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Bredan is right, we need a new humanism
2007-12-31 10:36:00
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/brend an_oneill/2007/12/the_new_atheism.html This is the first really thoughtful article on religion that I have seen here on CIF. The salient point, when you think about why religion is rising again, is ‘what has secularism (which is ultimately what atheism is promoting) failed to provide.’ Well, it has failed to provide a way forward, by proclaiming that the enlightenment is dead. But that is a mistake, and one that deserves looking at carefully. When we talk about “post-enlightenment thinking” we are actually muddling two things up. The first is the philosophical understanding of the impossibility of truly universal statements. This is the useful legacy of people like Foucault. But this is falsely conflated with the sense of a “human universal” as if humans are the only possible form of intelligence in what is a very big universe. This is stupid, and is what moves people to claim the enlightenment is dead. Y...
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Are we in a new climate?
2007-12-23 19:26:00
It makes you sweat as a social scientists, when one of the respected scientists in the field you work with has a go at the type of position you take: Climate Security: The New Determinism But as it turns out, there is a quite a lot for the social scientists to say to our natural cousins: Dear Mike, When I read this article I wanted to find out who you were, and so I went to your site and saw that you are one of the founders of the Tyndall center. I take this to mean that you are pretty strong on the science sides of this question. But as a social scientist who looks at these issues, I have to say there are some gaping holes in your arguments. Let me take them organized by the assumption that they are based on. Determinism: A description of a risk cannot be said to be deterministic. It is a risk, a possibility, not a pre-determined outcome. You cite people describing risks as examples of a new determinism. This is a basic error. Social complexity and response: You then argue agai...

A false sense of food security
2007-12-19 10:37:00
The IPCC has come out with some fairly mixed messages about food security. The headline finding is that up to 3 degrees of warming, global food production will increase. Policy makers have so much else to worry about even as we approach 1.5 or 2 degrees, meaning that food security slips down the agenda. But as I read the fourth assessment several things made me stop and think. For instance, the IPPC admits that its predictions do not take into account extreme weather events. This is very worrying: ask any farmer and they will tell you that it is not the 364 days of normal weather that scares them, but the one day of flash flooding. Take the 2003 summer heat-wave in Europe, it reduced agricultural yields in affected countries by between 10 to 40% of the harvests for that year. This is exactly the kind of thing which is set to become much more frequent. There is another warning within the IPCC’s prediction. Above 1 degrees, even ignoring extreme weather, food production in the trop...
More About: Security , Food , Sense

Will big oil heed the gathering clouds?
2007-12-19 08:30:00
The leaders of big oil companies should get behind the scheme of contraction and convergence, as it might be their only chance of avoiding nationalisation. It should have been a wake up cry for big oil when UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon announced1 that the tragedy of Darfur was caused by global warming. It is not only the horror of a country collapsing into civil war under environmental pressures, but also that a Secretary General, one appointed as such a safe candidate, feels he is in step with global public opinion in broadcasting this. The world is changing,and so are the political dynamics that go with it. Indeed, on closer examination, the situation in Darfur reveals how profound these changes are. Anthropologist Alex de Waal has written about the ground-level history leading up to the Darfur Crisis2. Climate change might well have had an impact on rainfall patterns in the area, causing the famine of 1984-85 and a persistent reduction in land productivity. The resource scar...
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Is the Market the Final Solution?
2007-11-06 05:00:00
It is a curious thing about human beings that we care far more for those close to us than those far away. This can be our saving grace, extending such proximity let’s us extend what we can protect. But it can also be our downfall leading us to focus only on our local cares and pleasures. This narrow utilitarianism could be the undoing of us all, our self-imposed final solution. This applies both in space and time, and applies seemingly both to humans, animals and even objects as our focus of affection. The contrast between our intimates and distant others is often striking: Here in the Nilgiri Hills of Tamil Nadu in Southern India, the various groups of Adivasi, or Indigenous people, have been suffering from Malnutrition, with the lost of their traditional forest ranges. They no longer have the space to gather nuts and herbs and small game to balance out there diet, so they are now confined to the starch and bloat of a diet of government subsidised white rice. They are get...
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Zeitgeist
2007-09-28 11:50:00
I have just been very entertained. Allen, my new Taiwanese-Canadian web-friend asked me to go look at the film Zeitgeist (Z) So I did the unthinkable and threw myself into a conspiracy theory film. And I have to say it was really good fun, I was thoroughly gripped and entertained throughout, and learned some very interesting things, although verifying them is entirely another matter. So I want to do a sort of film review of this web film. It is a film that attempts a global vision, and that is distributed on a global media, and so is probably worth debating as a form of emerging global public debate. It is interesting how constructing myths these days so often takes the form of debunking other myths. Z takes this form, part I attacking Christianity, Part II attacking the official account of 9-11, part three turning explanatory and discussing the history and power of the federal reserve and of the banking elite that are standing behind it. The synthesis is that these banking grou...

