The pressure to choose

As per this Calvin and Hobbes strip, I suggest that the terms of a conflict, that is, the way that a conflict is described, is actually a composite part of the conflict itself.

For example:

To describe a conflict as, say, having to choose between condemning homophobia (and thus alienating a swath of, hypothetically, more sexually-conservative Muslims) or condemning Islamophobia (and thus alienating a swath of atheist or anti-religious gays).

The above description in itself invites the reader into identifying with variations of the "Good and Ethical Subject".

I am either the Good and Ethical Subject who sides with the gays,
or the Good and Ethical Subject who sides with the Muslims.

It is not enough either, to propose the following rhetorical alternative to this conflict, which is the existence of the gay Muslim (who acts as a mediator between the aforementioned parties).

i.e. "What about gay Muslims?!"

Those who are invested in the terms of the conflict will bear no such thing.

"He has to choose!" both fundamentalists will proclaim,
"He has to choose between his homosexuality and his Islam!
Homosexuality or Islam!
He cannot do both!"

**

In a way, both the gay Islamophobe and the Muslim homophobe are caught in the same ideological trap: of Ethnocentrism, or the belief that it is my own collective (which absents the ideological Other) that is more worth protection from intrusion or harm than yours or more accurately, theirs.

In other words, it is not that Muslim homophobia or gay Islamophobia should be uniquely addressed as issues (true as this assertion may be in particular contexts), but that they are both expressions of a common commitment to ethnocentrism, a universal human propensity that, while developmentally appropriate in certain contexts, becomes dangerously pathological when mired in an inability to be creative in an increasingly pluralist and diverse world... Ethnocentrism must be adequately attended to across the board, in all of its variations. 

Part of dealing with this is to actually notice the ways that organising around minoritarianism (i.e. identification with the oppressed minority) is always contingent, in part, on an unwitting capitulation to the terms of this disenfranchisement. 

Far from blaming the victim, I intend to point this out as a route to true freedom. As a gay man, the way for me to truly eradicate homophobia is not only to target it and address it in others (e.g. the homophobic Muslim), nor even only to address it in myself (i.e. dealing with my own internalised homophobia), it is to also truly cultivate the possibility for a larrikin betrayal of my own identity, a sincere abandonment that intends no nobility but can simply bear a privileged and detached witness to the categorical lie.

My true freedom, as a gay man, is in my ability to cease to be a gay man.
Not in ceasing to desire other men, or having sex, but in ceasing to allow these particular desires or actions over-determine the formation of my personhood, at the same time that I would advocate it should not be over-minimised or repressed either.

Incidentally, of course, this is an incipient narrative in the evolution of gay discourse, as it evolves its own "queer" trajectories, its postmodern leanings toward the blurriness of sexual categories (not only of homosexuality and heterosexuality, but also of manhood or womanhood, of the boundaries between what-is-sex and what-is-not-sex). In this case, going more deeply into my "gay-ness" can actually present the means by which I can reject its original terms and liberate new possibilities for coalition and freedom.

Note:
This strategy is not the same as the abandonment of commitment to people or communities, but only an abandonment of the drive to see people, including our own people, only as variations of "Self" or "Other".

Perhaps, to radically re-envision people as always "Both Self And Other"...?

"I am a gay man and not a gay man. I am homophobic and not homophobic. I am not Muslim... and I am Muslim!"

Or perhaps, more accurately, "Neither Self Nor Other"...

"I am neither a gay man nor not a a gay man. I am neither homophobic nor not homophobic. I am neither not-Muslim... nor am I Muslim!"

And this is what liberates me to be free to be contextually and communally relevant, as new and emerging forms and definitions of community are constantly defining and redefining what it means to be a People...

...I radically embrace my brethren, through my abandonment of "brethrenism".

