/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Uncle Ted identified that industrial society causes alienation. But his solution is an ultra-reactionary “return to nature” movement created by terrorism against scientists and engineers. The purest expression of reactionary idealism.

>whats your opinion on the fully vibes based ramblings of some schizo boomer whining about modernity
a thread died for this

>>2461494
>alienation in the sociological sense
kys my man

>>2461505
I didn’t say he was using Marx’s theory of alienation, dumbass. Social alienation is evident in all socialist writing including Marx and Engels.

<The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

Not a communist. Ted had a very lazy American frontier myth idea about nature and pre-industrial societies. He does occasionally make good points, but nothing others haven’t said before.

Ted’s major flaw is he didn’t realize “nature” as thing thing that’s separate from humans and something you can manipulate and control, is itself a product of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. And the desire to destroy industrial technology to preserve and return to nature reproduces the Enlightenment-industrial mentality of “anything that isn’t useful to us must be destroyed” which he faults for screwing up the world in the first place. Instead of destroying ‘useless’ forests to make ‘useful’ developments, Ted kills scientists.So his whole approach falls apart at the core because it shares the same destructive logic.

>>2461487
Lifestylist deep ecology type whose ilk got bodied by Bookchin.

https://libcom.org/article/social-ecology-versus-deep-ecology-challenge-ecology-movement

<Let us face these differences bluntly: deep ecology, despite all its social rhetoric, has virtually no real sense that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in society and in social problems. It preaches a gospel of a kind of "original sin" that accurses a vague species called humanity—as though people of color were equatable with whites, women with men, the Third World with the First, the poor with the rich, and the exploited with their exploiters.

<Deep ecologists see this vague and undifferentiated humanity essentially as an ugly "anthropocentric" thing—presumably a malignant product of natural evolution—that is "overpopulating" the planet, "devouring" its resources, and destroying its wildlife and the biosphere—as though some vague domain of "nature" stands opposed to a constellation of nonnatural human beings, with their technology, minds, society, etc. Deep ecology, formulated largely by privileged male white academics, has managed to bring sincere naturalists like Paul Shepard into the same company as patently antihumanist and macho mountain men like David Foreman of Earth First! who preach a gospel that humanity is some kind of cancer in the world of life.

<It was out of this kind of crude eco-brutalism that Hitler, in the name of "population control," with a racial orientation, fashioned theories of blood and soil that led to the transport of millions of people to murder camps like Auschwitz. The same eco-brutalism now reappears a half-century later among self-professed deep ecologists who believe that Third World peoples should be permitted to starve to death and that desperate Indian immigrants from Latin America should be exclude by the border cops from the United States lest they burden "our" ecological resources.

<This eco-brutalism does not come out of Hitler's Mein Kampf. It appeared in Simply Living, an Australian periodical, as part of a laudatory interview of David Foreman by Professor Bill Devall, who co-authored Deep Ecology with Professor George Sessions, the authorized manifesto of the deep ecology movement. Foreman, who exuberantly expressed his commitment to deep ecology, frankly informed Devall that "When I tell people who the worst thing we could do in Ethiopia is to give aid—the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance, to let the people there just starve—they think this is monstrous. . . . Likewise, letting the USA be an overflow valve for problems in Latin America is not solving a thing. It's just putting more pressure on the resources we have in the USA."

…

<One could go on indefinitely with this sloppy admixture of "ancestors," philosophical traditions, social pedigrees, and religions that often have nothing in common with one another and, properly conceived, are commonly in sharp opposition with one another. Thus a repellent reactionary like Thomas Malthus and the neo-Malthusian tradition he spawned is celebrated with the same enthusiasm in Deep Ecology as Henry Thoreau, a radical libertarian who fostered a highly humanistic tradition. Eclecticism would be too mild a word for this kind of hodgepodge, one that seems shrewdly calculated to embrace everyone under the rubric of deep ecology who is prepared to reduce ecology to a religion rather than a systematic and deeply critical body of ideas. But behind all this is a pattern. The kind of "ecological" thinking that enters into the book seems to surface in an appendix called "Ecosophy T" by Arne Naess, who regales us with flow diagrams and corporate-type tables of organization that have more in common with logical positivist forms of exposition (Naess, in fact, was an acolyte of this repellent school of thought for years) than anything that could be truly called organic philosophy.