Food and Carbon Trading
2007-09-28 06:32:00
Here is my proposal for international financial reform, it is an extension of Aubrey Meyer’s Contraction and Convergence approach: Source: MIT Website There is a clear danger that food shortage will define the coming decades. Climate change, groundwater depletion, loss of organic matter in soil, bio-fuel production as well as increased demand for animal products are all factors putting pressure on both the supply and prices of the staples that the poor depend upon. So far international frameworks for addressing climate change have focussed on mitigation. Contraction and Convergence is the most widely accepted of these proposals, backed by the majority of the world’s governments. However it lacks any provision for defending the poor from the worst effects of climate change, starvation seeming to be the prime candidate, one that compounds all the other risks. Aubrey Meyer1 points out that any system of carbon trading is skewed where a national currency is being used as a w...
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Money’s dominance is not inevitable.
2007-09-28 06:24:00
Support the democracy protests in Burma! There is a group on face-book that has a good set of ways to support the monks: Facebook - Support the Monk’s Protest I got into a discussion with Allen from Taiwan (Hi Allen) who pointed out the inevitability of Chinese power grounded in international trade, and how this guaranteed that the monks would get squashed. I guess, sitting in Taiwan, this is not an entirely unreasonable view. He pointed me to a film, called Zeitgheist, which though I have not watched, tracks the current dominance of high level international banking in the global order. This is not an entirely new argument, though I will go see the film (Allen tells me it is available on the net or BT.) But I want to answer Allen’s point about the inevitability of financial dominance. Firstly Zheitghiest is an idea borrowed from Hegel. It means “spirit of the age.’ The basic idea is that humans do not control their destiny, but are animated by some histor...
More About: Money , Mina , Domin , Not I

Maybe its good if we all die…
2007-09-20 19:20:00
Keith Kahn-Harris points out that denial, the slasher flick baddie of Global warming debates, is related to the mind protecting itself from things it can’t cope with. So why not take the taboos, the worse case scenarios, and explore the positives in them? Surely that is a way to open up things a bit. So yes, maybe it is a good thing if, over the next few hundred years, the vast majority of life on earth goes extinct. Just think, if humanity survives this crisis, and goes on to colonize other planets, what a problem that would be for those other planets,and those that live on them. We don’t have a great track record, what with colonialism and environmental destruction, so maybe we will have saved the universe at large from a terrible fate. Besides, if you take a giant step back you can see it is all futile anyway: Lives will come and go, planets will live and die, and eventually stars, including our own, will burn out. The rest is just not worth getting too upset about,...
More About: Good

Feelings shape the world, sympathy gives us a future
2007-09-04 16:16:00
For a society that is so oriented to growth and progress, we seem remarkably immune to good news. We have a deep philosophical cynicism about such simple things as love and sympathy, even though there is evidence that these are forces with significant impact in our world. We are suspicious of ideas like happiness, even if they are central to our highest ethics, both freedom and progress. How can you be free if you are so unhappy you cannot enjoy your good fortune? How can there be progress where this becomes a general condition? Progress or Prozac? Take the decline of violence in the world: There are fewer and smaller wars now than ever before. The depressing spectacle of embedded journalism, during the last attempt to make war work, had lying beneath it a very good piece of news. People so dislike seeing others blown to pieces, that wars must now be structured around the public not seeing this happen. The media has extended people’s senses, and with it their consciences, a...
More About: World , Future , The World , Shape , Feelings

