Stan, as usual, I'm mostly in agreement with your writing. But it sounds to me as if your summary of the phenomenon of "eugenics" partakes of some serious flaws, and that you've overlooked some important points in your framing.
Yes, the Eugenics movement of the early 20th century was fatally flawed by racism. The proponents weren't even aware of DNA heritability at that point (which is NOT to say that an awareness of the role of DNA has led to the dismantling of racism, although logic and knowledge increase indicates that modern genetics leads in the direction of dismantling scientific racism, rather than verifying the concept.) The abuses of power that marked early Eugenic efforts- and the cold rationality that justified them- don't amount to a refutation of the entire principle.
My reading of history indicates that eugenic principles are nothing new, and there isn't anything abnormal about the human recognition of them, and nothing inhumane or forbiddingly presumptuous about conscious endeavors to pursue their improvement. The effort certainly isn't unnatural- some amount of eugenic activity had to have been performed from the outset of human society at the level of the smallest human groups. It's a natural reality that some infants were born too disabled for the group to care for; they were abandoned. The absence of physical confirmation of the practice enables modern humans to refrain from reflecting on it, but the logic is irrefutable; infanticide of disabled infants had to have been common practice. Exceptions to that rule have on rare occasions been found in the archaeological record (the paleoarchaeological record on any paleolithic human practice is threadbare and rudimentary, and is likely to remain so). But the fact that there are traces of evidence that sometimes disabled offspring received nurturing and care--as much as humanly possible--does not discredit the reality that most often that level of care was humanly impossible. And it's a simple physical fact that the fitness of the species had to have been increased as a result.
Moreover, I'd argue that most of the conventions of human marriage, inheritance, and family structure evolved as a eugenic effort. Right up to the modern era in the affluent and technologically advanced West--where choices about marriage are left to individual choice first and foremost, as a principle supported by law--improved fitness of offspring is a primary consideration for fertile couples. That's eugenics, too- a nonauthoritarian and informal sort of eugenics, but eugenics nonetheless. The modern system of individual adults as free agents seeking out other free agents with whom to reproduce is also arguably quite novel, and still far from universally accepted in contemporary human societies. Dowry, bride price, arranged marriage, child marriage, clan outbreeding, marriage for the purpose of political alliance, assortative mating on the basis of educational pedigree- all of those conventions partake of eugenic considerations! Eugenics is arguably the foundational purpose of all of them. As is the historic practice of inbreeding, as a conscious effort by aristocracies and monarchical dynasties. The modern discouragement of that practice- traditional for some centuries at the top reaches of European society, as well as in the top social stratum of civilizations going back to the Egyptians,and before- is also due to modern eugenic considerations; once it was observed that close-kinship marriage and inbred reproduction had dysgenic effects that outweighed any perceived eugenic benefit, it fell out of favor right away.
The human reverence for preserving human life- including the most helpless (and all human infants are born helpless)- has also long marked human history. That priority has traditionally provided the principal motivation for the development of modern medical technologies. And yes, there is such a thing as authentic medical progress: it's not only improved the duration and quality of life for the most genetically and materially advantaged of us, it's led to dramatic improvements for a much wider population, all over the planet. The fact that the advances haven't yet been universalized says nothing about the intrinsic benefits of their invention, or about their potential to be universalized eventually.
As a practical inevitability, those developments have also led to new challenges- including the conundrum that modern medical technology has played a pivotal role in foregrounding the ethical dilemmas related to abortion, and its elevation to prominence as a legal-political matter. I'm neither particularly knowledgeable or at all comfortable with discussing the history of infant survivability and prognosis for children born with gravely disabling or incapacitating conditions in former eras, but I think I can state with confidence that many ethical dilemmas of the present day were obviated by the stark reality that nature took its course with the workings of early mortality- often very early mortality. Whereas nowadays, medical technology is often utilized to the utmost to preserve newborn life under conditions that would not have been survivable for most of human history. This practical reality leaves characterizations that focus on modern medicine as is if one of its implicit missions is to act as an abortion factory in heedless pursuit of inhumane Eugenic ideas as a narrative very close to calumny.
Which is to say that I don't find any insight to be derived from an interpretation like this one:
"Echoing through this contrast between modern and premodern are Jean Bodin and Francis Bacon, advocating instrumental order in the face of a female nature’s chaos and disorder, now projected onto primitive peoples and the “unfit.” Nature itself must be conquered, and in this guise, we observe the eternal re-emergence of masculinity constructed as conquest..."
Sorry, Stan. That's facile sentimentality, feminist and pro-ecological tropes notwithstanding. In the course of our existence and spread on this planet at a species, "female nature" taking its ordained course included, as part of its holistic workings, a staggering infant mortality rate. Infirmity and disabilities were summarily culled, by the workings of "female nature", undisturbed by the power of human intelligence that led to the development of the disciplined craft of medicine and the empirical/scientific discipline of modern medicine and technology. I'm aware that there are features of the human condition that present intractable obstacles to any tech remedy, or any presumption of "progress" toward some idealized, perfected end state. But if there's no such thing as "human progress"- in any realm at all- we might as well burn all the books and close all the hospitals.
And while a much wider conversation on the ways that the post-oral contraceptive era impacts values and goals certainly needs to continue, there's simply no honest way to frame the increased access to abortion and the invention of technologies that enable ready access to contraception as a project driven by the ulterior goals of a Masculinist Patriarchal Conspiracy. It just isn't that simple. Mary Harrington makes some important counterpoints to assumptions that the consequences of the development of those technologies--and their widespread acceptance in the West--were entirely positive and "liberating", but the critique Harrington offers is also arguably indulging in some luxury beliefs of a different sort. An argument that I've found more ably articulated in this recent Substack post than anything I could construct in my own words https://coxkaren6.substack.com/p/mary-harringtons-worst-bad-idea
Lots more to say, but I need to leave off here, for now.
You have (1) misread me, and (2) presumed that I share what appear here to be scientistic premises. I'll try to get around to a more thorough response, but we are preparing for a prison visit. As I pointed out, some of this material--in response to MH and her racial anxieties--was extracted from my book, Borderline, which is a 446 page doorstop. The thesis was certainly not about a "Masculinist Patriarchal Conspiracy" (I've repeatedly discounted conspiracy accounts), but about the reciprocal and mutually reinforcing dynamic of war and masculinity constructed as violence and conquest. I think you used this phrase against MH, but you've also straw-manned *me* in your remarks. As to progress, which I consider a myth in the Ellulian sense, the "evidence" given for progress is generally a list of all the things we call progress, iow a petītiō principiī fallacy. Penicillin and refrigeration are progress, and progress is penicillin and refrigeration. Yes, things can be improved, but even then, as I took some pains to point out in another book (Mammon's Ecology), improvement Here often enough comes at the expense of something else There (cell phones, convenience, pollution, and child miners, eg). As Virilio said, with the invention of the ship comes the invention of the shipwreck. Fukushima? Climate change? Nuclear weapons? The progress myth otoh is a false teleology superimposed upon various "improvements." In Borderline, there is a long discussion of Disney propaganda on behalf of "our friend the atom," consumer society, and the Tomorrowland theme park. I don't begin with your sweeping anthropological postulates, so I don't end up with your conclusions. This is the whole problem outlined by MacIntyre regarding our generalizing inability to resolve debates in late modernity, though I also subscribe to his more hopeful suggestion that we can at least work in good faith toward some kind of translatability. There is a wide difference between exposing infants in early Rome and following Dawkins' suggestion that we can build great mathematicians by fucking around with people's DNA. Eugenics is special and modern a form of god-playing--and here may be one of our postulary variances. I am a Christian--the far weirder kind than the "evangelical" nationalists everyone knows about. The world IS a place where war and god-playing and the lust for power are woven into the landscape, and my stance (which includes my opposition to eugenics) is utterly counter-cultural; it is predicated on the entirely strange belief that I'm a resident alien, as Hauerwas put it, a reprobate citizen of an already/not yet Kingdom, an expat in a land where people believe they can capture and control reality with atomizing reductions and sweeping abstractions. I hope to return to this in more respectful detail, but as I said, we have to get ready to visit a relative whose doing seven to twenty inside the razor wire. Hope this finds you well.
To begin with, I apologize for introducing the C-word into my post. Males- of which I am one- are obviously too vast of a category to fit the definition of conspiracy. My statement was intended to note that contraceptive technologies and abortion procedures were not invented primarily as a convenience for males, for the opportunistic purpose of minimizing their liability for untoward complications arising from casual sexual encounters.
"I don't begin with your sweeping anthropological postulates, so I don't end up with your conclusions."
I really don't know what "postulates" you might be referring to. The inferences in my post were practically all derived from deductions based on factual records.
I'm not doing Theory, Stan. I'm puzzled why you're insistent on recurrently deferring to it to the extent that the empirical reality implied in your own factual observations is subordinated to your theoretical exposition, and occasionally even contradicted by it.
My approach is mostly about facts on their face. We both know what it is to be cold, wet, tired, hungry, stricken with chronic disease symptoms, and in a situation where we have to put up with it because there's no ready help for it; vs. warm, dry, well-rested, well-fed, healthy, proximate to health care and support, and with a record of that as a normative condition of existence with a reasonable expectation that it won't all vanish overnight.
I can't feature being an ingrate about that.
I also don't view the fact that billions of people on the planet still live in dire precarity in terms of basic human needs as an argument against material progress; instead, it's an argument in favor of it.
"improvement Here often enough comes at the expense of something else There"
I realize that. But you're implying that the entire realm of technological improvement is a zero-sum game--if not worse--per se. I don't find the evidence for such a sweeping indictment. And I find it impossible to justify a position that decries technological advance on the one hand while rejecting Malthusian pessimism out of moral principle on the other. I'm well-read well-apprised of the problems of the Industrial era (roughly the past 275 years), and the severity of some of them (and also the history of the amelioration of many of them- mostly through technological mean, rather than saying No and shutting them down.) But if humans had never harnessed fossil fuel resources, the evidence indicates that the predictions of Malthus would have won out long ago. The fact that hundreds of people living in the industrial cities of London in the late 19th century died from air pollution every time there was thermal inversion does not gainsay that wider reality.