***

To put it another way, freedom can be liberated not in the attempt to answer seemingly irreconcilable situations or bridge seemingly irreconcilable communities (e.g. between the Islamophobic gays or the homophobic Muslims), but, as per the Calvin and Hobbes strip, to deny all terms and conditions.

Every ideology and every community can be a straw target for intellectual game-playing...

I suggest a form of a-politicism (i.e. "this is meaningless and impossible to answer"),
an abandonment of identity politics...

...to embrace the impasse,
the impossibility,
the irreconcilability,
the restless nature of the dualism,
to reject its ideological premises,
to make room for something quiet and more enduring to take its stead...

...Relationship. Friendship. Comradeship.

Class struggle.

Decolonisation.

***

I look forward to that time when we have the strength, the conditions, and the collective will to properly reject even this aforementioned claim, to liberate more inventive, relevant inquiries and insights.

Australian-Invasion Day, and Aboriginal Custodianship

the Federated states and territories of Australia

"Australia Day"
is annually held on the 26th of January, and is celebrated as Australia's "National Day"
commemorating the arrival of the First Fleet of the ships that left Great Britain carrying convicts and settlers to this land, arriving at the port which is now Sydney.

So begins the national day of this country, commemorating Anglo settlement and colonisation.
Also known as Invasion Day and Survival Day.



This Invasion Day event on Facebook explains it best:

"The 26th January commonly known as "Australia day" is sold as a day to celebrate the 'lucky country' the date chosen to commemorate the arrival of the First Fleet, the 'discovery' of the Great Southern Land. The raising of the Union Jack symbolised British occupation of the eastern half of the continent claimed by Captain James Cook.

This date is more appropriately known to most First Nations people as Survival or Invasion day. It is also a day of mourning, we mourn the loss of land, culture, languages, we mourn the loss of freedom and abundance, and we mourn for the people who have, and continue to suffer under this disconnected, insatiable, violent and destructive imposed Capitalist system. Australia remains without Treaty, consent or compensation, the Stolen generation, stolen wages, dispossession, racism, assimilation, land theft continue."






Nearing this day,
I want to reflect, but briefly, on the issue of custodianship of the land.

the many Aboriginal language groups and nations of Australia

It seems to me that a major part of my cultural cringe in this country (a cultural cringe that I share, incidentally, with many other Australians as well) has to do in part with the way that we, as a country, not only relate in an ill-way to our country's Aboriginal inhabitants, but also to the land.

In Australia, settler peoples (this includes recent immigrants like myself) tend to hug the urbanised coastlines of Australia (e.g. Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane, Darwin), existing quite literally at this country's periphery, while claiming cultural hegemony and urban "centrality". Most the country's centre is desert, which is typically seen as more dangerous and uninhabitable, which of course reflects a certain... Euro-climate-normative idea of inhabitability...

Of course, Aboriginal people from diverse linguistic groups and nations have, for 40,000 years, wandered and lived across all of Australia's land, and, despite 3 centuries of displacement and genocide, necessarily retain a unique cultural custodianship over the land that we inhabit.



Here, I must necessarily set aside any rationalist biases, and come to embrace something quite a bit more "simple", in the encounter with Aboriginal custodianship as a political aspiration, as well as a lived cultural reality for many Aboriginal people (separate from the concept of land ownership)...

There is magic in this land that I am not, have not been, and perhaps cannot ever be privvy to... both as someone who is not ancestrally linked to this land, and as long as we, as a nation, do not reconcile ourselves with the ongoing ghettoisation of our Indigenous peoples...




Prior to 1967, Aboriginal people were not even allowed to vote
and indeed, were not even legally recognised as Humans.

Aboriginal people were classified under the Flora and Fauna Act.



I hold a lot of grief around this... Grief, so much grief for this land, and its desert "heart", and the heart of a government that deserted, no, til recently did not even recognise our Aboriginal people as people.

Through this grief, I also come to a place of quiet joy and gratitude, a place of wonder and awe, a place of hope.



