from the february 2009 issue of harper's magazine.
By chance, of course
By Wendell Berry. His essay “Faustian Economics”appeared in the May issue of Harper’s Magazine.
while attending the annual convocation of cause theorists and bigbangists at the local provincial research university, the mad farmer intercedes from the back row
“Chance” is a poor word among
the mazes of causes and effects, the last
stand of these all-explainers who,
backed up to the first and final Why,
reply, “By chance, of course!” As if
that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.
In the beginning something by chance
existed that would bang and by chance
it banged, obedient to the by-chance
previously existing laws of existence
and banging, from which the rest proceeds
by logic of cause and effect also
previously existing by chance? Well,
when all that happened who was there?
Did the chance that made the bang then make
the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?
Prove to me that chance did ever
make a sycamore tree, a yellow-
throated warbler nesting and singing
high up among the white limbs
and the golden leaf-light, and a man
to love the tree, the bird, the song
his life long, and by his love to save
them, so far, from all the machines.
By chance? Prove it, then, and I
by chance will kiss your ass.
Showing posts with label harpers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label harpers. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Friday, May 23, 2008
our phony economy
this was a great bit in Harper's Magazine on what should be the true measure of GDP.
http://peakwatch.typepad.com/Our_Phony_Economy.pdf
(an excerpt from the beginning...)
OUR PHONY ECONOMY
By Jonathan Rowe, from testimony delivered March 12 before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce. Rowe is codirector of West Marin Commons, a community-organizing group in California.
Suppose that the head of a federal agency came before this committee and reported with pride that agency employees had burned 10 percent more calories at work last year than they did the year before. Not only that-they had spent 10 percent more money too. I have a feeling you would want to know more. What were these employees doing when they burned those calories? What did they spend that money on? Most important, what were the results? Expenditure is a means, not an end, and to assess the health of an agency, or system, you need to know what it has accomplished, not just how much motion it has generated and money it has spent. The point seems obvious, yet Congress ignores it every day when it talks about "the economy." The administration and the media do it, too. Every time you say that "the economy" is up, or that you want to "stimulate" it, you are urging more expenditure and motion without regard to what that expenditure is and what it might accomplish, and without regard to what it might crowd out or displace in the process.
That term "the economy": what it means, in practice, is the Gross Domestic Product-a big statistical pot that includes all the money spent in a given period of time. If the pot is bigger than it was the previous quarter, or year, then you cheer. If it isn't bigger, or bigger enough, then you call Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke up here and ask him to do some explaining. The what of the economy makes no difference in these councils. It never seems to come up. The money in the big pot could be going to cancer treatments or casinos, violent video games or usurious credit-card rates. It could go toward the $9 billion or so that Americans spend on gas they burn while they sit in traffic, or the billion plus that goes to such drugs as Ritalin and Prozac that schools are stuffing into kids to keep them quiet in class. The money could be the $20 billion or so that Americans spend on divorce lawyers each year, or the $41 billion on pets, or the $5 billion on identity theft, or the billions more spent to repair property damage caused by environmental pollution. The money in the pot could betoken social and environmental breakdown-misery and distress of all kinds. It makes no difference. You don't ask. All you want to know is the total amount, which is the GDP. So long as it is growing then everything is fine.
http://peakwatch.typepad.com/Our_Phony_Economy.pdf
(an excerpt from the beginning...)
OUR PHONY ECONOMY
By Jonathan Rowe, from testimony delivered March 12 before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce. Rowe is codirector of West Marin Commons, a community-organizing group in California.
Suppose that the head of a federal agency came before this committee and reported with pride that agency employees had burned 10 percent more calories at work last year than they did the year before. Not only that-they had spent 10 percent more money too. I have a feeling you would want to know more. What were these employees doing when they burned those calories? What did they spend that money on? Most important, what were the results? Expenditure is a means, not an end, and to assess the health of an agency, or system, you need to know what it has accomplished, not just how much motion it has generated and money it has spent. The point seems obvious, yet Congress ignores it every day when it talks about "the economy." The administration and the media do it, too. Every time you say that "the economy" is up, or that you want to "stimulate" it, you are urging more expenditure and motion without regard to what that expenditure is and what it might accomplish, and without regard to what it might crowd out or displace in the process.