Malthus wasn't indulging in the ideological conceits of his economic privilege in order to come up with his predictions; he was just doing math. The math is the same whether an economy is mercantilist-imperialist, private capitalist investment and accumulation, social-democratic, or command economy redistributive, and it yields the same result: if human multiplication outstrips the resources to sustain the population, the result is famine and catastrophic population collapse. The only difference an economic paradigm might possibly affect is which people die- and the record of the largest socialist command economies in the 20th century shows that the population most traumatized by famine during the era of those regimes was the rural poor. No different than the potato famine in 19th century colonial Ireland, under British imperial rule.
The single most important factor in keeping Malthusian predictions from being fulfilled has been technological development. Maintaining that level of development is the only way to keep those predictions at bay. The key to maintaining it without exhausting the resources of the planet is increasing the efficiency of their use. Degrowth is part of that, but only part.
"As Virilio said, with the invention of the ship comes the invention of the shipwreck."
Yes, but I think it's a mistake to interpret that fact as an argument against the invention of ships. It's easily possible to conjugate any number of similar observations. But framing the shipwreck as the principal consequence of the invention of ships and the shipping industry is just silly. It's partaking of the confusion between features and bugs. Bugs only turn into deal-breakers if it's found that it's practically impossible to overcome them or ameliorate their ill effects, and if they're liable to induce persisting large-scale problems. Shipwrecks are not nearly the problem that they once were, for instance; and even when transoceanic travel was at its most hazardous, the benefits were commonly viewed as worth the risks. That assessment has not been revised in the centuries since the Magellan voyage. And if the Magellan voyage- a near-total disaster- had been taken as a template for the entire future of oceanic travel, it's clear that the conclusion would have been wrong.
Read the extensive historical record, Stan. Don't get mired in Theory in regard to hard-knocks ground-level experience questions like these.
Four book suggestions:
The Discoverers,by Daniel Boorstin 1983
Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond 1997
Green Delusions: an Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism, by Martin W. Lewis 1992 (Lewis was on the ground as an agricultural aid worker in the Philippines)
How The World Really Works, Vaclav Smil 2022 free to read on archive.org
I've just begun reading Vaclav Smil. He isn't a lightweight pop-futurist, and he shuns publicity (and also, by all indications, easy money; he could easily get it, if he were to modify some of his views.) He isn't in anyone's pocket. Slim is the only futurist writer I know of to speak knowledgeably on degrowth, which he views as an imperative (although not the entire answer) to meeting the challenges of preserving a healthy species on a healthy planet. https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/vaclav-smil-interview-growth-must-end-economists
I appreciate your engagement. And I did sort of slapdash that last reply (warned you). I’ll try to do better now, and I take some responsibility for the ways in which I still apparently haven’t made myself clear.
It’s true that hormonal birth control wasn’t invented primarily for the convenience of men having casual sex. Like all pharmaceutical interventions in this era, it was invented to make money . . . though back then, that meant making money mostly for men. It was, however, received enthusiastically by men for the very reasons you suggest. The grand pimp, Hugh Hefner, was a vocal advocate. This post was a very critical response to Mary Harrington (on race). But one of the (correct, in my view) things she and Louise Perry and others have been saying about the so-called “sexual revolution,” inaugurated by hormonal birth control, is that it was not some unadulterated blessing. The radical feminists, who noted how much worse their leftist male comrades were behaving, and the not-so-great way it shifted men’s sexual expectations (and relations), said much the same thing. It was not altogether liberatory, because it turned up the volume on the very thing many women rightly hated—that is, being sexually objectified by men. (The liberal feminists, with whom I seldom agree, have suggested that universalizing objectification is the way forward.) The other point these women have made is more prosaic; hormonal birth control, which fucks with the entire endocrine system, made them sick. Moreover, for everyday women whose lives and thoughts were not relentlessly politicized, and for whom the male-dominant world was still where they lived, it disempowered them in sexual negotiations. No conspiracy needed.
<<"I don't begin with your sweeping anthropological postulates, so I don't end up with your conclusions." I really don't know what "postulates" you might be referring to. The inferences in my post were practically all derived from deductions based on factual records. I'm not doing theory, Stan. I'm puzzled why you're insistent on it. My approach is mostly about facts on their face.>>
“Facts on their face” reminds me of Alasdair MacIntyre again, who wrote in After Virtue:
“‘Fact’ is in modern culture a folk-concept with an aristocratic ancestry. When Lord Chancellor Bacon as part of the propaganda for his astonishing and idiosyncratic amalgam of past Platonism and future empiricism enjoined his followers to abjure speculation and collect facts, he was immediately understood . . . to have identified facts as collector’s items, to be gathered in with the same kind of enthusiasm that at other times has informed the collection of Spode china or the numbers of railway engines. . . . that the scientist is a kind of magpie; it was also to suppose that the observer can confront a fact face to face without any theoretical interpretation imposing itself.”
The point he was getting at was that facts per se are incapable of relating anything beyond themselves, and that reliance on “facts” as the sole basis of truth, or truths, is impossible. Before any meaning can be discerned in the way we relate through language, we require *narratives*. Stories, if you will; an interrelation of the factual and the non-factual in a set of relations that is greater, and qualitatively different from, its parts. When I accused you of *scientism*, this is what I was aiming at. Empiricism cannot get at the truth of things, because it reductively denies relation and meaning. It is also deceptive, because it is itself telling a story. Stories are inevitable, even for Richard Dawkins, eg. “Scientism,” liberal philosophy, and late modernity’s cultures, all participate in this deception. Saying that “science” (or empiricism masquerading as science) has a monopoly on truth claims is a story. As my friend and mentor, Stanley Hauerwas, said:
“It is the story that we should have no story, except the story we chose when we had no story, it is a story that has at its heart the attempt to make us tyrants of our own lives. But no one is more lonely than tyrants.”
Of course, stories can be bad stories or good stories, but in whichever case, human beings are inescapably the storied animal.
In trying to break everything in the universe down to its evolutionary utility, empiricism evades all the problems created by the claim of a truth monopoly, having not yet identified all the trains of cause-and-effect that might prove their theory. In other words, their theory is correct even though it hasn’t yet been scientifically demonstrated to be so, because it is correct. (Then they castigate faith as a form of unfounded belief without the least sense of irony.)
Our miscommunications, even disagreements, I want to suggest, are outcomes of the irreconcilable differences between our background stories, which is why I resort to “doing theory,” as you put it, which is to say, this “fact” thing is already a narrative, and our incompatible narratives are the source of our disagreements. There is no such thing as “just the facts” and “just deduction.” When I said “postulates,” perhaps I should have said “narrative.” It’s very easy to use facts, actual facts, in support of a mistaken, misleading, or even false narrative.
I think Leotard iirc said something like—when we say ‘we can put everything important about you in a database,’ it will eventually morph into ‘everything vital about you is what we can put in a database,’ then all the stuff that doesn’t fit the database profile becomes either nonessential or pathological. I probably butchered that, sorry.
<<We both know what it is to be cold, wet, tired, hungry, stricken with chronic disease symptoms, and in a situation where we have to put up with it because there's no ready help for it; vs. warm, dry, well-rested, well-fed, healthy, proximate to health care and support, and with a record of that as a normative condition of existence with a reasonable expectation that it won't all vanish overnight. I can't feature being an ingrate about that.>>
I’m not totally clear about what you’re saying here, and I don’t want to misrepresent you. Is this a Hobbesian point? That premodernity was somehow uniformly “nasty and brutish”? My own experience of what you say above is military—where we were *forced* into these extremities. The possibility of dying young otoh weren’t enhanced by “premodern” exposures (cold, wet, tired, hungry), but by such modern artifacts as high-powered ammunition and explosives.
I spent a couple of months living with Haitian peasants once, far from any modern infrastructure, and I was never during that whole time exposed or hungry or even bored (my domino game improved, though). I don’t think I’m an “ingrate,” unless you can tell me to whom I need to be grateful. Certainly not some abstraction like progress. I’m quite sure that, in many ways, those who lived before me—long before me—were far more contented than I am most days, in spite of what we would now call hardships (based on our own pampering), because they were confident about what life meant—and not “measuring” life by some bare statistical standard. We, otoh, are in a state of constant metaphysical turmoil, more so as our lives become increasingly automated, disenchanted, disembedded, and disembodied. All we have left are transitory comforts, and so we have come to depend upon them as our metaphysical anesthetic. Consumption means happiness. Desire is a bottomless pit. We are “the lonely tyrants of our own lives.”
What I have noticed, being abroad, in war, where we are in a constant battle with our own cognitive dissonance, is that when we say that our transient comforts are all that makes life worthwhile, it becomes easier for us to justify the destruction of those whose lives fail to meet our standard for worthwhile. “Their lives were shit anyway.” “They don’t value life the way we do.” That’s hiding in the progress narrative, too. It’s just waiting for the right circumstances for this interpretation.
<<I also don't view the fact that billions of people on the planet still live in dire precarity in terms of basic human needs as an argument against material progress; instead, it's an argument in favor of it.>>
Au contraire. As I spent a whole book explaining—with supportive facts btw—the core-periphery dynamic (is that a metanarrative?) operates in such a way as to make precarity more dire. I keep going back to Haiti, just cuz I spent so much time there even after the Army, but in a conversation with an oungon in the ville of Fort Liberte (a voudon priest), we discussed the difference between “being poor without food, and being poor with food.”
“I am poor,” he said, “but I have food. In the city, they are poor without food.”
