The insistence by some biologists that we must halt economic growth in order to save the environment has bothered me for some time, but I was prompted to write about it now because yet another, albeit minor, group has adopted a policy statement on the issue. That a naturalist group has agreed to this nonsense is not a big deal, but the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) continually pressures major scientific organizations like the Ecological Society of America to adopt similar policy positions. Although major scientific societies like ESA have not yet adopted a policy position on economic growth, in my personal experience, such views are widely held in the biological community. Anyway, let me briefly address two major flaws with CASSE et al.’s arguments: 1) their downright shoddy use of empirical data; and 2) the illogic of their policy prescriptions. First, a small qualification. I agree with CASSE inasmuch as economic growth (measured as GDP) should not be a policy end unto itself in developed countries, but as I will show, it does not follow that reducing GDP will help preserve the natural world.
Anti-growthers claim that economic growth inexorably leads to environmental decline, but their standard of evidence for this purported causative link is abysmally low. Two examples should suffice. A brief letter to Science magazine proposed using GDP as an indicator of environmental decline. Their reasoning? The tight correlation between GDP and the number of threatened or endangered species (see below). Well, duh! The Endangered Species Act began in 1972 with zero species listed and, given the fact that recovery, if successful, takes decades, it must have increased with time. GDP likewise is well known to have increased since it has been measured, in large part due to population growth. Besides, why use GDP as an indicator of environmental decline because it correlates well when perfectly good measures like, oh, I don’t know, number of threatened or endangered species already exist and have a 100% correlation with a measure of environmental decline!?!
Another approach taken by anti-growthers to establish a causative link between GDP growth and environmental decline is to look at cross-sectional data. A study often cited by anti-growthers did just that in 2001. They find that for 3 out of 5 taxonomic groups, the number of threatened or endangered species rises with per capita GDP. Already this is not a strong trend. The bigger problem is that they have not controlled for some very obvious confounding factors. First, economically developed countries have had higher population densities for longer and did much of their growth when environmental regulations were virtually nonexistent. There is no a priori reason that contemporary economies cannot continue develop with more sound environmental policies. Secondly, rich countries can afford to list many more endangered and threatened species because they have long had a dedicated staff of professional scientists whose job it is to do just that. The authors even admit that their result could be an artifact, but (wrongly, in my opinion) do not seem to think it matters.
Even if there were an unassailable link between historic GDP growth and environmental degradation, it would not follow that reducing economic growth is a desirable policy to protect the environment. CASSE et al. claim that economic growth (GDP) occurs at the expense of the environment. However, GDP is merely an aggregate measure of everything people purchase and has no necessary relationship to anything. For example, much technological innovation (e.g. energy efficient light bulbs) allows us to consume as much while using less resources, which is probably why GDP growth has generally become less natural resource intensive over time. Another problem is that there exist endless policies that would assuredly reduce GDP and have no positive impact on the environment. To give an absurd example, if the government paid everyone to stop working and chop down forests, GDP would surely decrease because no one would be performing productive labor, and the environment would be much worse off. The new Farm Bill is a real life example of both poor economics and poor environmentalism. Just as CASSE point out that GDP has no necessary relationship with real welfare or societal progress, it likewise has no necessary relationship with environmental stewardship.
The argument to stop growth as environmental policy is largely unsupported, politically illogical as it is naive, and arguably a distraction from more effective environmental policies. Scientific societies should focus their policy positions on more direct means of biological conservation that are supported by their professional activities, rather than on indirect indicators like GDP on which biologists have no special expertise. Ultimately, the sensible policy is simply to find the most efficient means of protecting the environment and let GDP fall where it may – it could go down, but it might go up. A focus on GDP per se utterly misses the point.