That term "the economy": what it means, in practice, is the Gross Domestic Product-a big statistical pot that includes all the money spent in a given period of time. If the pot is bigger than it was the previous quarter, or year, then you cheer. If it isn't bigger, or bigger enough, then you call Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke up here and ask him to do some explaining. The what of the economy makes no difference in these councils. It never seems to come up. The money in the big pot could be going to cancer treatments or casinos, violent video games or usurious credit-card rates. It could go toward the $9 billion or so that Americans spend on gas they burn while they sit in traffic, or the billion plus that goes to such drugs as Ritalin and Prozac that schools are stuffing into kids to keep them quiet in class. The money could be the $20 billion or so that Americans spend on divorce lawyers each year, or the $41 billion on pets, or the $5 billion on identity theft, or the billions more spent to repair property damage caused by environmental pollution. The money in the pot could betoken social and environmental breakdown-misery and distress of all kinds. It makes no difference. You don't ask. All you want to know is the total amount, which is the GDP. So long as it is growing then everything is fine.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
artificial life
from "findings," harper's magazine, april 2008:
american scientists artificially reproduced the dna of a venereal-disease bacterium and expected to use the technique to create artificial life within ten years.
american scientists artificially reproduced the dna of a venereal-disease bacterium and expected to use the technique to create artificial life within ten years.
Friday, February 29, 2008
man clones himself
from harper's, march 2008, pg. 96 "findings":
japanese scientists unvelied a robot that plays the violin, a robot that solves rubik's cubes, a robot that recognizes itself in a mirror, a robot snoplow that eats snow and excretes ice bricks, a robot exoskeleton that can be worn be elderly farmers, and a robot that walks at the command of a monkey on a treadmill in north carolina.
a california scientist used skin cells to create embryonic clones of himself.
japanese scientists unvelied a robot that plays the violin, a robot that solves rubik's cubes, a robot that recognizes itself in a mirror, a robot snoplow that eats snow and excretes ice bricks, a robot exoskeleton that can be worn be elderly farmers, and a robot that walks at the command of a monkey on a treadmill in north carolina.
a california scientist used skin cells to create embryonic clones of himself.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
more on evolutionary extinction
from harper's (magazine), june 2007, pg. 96, "findings":
scientists in nevada created a sheep-human hybrid that is about 15 percent human; other researchers successfully grew sperm from human bone marrow, which could theoretically lead to a future in which pairs of lesbian mothers can produce their own daughters without the intervention of a male.
roboticists were working hard to create robots that will interact "rhythmically" with humans.
from harper's, april 2007, pg. 108, "findings":
a woman with a bionic arm can now sense her missing fingers in her chest.
scientists in nevada created a sheep-human hybrid that is about 15 percent human; other researchers successfully grew sperm from human bone marrow, which could theoretically lead to a future in which pairs of lesbian mothers can produce their own daughters without the intervention of a male.
roboticists were working hard to create robots that will interact "rhythmically" with humans.
from harper's, april 2007, pg. 108, "findings":
a woman with a bionic arm can now sense her missing fingers in her chest.
Monday, December 17, 2007
implants
percentage of americans who say they are willing to have an internet-access device implanted in their brains: 10
(from harpers index, january 2008 issue)
(from harpers index, january 2008 issue)
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
god has been cloned
i read this in Harper's Magazine and it changed my life, giving me my new fascination with evolutionary extinction and cloning, and i further took it toward it's natural conclusion of robots, androids and nanotechnology.
GOD HAS BEEN CLONED..:
(From a book of interviews between Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles, Exiles from Dialogue, to be published next month by Polity. Baudrillard, who died in March, was the author of more than fifty works of philosophy and criticism, including
Simulacra and Simulation. Noailles is a philosopher and journalist. Translated from the French by Chris Turner.)
ENRIQUE VALIENTE NOAILLES: You say there's sometimes a simultaneous upsurge of good and evil – that combating evil leads to reactivating it.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD: You've only to take the "zero deaths" formula, a basic concept of the security order. It's clear that this equates mathematically to "zero lives." By warding off death at all costs (burdensome medical treatment, genetics, cloning), we're being turned, through security, into living dead. On the pretext of immortality, we're moving toward extermination. It's the destiny of maximum good, of absolute happiness, to lead to a zero sum. Illusion – that is, evil – is vital. When you exchange this vital illusion for the unconditional promotion of good, then you're heading for a blowback from the accursed share. This is how things are getting better and better yet, at the same time, worse and worse.
NOAILLES: History might be an attempt to annihilate one part of the duality.