Subsistence is not always precarious. What makes it precarious is the degree to which the peasant is made to become dependent upon money, creating a whole new realm of scarcity that re-imbricates the peasant into a uniquely modern form of poverty. Again, you fall back on this “material progress” thing, but what this means can only be fully understood—nuclear power and uranium mines and nuclear accidents and nuclear bombs—in the context of how it reshapes relations of dependency . . . and of the ecosemiotic force of a monetized modernity. “Material progress” requires reference points, and the selection of those reference points determine narratives.
<<But you're implying that the entire realm of technological improvement is a zero-sum game--if not worse--per se. I don't find the evidence for such a sweeping indictment.>>
I can point you to the evidence. In my book, ‘Mammon’s Ecology’, or the many references therein, from which I gleaned my thesis. Even the simple scientific axiom in the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics supports a zero-sum conclusion. It’s not merely energy that constitutes this zero-sum game, but energy underwrites the larger zero-sum game. Everything ramifies. Everything. Loss of biospheric complexity? Readings: Jason C. Moore’s ‘Capitalism and the Web of Life’, Alf Hornborg’s ‘The Power of the Machine’ or ‘Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange’, Ivan Illich’s ‘Energy and Equity’, Clive Ponting’s “A New Green History of the World’, Maria Mies’s ‘Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale’. John Friedmann’s core-periphery model. Braudel’s histories. Araghi & Farides’s ‘Land Dispossession and Global Crisis’. Everything by Mike Davis. Joan Martinez-Alier. Karl Polanyi. Vandana Shiva. There’s plenty out there. All you have to do is study the flows. Millions of tons of ammoniated nitrogen poured into Midwestern corn, then transferred into North Carolina pork and poultry CAFOs, eg, meanwhile devastating biodiversity, while polluting land, air, and water . . . and oh yes, destroying workers and communities. Ramification.
As to Parson Malthus, he had it backwards. Population does not overrun land productivity. Increasing land productivity (by industrializing agriculture, eg) increases population, but it does so in the context of increasing dependency upon ever more distant and scarce inputs. When those inputs (which have a zero-sum character at some point) are exhausted, along with things like forests, soil complexity (health), and aquifers, then we have famines . . . which will inevitably become more frequent and more urban in the very near future. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Best estimates, global population spikes at 9.7 billion o/a 2064, then falls to 8.8 billion by 2100. Famines will contribute, based on ^^^; but many other factors will play a role.
On Virilio: He didn’t argue against the invention of ships—nor did I. He said we need to tell the whole truth. I did a longish piece on Virilio—who was a phenomenologist first and foremost—here: https://stanleyabner1951gmailcom.substack.com/p/speed-kills
Virilio, Ellul, and Illich are central characters in my current playbook. I’m not anti-modern; there’s no going back. I’m a Christian metaphysical postmodernist (one who still believes a couple of metanarratives, yeah), a political left-postliberal, a political-theoretical subsistence socialist, and a gonzo social critic. I also change my mind with some frequency (ergo my blog title, Molting). My disagreements with you in this instance, however, are really disagreements in many respects with my own past and once strictly materialist self. David Bentley Hart describes my former no-story story as “the most imperious of classic metaphysical gestures . . . the privileged vantage of a transcendental surveillance of all stories other than one’s own. . . the late modern story of an enlightened reason inhabiting no perspective at all and therefore entitled and able to dissolve all merely local narratives into provisional, mythical, tribal chatter.” The God’s eye view of a sweeping and all-encompassing anthropology (but I came to discover that this, too, is just another “story that we should have no story”).
His theses on “efficiency” have something to say about “overcoming bugs.” In many cases, this is a case of throwing good money after bad, as they say. We overcome one bug, then have to overcome the bug that emerged with the fix on the last one. Illich speaks about this as “iatrogenesis.” Ships, shipwrecks, fixed bugs, equals cruise ships that are entropic black holes, container ships that support environmentally horrendous and dependency-increasing international trade, a continent of oceanic plastic, what else? Wars for finite stores of strategic minerals? There is only one major negentropic process in the world, the basis of which high technology is a net destructive process: photosynthesis. There is only one major eco-semiotic process that can achieve stability and sustainability, and that is biospheric complexity . . . also which technology necessarily destroys in such a fashion that using technology to fix what technology has created (fixing bugs) is a net entropic and dissipative process. Our in train ecologic disaster is not a bug in the system, it’s a feature.
I read Diamond’s book. It convinced me he should have stuck with ornithology. His Pulitzer must have been based on his lyricism, because it wasn’t based on any kind of intellectual rigor. His geographic determinism appears to be utterly blind to cultural specificities or social structures (except perhaps by inference as geographically overdetermined). That’s how he draws (specious, in my view) comparisons between Montana ranchers and Haitians. He tries to compare Easter Island to the whole modern world system. He implicitly describes medieval Iceland as being the same kind of self-regulating bureaucratic-managerial entity as the board of directors for Johnson & Johnson. There’s not a single account of what Hornborg calls “environmental load displacement” (shifting environmental burdens from “first world” to “third world”, eg), which is a demonstrable feature of the world system right now. It’s just sloppy; and from these sloppy premises, he presumes to suggest how we get out of our (then) current mess. Consumer choices and bolder leadership. Right. Sounds like a good TED talk.
I’ll close out now. I feel like I’m doing us both a disservice by trying to stuff twenty pounds of shit in a ten pound sack. Apologies.
I do appreciate your engagement, and that you force me—even against my 72-year-old disinclination to do much more than chase panfish on Sand Lake—to explain myself (however inadequate my attempts).
I take most of your points, up to a point. But I don't find them leading to the sweeping inferences that you're drawing. I don't reject the use of metrics a priori on the basis of what I know that they aren't able to address, or on account of what they aren't able to accurately portray. If a sustainable population on a healthy planet has any chance of being accomplished, big-picture numerical assessments are absolutely vital.
Counting people as statistics doesn't automatically reduce them to statistics. Considering human beings solely in terms of their material impacts doesn't address our non-material impacts, but that doesn't render the consideration irrelevant, or that measurements of material culture only yield answers that encourage greed for power and control- to the contrary, I've found it quite humbling to reflect on the Livestock aspect of myself- as an animal that requires food, water and living space, consuming energy and generating waste. The systems of short-sighted greed and power on this planet have no need of cultural geographers. Psychopathic leaders have never required projections and estimates to simply eradicate anyone who got in their way. The impacts of human energy use are being studied and recorded in an attempt to manage the course of the human future on the planet- as much as its humanly possible to do so, given our dominion over it. Some of the decisions made in pursuit of that goal are likely to be foolish mistakes, but that's the goal on the table. An undiluted will to power would pay them no heed and find little necessity for the measurements in the first place, because only one thing matters to such a mentality: the ability to annihilate surplus populations at will. If humans don't figure out how to use science and deploy technology in the service of a humane future, the neglect and denial of our ability to influence that unfolding will lead to the place where paradigms of extermination loom large as "solutions" to human population increase and stress on resources.
I haven't read all of the authors you've cited. Of the ones that I've read, I find many of their insights on values to be vitally important. The authors also make many valid points about the problems of technological modernity. However, as is so often the case in social criticism, the authors I've read scrimp on addressing challenges of the solutions- the nuts and bolts of how to fix the problems. Most of the reflections I've I've heard have an unreal, cloud-castle quality to them; they don't scale up well, and scaling up is one of those knotty statistical requirements that just can't be gotten around. If the realm of economics, I think Hornborg has some great insights on the economics of money, but nothing about his proposals would have a direct impact on the carbon footprint of concrete. Finance economics shares a lot of overlap with computer science, to me: it's a realm of abstractions that doesn't grow corn. Growing corn is a material process. So is cultural ecology. There are nearly 8 billion of us. Our material challenges may possibly by ameliorated somewhat by changes in the global currency system, indirectly. But the material challenges are ultimately direct ones.
"...in a conversation with an oungon in the ville of Fort Liberte (a voudon priest), we discussed the difference between “being poor without food, and being poor with food.”
“I am poor,” he said, “but I have food. In the city, they are poor without food.”"
That's a trenchant insight- up to a point. It sets aside the question of what would happen to the currently balanced- but fragile- cultural ecology of the rural communities and inhabitants if that urban population were to return to the Haitian countryside to live.
"Subsistence is not always precarious. What makes it precarious is the degree to which the peasant is made to become dependent upon money, creating a whole new realm of scarcity that re-imbricates the peasant into a uniquely modern form of poverty."
No, over the long term subsistence gets progressively more precarious as population rises, unless food productivity expands accordingly. We both realize that the increases in global agricultural productivity are mostly the result of reliance in petrochemical fertilizers. The pros and cons of that particular situation aside, the resulting increase in human population hasn't yet refuted the prediction of Malthus; it's only delayed it. Humans still retain the potential to outstrip the food supply on this planet. It's a potential that's greater than any devolutionary economic paradigm or practical benefit from the prospect of technological advance.
"Again, you fall back on this “material progress” thing, but what this means can only be fully understood—nuclear power and uranium mines and nuclear accidents and nuclear bombs—in the context of how it reshapes relations of dependency . . . and of the ecosemiotic force of a monetized modernity. “Material progress” requires reference points, and the selection of those reference points determine narratives."
Yes, that informs my views on what numbers can't tell us; they can't tell us "what for", they shouldn't be taken as some "objective" justification for self-centered prerogatives, or a corrupt agenda of private ends. But that doesn't mean that the metrics are meaningless. I've also accepted that the great big ole grid of planetary energy supply and resource distribution involves a whole lot of dependence on remote inputs, for nearly everyone. The more that dependence partakes of interdependence, the better. The more localism and independence, the better. Yet and still: 8 billion people. A primary feature of how it is, presently. There are aspects of Modernity that require negotiation and resistance. But the underlying reality of 8 billion people--and growing--is a force all its own. For all the bugs of the technological advances that allowed that result, it's our status quo ante. There's no problem that wouldn't spiral out of control if the global system of material resources and energy supply were to be dismantled by an anti-technological effort.