Television’s panic attack
2007-08-25 10:22:00
Jeremy Paxman’s recent speech on declining standards in television misses the point. Paxman is significant in that he is who the BBC’s head of News, Roger Mosey, cited to me, when defending the BBC’s record as an example of the critical fourth estate, shortly after their post Iraq humiliation by Butler. He wrote an article about this. But Paxman is perhaps the past rather then the future of the fourth estate, which might be why he is upset. This is how I put it on Comment is Free (CIF) (The Guardian comment section), in response the the article below: Comment is free: Television s panic attack The irony of this debate on media, played out right here on CIF, is how it misses the issue of the medium being the message. Whilst Paxman points out the importance of good content, he misses out the new relationships with the media that digital technologies imply. For the under 25’s the internet is the primary medium, above TV as a source of information. On TV it is ...
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Oops, its really serious now.
2007-08-19 21:07:00
A few weeks ago I read a really depressing scientific paper: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/2007_ Hansen_etal_2.pdf The paper laid out the historical record of climate change, and the response of the ice sheets. Last time we had a 2 degree rise, the ice sheets largely collapsed. This meant two things: That sea levels rose massively (metres rahter than centimetres) and that the earth kept on warming, becuase the darker surfaces uncovered by the ice loss absorbed more heat. Which rather puts into the question the 2 degree limit that scientists, and social radicals like Monbiot have been calling for. He outlined the implications at a talk at the climate camp: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/media/2007/08 //378867.mp3 Now please do read Hansen’s paper, and find holes in the argument, and tell me we don’t need to stay within 1.5C of warming. Please do the sums on the amount of co2 emmissions, and tell me that we are not looking at such huge reductions worldwide. I haven&rsq...
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We need leadership, not management by objectives
2007-08-03 18:41:00
Graham Thompson writes about neo-liberalism off the back of a conference at SOAS on corporate social responsibility. However, whilst articulating that neo-liberalism has moral content, he does not go very far in exploring the implications of that morality: Responsibility and neo-liberalism | openDemocracy My commentary was as follows: Thompson argues coherently that neo-liberalism has become internalised into a form of governmentality, where a certain kind of personal responsibility works hand in hand with the outer forms of governance. However it is important to remember that this internalisation of responsibility is neither new, nor unique to neo-liberalism, and that what are significant are the specific forms these internalisations take. The nub of the problem is this: Individual responsibility is amenable to a kind of privatisation, where it is set as a target to individuals and then measured. In management speak this is broadly called management by objectives. This is the kin...
More About: Management , Leadership , Ship , Manage , Lead

On the subject of the environment
2007-07-24 15:44:00
Monbiot is understandably upset with Green Consumerism, writing fairly persuasively about how it is becoming a marker of social status, without actually bringing about any strong green outcomes: Monbiot.com » Eco-junk What is interesting in this is the link he draws between the consumerisation and individualisation of green politics, and the lack of calls for strong collective action in the media: Apparently collectivism doesn’t sell. Well this calls into question a lot of the ways in which the marketing dynamics of the media impinge on how we imagine ourselves collectively. But this is not something separately from how we imagine ourselves academically, or in political circles. Take the hegemony of the liberal self in international law, coupled with the dominance of individualistic rational choice models of the subject in political economy - it would seem that much of the social sciences has surrendered, in its basic assumptions about the human subject, to such a consumerist...
More About: Environment , The Environment , Iron , Subject , Envi

