström writes:
More than 200,000 rapes have been reported since war began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo more than a decade ago. The eastern part of the country has been labelled the rape capital of the world. Control of Congo's natural resources and minerals has always been contested, and these vast riches have fuelled the country's conflicts. They have helped enrich militant groups, who have employed sexual violence as a tactic of war.
The US has recently proposed regulations around the trade and use of conflict minerals. However, whether or not such regulations prove sufficient (it does not seem likely), they will have very little impact on China's 97% of the pie, and it seems unlikely that China will be interested in similar measures of its own.