"As to Parson Malthus, he had it backwards. Population does not overrun land productivity. Increasing land productivity (by industrializing agriculture, eg) increases population, but it does so in the context of increasing dependency upon ever more distant and scarce inputs. When those inputs (which have a zero-sum character at some point) are exhausted, along with things like forests, soil complexity (health), and aquifers, then we have famines . . . which will inevitably become more frequent and more urban in the very near future. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet."
Those are Malthusian observations- especially that final sentence! I doubt that Malthus would find anything to disagree with in that paragraph. You haven't reversed the precepts that he was considering; you've simply done the logical thing and extended his postulate beyond a local bioregion to the entire planet. The concept of limits still applies.Farmer reliance on remote energy inputs in order to assure abundant crop yields also includes the reality that those inputs can't be but so remote--still planet Terra, okay?--that an increased plentitude of mobile energy resources cannot be confused with an infinitude.; and that, in this case, petrochemicals have a downside that approaches zero-sum as the negative effects from pollution and climate change continue to accumulate and increase.
But that's an argument for decreasing petrochemical use in the interest of prudence, thrift, and long-term attention to increasing efforts like soil conservation and riparian protection--not for the fiat imposition of a ban on fertilizer and machine agriculture. Although that's the Green Sentimentalist answer to the problem, undeniably. The Achilles heel of the Greens is that the activists put more of their efforts into saying "No" than they do into crafting solutions that can scale up to serve a the healthy life support functions of a planet that hosts >8 billion people.
Since you've shown that you're familiar with concepts of "purity and magic", I might as well share my view that many Greens have an ill-concealed disgust with any form of development or technology, as per se "Impure." That's why Green acvitists are seldom comfortable with offering detailed shovel-ready specifics in regard to their proposed solutions: they don't want to get their hands dirty with that. They fear Contamination. And that they might have to crunch numbers and find out that their proposals have more in common with a wish list sent to Santa Claus than an practical agenda.
Many Greens don't like Business, either, in the abstract. Despite the bottom line reality that NGOs like the Center for Biological Diversity are businesses, and their "nonprofit" designation is legalese, a rhetorical convention that's only partially and conditionally true. But you can't get rid of Business. Even Soviet-style command economies require Business. Business is what tills fields and builds houses. Questions can arise on the best way to carry out business. But the problems related to abuse of business pale in comparison with the problems of not taking care of business.
Technology built the modern world. I get that some people are under the delusion that it can replace it entirely. But it's also a delusion to frame the entire arc of human technological advance as a mistake, or as a project that has to involve disadvantaging the majority to serve the whims of a privileged few. I'm not alone in thinking that grappling with technology is more about mending it than ending it.
"I read Diamond’s book. It convinced me he should have stuck with ornithology. His Pulitzer must have been based on his lyricism, because it wasn’t based on any kind of intellectual rigor."
I realize that Germs, Guns, and Steel contains a lot of weak speculative surmises, and he can be criticized on the basis of his interpretation on different cases. But other points of his are inarguable.
"His geographic determinism appears to be utterly blind to cultural specificities or social structures (except perhaps by inference as geographically overdetermined). That’s how he draws (specious, in my view) comparisons between Montana ranchers and Haitians. He tries to compare Easter Island to the whole modern world system. He implicitly describes medieval Iceland as being the same kind of self-regulating bureaucratic-managerial entity as the board of directors for Johnson & Johnson."
Diamond begins getting into trouble when he makes local cross-cultural comparisons, or reaches for exceptional examples like Icelandic society c.1000. But that doesn't impeach his facts. The strong part of his book is that he gets a lot of the basics right.
Vaclav Smil gets even more of those basics right- and he does it as a primary concentration, with little desire to offer much in the way of opinion on cultures and economic or political ideologies. He discusses China's energy production priorities and economic development in terms of amounts, trends and results, without offering more than cursory commentary about Chinese politics and society, for example.. That perspective is foundational; Smil's bringing up material conditions as facts, not opinions or interpretations. He's big on letting the facts speak for themselves. It's a mistake to simply hand-wave that approach as toadying for the status quo, or to reduce Smil to the status of a material reductionist, on account of that emphasis. It isn't a defense of the status quo to admit the fact that the status quo exists, and then go on to outline the rough proportions of its most prominent material features. It's what we have to work from. We can't pretend that it doesn't exist.
[re: Diamond, again] "There’s not a single account of what Hornborg calls “environmental load displacement” (shifting environmental burdens from “first world” to “third world”, eg), which is a demonstrable feature of the world system right now."
Smil spends little time offering opinions on that situation, either. He's looking at the entire planet- and in that regard, he finds economic inequality to be a situation as pressing as climate change. He doesn't spend much time commenting on intramural comparisons- other than noting that the disparities require focused attention in order to solve them, and they haven't gotten enough of it. Smil is outright disgusted with the paradigm of disposability that accounts for so much of the consumer market nowadays. He's a degrowth guy. But he's also a realist who understands that there isn't anything sustainable about returning to relying on wood fires for heat. His model is the consumption footprint of a median-income French citizen in 1959 (albeit with less meat consumption). Smil thinks that a living standard of that order ought to be attainable for 8 billion people. He has the numbers on how far that standard has been exceeded by most Americans, c.2023.
I have read a book that investigates some aspects of environmental load displacement in very close detail- Junkyard Planet, by Adam Minter. It's only too clear that "environmental load displacement" generates a lot of problems for the third world locations that host the dumping, disposal, and recycling. But if you read Minter's account, you'll realize that the situation isn't as simple as is implied by the phrase. It also is not static; there are people who are taking responsibility for improving the occupational hazards of the industry and cleaning up its toxic waste output. The fact that improvement is not something that can be achieved overnight does not mean that it isn't happening. The improvements rely on advancing technology.
"There is only one major negentropic process in the world, the basis of which high technology is a net destructive process: photosynthesis. There is only one major eco-semiotic process that can achieve stability and sustainability, and that is biospheric complexity . . . also which technology necessarily destroys in such a fashion that using technology to fix what technology has created (fixing bugs) is a net entropic and dissipative process. Our in train ecologic disaster is not a bug in the system, it’s a feature."
You're speaking in idealized abstractions. They're great as goals, but oblivious to material realities. The idealized natural world relying only on natural processes of photosynthesis and an emphasis on maintaining a maximum of biological complexity would, of necessity, be a world with a lot lower human population: much higher infant mortality and maternal mortality, shorter human lifespan, more sickness and intractable injury and disability, more vulnerability to privation. The fact that local bioregions function in a way that sums up to an orderly balance says nothing about the fate that might happen to befall one or more species of the living inhabitants at any moment in time: plagues, pestilence, drought, flooding, freezing, loss of food resources...ecosystems rebound- or adjusts- dynamically in a way that can be framed as "negentropic", but that resilience also relies on entropic processes as a component of maintaining stability.
The species that most persistently resists such entropic calamities is humans (despite the reality that was also harbor entropic propensities.) That's how we've managed to spread so far and wide all over the planet, across so many wildly varying bioregions and climate conditions. We do it by using our brains to craft adaptive responses: using fire for heat. Digging aqueducts to supply crops with water. Inventing mosquito nets. Etc. The potential to construct negentropy is present in human self-aware consciousness, and there are many examples of its activation. The human tool-making experiment is not inherently entropic- although nothing rules out the notion that our entropic tendencies might overwhelm our negentropic achievements, and put the species in a tight corner. Human decisions can be wise or foolish. But they aren't just foredoomed, as if all human effort at material improvement is inherently futile or harmful.
"Our in train ecologic disaster is not a bug in the system, it’s a feature."
No, it's a bug. The bug is about continuing to mock the utility of a brake pedal. The neoliberal economic paradigm is like an amplifier designed to be as efficient as possible. But the more efficient an amplifier, the more unstable it is. That isn't an argument against the invention of the amplifier. It's an argument against a faulty, recklessly designed circuit that is on-track to overheat and short-circuit. The existence of faulty designs does not mean that it's impossible to build a reliable amplifier. The same can be said of a great many other technologies.
"...[Vaclav Smil] is not about to say that a collapse is inevitable now—not even with humanity on a problematic course and unlikely to change direction soon. "You ask me, ‘When will the collapse come?'" Smil says. "Constantly we are collapsing. Constantly we are fixing."
You've said much the same thing. But Smil sounds like he thinks the effort to repair and improve modern technological civilization is worthwhile--or anyway that the future holds sufficient promise that it's worth continuing the attempt. While your narrative framing makes out most of the landmark events in the history of discovery and invention as ending up falling prey to the same sunk-cost fallacy. All I have to so to refute that thematic premise is to switch on a light bulb and head down the hall of my heated apartment to get a drink of orange juice from my refrigerator. Around 15 per cent of the humans of the planet currently partake of that level of material circumstance, according to Vaclav Smil (sorry about the continuing reference, but as far as being someone who's paid the dues to run the numbers on these matters, Smil has no peers.) That's more than a billion people, every one of us able to routinely partake of a level of ergonomic ease that the wealthiest tycoons of dynastic monarchs c.1900 would envy.
The fact that around 85% of the world has yet to attain that material circumstance can be viewed in several different ways. Some folks want to universalize a humane baseline of technological affluence as available to all households, schools, and most indoor work environments. Others are exclusively privately interested in accumulating even more affluence on top of everyone else, and they don't give a damn about anyone but their own. But the absolutely most hopeless conclusion is to insinuate that no human being ever deserved electric lights, food refrigeration, or indoor central heating in the first place, because problems.
Stan, as usual, I'm mostly in agreement with your writing. But it sounds to me as if your summary of the phenomenon of "eugenics" partakes of some serious flaws, and that you've overlooked some important points in your framing.