A lovely poem,
Hate He Said
by Aboriginal Australian "malafella" on youtube
exploring grief around Australia Day...





... and for me?

to "belong" here...? What is my prerogative in this?
Me, global nomad, indigenous to nowhere for many generations.

I carry with me the spirit of wandering and chance upon this country as a clearing through global forest, and this is what I see.

I want to learn more...

Fraternity?

"The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy, but fraternity..."
- Germaine Greer


Greer continues... "yet I think it’s women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation..."


a cooperation of a kind that...
"...could make politics irrelevant; by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action the like of which we have never seen; which is so far from people’s ideas of state structure or viable social structure that it seems to them like total anarchy — when what it really is, is very subtle forms of interrelation that do not follow some heirarchal pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal."


I wonder if it must be women who break this spiral alone...?

How do we foster a culture of brotherhood and sisterhood and siblinghood,
no matter our gender nor our desire nor
some alchemical archetype of some form...


Siblinghood?

A preliminary Definition :
Through this world of strange times... we look out for one another, encourage one another to fight for the things worthy of fight. To nurture and hold whosoever needs nurturing and comfort. To hold one another accountable for the things we've done wrong that we should right. For forgiving those who have hurt us, and for forgiving ourselves for having hurt others...
and then telling one another, gently but firmly,
to stand up..., and
"Let's try again."

For sticking together no matter how difficult the journey ahead may get... this strange rush of civilisation toward ... what End?

What joy,
what a privilege,
to have space and time this precious,
to reflect and to contemplate.

Identity Politic wishlist

1. Enough critical mass of queer Buddhists of colour to organise for a regular meditation sitting group in Sydney

2. Working with a group of people who were raised (upper-)middle class on engaging and challenging class privilege (rather than just paternalistic work on poverty)

3. Mix-gender queer dubstep party

4. Intellectual discussion group on sexual ethics with other young gay men

Nature and the World Order

Environmentalism is over. The time for setting aside a portion of our awareness, efforts and resources to maintain a nominal sense of the primacy of nature, to try to save the planet, is over. The mindset persists: we haven't given up on the still-unsolved material and ecological problems. Rather, environmentalism has diffused into the matrix of civilization. At the same time, its potency has decayed, like the weak guilt that accompanies but ultimately allows indulging an addiction. The language of reducing environmental impacts has become a deception, a tool for ensuring the steady continuation of the very trends it was meant to push back against.

How do we make our way in the desert of decayed language? How do we communicate that there's still a real need for fundamental shifts in our ways of life—communicate in a manner that doesn't undermine the very possibility of that change?

1.
To my knowledge, the concept of environmental protection would not exist outside the context of an environmentally threatening industrial economy. In this context, the planetary environment has generally been thought of as a finite system in a state of approximate equilibrium, with some finite capacity for resilience. Unrestrained human industrial activity is then an intervention that disturbs and harms the environment. It's a model that's accurate enough to account for real problems like fishery collapse, acid rain, anthropogenic climate change, etc.

Slavoj Žižek says that this view underlies a mystification of ecological problems; that it is "a secular version of the religious story of the fall." There can be two answers: that we are part of nature—there is no fall—or that there is no nature. (To be clear, he answers that there is no nature.)

The first answer is very compelling for a lot of folks, and Žižek is right to identify an ideological current that can be traced to a mystified ecology. Much can be said about the worldview in which we're "one with nature," but I just want to point out that it has very directly informed some responses to the global material crisis. There's the dream of "going back to nature" to a retro-utopian world as it was before industrialization, which still has its determined off-the-grid adherents. And there are movements to revitalize the ancient wisdom of indigenous peoples, promoting proven ecologically effective practices. Some truly marginalized people work hard to embody these ideas, and I have the utmost respect for them.