Oh the times, they are a changin’
2007-06-15 13:30:00
I have been finishing off some market research work, and as ever when I am bored, blogging has returned as a pressing hobby. I have been scattering comments around the web, and it struck me as fun to try and draw them together. It seems that change is in the air (rather literally.) With our material existence shifting around us, perhaps there are implications to be considered for our political and philosophical outlooks.The death of Richard Rorty and the BAE affair caught my attention during my restless week, and I feel that there is a link to be drawn here. Can you guess what it might be about? Lets start with Rorty. Roger Scruton, who serves a a conservative commentator for Open Democracy, took his chance to do a bit of grave dancing, unveiling his startlingly original ideas about truth: Scruton’s Ripping Unfortunately for him someone had already come up with a reply to his arguments, four years ago, proving that Conservatives are kind in some ways, in at lest they try not...
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Who faces the abyss?
2007-05-24 08:54:00
Mark Lynas writes passionately and accurately at the current corruption of leadership on climate change. New Statesman - Our leaders are steering us into the abyss My response is that this is to do with us aiming our messages at the wrong people. The question that bears most strongly on all of this is who is facing the abyss the most. That is where the strongest political pressure-base can come from: I believe we are not fighting this issue in the right places.I am sat in India, where people with marginal lives stand to die in collosal numbers if nothing is done. And yet awareness of the issues is miniscule amongst those most likely to be killed by it. The rich world (wrongly) feels insulated from the problem by our huge wealth, thinking it will be possible to enjoy now and buy our way out later. The poor in the tropics have no such illusions, but have yet to mount any major campaigns on this, largely due to its absence form the sort of media they have contact with: Their is a nea...
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Imaginary futures
2007-05-18 04:53:00
There is a new book out on the history of imagined futures.  This has some interesting implications for development: Imaginary futures: frozen and fluid time Richard Barbrook - openDemocracy Funnily enough, development studies and this kind of social theorising seldom shake hands.  I had a few things to say about this: What is interesting about the information age is that communication becomes a stand-in for the future, for progress. But communication is a term that alienates “information” “channels” and “flows” from the people saying and the circumstances they say in. The information future is thus a disconnected rather than a connected future. One of the things that this vision of progress, as well as the philosophies of representation that accompany it, cannot cope with is, the suprising character of the surround. Things come out of the blue, from beyond representation, and this brings the focus back to the environment. Which gives you a sens...
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Free TVs in Tamil Nadu
2007-05-07 09:39:00
There is a fascinating tale of free TV’s in Tamil e Nadu that needs further follow up, that I stuck up on the prospect blog.  Please do go comment, its a little slow right now: Free TVs in Tamil Nadu Uncategorized

