All that STUFF

Ok, I usually try and refrain from making sweeping social judgements about the intelligent and hard working (yada yada yada,) students of Williams college. But when I see the mountains of crap that piles up in the dumpsters outside dorms this time of year, it just makes me feel awful inside for so many reasons.

How much stuff is getting thrown out that is in perfectly usable condition, only the owner was too lazy to find a new owner for it? How much of that was used once all year, and is now cast away as too old or no longer worth the space? How much does it really made your life better here at Williams?

Yes, I'm talking about extra rugs and funny looking pillows, blow up chairs and halogen lamps, strings of Christmas tree lights and garbage bags full of t-shirts, mountains of books and entire couches left out in the rain. Why are you throwing these perfectly good things away? Can it possibly be that we like the act of acquiring the stuff and the value that comes from bringing home something new and flashy more than we actually like keeping them around and dealing with the space they take up?

Its like this is the dirty little secret of our rampant consumer lifestyle, rearing its ugly head for one short spell of wasteful glory, getting it all out of the way in a few painful days, so that we can return next year with more 'cool new things' from home to fill up the new spaces we'll have. And what's worse is that Williams is just one of thousands of colleges and universities whose dorms are emptying in the same way as we speak, all carelessly filling up dumpsters and thinking about trendy things to bring to the dorm next year.

Well, I'm grossed out. I'm making a point of picking up as much as I can and saving it until it can be given or sold to someone who will value this stuff for what it is. And please, don't feed me back stories of how you've 'saved this item since grade school' or 'aren't throwing anything away'. I know you good people are out there and I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to the people who fill up the dumpsters, what do you have to say about your excessive waste!

A World Without the Poor

Just step back and consider for a moment a world in which there are no poor. Where everyone has enough money to not be considered poor or lacking and everyone has disposable income to spend not only on 'luxuries' but also to spend on lawyers, political rights, education, etc. Lets put the economic and sociological feasibility of this project aside for the time being because I am going to stay away from that.

Instead, consider how you would act in such a world. When you want to buy a new hot tub you have to find a way to produce the electricity needed for it. You could not build another coal power plant somewhere because the people living there wouldn't allow it, and in this world they would have the means to make that desire a reality. You couldn't even build a windmill somewhere because there would always be some active protester who didn't want the eyesore on his ridge top. Instead you'd have to either build a power plant in your community, and mine the coal from your backyard to power it. With every kilowatt put into the hot tub, you inhale a little breath of coal smoke. Suddenly the hot tub becomes less appealing.

Next lets drive to the store for some groceries. But would you think twice about getting into your car if you know gasoline costs $20 a gallon? If the people in the middle east, Colombia, Nigeria and Sudan were as well off as we are, do you think they'd be selling crude oil for as cheap as they are? No, they, and everyone, would be using more and they'd live in a society that didn't give away its resources. Just imagine if Saudi Arabia's oil reserves were under America instead, would we be giving the stuff away at $70 a barrel? No, we'd be calling it a strategic resource and trying to manage it responsibly so that we can drive gas cars long after the rest of the world is starving for good old fossile fuels.

Then you'd get to the store, maybe on your bike at this point, and go in. Maybe you feel like ham for dinner. But as you reach for the pork you begin to smell the stench of the hog farm just outside the grocery store, because after all no body else wants a hog farm stinking up their backyard unless its going to benefit them in the only particular way a hog farm can: giving them pork. I mean, the only other reason you'd have a hog farm would be to make a living, and if it came down to making $30,000 a year raising hogs or $30,000 a year sitting in a puffy chair writing political satire, which would you choose? Given a free choice I'm not sure how many people would choose the pigs.

When anyone says 'not in my back yard' it either means 'I'm rich enough that i don't have to deal with this' or 'I'm not rich enough and the only thing I can do is complain to the few people who will listen'.

A world without poor is probably not possible, but I'm no theoretical economist. What I do know is that we profess ideals of humanism and equality and hold the power of money in politics in contempt. But as Americans we often blatantly overlook how our own actions may contribute to perpetuating the poverty, pollution and corruption that plagues our supposedly developed and modern society.

Unpackaging Modernization

Unpacaging Modernization

"I don't think the Western 'packaged view of modernization is inherently flawed." - Claus Jacobson

It has been thought that modernization was a process that had a 'package' of 'natural' consequences which are inherent in this self propelling process. The process is specifically the commodification of labor and resources which leads to economic development, industrialization and specialization. These are the most primary characteristics, and they are followed by the acknowledgment of a legal-rational system of government, property rights and professionalization of the work force which should in turn allow for pluralism, greater human rights, democracy (1 person, 1 vote - very individualistic), the project of the self, i.e. the notion that the goal of life is to improve one's condition, ability, position, etc. Increased value of the self should replace community and tradition with chosen groups of spatially separate friends and a scientific world view. The old ways become less relevant in the new world, and religion as a traditional institution should fade in influence: secularization. This is the my rough paraphrase of the theory of secularization, associated with modernization, put forth by Weber, Marx, Casanova and others who have said it much better than me.