I want to compare those proposals with another popular way to frame the global material crisis: that our methods of production, consumption, transportation, etc. are not correctly designed to render economic activity free of harm to the natural environment, and that it's possible to redesign them. For some people, including many of the folks that I work with, this framing leads to the visionary goal of transformative technological and social change (evolution, or revolution), which eliminates the negative environmental effects of the industrial economy.

I can't generalize about all people who believe in a future fueled by renewable energy, built using cradle-to-cradle renewable materials, underpinned by green design or biomimicry... But if I had to guess, I would say that such people think we have something to learn from nature through science, and that by putting scientific insights about nature into practice, we can create the verdant future. Therefore, I suggest that both the former, more mystical visions and the latter, more technocratic vision, share a sense of achieving fruitful coexistence with nature. This is basically Žižek's first answer: a reconciliation, after the fall from grace due to human hubris.

Yet, these two kinds of visions differ as greatly as possible on their approaches to something very deep at the source of environmental problems: a global economy based on industrialized consumerism. A self-sufficient subsistence farmer wants nothing to do with that, while a photovoltaic technology visionary would leverage it to sell everyone their own clean solar power source. What I'm getting at is that the narrative of co-existence with nature doesn't imply just one "right" approach to the fundamental problem of the global order.

In other words, being "one with nature" probably isn't the mythical salvation we're seeking. For the many other deep problems besides environmental ones (e.g. poverty, oppression, brainwashing), I would suggest that resolving the dualism between humankind and nature enters only obliquely, or even tangentially, into imaginable solutions.

2.
The environmentalist narrative is limited, but maybe it's still useful for getting people to deal with pollution, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and related crises. That was probably true for a while, early in the "Silent Spring" era. And it would be ridiculous for me to deny that there has been progress toward ecologically safer industrial systems, and improvements in public awareness and effort.

But over time, the environmentalist plea has undergone a semantic drift. We now see environmentalist language and ideas used boldly, and even legally owned, by the very actors who profit from the most ecologically destructive activities. What has occurred more broadly, in the middle ground between the BPs of the world and the local "green" dry cleaners, is that environmental protection has become a normative element in the construction of meaning. All that the environmentalists needed to do was establish that green is a virtue, if you can afford it; capitalists followed quickly with the corollary that you're being good by buying this product, even if it's really just slightly less bad.

And that's why environmentalists need to constantly fight to keep their language relevant (e.g. by diligently producing scientific criticism of every bogus green claim on the market), to keep it from simply supporting normative inaction.

Completing the semantic push-pull, scientific materialists who share the vision of green technology constantly must respond to a demand to express their messages in terms of market economics. To be most persuasive, they must intertwine the message of sustainability with the fiction of the consumer economy. Environmental protection is being reformulated as a way of valuing ecosystem services: the wetlands aren't just sitting there, they're providing a water filtration service that's worth a certain dollar amount on the market. I've seen several talks by the authors of the landmark book "Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice," and the two points they always seem to push the strongest are: it's science; and it will make money.

3.
Sustainably or not, through the process of living we take what we can from the universe, and we make from it something of our own.

At some point since the emergence of homo sapiens in the holocene, a notional boundary between nature and humanity was established, and it is now being dismantled. The same can be said of notional distinctions between humanity and technology, or technology and nature. The current geological epoch is unofficially being called the anthropocene. (To me, this makes it clear that the concept of "nature conservation" is obsolete.) Did the line between humanity and nature gradually move all the way from one side to the other, or is it more like the line between past and future: an abstraction from our way of seeing, but technically inexplicable and illusory?

Žižek thinks we should throw out the idea that we are rooted in nature, and forget the imperative to cultivate our connectedness with the balanced whole of ecology. From what I understand, this is because the idea of a natural equilibrium—the idea that "the existing world is the best possible world"—is false in the first place; and because this false idea has become a conservative ideology, a force that resists change. Let me try to tease apart this tight argument, because I find some of it troubling.