Non-violent revolutions are the most effective
2007-04-13 18:35:00
There is a very interesting article on Open Democracy, where bean counters have looked at various forms of assymetric warfare (between state and non-state actors, with radicaly different levels of power and resources) and, from the way they have gathered and treated their data set (caveat emptor), they have found that non-violent revolution is more effective: Madrid11.net | Does terrorism work? This is pleasing to me, considering the bashing I took for making a stand against violent methods as the best way for the Palestinians to respond to Isreali occupation and ethnic cleansing. It is also interesting, because I have been on the horns of a dilemma recently. I am pretty close to being a pacifist, and a gradualist poltically, yet I have increasingly felt that climate change requires a revolutionary poltics, in order that we will be able to make the changes required within the 10-20 year timespan we have. It is heartening news that revolution does not equal violence, and nor should...
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Reith Lectures 2007
2007-04-11 15:01:00
The Reith Lectures this year are given by Sachs. He’s an economist, and an American, but he actually seems sensible:  He is having a good go at putting a picture together. BBC Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2007 Summary Also, the BBC seems to be wising up about open source and is offering the lectures as an MP3 podcast. You can even subscribe via iTunes! Looks like parts of the mainstream are actually starting to wake up to what is going on. Uncategorized
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Will we choose Malthus?
2007-04-02 07:24:00
Here is a reponse to a comment piece in the Guardian, from  UN official, about the upcoming IPCC report on the impacts of climate change, particularly in the tropics: Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Tide of suffering What needs to be borne in mind in this is the high proportion of earnings that the cost of food represents for the poor. When we talk about climate change, we seem to forget that all these effects, rising sea levels, changes in weather patterns, an overall drying trend globally, will all tend to impact on food production, and thus the price of food. This is already happening: The world has been in net food deficit for the last couple of years: Not just because of climate change, but because of various forms of environmental degradation, that climate change is likely to make worse. Also, the recent emphasis on biofuels is likely to push up the price of crops, that  might now be used to either feed poorer people or alternatively, and more lucratively, to drive ri...
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People, people everywhere, it makes you stop and think?
2007-03-30 06:05:00
New Statesman - Time Out with Nick Cohen Oh my God! Nick Cohen has written something I agree with. It is always instructive to actually get close to people and understand how they view the world. We have a name for it among the liberal lefties, it is called Anthropology. But Nick is right, people in North London have a tendency to prefer “natives” in far flung fileds, and that is strange. But this is not an English Phenomenon. I sit here in India observing the same thing: Urban Indians coming to visit the village that I am living in, and finding it hard to understand the locals. This is a fairly general phenomenon. As is the emphasis on place amongst the general population. Baggiani has attempted to understand this, because his philosophical pragmatism takes him past worshipping ideas as abstracts, and draws him to understanding how ideas are found in practice, in people’s lives. But Nick, you are not so far from Islington really, you are also an urban intellectua...
More About: People , Everywhere , Stop , Think , Here

Fortress Earth?
2007-03-27 08:23:00
Comment in response to article linked below: Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | George Monbiot: If we want to save the planet, we need a five-year freeze on biofuels The biofuels issue is part of a wider issue of Global food supply. Even the most hardened climate sceptics acknowledge the climate is changing. All forecasts seem to agree on one thing at least: That these changes are likely to damage food production in the tropics, and also, on balance, reduce food production globally. Even without biofuels it is hard to see the price of food remaining stable. There have been prodictions of global drying from the Met Office, as well as a range of predictions about impacts on tropical agriculture: see: http://sedac.ciesin.org/giss_crop_study/C CMresources.html What is clear is that the price of food is likely to rise, as food production falls. This is likely to lead to both civil unrest and environmental refugees, as well as disruption of the cheap labour sources that currently under...
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E-politics in action
2007-03-24 05:42:00
E-participation seems to be taking various forms. Apart from the recent emerging role of YouTUbe in the US Primaries (see the videos here) there is also the issue of epetitions. Waste of time? I almost thought so, but.. I signed an epetition a while back and then forgot about it. Then I got this email back: Dear friends, Last week, Avaaz campaigners hand-delivered our 100,000-signature climate change petition to the environment ministers of the world’s most polluting countries. It worked. The chair of the meeting waved the petition in the air, calling on his fellow ministers to act–and they agreed that climate change would be the #1 issue at the G8 summit in June. The momentum is on our side. Let’s build on it. Next Tuesday, another high-level group will meet to move forward with G8 planning — and we can keep the focus on the climate issue by showing that the call for action is growing. Can you help us reach our ambitious goal of 150,000 signatures by Tuesd...
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Open Source Virtual Meetings
2007-03-18 13:04:00
Second Life is becoming a destination for increasingly many. But what is a parallel reality useful for? Well one answer is that it gives an interaction space where people can meet and learn. Sloodle is one such project. They are taking the very good open source distance learning platform Moodle, and making it work within the 3D visual space that is second life. In other words they are using second life to add extra dimensions to an allready successful e-learning platform. And Moodle is successful, it has just been adopted as standard by the biggest distance learning institution in the world, the Open University, and they are also showing an interest in Sloodle. The head of e-learning at the OU can be found on the Sloodle list. But this is not all. Business is very interested in the possibilities of meetings in virtual worlds. Just think of the potential savings in travel costs! IBM has already started having meetings in Second Life, and there is an interest group about this: ...
More About: Open Source , Source , Open-Source , Virtual