Yes, the Eugenics movement of the early 20th century was fatally flawed by racism. The proponents weren't even aware of DNA heritability at that point (which is NOT to say that an awareness of the role of DNA has led to the dismantling of racism, although logic and knowledge increase indicates that modern genetics leads in the direction of dismantling scientific racism, rather than verifying the concept.) The abuses of power that marked early Eugenic efforts- and the cold rationality that justified them- don't amount to a refutation of the entire principle.
My reading of history indicates that eugenic principles are nothing new, and there isn't anything abnormal about the human recognition of them, and nothing inhumane or forbiddingly presumptuous about conscious endeavors to pursue their improvement. The effort certainly isn't unnatural- some amount of eugenic activity had to have been performed from the outset of human society at the level of the smallest human groups. It's a natural reality that some infants were born too disabled for the group to care for; they were abandoned. The absence of physical confirmation of the practice enables modern humans to refrain from reflecting on it, but the logic is irrefutable; infanticide of disabled infants had to have been common practice. Exceptions to that rule have on rare occasions been found in the archaeological record (the paleoarchaeological record on any paleolithic human practice is threadbare and rudimentary, and is likely to remain so). But the fact that there are traces of evidence that sometimes disabled offspring received nurturing and care--as much as humanly possible--does not discredit the reality that most often that level of care was humanly impossible. And it's a simple physical fact that the fitness of the species had to have been increased as a result.
Moreover, I'd argue that most of the conventions of human marriage, inheritance, and family structure evolved as a eugenic effort. Right up to the modern era in the affluent and technologically advanced West--where choices about marriage are left to individual choice first and foremost, as a principle supported by law--improved fitness of offspring is a primary consideration for fertile couples. That's eugenics, too- a nonauthoritarian and informal sort of eugenics, but eugenics nonetheless. The modern system of individual adults as free agents seeking out other free agents with whom to reproduce is also arguably quite novel, and still far from universally accepted in contemporary human societies. Dowry, bride price, arranged marriage, child marriage, clan outbreeding, marriage for the purpose of political alliance, assortative mating on the basis of educational pedigree- all of those conventions partake of eugenic considerations! Eugenics is arguably the foundational purpose of all of them. As is the historic practice of inbreeding, as a conscious effort by aristocracies and monarchical dynasties. The modern discouragement of that practice- traditional for some centuries at the top reaches of European society, as well as in the top social stratum of civilizations going back to the Egyptians,and before- is also due to modern eugenic considerations; once it was observed that close-kinship marriage and inbred reproduction had dysgenic effects that outweighed any perceived eugenic benefit, it fell out of favor right away.
The human reverence for preserving human life- including the most helpless (and all human infants are born helpless)- has also long marked human history. That priority has traditionally provided the principal motivation for the development of modern medical technologies. And yes, there is such a thing as authentic medical progress: it's not only improved the duration and quality of life for the most genetically and materially advantaged of us, it's led to dramatic improvements for a much wider population, all over the planet. The fact that the advances haven't yet been universalized says nothing about the intrinsic benefits of their invention, or about their potential to be universalized eventually.
As a practical inevitability, those developments have also led to new challenges- including the conundrum that modern medical technology has played a pivotal role in foregrounding the ethical dilemmas related to abortion, and its elevation to prominence as a legal-political matter. I'm neither particularly knowledgeable or at all comfortable with discussing the history of infant survivability and prognosis for children born with gravely disabling or incapacitating conditions in former eras, but I think I can state with confidence that many ethical dilemmas of the present day were obviated by the stark reality that nature took its course with the workings of early mortality- often very early mortality. Whereas nowadays, medical technology is often utilized to the utmost to preserve newborn life under conditions that would not have been survivable for most of human history. This practical reality leaves characterizations that focus on modern medicine as is if one of its implicit missions is to act as an abortion factory in heedless pursuit of inhumane Eugenic ideas as a narrative very close to calumny.
Which is to say that I don't find any insight to be derived from an interpretation like this one:
"Echoing through this contrast between modern and premodern are Jean Bodin and Francis Bacon, advocating instrumental order in the face of a female nature’s chaos and disorder, now projected onto primitive peoples and the “unfit.” Nature itself must be conquered, and in this guise, we observe the eternal re-emergence of masculinity constructed as conquest..."
Sorry, Stan. That's facile sentimentality, feminist and pro-ecological tropes notwithstanding. In the course of our existence and spread on this planet at a species, "female nature" taking its ordained course included, as part of its holistic workings, a staggering infant mortality rate. Infirmity and disabilities were summarily culled, by the workings of "female nature", undisturbed by the power of human intelligence that led to the development of the disciplined craft of medicine and the empirical/scientific discipline of modern medicine and technology. I'm aware that there are features of the human condition that present intractable obstacles to any tech remedy, or any presumption of "progress" toward some idealized, perfected end state. But if there's no such thing as "human progress"- in any realm at all- we might as well burn all the books and close all the hospitals.
And while a much wider conversation on the ways that the post-oral contraceptive era impacts values and goals certainly needs to continue, there's simply no honest way to frame the increased access to abortion and the invention of technologies that enable ready access to contraception as a project driven by the ulterior goals of a Masculinist Patriarchal Conspiracy. It just isn't that simple. Mary Harrington makes some important counterpoints to assumptions that the consequences of the development of those technologies--and their widespread acceptance in the West--were entirely positive and "liberating", but the critique Harrington offers is also arguably indulging in some luxury beliefs of a different sort. An argument that I've found more ably articulated in this recent Substack post than anything I could construct in my own words https://coxkaren6.substack.com/p/mary-harringtons-worst-bad-idea
Lots more to say, but I need to leave off here, for now.
You have (1) misread me, and (2) presumed that I share what appear here to be scientistic premises. I'll try to get around to a more thorough response, but we are preparing for a prison visit. As I pointed out, some of this material--in response to MH and her racial anxieties--was extracted from my book, Borderline, which is a 446 page doorstop. The thesis was certainly not about a "Masculinist Patriarchal Conspiracy" (I've repeatedly discounted conspiracy accounts), but about the reciprocal and mutually reinforcing dynamic of war and masculinity constructed as violence and conquest. I think you used this phrase against MH, but you've also straw-manned *me* in your remarks. As to progress, which I consider a myth in the Ellulian sense, the "evidence" given for progress is generally a list of all the things we call progress, iow a petītiō principiī fallacy. Penicillin and refrigeration are progress, and progress is penicillin and refrigeration. Yes, things can be improved, but even then, as I took some pains to point out in another book (Mammon's Ecology), improvement Here often enough comes at the expense of something else There (cell phones, convenience, pollution, and child miners, eg). As Virilio said, with the invention of the ship comes the invention of the shipwreck. Fukushima? Climate change? Nuclear weapons? The progress myth otoh is a false teleology superimposed upon various "improvements." In Borderline, there is a long discussion of Disney propaganda on behalf of "our friend the atom," consumer society, and the Tomorrowland theme park. I don't begin with your sweeping anthropological postulates, so I don't end up with your conclusions. This is the whole problem outlined by MacIntyre regarding our generalizing inability to resolve debates in late modernity, though I also subscribe to his more hopeful suggestion that we can at least work in good faith toward some kind of translatability. There is a wide difference between exposing infants in early Rome and following Dawkins' suggestion that we can build great mathematicians by fucking around with people's DNA. Eugenics is special and modern a form of god-playing--and here may be one of our postulary variances. I am a Christian--the far weirder kind than the "evangelical" nationalists everyone knows about. The world IS a place where war and god-playing and the lust for power are woven into the landscape, and my stance (which includes my opposition to eugenics) is utterly counter-cultural; it is predicated on the entirely strange belief that I'm a resident alien, as Hauerwas put it, a reprobate citizen of an already/not yet Kingdom, an expat in a land where people believe they can capture and control reality with atomizing reductions and sweeping abstractions. I hope to return to this in more respectful detail, but as I said, we have to get ready to visit a relative whose doing seven to twenty inside the razor wire. Hope this finds you well.
To begin with, I apologize for introducing the C-word into my post. Males- of which I am one- are obviously too vast of a category to fit the definition of conspiracy. My statement was intended to note that contraceptive technologies and abortion procedures were not invented primarily as a convenience for males, for the opportunistic purpose of minimizing their liability for untoward complications arising from casual sexual encounters.
"I don't begin with your sweeping anthropological postulates, so I don't end up with your conclusions."
I really don't know what "postulates" you might be referring to. The inferences in my post were practically all derived from deductions based on factual records.
I'm not doing Theory, Stan. I'm puzzled why you're insistent on recurrently deferring to it to the extent that the empirical reality implied in your own factual observations is subordinated to your theoretical exposition, and occasionally even contradicted by it.
My approach is mostly about facts on their face. We both know what it is to be cold, wet, tired, hungry, stricken with chronic disease symptoms, and in a situation where we have to put up with it because there's no ready help for it; vs. warm, dry, well-rested, well-fed, healthy, proximate to health care and support, and with a record of that as a normative condition of existence with a reasonable expectation that it won't all vanish overnight.
I can't feature being an ingrate about that.
I also don't view the fact that billions of people on the planet still live in dire precarity in terms of basic human needs as an argument against material progress; instead, it's an argument in favor of it.
"improvement Here often enough comes at the expense of something else There"
I realize that. But you're implying that the entire realm of technological improvement is a zero-sum game--if not worse--per se. I don't find the evidence for such a sweeping indictment. And I find it impossible to justify a position that decries technological advance on the one hand while rejecting Malthusian pessimism out of moral principle on the other. I'm well-read well-apprised of the problems of the Industrial era (roughly the past 275 years), and the severity of some of them (and also the history of the amelioration of many of them- mostly through technological mean, rather than saying No and shutting them down.) But if humans had never harnessed fossil fuel resources, the evidence indicates that the predictions of Malthus would have won out long ago. The fact that hundreds of people living in the industrial cities of London in the late 19th century died from air pollution every time there was thermal inversion does not gainsay that wider reality.