I have started reading Charles Darwin’s 1871 book Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Darwin published this book well after he introduced the idea of evolution by natural selection in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. Despite persistent claims to the contrary, Darwin initially dealt very little with human evolution, partially to avoid controversy (as he admits in the introduction of Descent), but also because he was concerned with much broader patterns in nature than the origin of humans. He sums this point up very nicely in the introduction of Descent:
When we confine our attention to any one form , we are deprived of the weighty arguments derived from the nature of the affinities which connect together whole groups of organisms…
Darwin’s insightful comment on the utility of comparisons across many species, geographic areas, etc., while a staple of evolutionary research, is still greatly underappreciated, even by scientists. As Darwin presciently realized, the paucity of species closely related to humans, by prohibiting independent comparisons across many species, is the main problem with much evolutionary psychology research today. To take one example, there are many competing hypotheses as to why selection would have favored large brains in the lineage leading to modern humans and not other great apes - greater tool use, need to communicate, bipedalism allowed longer period of childhood development, and so on. The problem is that many of these selective pressures happened concurrently, and there is often no good way to rule out competing hypotheses since there exist no other big-brained species with which to make an independent comparison. Fortunately, biologists are no so impoverished in other areas of research. For example, we can infer that red, tubular flowers represent an adaptation to hummingbird pollination because those traits have evolved together independently many times across angiosperms.
Despite the dearth of data on human evolution in 1871, Darwin marshals several compelling arguments for the evolution of man from common ancestors with chimpanzee, gorilla, and other apes. Although now accepted as a scientific fact backed up by exquisitely detailed fossil and molecular data, even prominent 19th century naturalists like Wallace, who independently proposed natural selection, doubted the evolutionary origin of man. Darwin, often borrowing from contemporaries like Huxley and Häckel, dispatches such ideas by synthesizing disparate information, usually collected for entirely different reasons. For example, it was well known then that humans and apes suffered from more similar diseases (genetic and infectious) than, say, man and mouse or man and bird. Furthermore, diseases tend to pass more easily between man and ape than between man and more distantly related species (e.g. HIV evolved from Simian Immunodeficiency Virus). Darwin points out that this fact is completely explicable from the standpoint of common descent, but utterly mystifying under the view of special creation of man.
Although Darwin strongly affirms his belief in the natural origin humanity, still a controversial topic among the public, he shows characteristic caution often not observed in later students of human evolution. Brain size, often considered the pinnacle of (human) evolutionary progress and an indicator of intelligence by many biologists and anthropologists, has been abused to justify anthropocentrism and, much worse, racism or eugenics. Darwin however states that “no one supposes that the intellect of any two animals or of any two men can be accurately gauged by the cubic contents of their skills” (pg. 42). In contrarian fashion, he even notes:
[T]he wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affectations of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin’s head. Under this point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of man.
All this is not to say that Darwin’s language never comes off as Europocentric or even racist, or that he didn’t appreciate the unique qualities of human intelligence. He did. However, even in the first few chapters, he gets three things right: 1) that human descended from a common ancestor, like all life on earth, is the only explanation that makes sense of all the data; 2) even though human variation can be explained via natural selection, we should use much caution in naively interpreting the meaning of heritable differences between individuals or races; and 3) many “human” qualities such as intelligence (and morality) are not unique to humans. Scientists and nonscientists alike would do well to remember these lessons.
The conspiracy theory craze of the 1990s–criticized and largely explored in some of Steve Beard’s journalism from his collections Logic Bomb: Transmissions from the Edge of Style Culture and Aftershocks: The End of Style Culture–helped further open up and prime the public’s willing desire to believe that the forces that seemed to control their bank accounts, governments, food packaging, and religions were actually in league with other, more nefarious masters. Oliver Stone’s JFK (1994) and the popularization of Area 51 in television and video games show how powerful these representations were. Of course, conspiracy theories had been around for far longer. The seeds of modern antisemitism come from one of Europe’s most long-lived and debated conspiracies, the supposed creation, perpetuation, and malicious intention of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1920 and 1921. Here, antisemites fabricated a global conspiracy that placed the Jewish people at the center of problems that were manifest at other locations (and on other levels) of the social order.
Or, another example. Utopian and dystopian science fiction has long been a breeding ground for more extreme forms of speculation. Beyond UFOs, alternative histories, and “steam punk” are books that imagine prescient disruptions in the total world system (all sci-fi does this at one level or another, but some seem to be read more universally). I am thinking, in particular, of George Orwell’s famous 1984 (1948), a text that has been championed by Left and Right as a warning for the disappearance of civil liberties, against uncritically listening to corrupt government, and for the problems associated with the total (de)mystification of culture.