<If we look beyond the spiritual "Eco-la-la" (to use a word coined by a remarkable ecofeminist, Chaia Heller), and examine the context in which demands like decentralization, small-scale communities, local autonomy, mutual aid, communalism, and tolerance are placed, the blurred images that Sessions and Devall create come into clearer focus. Decentralism, small-scale communities, local autonomy, even mutual aid and communalism are not intrinsically ecological or emancipatory. Few societies were more decentralized than European feudalism, which in fact was structured around small-scale communities, mutual aid, and the communal use of land. Local autonomy was highly prized and autarchy formed the economic key to feudal communities. Yet few societies were more hierarchical. Looming over medieval serfs, who were tied to the land by an "ecological" network of rights and duties that placed them on a status only slightly above that of slaves, were status groups that extended from villeins to barons, counts, dukes, and rather feeble monarchies. The manorial economy of the Middle Ages placed a high premium on autarchy or "self-sufficiency" and spirituality. Yet oppression was often intolerable, and the great mass of people who belonged to that society lived in utter subjugation to their "betters" and the nobility.

…

<The seeming ideological tolerance that deep ecology celebrates has a sinister function of its own. It not only reduces richly nuanced ideas and conflicting traditions to their lowest common denominator; it legitimates extremely regressive, primitivistic, and even highly reactionary notions that gain respectability because they are buried in the company of authentically radical contexts and traditions.

<Consider, for example, the "broader definition of community (including animals, plants); intuition of organic wholeness" with which Devall and Sessions regale their menu of "Dominant and Minority" positions (18-19). Nothing could seem more wholesome, more innocent of guile, than this "we are all one" bumper-sticker slogan. What the reader may not notice is that this all-encompassing definition of community erases all the rich and meaningful distinctions that exist not only between animal and plant communities but above all between nonhuman and human communities. If community is to be broadly defined as a universal "whole," then a unique function that natural evolution has conferred on human society dissolves into a cosmic night that lacks differentiation, variety, and a wide array of functions. The fact is that human communities are consciously formed communities—that is to say, societies with an enormous variety of institutions, cultures that can be handed down from generation to generation, lifeways that can be radically changed for the better or worse, technologies that can be redesigned, innovated, or abandoned, and social, gender, ethnic, and hierarchical distinctions that can be vastly altered according to changes in consciousness and historical development. Unlike most so-called "animal societies" or, for that matter, communities, human societies are not instinctively formed or genetically programmed. Their destinies may be decided by factors—generally economic and cultural–that are beyond human control at times, to be sure; but what is particularly unique about human societies is that they can be racially changed by their members—and in ways that can be made to benefit the natural world as well as the human species.

<Human society, in fact, constitutes a "second nature," a cultural artifact, out of "first nature," or primeval nonhuman nature. There is nothing wrong, unnatural, or ecologically alien about this fact. Human society, like plant and animal communities, is in large part a product of natural evolution, no less than beehives or anthills. It is a product, moreover, of the human species, a species that is no less a product of nature than whales, dolphins, California condors, or prokaryotic cells. Second nature is also a product of mind—of a brain that can think in a richly conceptual manner and produce a highly symbolic form of communication. Taken together, second nature, the human species that forms it, and the richly conceptual form of thinking and communication so distinctive to it, emerges out of natural evolution no less than any other life-form and nonhuman community. This second nature is uniquely different from first nature in that it can act thinkingly, purposefully, willfully, and depending up on the society we examine, creatively in the best ecological sense or destructively in the worst ecological sense. Finally, this second nature called society has its own history: its long process of grading out of first nature, of organizing or institutionalizing human relationships, human interactions, conflicts , distinctions, and richly nuanced cultural formations, and of actualizing its large number of potentialities—some eminently creative, others eminently destructive.

<Finally, a cardinal feature of this product of natural evolution called society is its capacity to intervene in first nature—to alter it, again in ways that may be eminently creative or destructive. But the capacity of human beings to deal with first nature actively, purposefully, willfully, rationally, and one hopes ecologically is no less a product of evolution than the capacity of large herbivores to keep forests from eating away at grasslands or of earthworms to aerate the soil. Human beings and their societies alter first nature at best in a rational and ecological way—or at worst in an irrational and anti-ecological way. But the fact that they are constituted to act upon nature, to intervene in natural processes, to alter them in one way or another, is no less a product of natural evolution than the action of any life-form on its environment.

<In failing to emphasize the uniqueness, characteristics, and functions of human societies, or placing them in natural evolution as part of the development of life, or giving full, indeed unique due to human consciousness as a medium for the self-reflective role of human thought as nature rendered self-conscious, deep ecologists essentially evade the social roots of the ecological crisis. They stand in marked distinction to writers like Kropotkin who outspokenly challenged the gross inequities in society that underpin the disequilibrium between society and nature. Deep ecology contains no history of the emergence of society out of nature, a crucial development that brings social theory into organic contact with ecological theory. It presents no explanation of—indeed, it reveals no interest in—the emergence of hierarchy out of society, of classes out of hierarchy, of the State out of classes–in short, the highly graded social as well as ideological development that gets to the roots of the ecological problem in the social domination of women by men and of men by other men, ultimately giving rise to the notion of dominating nature in the first place.