Malthus wasn't indulging in the ideological conceits of his economic privilege in order to come up with his predictions; he was just doing math. The math is the same whether an economy is mercantilist-imperialist, private capitalist investment and accumulation, social-democratic, or command economy redistributive, and it yields the same result: if human multiplication outstrips the resources to sustain the population, the result is famine and catastrophic population collapse. The only difference an economic paradigm might possibly affect is which people die- and the record of the largest socialist command economies in the 20th century shows that the population most traumatized by famine during the era of those regimes was the rural poor. No different than the potato famine in 19th century colonial Ireland, under British imperial rule.
The single most important factor in keeping Malthusian predictions from being fulfilled has been technological development. Maintaining that level of development is the only way to keep those predictions at bay. The key to maintaining it without exhausting the resources of the planet is increasing the efficiency of their use. Degrowth is part of that, but only part.
"As Virilio said, with the invention of the ship comes the invention of the shipwreck."
Yes, but I think it's a mistake to interpret that fact as an argument against the invention of ships. It's easily possible to conjugate any number of similar observations. But framing the shipwreck as the principal consequence of the invention of ships and the shipping industry is just silly. It's partaking of the confusion between features and bugs. Bugs only turn into deal-breakers if it's found that it's practically impossible to overcome them or ameliorate their ill effects, and if they're liable to induce persisting large-scale problems. Shipwrecks are not nearly the problem that they once were, for instance; and even when transoceanic travel was at its most hazardous, the benefits were commonly viewed as worth the risks. That assessment has not been revised in the centuries since the Magellan voyage. And if the Magellan voyage- a near-total disaster- had been taken as a template for the entire future of oceanic travel, it's clear that the conclusion would have been wrong.
Read the extensive historical record, Stan. Don't get mired in Theory in regard to hard-knocks ground-level experience questions like these.
Four book suggestions:
The Discoverers,by Daniel Boorstin 1983
Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond 1997
Green Delusions: an Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism, by Martin W. Lewis 1992 (Lewis was on the ground as an agricultural aid worker in the Philippines)
How The World Really Works, Vaclav Smil 2022 free to read on archive.org
https://archive.org/details/how-the-world-really-works-a-scientist-s-guide-to-our-past-present-and-future-by-vaclav-smil
I've just begun reading Vaclav Smil. He isn't a lightweight pop-futurist, and he shuns publicity (and also, by all indications, easy money; he could easily get it, if he were to modify some of his views.) He isn't in anyone's pocket. Slim is the only futurist writer I know of to speak knowledgeably on degrowth, which he views as an imperative (although not the entire answer) to meeting the challenges of preserving a healthy species on a healthy planet. https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/vaclav-smil-interview-growth-must-end-economists
I appreciate your engagement. And I did sort of slapdash that last reply (warned you). I’ll try to do better now, and I take some responsibility for the ways in which I still apparently haven’t made myself clear.
It’s true that hormonal birth control wasn’t invented primarily for the convenience of men having casual sex. Like all pharmaceutical interventions in this era, it was invented to make money . . . though back then, that meant making money mostly for men. It was, however, received enthusiastically by men for the very reasons you suggest. The grand pimp, Hugh Hefner, was a vocal advocate. This post was a very critical response to Mary Harrington (on race). But one of the (correct, in my view) things she and Louise Perry and others have been saying about the so-called “sexual revolution,” inaugurated by hormonal birth control, is that it was not some unadulterated blessing. The radical feminists, who noted how much worse their leftist male comrades were behaving, and the not-so-great way it shifted men’s sexual expectations (and relations), said much the same thing. It was not altogether liberatory, because it turned up the volume on the very thing many women rightly hated—that is, being sexually objectified by men. (The liberal feminists, with whom I seldom agree, have suggested that universalizing objectification is the way forward.) The other point these women have made is more prosaic; hormonal birth control, which fucks with the entire endocrine system, made them sick. Moreover, for everyday women whose lives and thoughts were not relentlessly politicized, and for whom the male-dominant world was still where they lived, it disempowered them in sexual negotiations. No conspiracy needed.
<<"I don't begin with your sweeping anthropological postulates, so I don't end up with your conclusions." I really don't know what "postulates" you might be referring to. The inferences in my post were practically all derived from deductions based on factual records. I'm not doing theory, Stan. I'm puzzled why you're insistent on it. My approach is mostly about facts on their face.>>
“Facts on their face” reminds me of Alasdair MacIntyre again, who wrote in After Virtue:
“‘Fact’ is in modern culture a folk-concept with an aristocratic ancestry. When Lord Chancellor Bacon as part of the propaganda for his astonishing and idiosyncratic amalgam of past Platonism and future empiricism enjoined his followers to abjure speculation and collect facts, he was immediately understood . . . to have identified facts as collector’s items, to be gathered in with the same kind of enthusiasm that at other times has informed the collection of Spode china or the numbers of railway engines. . . . that the scientist is a kind of magpie; it was also to suppose that the observer can confront a fact face to face without any theoretical interpretation imposing itself.”
The point he was getting at was that facts per se are incapable of relating anything beyond themselves, and that reliance on “facts” as the sole basis of truth, or truths, is impossible. Before any meaning can be discerned in the way we relate through language, we require *narratives*. Stories, if you will; an interrelation of the factual and the non-factual in a set of relations that is greater, and qualitatively different from, its parts. When I accused you of *scientism*, this is what I was aiming at. Empiricism cannot get at the truth of things, because it reductively denies relation and meaning. It is also deceptive, because it is itself telling a story. Stories are inevitable, even for Richard Dawkins, eg. “Scientism,” liberal philosophy, and late modernity’s cultures, all participate in this deception. Saying that “science” (or empiricism masquerading as science) has a monopoly on truth claims is a story. As my friend and mentor, Stanley Hauerwas, said:
“It is the story that we should have no story, except the story we chose when we had no story, it is a story that has at its heart the attempt to make us tyrants of our own lives. But no one is more lonely than tyrants.”
Of course, stories can be bad stories or good stories, but in whichever case, human beings are inescapably the storied animal.
In trying to break everything in the universe down to its evolutionary utility, empiricism evades all the problems created by the claim of a truth monopoly, having not yet identified all the trains of cause-and-effect that might prove their theory. In other words, their theory is correct even though it hasn’t yet been scientifically demonstrated to be so, because it is correct. (Then they castigate faith as a form of unfounded belief without the least sense of irony.)
Our miscommunications, even disagreements, I want to suggest, are outcomes of the irreconcilable differences between our background stories, which is why I resort to “doing theory,” as you put it, which is to say, this “fact” thing is already a narrative, and our incompatible narratives are the source of our disagreements. There is no such thing as “just the facts” and “just deduction.” When I said “postulates,” perhaps I should have said “narrative.” It’s very easy to use facts, actual facts, in support of a mistaken, misleading, or even false narrative.
I think Leotard iirc said something like—when we say ‘we can put everything important about you in a database,’ it will eventually morph into ‘everything vital about you is what we can put in a database,’ then all the stuff that doesn’t fit the database profile becomes either nonessential or pathological. I probably butchered that, sorry.
<<We both know what it is to be cold, wet, tired, hungry, stricken with chronic disease symptoms, and in a situation where we have to put up with it because there's no ready help for it; vs. warm, dry, well-rested, well-fed, healthy, proximate to health care and support, and with a record of that as a normative condition of existence with a reasonable expectation that it won't all vanish overnight. I can't feature being an ingrate about that.>>
I’m not totally clear about what you’re saying here, and I don’t want to misrepresent you. Is this a Hobbesian point? That premodernity was somehow uniformly “nasty and brutish”? My own experience of what you say above is military—where we were *forced* into these extremities. The possibility of dying young otoh weren’t enhanced by “premodern” exposures (cold, wet, tired, hungry), but by such modern artifacts as high-powered ammunition and explosives.
TBC in next box
I spent a couple of months living with Haitian peasants once, far from any modern infrastructure, and I was never during that whole time exposed or hungry or even bored (my domino game improved, though). I don’t think I’m an “ingrate,” unless you can tell me to whom I need to be grateful. Certainly not some abstraction like progress. I’m quite sure that, in many ways, those who lived before me—long before me—were far more contented than I am most days, in spite of what we would now call hardships (based on our own pampering), because they were confident about what life meant—and not “measuring” life by some bare statistical standard. We, otoh, are in a state of constant metaphysical turmoil, more so as our lives become increasingly automated, disenchanted, disembedded, and disembodied. All we have left are transitory comforts, and so we have come to depend upon them as our metaphysical anesthetic. Consumption means happiness. Desire is a bottomless pit. We are “the lonely tyrants of our own lives.”
What I have noticed, being abroad, in war, where we are in a constant battle with our own cognitive dissonance, is that when we say that our transient comforts are all that makes life worthwhile, it becomes easier for us to justify the destruction of those whose lives fail to meet our standard for worthwhile. “Their lives were shit anyway.” “They don’t value life the way we do.” That’s hiding in the progress narrative, too. It’s just waiting for the right circumstances for this interpretation.
<<I also don't view the fact that billions of people on the planet still live in dire precarity in terms of basic human needs as an argument against material progress; instead, it's an argument in favor of it.>>
Au contraire. As I spent a whole book explaining—with supportive facts btw—the core-periphery dynamic (is that a metanarrative?) operates in such a way as to make precarity more dire. I keep going back to Haiti, just cuz I spent so much time there even after the Army, but in a conversation with an oungon in the ville of Fort Liberte (a voudon priest), we discussed the difference between “being poor without food, and being poor with food.”
“I am poor,” he said, “but I have food. In the city, they are poor without food.”