BAUDRILLARD: Human beings can't bear this duality either in the world or in themselves. They can't bear failing the world by their very existence, nor the world failing them. They've sown disorder everywhere, and in wishing to perfect the world, they end up failing themselves. Self-hatred fuels the whole technological effort to make the world over anew. It's on this failing of existence that all religions thrive. You have to pay. In the past, it was God who took the reprisals; now we do it. We have undertaken to inflict the worst on ourselves, and to engineer our disappearance in an extremely complex and sophisticated way, in order to restore the world to the pure state it was in before we were in it.
NOAILLES: Perhaps the Last Judgment has taken place, and we're carrying out the punishment.
BAUDRILLARD: A fine metaphysical hypothesis, except that this self-hatred is a turn taken by Western subjectivity, and also one it's currently imposing on the rest of the world. This nihilism begins with Romanticism, but it has now become a major undertaking, an enterprise of self-immolation by technology against a background of obscure resentment at the evil spirit that's dragging us into it. So depending on how you see it, it can be taken as a challenge in suicidal form or as the enactment, as you said, of God's judgment.
NOAlLLES: What makes it look more like a punishment being carried out than a suicide is that it's taking place in slow motion.
BAUDRILLARD: And cloning can be said to be a slow-motion suicide – not a sudden disappearance but an innovative form of extinction of the species by doubling. The obliteration of something by that selfsame thing is the definition of suicide.
NOAILLES: This could also be a repetition of the original act: in the same way as we received it, giving the world over to another species, handing on the torch. We can't do any more with it, so over to you!
BAUDRILLARD: It's a way of being rid of the problem, of relieving ourselves of the responsibility by devolving it to another – artificial species; a way of telling God, "Sort it out with them!" But that's just a dream. One question remains: Isn't the process of artificial perpetuation of the species – which runs counter to evolution – part of evolution? "Natural" evolution wants species to disappear. It isn't just a biological fact that every species and every individual wishes both to survive and at the same time to disappear. It isn't just that it's destined to disappear but that it wants to, by another kind of will, and does all it can to do so. Human beings are opting to break that rule today by aiming for immortality, through cloning and many other things. But aren't they actually obeying the same rule or even bringing about an accelerated disappearance? It might be an opportunity for the human race, by putting a world of clones into orbit, to recover its original form, but God will be forced to clone himself too! It would take a clone-God to manage a world of clones.
NOAILLES: Nietzsche's madman, who went looking for God with a lantern in the daytime, would run off horrified, shouting, "God has been cloned!" And if we've materialized the kingdom of God in this world, we've created an immanence with all the tools of transcendence, including salvation and damnation. If what Saint Thomas Aquinas cruelly points out is true-"So that the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly, they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell"-it is perhaps this deep delight in the misfortune of others that's the engine of the duplication.
BAUDRILLARD: But we're already in this artificial world. We've already become clones here and now. We've already exchanged transcendence for the law of DNA. The moral law, Kant's law, the one that was written in the starry sky and in man's inner world, is now inscribed in the genetic code. There's no ideal site of consciousness any longer. And if in the past we could symbolically exchange this world with God under the sign of a moral law we'd invented, we can't exchange it for anything any longer, except the spectral universe that awaits us. Even in the economic field, the field of exchange par excellence and of value, we're beginning to realize, as generalized speculation takes over, that it's the nothing that circulates. And this is why things are going faster and faster, no longer being hampered by either the moral law or the law of value. There's obviously an extraordinary fragility in this, which shows up in the perpetual crisis of the economic and political spheres. But there's a complicity in this exchange of the nothing, a deep complicity that has a bright future because it's a collusion between criminals, between accomplices in the perfect crime. There will no longer be anyone to say the emperor has no clothes, no longer anyone to betray the fact that all this generalized exchange is based on nothing and that it can generalize itself only on the basis of the nothing. If this were revealed, it would be the apocalypse in the literal sense, and we would stand before the nothing as a fait accompli.
GOD HAS BEEN CLONED..:
(From a book of interviews between Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles, Exiles from Dialogue, to be published next month by Polity. Baudrillard, who died in March, was the author of more than fifty works of philosophy and criticism, including
Simulacra and Simulation. Noailles is a philosopher and journalist. Translated from the French by Chris Turner.)