Universalism fails the majority
2007-03-09 13:32:00
The two people who mind the garden in our house, between them they earn 2000 rupees a month. That’s about £25-30. Funny thing is that the housekeeper,  who makes 1000 rupees a month (for half-time work, that’s a relatively good deal for the market she is operating in) questioned why they struggled to get by on that money. The answer came back that so many people come and eat at their house. In other words, on that kind of money, they are acting as a form of local social welfare, and it would be seen as strange if they didn’t do so. Upshot of it is that the wife of our care-taking couple has arthritis and needs 30 rupees (50 pence) to get on a bus to the local state hospital. I suspect that this is true, but actually don’t care if it is not. It is almost harder to deal with their honesty than with being ripped off. Funnily enough I just read a piece by John Gray in the New Statesman about human agency, and the wierd take poltical philosophers tend to t...
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Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | The point of no return
2007-03-07 09:43:00
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | The point of no return The sense of resignation is more than troubling, it speaks of a collective cynicism. It seems that government is publically saying it will try and stop climate change, but privately admitting to itself that it cannot summon the political will to challenge vested interests. This is whilst preparing to deal with adapting to the effects of climate change, using the resources of the world’s fourth or fifth largest economy. That large economy will let it adapt more than most other economies. It also fed the vested interests that are blocking the much smaller costs associated with stopping climate change. Finally, that larger economy created a disprortionate (per capita, per human being) amount of the problem in the first place. This is a problem that smaller economies will not be in such a good position to adapt to. Especially not if global warming (as it is predicted to do) leads to a drop in food production and thus ...
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Economics, the soulful science?
2007-02-23 07:04:00
In response to Diane Coyle’s article on the open democracy site: Econ omic s , the soulful science Diane Coyle - openDemocracy There is a history to Economics notoriety, and also to its attempted rehabilitiation since the 1980s. The dominant form of economics globally is a particualr strand of “laissez faire” neo-liberal economics, overseen by Washington-based international institutions, set up to run the world, and marginalise the UN, during the post-war settlement. There is a revolving door between US government particularly the treasury and staffing in these insitutions. These institutions, which are often seen as extensions of US foreign policy, have done immeasurable damage to developing countries, since their “structural adjustment policies have failed so spectacularly. It is clear that this represents the dominant stream in economics, since the post 1980 shift in the profession coincided with these huge financial institutions finally caving in under the o...
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7 Feb 2007 Action and Illusion
2007-02-07 14:27:00
The tension between those that see things in terms of dominant groups persuading the rest to do their bidding, and practical folk who are concerned with how things get done, has some very interesting philosophical underpinnings. Action requires a basis. This is simple in principle: In order to exercise agency and bring about some outcomes in preference to other outcomes, you need to be able to exercise some control. That control is in turn only possible if you can render things in some way predictable. Fixed forms therefore either need to be picked out as stable entities from the surroundings, or need to be rendered as fixed entities by some sort of effort. This applies as much to representations as it does to materialities. These two can be seen as aspects of social practices also. For example, communication requires some fixation of categories, just as exchange requires currencies or standards of evaluation, work requires tools and training, and so on. This in itself is not...
More About: Illusion , Sion

Life beyond ground zero
2007-02-07 00:41:00
I recently got over an existential angst. The sense of nothingness that my ex-supervisor’s philosophical take was bringing on, under the surface of it all, had been getting me down. That sense of nothing being equal or real, or anything at all, of all things being nothing more than splintered instances, a kind of material emptiness underpinning the world and leaving us like leaves in the empty ocean. But it is an illusion. It struck me, maybe from a fragment of an article I read, resurfacing in my memories, that I was projecting my mind into an emptiness that I could have no relationship with: Yes there are “things” out there that know no meaning, even if they are formless and changing in doing so. But those “things” are not things and meaningless, because they can only be made so in relationship to a meaning-making mind. All the things my mind can touch, have such a relationship, by definition. So that meaninglessness is an illusion: It is a s...
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