Subsistence is not always precarious. What makes it precarious is the degree to which the peasant is made to become dependent upon money, creating a whole new realm of scarcity that re-imbricates the peasant into a uniquely modern form of poverty. Again, you fall back on this “material progress” thing, but what this means can only be fully understood—nuclear power and uranium mines and nuclear accidents and nuclear bombs—in the context of how it reshapes relations of dependency . . . and of the ecosemiotic force of a monetized modernity. “Material progress” requires reference points, and the selection of those reference points determine narratives.
<<But you're implying that the entire realm of technological improvement is a zero-sum game--if not worse--per se. I don't find the evidence for such a sweeping indictment.>>
I can point you to the evidence. In my book, ‘Mammon’s Ecology’, or the many references therein, from which I gleaned my thesis. Even the simple scientific axiom in the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics supports a zero-sum conclusion. It’s not merely energy that constitutes this zero-sum game, but energy underwrites the larger zero-sum game. Everything ramifies. Everything. Loss of biospheric complexity? Readings: Jason C. Moore’s ‘Capitalism and the Web of Life’, Alf Hornborg’s ‘The Power of the Machine’ or ‘Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange’, Ivan Illich’s ‘Energy and Equity’, Clive Ponting’s “A New Green History of the World’, Maria Mies’s ‘Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale’. John Friedmann’s core-periphery model. Braudel’s histories. Araghi & Farides’s ‘Land Dispossession and Global Crisis’. Everything by Mike Davis. Joan Martinez-Alier. Karl Polanyi. Vandana Shiva. There’s plenty out there. All you have to do is study the flows. Millions of tons of ammoniated nitrogen poured into Midwestern corn, then transferred into North Carolina pork and poultry CAFOs, eg, meanwhile devastating biodiversity, while polluting land, air, and water . . . and oh yes, destroying workers and communities. Ramification.
As to Parson Malthus, he had it backwards. Population does not overrun land productivity. Increasing land productivity (by industrializing agriculture, eg) increases population, but it does so in the context of increasing dependency upon ever more distant and scarce inputs. When those inputs (which have a zero-sum character at some point) are exhausted, along with things like forests, soil complexity (health), and aquifers, then we have famines . . . which will inevitably become more frequent and more urban in the very near future. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
As to birth rates, they’re falling now, but not where there is food scarcity. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30677-2/fulltext
Best estimates, global population spikes at 9.7 billion o/a 2064, then falls to 8.8 billion by 2100. Famines will contribute, based on ^^^; but many other factors will play a role.
On Virilio: He didn’t argue against the invention of ships—nor did I. He said we need to tell the whole truth. I did a longish piece on Virilio—who was a phenomenologist first and foremost—here: https://stanleyabner1951gmailcom.substack.com/p/speed-kills
Virilio, Ellul, and Illich are central characters in my current playbook. I’m not anti-modern; there’s no going back. I’m a Christian metaphysical postmodernist (one who still believes a couple of metanarratives, yeah), a political left-postliberal, a political-theoretical subsistence socialist, and a gonzo social critic. I also change my mind with some frequency (ergo my blog title, Molting). My disagreements with you in this instance, however, are really disagreements in many respects with my own past and once strictly materialist self. David Bentley Hart describes my former no-story story as “the most imperious of classic metaphysical gestures . . . the privileged vantage of a transcendental surveillance of all stories other than one’s own. . . the late modern story of an enlightened reason inhabiting no perspective at all and therefore entitled and able to dissolve all merely local narratives into provisional, mythical, tribal chatter.” The God’s eye view of a sweeping and all-encompassing anthropology (but I came to discover that this, too, is just another “story that we should have no story”).
This link outlines some of my reflections on Ellul: https://stanleyabner1951gmailcom.substack.com/p/a-good-word-for-jacques-loose-reflections
His theses on “efficiency” have something to say about “overcoming bugs.” In many cases, this is a case of throwing good money after bad, as they say. We overcome one bug, then have to overcome the bug that emerged with the fix on the last one. Illich speaks about this as “iatrogenesis.” Ships, shipwrecks, fixed bugs, equals cruise ships that are entropic black holes, container ships that support environmentally horrendous and dependency-increasing international trade, a continent of oceanic plastic, what else? Wars for finite stores of strategic minerals? There is only one major negentropic process in the world, the basis of which high technology is a net destructive process: photosynthesis. There is only one major eco-semiotic process that can achieve stability and sustainability, and that is biospheric complexity . . . also which technology necessarily destroys in such a fashion that using technology to fix what technology has created (fixing bugs) is a net entropic and dissipative process. Our in train ecologic disaster is not a bug in the system, it’s a feature.
I read Diamond’s book. It convinced me he should have stuck with ornithology. His Pulitzer must have been based on his lyricism, because it wasn’t based on any kind of intellectual rigor. His geographic determinism appears to be utterly blind to cultural specificities or social structures (except perhaps by inference as geographically overdetermined). That’s how he draws (specious, in my view) comparisons between Montana ranchers and Haitians. He tries to compare Easter Island to the whole modern world system. He implicitly describes medieval Iceland as being the same kind of self-regulating bureaucratic-managerial entity as the board of directors for Johnson & Johnson. There’s not a single account of what Hornborg calls “environmental load displacement” (shifting environmental burdens from “first world” to “third world”, eg), which is a demonstrable feature of the world system right now. It’s just sloppy; and from these sloppy premises, he presumes to suggest how we get out of our (then) current mess. Consumer choices and bolder leadership. Right. Sounds like a good TED talk.
I’ll close out now. I feel like I’m doing us both a disservice by trying to stuff twenty pounds of shit in a ten pound sack. Apologies.
I do appreciate your engagement, and that you force me—even against my 72-year-old disinclination to do much more than chase panfish on Sand Lake—to explain myself (however inadequate my attempts).
Be well, sir.
I take most of your points, up to a point. But I don't find them leading to the sweeping inferences that you're drawing. I don't reject the use of metrics a priori on the basis of what I know that they aren't able to address, or on account of what they aren't able to accurately portray. If a sustainable population on a healthy planet has any chance of being accomplished, big-picture numerical assessments are absolutely vital.
Counting people as statistics doesn't automatically reduce them to statistics. Considering human beings solely in terms of their material impacts doesn't address our non-material impacts, but that doesn't render the consideration irrelevant, or that measurements of material culture only yield answers that encourage greed for power and control- to the contrary, I've found it quite humbling to reflect on the Livestock aspect of myself- as an animal that requires food, water and living space, consuming energy and generating waste. The systems of short-sighted greed and power on this planet have no need of cultural geographers. Psychopathic leaders have never required projections and estimates to simply eradicate anyone who got in their way. The impacts of human energy use are being studied and recorded in an attempt to manage the course of the human future on the planet- as much as its humanly possible to do so, given our dominion over it. Some of the decisions made in pursuit of that goal are likely to be foolish mistakes, but that's the goal on the table. An undiluted will to power would pay them no heed and find little necessity for the measurements in the first place, because only one thing matters to such a mentality: the ability to annihilate surplus populations at will. If humans don't figure out how to use science and deploy technology in the service of a humane future, the neglect and denial of our ability to influence that unfolding will lead to the place where paradigms of extermination loom large as "solutions" to human population increase and stress on resources.
I haven't read all of the authors you've cited. Of the ones that I've read, I find many of their insights on values to be vitally important. The authors also make many valid points about the problems of technological modernity. However, as is so often the case in social criticism, the authors I've read scrimp on addressing challenges of the solutions- the nuts and bolts of how to fix the problems. Most of the reflections I've I've heard have an unreal, cloud-castle quality to them; they don't scale up well, and scaling up is one of those knotty statistical requirements that just can't be gotten around. If the realm of economics, I think Hornborg has some great insights on the economics of money, but nothing about his proposals would have a direct impact on the carbon footprint of concrete. Finance economics shares a lot of overlap with computer science, to me: it's a realm of abstractions that doesn't grow corn. Growing corn is a material process. So is cultural ecology. There are nearly 8 billion of us. Our material challenges may possibly by ameliorated somewhat by changes in the global currency system, indirectly. But the material challenges are ultimately direct ones.
"...in a conversation with an oungon in the ville of Fort Liberte (a voudon priest), we discussed the difference between “being poor without food, and being poor with food.”
“I am poor,” he said, “but I have food. In the city, they are poor without food.”"
That's a trenchant insight- up to a point. It sets aside the question of what would happen to the currently balanced- but fragile- cultural ecology of the rural communities and inhabitants if that urban population were to return to the Haitian countryside to live.
"Subsistence is not always precarious. What makes it precarious is the degree to which the peasant is made to become dependent upon money, creating a whole new realm of scarcity that re-imbricates the peasant into a uniquely modern form of poverty."
No, over the long term subsistence gets progressively more precarious as population rises, unless food productivity expands accordingly. We both realize that the increases in global agricultural productivity are mostly the result of reliance in petrochemical fertilizers. The pros and cons of that particular situation aside, the resulting increase in human population hasn't yet refuted the prediction of Malthus; it's only delayed it. Humans still retain the potential to outstrip the food supply on this planet. It's a potential that's greater than any devolutionary economic paradigm or practical benefit from the prospect of technological advance.
"Again, you fall back on this “material progress” thing, but what this means can only be fully understood—nuclear power and uranium mines and nuclear accidents and nuclear bombs—in the context of how it reshapes relations of dependency . . . and of the ecosemiotic force of a monetized modernity. “Material progress” requires reference points, and the selection of those reference points determine narratives."
Yes, that informs my views on what numbers can't tell us; they can't tell us "what for", they shouldn't be taken as some "objective" justification for self-centered prerogatives, or a corrupt agenda of private ends. But that doesn't mean that the metrics are meaningless. I've also accepted that the great big ole grid of planetary energy supply and resource distribution involves a whole lot of dependence on remote inputs, for nearly everyone. The more that dependence partakes of interdependence, the better. The more localism and independence, the better. Yet and still: 8 billion people. A primary feature of how it is, presently. There are aspects of Modernity that require negotiation and resistance. But the underlying reality of 8 billion people--and growing--is a force all its own. For all the bugs of the technological advances that allowed that result, it's our status quo ante. There's no problem that wouldn't spiral out of control if the global system of material resources and energy supply were to be dismantled by an anti-technological effort.