ENRIQUE VALIENTE NOAILLES: You say there's sometimes a simultaneous upsurge of good and evil – that combating evil leads to reactivating it.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD: You've only to take the "zero deaths" formula, a basic concept of the security order. It's clear that this equates mathematically to "zero lives." By warding off death at all costs (burdensome medical treatment, genetics, cloning), we're being turned, through security, into living dead. On the pretext of immortality, we're moving toward extermination. It's the destiny of maximum good, of absolute happiness, to lead to a zero sum. Illusion – that is, evil – is vital. When you exchange this vital illusion for the unconditional promotion of good, then you're heading for a blowback from the accursed share. This is how things are getting better and better yet, at the same time, worse and worse.
NOAILLES: History might be an attempt to annihilate one part of the duality.
BAUDRILLARD: Human beings can't bear this duality either in the world or in themselves. They can't bear failing the world by their very existence, nor the world failing them. They've sown disorder everywhere, and in wishing to perfect the world, they end up failing themselves. Self-hatred fuels the whole technological effort to make the world over anew. It's on this failing of existence that all religions thrive. You have to pay. In the past, it was God who took the reprisals; now we do it. We have undertaken to inflict the worst on ourselves, and to engineer our disappearance in an extremely complex and sophisticated way, in order to restore the world to the pure state it was in before we were in it.
NOAILLES: Perhaps the Last Judgment has taken place, and we're carrying out the punishment.
BAUDRILLARD: A fine metaphysical hypothesis, except that this self-hatred is a turn taken by Western subjectivity, and also one it's currently imposing on the rest of the world. This nihilism begins with Romanticism, but it has now become a major undertaking, an enterprise of self-immolation by technology against a background of obscure resentment at the evil spirit that's dragging us into it. So depending on how you see it, it can be taken as a challenge in suicidal form or as the enactment, as you said, of God's judgment.
NOAlLLES: What makes it look more like a punishment being carried out than a suicide is that it's taking place in slow motion.
BAUDRILLARD: And cloning can be said to be a slow-motion suicide – not a sudden disappearance but an innovative form of extinction of the species by doubling. The obliteration of something by that selfsame thing is the definition of suicide.
NOAILLES: This could also be a repetition of the original act: in the same way as we received it, giving the world over to another species, handing on the torch. We can't do any more with it, so over to you!
BAUDRILLARD: It's a way of being rid of the problem, of relieving ourselves of the responsibility by devolving it to another – artificial species; a way of telling God, "Sort it out with them!" But that's just a dream. One question remains: Isn't the process of artificial perpetuation of the species – which runs counter to evolution – part of evolution? "Natural" evolution wants species to disappear. It isn't just a biological fact that every species and every individual wishes both to survive and at the same time to disappear. It isn't just that it's destined to disappear but that it wants to, by another kind of will, and does all it can to do so. Human beings are opting to break that rule today by aiming for immortality, through cloning and many other things. But aren't they actually obeying the same rule or even bringing about an accelerated disappearance? It might be an opportunity for the human race, by putting a world of clones into orbit, to recover its original form, but God will be forced to clone himself too! It would take a clone-God to manage a world of clones.
NOAILLES: Nietzsche's madman, who went looking for God with a lantern in the daytime, would run off horrified, shouting, "God has been cloned!" And if we've materialized the kingdom of God in this world, we've created an immanence with all the tools of transcendence, including salvation and damnation. If what Saint Thomas Aquinas cruelly points out is true-"So that the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly, they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell"-it is perhaps this deep delight in the misfortune of others that's the engine of the duplication.
BAUDRILLARD: But we're already in this artificial world. We've already become clones here and now. We've already exchanged transcendence for the law of DNA. The moral law, Kant's law, the one that was written in the starry sky and in man's inner world, is now inscribed in the genetic code. There's no ideal site of consciousness any longer. And if in the past we could symbolically exchange this world with God under the sign of a moral law we'd invented, we can't exchange it for anything any longer, except the spectral universe that awaits us. Even in the economic field, the field of exchange par excellence and of value, we're beginning to realize, as generalized speculation takes over, that it's the nothing that circulates. And this is why things are going faster and faster, no longer being hampered by either the moral law or the law of value. There's obviously an extraordinary fragility in this, which shows up in the perpetual crisis of the economic and political spheres. But there's a complicity in this exchange of the nothing, a deep complicity that has a bright future because it's a collusion between criminals, between accomplices in the perfect crime. There will no longer be anyone to say the emperor has no clothes, no longer anyone to betray the fact that all this generalized exchange is based on nothing and that it can generalize itself only on the basis of the nothing. If this were revealed, it would be the apocalypse in the literal sense, and we would stand before the nothing as a fait accompli.
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