1984 never really leaves the collective consciousness, but is instantly remembered at the first threat of totalitarian power struggles. The book has spawned a list of imitators and admirers in film and television. From the glossy (Ultraviolet [2004], Equilibrium [2003]) to the gritty (Children of Men [2004], Brazil [1985]), the warnings have rung true.
The reason that I bring up these pop cultural precedents to potential civil disruptions is that there is a major initiative currently under consideration in Britain that could move the world one step closer (though that step may have already been taken, as I discuss below) to problematic control. That initiative, already defensively called the “Big Brother” database, is a centralized collection of all telephone calls, emails, and web site visits in the United Kingdom. The possible benefits (the ability to monitor terrorist and illegal activity; behavior tracking records that could be utilized in civil and criminal court cases; a large “receipt” for a year’s worth of social and cultural activity) and the certain side effects (almost guaranteed violations of civil liberties; a disruption to the processes of fair trail; potential security breaches) are evident.
Beyond those speculative and literary associations, I would like to take this possible occasion for control policy as a means of discussing some ideas from Alexander Galloway’s excellent book Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (2004, MIT Press). Though I am currently only about halfway through, I have taken a keen interest in Galloway’s discussions of periodization theory as a means of mapping historical change over large expanses of time. Galloway is interested in setting up the technical, cultural and historical actions that lead to the invention and development of computing protocols that function to both enable and control the essence of decentralized internet and network discourse. The specifics of how protocol works are not as essential for the issue under consideration here. Rather, I am referring to his chart “Control Matrix” (Table 3.1, 114-15), which is a shorthand summary/synthesis of how control works (in largely materialist dimensions) in various historical periods. For example, the feudal/early modern period in Europe was characterized–though Galloway provides more examples than I am about to give– by certain disciplinary modes (tithe, tribute), different machines (levels, pulleys), virtues (loyalty), and active threats (armed revolt, sedition).
Our current era, perhaps a later instantiation of postmodernity, is governed by the computer and its associated logics (energy as information and immaterial, discipline as debugging, control as protocol, virtue as pattern and algorithm, all marked by strategies of security and containment across dispersed fields). Galloway continues by explaining how computer protocols have cultural analogs in how decentralized societies are controlled in other, sometimes physical and visible, realms.
My point with all this, without sticking too closely to Galloway’s argument, is that this latest piece of news from Britain is the sort of thing that shows the degree to which periodization theory works. It illustrates, in pretty terrifying terms, how the stuff of dystopic fiction becomes the lifeblood of mundane policy. Control will at once be “invisible” (carried out by machinic code that works without moral judgment, is immaterial, and does not reveal its apparatus), decentralized (it will take place across whole nations, over shifting servers and floating IPs, under constant surveillance from intelligent humans and from pattern-spotting artificial intelligence), and still strangely, almost nostalgically centralized (there will, no doubt, be some menacing building like the Ministry of Information that will invoke physical discipline and massive presence). This is the kind of notice that cannot be buried under the glitz and dazzle of summer movie premieres, professional sports, or Presidential weddings. The future is almost here, and we hardly have the perspective, let alone vocabulary and sense of understanding, to discuss it.
Ahoy, folks! Things have been slightly slow around The Modest Proposal offices as we gear up for another issue! Wanted to point everybody’s attention to a new jazz/improv/free/psych journal that recently began publication. EarTrip’s first issue is MASSIVE–over 200 pages!–and contains some fine writing about a variety of topics. I certainly can’t speak for everyone, as many people neither like nor care about this kind of adventurous music, but for those who want to really broaden their horizons (and start listening to some things that might make them uncomfortable), the suggestions and topics in this magazine are a good place to start. I particularly like “Downtown Music: William Harper” by Daniel Huppatz, which contextualizes one of the central figures of the criminally under-explored New York downtown jazz scene. There is an article about jazz vinyl blogs (a topic that might just pop up in a future issue of The Modest Proposal) and are enough concert reviews to hold you over until your next festival. Also note that the zine can be purchased in a physical copy via Lulu.com, from a link provided on the zine’s blog. Enjoy!