"As to Parson Malthus, he had it backwards. Population does not overrun land productivity. Increasing land productivity (by industrializing agriculture, eg) increases population, but it does so in the context of increasing dependency upon ever more distant and scarce inputs. When those inputs (which have a zero-sum character at some point) are exhausted, along with things like forests, soil complexity (health), and aquifers, then we have famines . . . which will inevitably become more frequent and more urban in the very near future. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet."
Those are Malthusian observations- especially that final sentence! I doubt that Malthus would find anything to disagree with in that paragraph. You haven't reversed the precepts that he was considering; you've simply done the logical thing and extended his postulate beyond a local bioregion to the entire planet. The concept of limits still applies.Farmer reliance on remote energy inputs in order to assure abundant crop yields also includes the reality that those inputs can't be but so remote--still planet Terra, okay?--that an increased plentitude of mobile energy resources cannot be confused with an infinitude.; and that, in this case, petrochemicals have a downside that approaches zero-sum as the negative effects from pollution and climate change continue to accumulate and increase.
But that's an argument for decreasing petrochemical use in the interest of prudence, thrift, and long-term attention to increasing efforts like soil conservation and riparian protection--not for the fiat imposition of a ban on fertilizer and machine agriculture. Although that's the Green Sentimentalist answer to the problem, undeniably. The Achilles heel of the Greens is that the activists put more of their efforts into saying "No" than they do into crafting solutions that can scale up to serve a the healthy life support functions of a planet that hosts >8 billion people.
Since you've shown that you're familiar with concepts of "purity and magic", I might as well share my view that many Greens have an ill-concealed disgust with any form of development or technology, as per se "Impure." That's why Green acvitists are seldom comfortable with offering detailed shovel-ready specifics in regard to their proposed solutions: they don't want to get their hands dirty with that. They fear Contamination. And that they might have to crunch numbers and find out that their proposals have more in common with a wish list sent to Santa Claus than an practical agenda.
Many Greens don't like Business, either, in the abstract. Despite the bottom line reality that NGOs like the Center for Biological Diversity are businesses, and their "nonprofit" designation is legalese, a rhetorical convention that's only partially and conditionally true. But you can't get rid of Business. Even Soviet-style command economies require Business. Business is what tills fields and builds houses. Questions can arise on the best way to carry out business. But the problems related to abuse of business pale in comparison with the problems of not taking care of business.
Technology built the modern world. I get that some people are under the delusion that it can replace it entirely. But it's also a delusion to frame the entire arc of human technological advance as a mistake, or as a project that has to involve disadvantaging the majority to serve the whims of a privileged few. I'm not alone in thinking that grappling with technology is more about mending it than ending it.
"I read Diamond’s book. It convinced me he should have stuck with ornithology. His Pulitzer must have been based on his lyricism, because it wasn’t based on any kind of intellectual rigor."
I realize that Germs, Guns, and Steel contains a lot of weak speculative surmises, and he can be criticized on the basis of his interpretation on different cases. But other points of his are inarguable.
"His geographic determinism appears to be utterly blind to cultural specificities or social structures (except perhaps by inference as geographically overdetermined). That’s how he draws (specious, in my view) comparisons between Montana ranchers and Haitians. He tries to compare Easter Island to the whole modern world system. He implicitly describes medieval Iceland as being the same kind of self-regulating bureaucratic-managerial entity as the board of directors for Johnson & Johnson."
Diamond begins getting into trouble when he makes local cross-cultural comparisons, or reaches for exceptional examples like Icelandic society c.1000. But that doesn't impeach his facts. The strong part of his book is that he gets a lot of the basics right.
Vaclav Smil gets even more of those basics right- and he does it as a primary concentration, with little desire to offer much in the way of opinion on cultures and economic or political ideologies. He discusses China's energy production priorities and economic development in terms of amounts, trends and results, without offering more than cursory commentary about Chinese politics and society, for example.. That perspective is foundational; Smil's bringing up material conditions as facts, not opinions or interpretations. He's big on letting the facts speak for themselves. It's a mistake to simply hand-wave that approach as toadying for the status quo, or to reduce Smil to the status of a material reductionist, on account of that emphasis. It isn't a defense of the status quo to admit the fact that the status quo exists, and then go on to outline the rough proportions of its most prominent material features. It's what we have to work from. We can't pretend that it doesn't exist.
[re: Diamond, again] "There’s not a single account of what Hornborg calls “environmental load displacement” (shifting environmental burdens from “first world” to “third world”, eg), which is a demonstrable feature of the world system right now."
Smil spends little time offering opinions on that situation, either. He's looking at the entire planet- and in that regard, he finds economic inequality to be a situation as pressing as climate change. He doesn't spend much time commenting on intramural comparisons- other than noting that the disparities require focused attention in order to solve them, and they haven't gotten enough of it. Smil is outright disgusted with the paradigm of disposability that accounts for so much of the consumer market nowadays. He's a degrowth guy. But he's also a realist who understands that there isn't anything sustainable about returning to relying on wood fires for heat. His model is the consumption footprint of a median-income French citizen in 1959 (albeit with less meat consumption). Smil thinks that a living standard of that order ought to be attainable for 8 billion people. He has the numbers on how far that standard has been exceeded by most Americans, c.2023.
I have read a book that investigates some aspects of environmental load displacement in very close detail- Junkyard Planet, by Adam Minter. It's only too clear that "environmental load displacement" generates a lot of problems for the third world locations that host the dumping, disposal, and recycling. But if you read Minter's account, you'll realize that the situation isn't as simple as is implied by the phrase. It also is not static; there are people who are taking responsibility for improving the occupational hazards of the industry and cleaning up its toxic waste output. The fact that improvement is not something that can be achieved overnight does not mean that it isn't happening. The improvements rely on advancing technology.
"There is only one major negentropic process in the world, the basis of which high technology is a net destructive process: photosynthesis. There is only one major eco-semiotic process that can achieve stability and sustainability, and that is biospheric complexity . . . also which technology necessarily destroys in such a fashion that using technology to fix what technology has created (fixing bugs) is a net entropic and dissipative process. Our in train ecologic disaster is not a bug in the system, it’s a feature."
You're speaking in idealized abstractions. They're great as goals, but oblivious to material realities. The idealized natural world relying only on natural processes of photosynthesis and an emphasis on maintaining a maximum of biological complexity would, of necessity, be a world with a lot lower human population: much higher infant mortality and maternal mortality, shorter human lifespan, more sickness and intractable injury and disability, more vulnerability to privation. The fact that local bioregions function in a way that sums up to an orderly balance says nothing about the fate that might happen to befall one or more species of the living inhabitants at any moment in time: plagues, pestilence, drought, flooding, freezing, loss of food resources...ecosystems rebound- or adjusts- dynamically in a way that can be framed as "negentropic", but that resilience also relies on entropic processes as a component of maintaining stability.
The species that most persistently resists such entropic calamities is humans (despite the reality that was also harbor entropic propensities.) That's how we've managed to spread so far and wide all over the planet, across so many wildly varying bioregions and climate conditions. We do it by using our brains to craft adaptive responses: using fire for heat. Digging aqueducts to supply crops with water. Inventing mosquito nets. Etc. The potential to construct negentropy is present in human self-aware consciousness, and there are many examples of its activation. The human tool-making experiment is not inherently entropic- although nothing rules out the notion that our entropic tendencies might overwhelm our negentropic achievements, and put the species in a tight corner. Human decisions can be wise or foolish. But they aren't just foredoomed, as if all human effort at material improvement is inherently futile or harmful.
"Our in train ecologic disaster is not a bug in the system, it’s a feature."
No, it's a bug. The bug is about continuing to mock the utility of a brake pedal. The neoliberal economic paradigm is like an amplifier designed to be as efficient as possible. But the more efficient an amplifier, the more unstable it is. That isn't an argument against the invention of the amplifier. It's an argument against a faulty, recklessly designed circuit that is on-track to overheat and short-circuit. The existence of faulty designs does not mean that it's impossible to build a reliable amplifier. The same can be said of a great many other technologies.
https://www.science.org/content/article/meet-vaclav-smil-man-who-has-quietly-shaped-how-world-thinks-about-energy
"...[Vaclav Smil] is not about to say that a collapse is inevitable now—not even with humanity on a problematic course and unlikely to change direction soon. "You ask me, ‘When will the collapse come?'" Smil says. "Constantly we are collapsing. Constantly we are fixing."
You've said much the same thing. But Smil sounds like he thinks the effort to repair and improve modern technological civilization is worthwhile--or anyway that the future holds sufficient promise that it's worth continuing the attempt. While your narrative framing makes out most of the landmark events in the history of discovery and invention as ending up falling prey to the same sunk-cost fallacy. All I have to so to refute that thematic premise is to switch on a light bulb and head down the hall of my heated apartment to get a drink of orange juice from my refrigerator. Around 15 per cent of the humans of the planet currently partake of that level of material circumstance, according to Vaclav Smil (sorry about the continuing reference, but as far as being someone who's paid the dues to run the numbers on these matters, Smil has no peers.) That's more than a billion people, every one of us able to routinely partake of a level of ergonomic ease that the wealthiest tycoons of dynastic monarchs c.1900 would envy.
The fact that around 85% of the world has yet to attain that material circumstance can be viewed in several different ways. Some folks want to universalize a humane baseline of technological affluence as available to all households, schools, and most indoor work environments. Others are exclusively privately interested in accumulating even more affluence on top of everyone else, and they don't give a damn about anyone but their own. But the absolutely most hopeless conclusion is to insinuate that no human being ever deserved electric lights, food refrigeration, or indoor central heating in the first place, because problems.