Author Archives: met

Zombies and the Moral Universe

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In my last post I ended up talking about invective. I will wend my way back to invective. Stay with me.

We live with zombies. Zombies are the betes noire of our times because they are a lurching confusion of categories; zombies are neither natural or human but they partake of the qualities of both.

Nature is impersonal. When Natural disasters strike (earthquakes,tornadoes, flash floods), they affect good people and bad people. Nobody “gets what they deserve” because Nature makes no moral distinctions. Nature simply and implacably does what it must do.

Zombies were human once. They don’t have feelings, they do not communicate, they are ugly and they are a contagion. Short of eating us tartare, they can also infect us with their corruption. We are are only a bite away from becoming mindless flesheaters ourselves. But what makes them truly frightening is that zombies do not see us “normals” as subjects; as thinking, feeling moral entities that deserve to live. We are merely edible objects and they are insatiable and implacable.

Zombies, although quasi-human in appearance, no longer live in our moral human universe. The foundational precept of human morality (tip of the hat to Immanuel Kant) is that we must treat other people as subjects not as objects. Subjects think and feel. Although we humans are subsumed (indifferently) by the same Laws of Nature that rule all creatures, we are also naturally endowed with the ability to think and create the moral universe in which we live. We take for granted that people will stop at stoplights; that we will not be subjected to random assaults by strangers. We assume that other people are going about their business based on ideas in their heads and will generally treat us as they expect to be treated (exceptions prove the rule).

Terrorists who set off bombs and kill innocent people are also zombies. They treat other humans as objects; as means to their religious/political ends. They have demonized or dehumanized those who do not think exactly as they do. In a very real sense, They are not killing people like themselves. How do people get like that? When in the course of his usual fulminations, Rush Limbaugh calls a Georgetown University co-ed a “whore” because she disagrees with him, most people recognize that strong beliefs have taken someone “over the line”.

When political discourse turns to invective, we become zombies.

Wine of the Month

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Roccofiore 2009 Prova d'Autore

Roccofiore 2009 Prova d’Autore

I pour a lot of wine for people. It doesn’t matter whether you drink Premier Cru or plonk, this wine -Roccofiore’s 2009 Prova d’Autore- makes almost everyone’s eyes widen in appreciation. The 2009 “Artist’s Proof” is a blend of Sangiovese (30%), Sagrantino (30%) and Montepulciano (40%). The red berry and dark cherry fruit simply suffuses the mouth and yet it is nicely structured with acidity and oak. It illumininates the mouth today and will only get better if you can keep your hands off of it for a couple of years. It retails in the US for between $26 and $30. Sorry for the terrible photo.
If you taste this wine and check out Roccofiore’s website, a visit to Umbria will rocket to the top of your bucket list.

What’s the point?

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Courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

Courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

When the topic of climate change comes up, I think a lot of people hear an interior monologue something like this:

(Okay, Okay, it’s true…) But Jesus Christ, what the f**k you expect me to do about it? I give money to the good guys, I recycle, I’m thinking about buying a Prius (when they get a little more HP). I don’t mind paying taxes. I can embrace the concept of putting the brakes on our national gluttony but…just how much are we talking here? I know it’s not all about me but I gotta ask… I mean I have obligations; a mortgage; kids that need private school so they won’t be (forced to be) baristas. Yeah, yeah climate change is a bad thing. Check. Text me when you’ve got a plan that other people will buy. In the meantime, it gives me a headache.

What do I feel I “know”? I feel that I know that our ancestors began changing our collective carbon footprint 125,000 years ago when they began using fire and that the archaeological record is replete with examples of localized environmental collapses. I owe this to having read books (most notably Jared Diamond). I have seen pictures of the “New Northwest Passage” but I have never been to the Arctic. I have seen “before” and “after” pictures of disappearing glaciers I have never visited. In years past I noted that coral reefs closer to large concentrations of people (as off much of the Hawaiian Islands) are dull and lifeless compared to the more remote reefs of Fiji. I read the climate statistics. I find them compelling as statistics but I honestly cannot connect them to my own bodily experiences. Weather is variable. I know that we are a species capable of fouling our own nest because I remember when the 34 square miles of Lake Washington in Seattle was a toilet bowl. I remember when the city taxed itself to clean the lake that I swim in now.

What I feel I “know” is a combination of my limited personal experience and what I have accepted from authority. People who deny climate change come to their “knowledge” the same way I do. They marry their own experience with other information they take from (some other) authority. So what’s my point with all this?

My point is that in deconstructing my own “knowledge” about climate change I can recognize that the people with whom I might disagree have arrived at their “knowledge” just as I have. They are not stupid, venal and/or immoral. If there is to be discourse on this topic, invective will not get us there.

I believe in less invective. More later.

Breath, Courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

Breath, Courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

Do we all deny climate change? continued

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Papoose Courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

Papoose Courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt

We have all heard variations on these responses to the notion of global warming.

(If it’s true…) It’s not MY fault.
We didn’t ask to be born into this modern world. While we’re just trying to live our lives we’re told that with every breath we take (much less every mile we drive) we are causing a disaster.

(If it’s true…) It’s not JUST my fault.
Hey, we can’t be the only guilty parties. All human beings who have preceded us and all those humans who currently live other lives elsewhere are also agents of destruction. These ancestral and geographical “others”, do they dilute our own sense of agency (and urgency)? Hey, my daddy did it and look at what the Chinese are doing! These indicted co-conspirators do not lessen our own culpability but they do make the problem seem more intractable and the solution more complex; more time and resource consuming than we are able think about.