Sir Arthur C. Clarke, CBE, died earlier today in Sri Lanka.
It is far beyond my poor powers to condense an extraordinary 90-year life into a few paragraphs, but I can’t let his life pass without saying something. This man I’ve never met influenced my life too much for me to stay silent. He touched your life too, but you might not realize it; Clarke came up with the idea for geostationary communications satellites, without which our world would be a very different place, to say the least. There are innumerable obituaries that cover the salient facts of his life. Let them; this is not the place for that.
Clarke had a superior grasp of science and technology, and it shone through in all of his work. But he never let that become the sole focus of, or the sole reason for, his writing. He was a humanist, and at his best when writing about humans. Clarke’s world was a place where men and women harnessed science and reason to better themselves and the world around them, always pushing to expand the limits of knowledge.
The infamous Monolith in 2001 is sinister - always working at some hidden purpose that is never fully revealed. It is dark, unknown, and terrifying. But it leads to something wonderful.
Goodbye, Arthur.
One of the Last Arch-Modernists.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, French artist and pioneer of the “new novel” died this past week aged 85. Robbe-Grillet had one of the most maddeningly difficult world-views of the 20th century. His cold prose, disdain for conventional narrative structure, and emphasis on experiential memory set his work part from even his most similar contemporaries. Though still somewhat obscure to the United States, Robbe-Grillet maintained a dedicated following (one hesitates to call it a “cult” following, since much of what usually constitutes such fandom could hardly be translated to his target audience) in Europe. His work was especially privileged by the New York intelligentsia of the 1950s and 1960s. 
Robbe-Grillet was one of the darlings of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review. My first encounter with his work was through the Alain Resnais film Last Year at Marienbad (1962). At this time, I was slowly working my way through the major films of the “French New Wave” of the late 1950s and early 1960s. My early exposure had been to the energetic, youthful movies of this type of film making. Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and Jean-Luc Goddard’s Breathless (1960) were the ur-texts: stylistically bold, partially-autobiographical, and awash in the American influences of post-WWII Europe. That said, I was almost wholly unprepared for Last Year at Marienbad, which largely represents the opposite end of the tendency. Here, high modernism is obscurity. Europe remains the realm of the detached aristocracy. Obtuse art, deadening leisure and shear brooding prove an equally mesmerizing, which is to say “wholly appropriate,” response to the horror of life after Hitler and the Holocaust as did youth, America, and playful revolt.
Last Year at Marienbad was an international success - art film a la lettre - and it remains a core text of classes on European Cinema. Robbe-Grillet was a director as well, helming many shorts and a few features (the most readily available of which is La Belle Captive [1983]). As compared to his literary texts, his film work begs re-distribution, re-appraisal, and general re-discovery.
I am slightly less familiar with Robbe-Grillet the writer, as many of his texts are not easy to come-by in English translation. My personal encounter with that aspect of his work is almost solely with Snapshots (originally 1962). This collection of pieces - not stories, per se, but analytical situations - is done as non-narrative prose. Robbe-Grillet furnishes absolutely precise descriptions of objects and spaces. Little more. This experimental approach totally befits the structuralist turn in modernist thought and proves that analytical writing had literary value beyond the endless passages of Proust.
I am angry at myself for only re-assessing the great modernists (Antonioni and Bergman included) at their times of death. The fact that this entire generation is now quite old means that the living voice of the most prominent artists, critics, and writers of the 1950s and 1960s does not have all that long to go.
A sound clip of Jealousy from UbuWeb.
At risk of merely propagating other’s ideas instead of making novel contributions to the blogosphere, I recommend everyone reading this short piece from Paul Krugman regarding his disillusionment with the Obama campaign.