I'm not troubled by the falsehood of the self-sustaining optimized equilibrium of nature, but I'm slightly disappointed that Žižek calls this "the implicit premise of ecology." The ecology that he talks about sounds more like the "Gaia hypothesis" of Lovelock and Margulis, and he is probably referring to popular environmentalist ecology that has abstracted simple, compelling ideas from the science. I'm no ecologist, but I thought we had already realized that the earth is in a constant dynamic non-equilibrium state. We know that the conditions of this planet are subject to global and often catastrophic change due to biogeochemical, solar and cosmic processes. Among those processes are the evolution of biological life (which radically changed the chemical composition of the earth's crust and atmosphere), and the evolution of technology (which is doing that again).

But recognizing that "nature is a series of unimaginable catastrophes" does not, to me, mean that we can't learn anything more from ecology. Actually, that is something we've learned from ecology. We now have to look at the favourable, human life-supporting environmental conditions in the holocene epoch as an inherently impermanent condition, and we can ask any number of non-mystical questions about how to continue to support biological life in the next epoch.

The dominant ecological ideology is problematic, Žižek says, because it is "the voice which warns us not to trespass against an invisible limit." I agree that any ideology (e.g. religion, capitalism) deserves to be scrutinized, but if Žižek's challenge here is that there is no idealized nature and therefore there are no invisible limits, then I think he's mistaken. There may be no mystical nature, but there are theoretical planetary system thresholds, in effect invisible limits predicted by science, that correspond to the boundary conditions outside of which the system rapidly becomes hostile to human life. In other words, I see a scientific justification for the conservative role of environmentalist thinking: we actually cannot simply accept any change to the earth system as simply a matter of course, or else we may actually perish.

I've now placed myself in the dubious series of people who have claimed scientific justification for ways of thinking that could be seen from another angle as ideology. But I have to stand my ground, because science is the way I'm best equipped to communicate the need for radical shifts toward sustainable modes of living.

4.
Godfrey Reggio's film Naqöyqatsi is a beautiful documentation of the disappearance of that vanished sense of nature, and the complete transformation of reality through technology. I find it incredibly inspiring, although it is by no means an easy film to watch.

What I'm trying to offer with all my tiresome critical energy here is a way to dig out the last green offshoot of the trampled environmentalist movement, and transplant it into a more fertile substrate of ideas. The word "radical" comes from the Latin word for root, radix. Radical action needs space to grow, and I want to transpose the environmentalist ethic from enclosed "nature" into the treacherously imaginative space where we must now struggle and work creatively to build a better world order.

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

The Solution indicates the Problem

I love this video.

In it, Zizek suggests that the systems we have created around charity are contingent not only on 'working with' the existing capitalist economic superstructure which sustains inequities in the first place, but indeed, in a significant way, may well strengthen or support this very system!

I am reminded of this event:
I occasionally sit Zazen and do walking meditations at the Zen Open Circle, a Zen meditation/discussion group based in Camperdown on Friday nights.

One evening, the teacher Susan spoke about the non-duality of Good and Evil (something I believe Zizek is hinting at), and the importance of non-attachment to either extreme in this respect. Any idea of the Good is intimately dependent on an idea of the Evil, and the two are thus inseparable.

One of the group members then raised the question or paedophilia. About how there is no way, absolutely no way whatsoever, to think of a "paedophile" as someone with any redeeming qualities. Immediately, the group was triggered into this chaotic groupthink of uncritical agreement.

"Paedophiles are disgusting."

"Sick."

and so on.

Now, I have no love for paedophilia as such, but I feel far less hateful toward the "paedophile." In Buddhist terms, all phenomena are empty of their own inherent existence, and require the right causes and conditions before they can even arise. Concerning paedophilia, and this is a line of thought first brought to my attention by manoverbored, I started to wonder about the causes and conditions which sustain paedophilia, and the ways that we are complicit in maintaining these causes and conditions.