(If it’s true…) It’s hard to believe. Climate change is not affecting me. I don’t feel like a victim of climate change, I don’t know any victims of climate change now and I won’t be here to know any future victims (if there are any). Some people (scientists) are merely telling us what they think will happen. These scientists are mercurial to say the least. Fifty years ago, the atom was the smallest particle. Maybe some property of the Earth’s systems we don’t yet fully understand will kick in and mitigate the situation. If we can’t really perceive any change, what do we (you and I living in this time and place) gain by perseverating over the future and denying ourselves the creature comforts. I should change my lifestyle so a few rich assholes don’t lose their beach front property?

We don’t really feel the nasty point of the climate knife sawing away at us. The disaster is still largely imagined. Weather is, after all, variable. Are we really the frogs in the pot oblivious to the incremental rise in temperature?

Do we all deny climate change? pt. 3

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Another more nuanced rejection of climate change goes a little like this:
Why should I believe it’s true ?Why should we trust “climate scientists” any more than we can trust “nutrition scientists” who have a different “consensus” on cholesterol every ten years? Scientists tell us that everything we like is carcinogenic and that can’t be true. Scientists tell us that the Earth is billions of years old and that humans have evolved from simpler creatures but the person at the pulpit of my church says that the Bible has the right answer on these issues. And, guess who is going to tell each of us what we have to do to fix this climate “problem”? Scientists and people who think all the answers are found in science.

This is a rejection of the message and the messengers.

I don’t think climate change denialists are stupid and I don’t think they have closed their ears to truth. I think that they apperceive the consequences of NOT denying climate change.

To accept the idea of anthropogenic climate change is to accept the notion that each and every one of us are the agents causing planet wide trauma. Our lives as we are now living them are (at the very least) degrading the world our grandchildren and their children will experience. Most daily activities we undertake as Americans add to our “carbon footprint” and thereby contribute to the unfolding disaster. If we believe in climate change, that belief opens the door for all of us to be more moral than we ever imagined because every action we take will ramify and affect billions of other human beings.

When Congressman Steve King recently remarked that “It (climate change) is not proven, it’s not science. It’s more of a religion than a science,” his subtext says it all. King knows that belief in global warming entails a new morality that will change the moral calculus of everyday living. It feels to him, not incorrectly, like a new religion. This new “religion” is not issuing from a sacred text or the pulpit but from the heart of the secular order from scientists whose values he believes differ from his own.

Denialists do apprehend the moral implications of climate change and I think they are highly sensitive to the political implications. More on that next time.

Do we all deny climate change? pt.2

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More on Science & Epistemic Closure
Philosophers can argue about the ontological status of what scientists study; i.e. what is reality? You can’t see a quark any more than you can see a thought. Is one more “real” than the other? I subscribe to Thomas Kuhn’s ontological punt that – roughly rendered – science is the human enterprise that allows us to ask better and better questions of the world we experience. Since Anton van Leeuvenhoek first saw little critters swimming under his microscope, science has asked better and better questions about the microbial world. We have modern medicine as a result.

Science is a social activity. Scientists are humans who understand that it is the synergy of all their collective work that expands our species’ knowledge base. This collective work proceeds because scientists endeavor to abide by (socially constructed) standards of intellectual rigor, transparency and replicability. As a social activity they provide the best example of why human beings hold dominion on this planet; we are social, cooperative beings who, together, create meaning.

I try not to feel morally superior to people who make earlier stops on the epistemological trail, but I place a high value on the social process we call “science” and what it has brought humanity.

I do accept what science is telling us now; we are warming the planet.But I am not sure my own response to this “knowledge” is morally much different than a denialist’s response might be.

More to follow.

Do we all deny climate change? pt. 1

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Why do conservative, (and particularly Christian) Republican Americans feel a need to deny climate change? From where does this (to my way of thinking) willful denial of reality spring?

I personally believe that climate change is a big problem but I am not sure my own personal stance differs in any great degree from that of many Americans who are more skeptical than I am.

There are really only a few types of responses to the idea of man-made climate change. Here is one: “It’s not true because God made us in his image and gave us Nature as our realm to rule.” There is sliver of the population that might have a response like this. There are a number of members of Congress who have expressed such views. There is probably no amount of fact-wielding that would change this response.  But, a word here about “epistemic closure”: Julian Sanchez has used the term to describe the fact that many conservatives seem to dwell in a world that is defined by belief systems and that they seem to be impervious to empirical evidence that does not confirm their a priori beliefs. Now, the one thing that most philosophers would agree upon is that none of us sits “on high” and wields the scalpel of Objective Truth. What any of us “knows” is an overdetermined product of our personal, cultural and social experience. Epistemology has its devotees but for most of us it’s a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion of passageways to infinite regressions (What do you know, how do you know it? Is there a single piece of absolute “knowledge” that does not depend upon another piece of arguably unreliable knowledge or a belief system?) You can think long and hard about theses issues, and you can not think about them. William James’ pragmatic answer gets to the heart of the matter:

The philosopher’s logical tranquility is thus in essence no other than the boors’. They differ only as to the point at which each refuses to let further considerations upset the absoluteness of the data he assumes.

In other words, each of us will find the place of comfort where skepticism stops and confirmation bias takes over.

Whitsitt 11-25-12

Image courtesy of L.J. Whitsitt