While some take a relatively dispassionate view of criticism (essentially that criticism is jaded and interchangeable, because those who “can’t” spend their time criticizing others out of childish envy), I’ve always subscribed to the notion that the critic shows as much individuation as the artist. They are able to attain a certain level of singularity, consistent thought, and personal style over a period time. In the 1950s and 1960s, critics attached to specific papers, magazines, or broadcast programs achieved superstar levels of notoriety, success, or just plain admiration. At one point in public discourse around theater, it was well known that Kenneth Tynan was lead critic for The Observer, meaning that man and periodical were nearly inseparable, that his views on a production could act as a personal stand-in for the ideology of his paper, the type of audience that could expect to like or dislike a particular play, or even the sort of sense of humor that a work could espouse. Criticism today still does this, to an extent. When most people cite a review, they say “The Washington Post liked such and such,” rather than the slightly more awkward “Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post liked such and such.” The paper itself (as a material thing or institutional body) did not like the work of art, but rather the person representing the paper, its ideology, and the general orientation of its readership. So reading and thinking about criticism in this professional way still has meaning, but I very much feel that the connotations of who and what a particular critic stand for, and their rootedness to a particular outlet, have faded in recent years. Very few of us remember that John Simon was theater critic for New York magazine for over 35 years - 30 years ago, however, reading his reviews would either be enough to make you swoon or flee in terror.
Bearing that in mind, this notice mentions that a very large circulation newspaper recently fired its full-time film critic, thus becoming the first large American newspaper to do so. The Detroit Free Press no longer employs, supports, or gives space to Terry Lawson. What does this mean? For starts, the people of Detroit - people who are geographically located in a place, a unique place with its own view of the world, local businesses, patterns of weather, etc - no longer have a “local” voice for cinematic matters. In short, people in Detroit do not have a personality, rooted in place, to provide reviews, criticism, and comment on recent films. To some, this does not matter. After all, it is Detroit…isn’t cultural decline their national pass time? (No, it is not, but this could be a sign of more to come). Others might argue that internet critics in and around the Detroit area could fill the gap. While this could be true, it might be hard for people in Detroit to find someone on the internet who could potentially be read by so many people, at the same time…in short, for their to be a consensus discourse around a particular critic and their criticism. Though criticism is often considered a solitary thing done at night, quietly, and in portentous monologue, it could more fairly be viewed in its cultural connectivity. Criticism forges (or breaks, or refines) opinions, opinions which percolate to the water cooler, the line in the grocery store, the cocktail party, the classroom, or the tennis court. With the disappearance of a widely read voice, that little bit of potential cultural discourse is gone.
Like democracy, criticism thrives on the regional level before the national. Without voices spread across the country, writing for potentially big audiences in a visible way, the types of cultural products that slide down to us consumers (potentially nasty products made on the assembly line by philistines and their formulas) are ever-limited. Tempers need to flair, with disagreements from Albuquerque to Mt. Zion, in order for art to be worth its salt.
The second season of the online sci-fi serial The House Between is now online. To learn more and view each episode from season one, visit the official website. Myself and webmaster Bobby worked on this show, as jack-of-all-trades on the technical side and even moonlighting as actors in later episodes.
A new blog on science/evidence based medicine caught my eye. It is written mostly, if not completely, by practicing doctors - most of them seem to be academic researchers. They plan to have a daily entry reviewing the evidence for some medical topic or debunking a medical modality that is not supported by scientific evidence. As someone who cares about science and health, but who is not well-versed in medicine, a blog such as this can be useful in hearing expert opinion on which advertised claims are based on solid evidence and which are not. Thus far, the blog’s authors have been highly critical of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). And deservedly so! They do a really great job at pointing out the logical fallacies of and lack/distortion of evidence for CAM. My primary complaint is that the tirades against, say, homeopathy can become a bit tiresome and redundant. I can understand that ‘doctors’ using water as a treatment (which is what homeopathy is) can be infuriating, but do we need a weekly update on it? I hope that eventually they will focus more on recent medical claims close to the border of acceptance. That is, potentially beneficial medicine that has only recently been studied, but maybe isn’t quite there in terms of scientific evidence. Such posts could highlights medicine that is likely to be important in the near future and maybe help sort out hype from reality. In any case, I look forward to some insightful analysis of medical science.