For example, here in the industrialised, Anglo-phonic "first world" (Australia, USA, as examples where the authors now live), if any of us WEARS SHOES, then the chances are very high that these shoes were made possible through the exploitation of child labour. The factories and, of course, the wider global economic structure that gives rise to these factories (for example through the outsourcing of labour from American shoe companies), have incredibly fucked up and problematic conditions which exploit the bodies of children.

Is this NOT paedophilia? If I wear shoes, does this not make me complicit in the tragedy of the exploitation of children's bodies for the purposes of my own (adult) consumption?

So what is Zizek's proposed solution?



Non-duality of Solution and Problem

From a Zen perspective, a first step is to break out of the victim-perpetrator dualism... Of course victimisation happens, and there are people who perpetrate victimising attitudes and behaviours that impact all of us very negatively.
At the same time, it is important to do the hard, spiritual labour of dancing between identification and dis-identification with the solution and problem, victim and perpetrator. There are no ultimate victims as such, nor ultimate perpetrators.

Thich Nhat Hanh clarifies this point in his poem "Call Me By My True Names"...


Call Me By My True Names
by Thich Nhat Hanh

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to
Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea
pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and
loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my
hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my
people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

Ecology as ideology

It's really the implicit premise of ecology that the existing world is the best possible world, in the sense of it's a balanced world that is disturbed through human hubris. So why do I find this problematic? Because I think that this notion of nature - nature as a harmonious, organic, balanced, reproducing almost living organism which is then disturbed, perturbed, derailed through human hubris, technological exploitation and so on is, I think, a secular version of the religious story of the Fall. And the answer should be not that there is no Fall, that we are part of nature, but on the contrary, that there is no nature. Nature is not a balanced totality which then we humans disturb. Nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes.

- Slavoj Zizek in The Examined Life, dir. Astra Taylor

It is difficult to hear this bit of thinking from Zizek and not immediately jump to its refutation (this is not true because...) or a Plan For Action (if this is true, we should do...). However, I think it may be worth taking time to unpack "nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes," especially the "unimaginable" and "catastrophes" part.

Unimaginable

Zizek elsewhere has noted that there are two kinds of events that we are incapable of imagining. He borrows some terminology either from Freud or Rumsfeld. I shall inject a third frame/metaphor, that of sight and distance, just because.

There are "unknown unknowns" (Rumsfeld) or "trauma" (Freud) - as I understand it, things that we cannot possibly imagine because they are too far outside our field of vision and are in fact blocked from our vision. It is the nature of the geography of our thought that render them unknowable. They are beyond the horizon.

There are also "unknown knowns" (Rumsfeld) or "the unconscious" (Freud), things that we adhere to or know that we cannot see, that are right in front of our nose, or perhaps even behind our noses. Unlike the unknown unknowns, which are geographically hidden from us, these things are unseeable because of our particular physiology. It is theoretically possible that with a corrective step (a pair of glasses, or therapy) we might be able to see them.

So I think it's worth noting, when Zizek says that the catastrophes of nature (or Nature?) are "unimaginable," he may mean both that they are unforeseeable and/or that they are completely foreseeable, if only we had the right attitude or orientation.

Catastrophes

There is something about the word "catastrophe" which is both terrible and wonderful. It is very much focused on results and not on causes. By which I mean that a "catastrophe" is something huge and possibly irremediable that happens to people, and fundamentally contradicts our values, disrupts our way of life, and ruins our institutions. However, there is nothing in the word "catastrophe" which suggests its source, which is left deliciously ambiguous (unlike say "massive fuck up" or "act of God" or "horrible accident" or "unspeakable evil" - which convey both the scope of an event's effects and define its source).

After all, "nature" is constructed by us, and is not fully outside us. It is fitting that it be a series of "catastrophes" which could be read as coming spontaneously through no fault of our own, or advertable, our responsibility to prevent, or at least prepare to mitigate.