<Instead, what deep ecology gives us, apart from what it plagiarizes from radically different ideological contexts, is a deluge of Eco-la-la. Humanity surfaces in a vague and unearthly form to embrace everyone in a realm of universal guilt. We are then massaged into sedation with Buddhist and Taoist homilies about self-abnegation, biocentrism, and pop spiritualism that verges on the supernatural—this for a subject-matter, ecology, whose very essence is a return to earthy naturalism. We not only lose sight of the social and the differences that fragment humanity in to a host of human beings—men and women, ethnic groups, oppressors and oppressed; we lose sight of the individual self in an unending flow of Eco-la-la that preaches the "realization of self-in Self where ?Self' stands for organic wholeness" (67). That a cosmic "Self" is created that is capitalized should not deceive us into believing that it has any more reality than an equally cosmic "Humanity." More of the same cosmic Eco-la-la appears when we are informed that "the phrase' includes not only men, an individual human, but all humans, grizzly bears, whole rainforest ecosystems, mountains and rivers, the tiniest microbes in the soil and so on."

<A "Self" so cosmic that it has to be capitalized is no real self at all. It is an ideological category as vague, faceless, and depersonalized as the very patriarchal image of "man" that dissolves our uniqueness and rationality into a deadening abstraction.

….

>>2461591
(cont)

<One does not leave the muck of deep ecology without having mud all over one's feet. Exactly who is to decide the nature of human "interference" in first nature and the extent to which it can be done? What are "some" of the ecosystems we can modify, and which ones are not subject to human "interference"? Here again we encounter the key problem that Eco-la-la, including deep ecology, poses for serious, ecologically concerned people: the social bases of our ecological problems and the role of the human species in the evolutionary scheme of things.

<Implicit in deep ecology is the notion that a "humanity" exists that accurses the natural world; that individual selfhood must be transformed into a cosmic "Selfhood" that essentially transcends the person and his or her uniqueness. Even nature is not spared a kind of static, prepositional logic that is cultivated by the logical positivists. Nature in deep ecology and David Foreman's interpretation of it becomes a kind of scenic view, a spectacle to be admired around the campfire (perhaps with some Budweiser beer to keep the boys happy or a Marlboro cigarette to keep them manly)—not an evolutionary development that is cumulative and includes the human species, its conceptual powers of thought, its highly symbolic forms of communication, and graded into second nature, a social and cultural development that has its own history and metabolism with pristine first nature. To see nature as a cumulative unfolding form first into second nature is likely to be condemned as anthropocentric—as though human self-consciousness at its best were not nature rendered self-conscious.

<The problems that deep ecology and biocentrism raise have not gone unnoticed in more thoughtful press in England. During a discussion of "biocentric ethics" in The New Scientist 69 (1976), for example, Bernard Dixon observed that no "logical line can be drawn" between the conservation of whales, gentians, and flamingoes on the one hand and the extinction of pathogenic microbes like the small pox virus on the other. At which point God's gift to misanthropy, David Ehrenfeld, cutely observes that the smallpox virus is an "endangered species" in his The Arrogance of Humanism, a work that is so selective and tendentious in its use of quotations that it should validly be renamed "The Arrogance of Ignorance." One wonders what to do about the AIDS virus if a vaccine or therapy should threaten its survival. Further, given the passion for perpetuating the ecosystem of every species, one wonders how smallpox and AIDS virus should be preserved. In test tubes? Laboratory cultures? Or to be truly ecological, in their native habitat, the human body? In which case, idealistic acolytes of deep ecology should be invited to offer their own bloodstreams in the interests of "biocentric equality." Certainly, if "nature should be permitted to take its course," as Foreman advises for Ethiopians and Indian peasants, then plagues, famines, suffering, wars, and perhaps even lethal asteroids of the kind that exterminated the great reptiles of the Mesozoic should not be kept from defacing the purity of first nature by the intervention of second nature. With so much absurdity to unscramble, one can indeed get heady, almost dizzy, with a sense of polemical intoxication.

<At root, the eclecticism that turns deep ecology into a goulash of notions and moods is insufferably reformist and surprisingly environmentalist—all its condemnations of "superficial ecology" aside. It has a Dunkin' Donut for everyone. Are you, perhaps a mild-mannered liberal? Then do not fear: Devall and Sessions give a patronizing nod to "reform legislation," "coalitions," "protests," the "women's movement" (this earns all of ten lines in their "Minority Tradition and Direct Action" essay), "working in the Christian tradition," "questioning technology" (a hammering remark if ever there was one), "working in Green politics" (which faction, the Fundis or the Realos?)—in short, everything can be expected in so "cosmic" a philosophy. Anything seems to pass through deep ecology's Dunkin Donut hole: anarchism at one extreme and eco-fascism at the other. Like the fast-food emporiums that make up our culture, deep ecology is the fast food of quasi-radical environmentalists.

