Post Scipt to Beginnings

Well, I attempted to neatly sidestep producing a fully referenced article by writing in blank verse. This has the advantage of sitting on the less offensive side of the polemic. I hope that it might be inspiring.

As some context for why and how I am writing, and where my theoretical and factual groundwork comes from.

My predominant theoretical framework is grounded in the work of Fernand Braudel, specifically the three volumes of "Civilization and Capitalism: 15th - 18th Century". Braudel is probably best described as a dialectical materialist. He is especially interested in the "longue duree" or long duration of economic history. He derives some interesting ideas about the roots of long period economic swings (the so called Kondratievs) related to changes in communication and the maturation of relationships, the codification of what are initially innovative means of exchange into established facts of life. To encapsulate this, economic realities are grounded in long term arrangement between many individuals and institutions which slowly change over time. These changes, following naturally from the interplay of human creativity and competitiveness with changing technologies, social values and moralities, lead to long term up- and down-swings in the world economy.



I wouldn't say I'm a dialectical materialist however. For two almost opposite reasons. One is, that as a natural scientist I recognise that there is a material aspect external to humanity which is largely missing from the discussion. That is, we actually live on a planet, wherein there are given physical constraints on human behaviour. My wife (well, in two weeks anyway. Feels like we're already married so ...) uses the word metabolism to describe these relationships, and I think that's pretty apt. So the relationship between humans must also include a metabolic relationship with the earth and with each other. In fact we have to conceive of economic activity as part of a larger metabolic cycle. Jared Diamond is a real pioneer of this approach, specifically with "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," in which he discusses a number of societal collapses in the historical or archaeological record*.

It's a general concept: Human beings are part of the metabolic cycle of the earth. Not in a cutesy "We're all one with nature" way, but more a "all that trash ends up in the guts of fish and seagulls and rats" kind of way.

The second issue against dialectic materialism is that it doesn't take into account that human beings have a psyche. There's an argument that colonising other planets would be impossible because our spacecraft would have to perfectly reproduce the entire metabolic cycle that the earth performs for us now. There's another argument that says it only takes one hormonal teenage boy man (yay testosterone. It doesn't switch off) getting dumped before he wanders over to the airlock and blows the entire atmosphere out into space**. So, we have to consider the human psyche as a deeply irrational entity. Our rationality is something we had learned and developed culturally. It's not some innate thing that all humans are just programmed with. It's what you learn as you grow up and relate to people around you, as you play and find out what happens when you drop this or smash that against the other thing over there and make a load bang. And don't get a smack on the wrist for being a nuisance.

So we have a strange concept of our reality and our place in the world which doesn't actually sit quite right with the objective reality we occupy. This is basically Slavoj Zizek style transcendental materialism. That is, physical object and systems can have entirely unique qualities which actually have no objective existence, but are based on our perceptions and emotional attachments to them. My favourite example is Slavoj Zizek's description of a toilet as a powerful machine of ideology. You see, when you flush it, it makes your shit disappear. Yes, I know, doesn't seem to profound. Now, if you've ever taken a wild poo, you'll know that the place you went is something that stays in your mind, as you don't want to go stepping in it the next day, or get a drink downstream from it. Whilst the toilet makes that disappear. Clever!

Many human constructions have ideological (i.e. mass psychological) functions. Michel Foucaults "Discipline and Punish" is great for this kind of analysis of prison and school architecture and its wider context in society. Buildings are an example of physical ideological machines. There also exist institutional, social and moral 'machines' which serve to maintain and preserve relationships between people, but have no physical existence.

Well, that's enough for one post. Next - Geopolitics. Yay.

Ah, I assure you all I will be writing more in the future. So hopefully this can serve as something of a reference for some of my conclusions. When I'm jotting down some quick thoughts I'd rather not try to "show my workings" as it were.



*I'm not going to take a specific example, I'm largely unconcerned if new evidence shows that, well actually this particular society didn't collapse, it actually moved somewhere else and downsized, or the concept of collapse is just an imposition, the people were fed up of living in cities and having kings. Whatever. The point is to situate humanity within a metabolic cycle, within natural systems.

 
**By the by, I don't think astronauts would behave like this. They are pretty awesome people. But colonisation means you need to take all sorts with you, and maybe even raise several generations. But we're getting off topic here.