But what happens when a country does not modernize in this way? The middle east, for instance, has seen enormous growth in wealth and lifestyle comforts, but have not secularized (at least as we understand it). This could be because they depend on the global economy for a lot of their production and larger financial stability. But the United States has not seen a decrease in religiosity, it has seen a growth from the low 30 years ago. Hardly becoming more marginalized or privatized, religion in America is gaining public support which throws a big monkey wrench into the traditional, liberal view of modernization.

The continued strength of conservative religion in America is a direct contradiction to the idea of modernization being a value-normative force, a connected package.

Interestingly, secularization theory operated as a self-fulfilling idea for a long time. Church leaders also resigned themselves to the eventual demise of their influence, or at least the possibility of growth. All it has taken has been the refusal of one group, the American evangelical movement, to deny the inevitability of demise and pro actively seek political-religious power, and the possibility has been opened up to many other religious groups to do the same.

I don't think secularization is the only aspect of modernity that should come under scrutiny like this. While I would like to believe that China can never become an economically modernized country while still restricting the open flow of information to its population, we must consider that scenario because the old theory is not a sure thing.

Language of Authoritarianism in America

Vaclav Havel starts off a 1979 essay on eastern European society with this image: “The manager of a fruit and vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: 'Workers of the World, Unite!' Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world?... Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?”

Havel answers no, this grocer has no need to think about what it means because no one else does. In eastern Europe everyone has been raised on this stuff and they know by now that when one quotes Marx, all they are really saying is 'I am a normal person who does not want to attract attention to himself' This is called normative or performative use of language, where it only matters that it is said, not what is said. In a society imbued with propaganda it is very easy to spot the people who merely reproduce the message because it is the easiest thing to do, there is no risk or challenge. Furthermore these people are attuned to what language is propaganda and what isn't and so keep their sanity in a world split between unquestionable meaning and their own private lives.

Under the soviet system most people were neither dissidents or activists; they simply didn't care about politics. Those who did resist were often seen as dangerous to the state and dealt with. Interestingly, those who were activists and truly believed in the communist program were also disruptive to the state. Imagine your local grocer really believing the workers of the world should unite, and haranguing you about it everyday, and also doing everything in his power to unite and organize workers. Taken literally, most communist ideology was as threatening to the state if it was followed as if it was resisted. Just think of how many labor unions were smashed and strikes broken up by communist states. So in a society where no one used the constantive meaning (opposite of performative), those who did threatened the stability of the rest.

In the United States we also have a national performative language. When we talk about things like freedom, equality, democracy, free speech etc., we understand the societal (performative) meanings of these words without fully considering their constantive meanings. Lets take the right to self expression for example. I found a news report recently http://www.wpxi.com/education/8508170/detail.html about a ten year old girl who is protesting her right wear a mini-skirt to school because she needs the freedom to express her individual identity. This girl clearly uses the same argument that many others have used to win their rights of expression, but in a way that none of them intended. But because she is repeating accepted phrases that have a resonance in our society (as opposed to not wanting to wear clothes or wanting to look cute for other 4^th graders), she causes a minor disturbance.

This girl is an activist, someone who takes our uncontested American language seriously and therefore threatens what we call normal society just by upholding the values our normal society is supposedly based on. Some (probably more liberal observers) may find her argument noteworthy because it is within their own language of authority, after all, why can't 4^th graders express themselves? Others, (possibly more conservative) see this as a sign of the absurdities of the left, that things have gone too far, because they may be more likely to pick up the stand out phrases

Unlike in the Soviet Union and the communist bloc countries, we have two sources of authoritarian language, and neither is as strong or unified as the Soviets was. But because neither is as strong, they are both more believable to their respective followers. We don't know when we're being propagandized to!

I make note of an earlier 'vine post http://sheep.newsvine.com/_news/2006/04/07/159903-how-to-distinguish-between-news-and-propaganda, about republican use of key terms used repeatedly to solidify identity and allegience more than getting a point accross. The right sees a 'liberal media filter' and the left sees a 'conservative propaganda' but both sides have a much harder time seeing their own linguistic framework. (I'm heartened that most liberals don't like Michael Moore)

So what am I saying? I am not saying we are spiraling down towards some horrific low of 1984 style control through language. Nor am I saying that present phenomenon are fundamentally or significantly different than the past; proclaiming such things is, I think, the most frequently drawn false conclusion in popular social commentary. However, 'viners and the public at large would benefit for sharpening their reading eye to the use of language as an identifier and social signifier, and most importantly in our own speech, myself included, being aware of the sub-conscious use of language to strengthen our social status quo rather than express our ideas.

photo for profile

 

The creation of a blog

Entering the public domain is a profound thing. It is at once saying you have something to say that no one else is saying, and that other people will care. Now, I'm not too sure about either of these things, but of course the main purpose of this will be to share pictures and experiment with better ways of sharing various bits of information.
We'll see what happens.