<Despite its pretense of radicality, deep ecology is more New Age and Aquarian than the environmentalist movements it denounces under these names. If "to study the self is to forget the self," to cite a Taoist passage with which Devall and Sessions regale us, then the "all" by which we are presumably "enlightened" is even more invertebrate than Teilhard de Chardin, whose Christian mysticism earns so much scorn from the authors of Deep Ecology. Indeed, the extent to which deep ecology accommodates itself to some of the worst features of the dominant view it professes to reject is seen with extraordinary clarity in one of its most fundamental and repeatedly asserted demands: namely, that the world's population must be drastically reduced, according to one of its acolytes, to 500 million. If deep ecologists have even the faintest knowledge of the population theorists that Devall and Sessions invoke with admiration—notably Thomas Malthus, William Vogt, and Paul Ehrlich—then they would be obliged to add: by measures that are virtually eco-fascist. This specter clearly looms before us in Devall and Sessions's sinister remark: "the longer we wait [in population control] the more drastic will be the measures needed"

…

>>2461592
<Deep ecology provides is with no approach for responding to, much less acting upon, this key question. It not only rips invaluable ideas like decentralization, a nonhierarchical society, local autonomy, mutual aid, and communalism from the liberatory anarchic tradition of the past where they have acquired a richly nuanced, anti-elitist , and egalitarian content—reinforced by passionate struggles by millions of men and women for freedom. It reduces them to bumper-sticker slogans that can be recycled for use by a macho mountain man like Foreman at one extreme or flaky spiritualists at the other. These bumper-sticker slogans are then relocated in a particularly repulsive context whose contours are defined by Malthusian elitism, antihumanist misanthropy, and a seemingly benign "biocentrism" that dissolves humanity with all its unique natural traits for conceptual thought and self-consciousness into a "biocentric democracy" that is more properly the product of human consciousness than a natural reality. Carried to its logical absurdity, this "biocentric democracy'"—one might also speak of a tree's morality or a leopard's social contract with its prey—can no more deny the right of pathogenic viruses to be placed in an Endangered Species list (and who places them there in the first place?) than it can deny the same status to whales. The social roots of the ecological crisis are layered over with a hybridized, often self-contradictory spirituality in which the human self, writ large, is projected into the environment or into the sky as a reified deity or deities—a piece of anthropocentrism if ever there was one, like the shamans dressed in reindeer skins and horns—and abjectly revered as "nature." Or as Arne Naess, the grand pontiff of this mess, puts it: "The basic principles within the deep ecology movement are grounded in religion or philosophy" (225)—as though the two words can be flippantly used interchangeably. Selfhood is dissolved, in turn, into a cosmic "Self" precisely at a time when deindividuation and passivity are being cultivated by the mass media, corporations, and the State to an appalling extent. Finally, deep ecology, with its concern for the manipulation of nature, exhibits very little concern for the manipulation of human beings by one another, except perhaps when it comes to the drastic measures that may be "needed" for "population control."

<Unless there is a resolute attempt to fully anchor ecological dislocation in social dislocations, to challenge the vested corporate and political interests known as capitalist society—not some vague "industrial/technological" society that even Dwight D. Eisenhower attacked with a more acerbic term—to analyze, explore and attack hierarchy as a reality, not only as a sensibility, to recognize the material needs of the poor and of Third World people, to function politically, not simply as a religious cult, to give the human species and mind their due in natural evolution, not simply to regard them as cancers in the biosphere, to examine economies as well as souls and freedom as well as immerse ourselves in introspective or scholastic arguments about the rights of pathogenic viruses—unless in short North American Greens and the ecology movement shift their focus toward a social ecology and let deep ecology sink into the pit it has created, the ecology movement will become another ugly wart on the skin of society.

fin.

>>2461591
Bookchin was a lazy retard but did you really have to spam this entire thread with his writing?

>>2461599
Just scroll past it if you don't want to read it you fucking baby.

Just post the damn link. I can read the article myself. I don’t need you to post the whole damn thing here you chud

Gray goo scary.

she was a narodnik

>>2461609
No u

He killed a porky. That makes him alright in my books.

he was an autistic, rabidly reactionary transgender repressor. if he was born today he would be a school shooter.

>>2461487
Peak reactionary ideology trying to get us back to the "good old days" of feudalism.

Him and his followers should be placed in an industrial macerator

>>2461487
would've been based if he mailed his country equivalent of that polish ceo that came on tv to justify illegally dumping mercury into rivers,but alas reactionaries always choose the easier targets

>>2461487
You could have googled this. It would have been literaly faster than typing out this OP and so on without shitting up the catalogue.
>>>/siberia/ - Sage and report.

>>2462059
Tru sis, sage report and downvoted