Aggregate Space Summer Writer-In-Residence

Miscellaneous chapbooks

I'm delighted to announce that I'll be the Aggregate Space Writer-In-Residence this summer. I'm honored to be the first participant in the artist-run space's new program and I'm looking forward to my time in West Oakland! (For readers unfamiliar with Aggregate Space, I recommend reading Kelly Inouye's interview with Conrad Meyers II and SD Willis in SFAQ. As Inoyue writes, Meyers and Willis "basically created a gallery, artist studios, metal and wood fabrication shop, small theater, and office space out of an empty warehouse.")

Of ideologues and pragmatists

Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson

A few months after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, many one-time "Yes we can" cheerleaders are grumbling and casting skeptical glances at Washington. Indeed, I've been disappointed by some of our new president's decisions, but I also accept his maneuvering as an unfortunate political reality.

Unlike his predecessor, Barack Obama realizes that the President of the United States should not operate as an ideologue. Of course, he (and some election year soon, she) could choose to embrace ideology over pragmatism but, in doing so, the Commander-in-Chief risks aligning himself with the sort of tyrannical autocracy that our leaders rhetorically (and routinely) condemn.

But political reality doesn't temper the poor reviews that Obama receives from many on the political left. Considering their critique of Obama's centrism, I recalled an earlier HH post. In "The Whiteness of the Whale," I wrote:

"Craig Nelson's recent biography of Thomas Paine serves as my subway reading these days, [and] I find the following observation relevant.

'Beginning with Franklin and Washington, every successful American leader would balance the pragmatic with the Utopian. Where Franklin the master politician would be almost entirely pragmatic, Paine would be too fervidly Utopian in ways that would not just damage him financially, but imperil him physically... Paine would...always be too ardent with his religion of the lights, a Savonarola of reason and liberty, and as inept a political operator as any fervid Christian saint...The success or failure of any leader in U.S. history can be judged through his or her successes or failures at reaching the pragmatic Utopian paradox that remains at the heart of the American experiment.'

Nelson's words ring true. 'The pragmatic Utopian paradox' is not uniquely American, but it is central to our American experience. For confirmation, we need look no further than the glut of contemporary, progressive American politicians striving to develop a decidedly centrist track record, even if they contradict themselves (and their conscience) in doing so. By contrast, it's easy to discard compromise and contradiction if you are a committed revolutionary or a monkish loner operating in an intellectual and philosophical vacuum."

Barack Obama qualifies as one of the "contemporary, progressive American politicians" I criticize in that excerpt. Yet, as I suggest in the same post, "outside the D.C. beltway, ideologues are a dime a dozen, but exceptionally gifted rhetoricians like Paine or King, Jr. emerge (and make [a legitimate political] impact) only rarely."

Yet even if the political impact of fringe ideology is negligible, those voices must be heard. Indeed, unpopular opinions are sometimes the most vital in a just democracy. There's a reason, after all, that liberals wring their hands when contemplating the censorship of bigoted hate speech. If you believe in the democratic fray, you're obligated to let all of society's individuals speak.

In a recent episode of the "The Thomas Jefferson Hour," historian and Jefferson impersonator Clay Jenkinson read and responded to the following Paine quotation.

'He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.'

"This is how Paine would react to the Bush Administration for the past seven-and-a-half years. This is an answer to the Patriot Act, to the surveillances, to Guantanamo, to Abu Ghraib!"

Jenkinson's right. In fact, a great many of Paine's sentiments are as pertinent today as they were in the late 18th century, his abolitionist and proto-feminist writing especially so.

He may have made many political enemies in his day but, two hundred years after the turmoil of our nation's early ideological disputes, Thomas Paine's unwavering moralism aligns more closely with contemporary progressive attitudes than does Thomas Jefferson's political pragmatism. Compared to the public attitudes of the slave-owning and patriarchal Jefferson, Paine strikes the 21st century citizen as the more modern thinker and the more conscientious man.

Does it matter that Jefferson, in his private correspondence, agreed with Paine's abolitionist argument? From our vantage point (one of comfortable remove), no, it doesn't. What we consider, above all, is that Jefferson was a slave owner and that Paine was an outspoken abolitionist. 'Deeds, not creeds,' as the saying goes. But it's noteworthy that Paine was poor and unlanded, and therefore never in a position to own slaves. (Indeed, Paine was never in a position to give up slavery, power, or riches; essentially, his social standing cloistered him from temptation.) Nor was Paine a political figure; he could be strident because he didn't have to consider popular opinion or the practical effect of enacting reform.

Writing in his philosophical memoir An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God, Erik Reece succinctly describes the democratic ideal to which I subscribe.

"Like [Walt] Whitman, John Dewey thought of the ideal American democracy as an 'organism,' a whole that is reflected in each of its parts - that is to say, in each individual citizen. ...As cells work together within an organism, Dewey believed individuals worked together within a good society to achieve 'a unity of will.' ...And because democracy is a social idea, it is also ethical by its very nature. Ethics, after all, begins with the realization that one is a social being and therefore part of a larger whole. A man living alone on an island requires no ethic. An aristocracy or a dictatorship could be run by only a few of its members. But the democratic organism needs all of its cells. And those cells must act simultaneously in their own interest and in the interest of the larger organism."

But Dewey was a pragmatist. Surely he realized that the democratic organism's ability to fight off infection of the malignant variety is not nuanced; the democratic immune system, if you will, acts to extinguish all radical cells. In other words, this organism is just as likely to rise up against outspoken abolitionists as it is against outspoken racists. And, indeed, history stands as a testament to this action.

Thomas Paine found an American and French populace eager to absorb his revolutionary and populist manifestos Common Sense and Rights of Man, but he was eventually ruined by his rational dismissal of Christian doctrine, The Age of Reason. His New York Citizen obituary read, "He had lived long, did some good and much harm." Much harm? Paine's progressive opinions about slavery and feminism didn't win him sustained popularity.

Jefferson, too, was a lightening rod in his day, provoking as much disdain as he did praise (especially from the Federalists and, in particular, Alexander Hamilton). But Jefferson was a savvy political operator, a master of Nelson's pragmatic Utopian paradox. Although he shared many of Paine's opinions, Jefferson did not draft legislation addressing those issues or even, because of his deism, allow his private correspondence to be made publicly available in his lifetime. Our third president carefully considered what the demos were and weren't ready to accept. Paine, the ideologue, simply didn't care.

So what will it be? Should an independent, liberal leaning citizen like myself wish for a revolutionary president, a Paine-like Obama less concerned with centrist politics, an Obama driven by moral conviction? Can I believe that such a president's radical agenda won't be consumed by the fires of reaction?

For my part, I trust that Obama is striving to foment as much progress as he safely can in our flawed, anti-intellectual democracy. I express my few disappointments by signing petitions for ads calling on Obama to address some of what I see as missteps but, above all, I'm proud of our country for electing an intelligent, disciplined and thoughtful man to the nation's highest office...and I remain optimistic.

Image credits: Thomas Paine portrait ripped from American History Guide and Thomas Jefferson portrait ripped from The World Union of Deists

The Whiteness of the Whale

"Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?...And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

In a post entitled, "The Expanding Ethical Embrace" (March 2005), I expressed skepticism regarding Peter Joost's argument that humanity will adopt a moral code that grants other mammals, birds, reptiles, and even, eventually, bacteria, the same natural rights that we now reserve for ourselves (supposedly irrespective of race, sex, sexuality, or religion). I did not doubt the plausibility of Joost's prediction, but rather his assertion that this ethical evolution portended only happy returns. I wondered, if humans were to transcend the cruel machinations of biological determinism, wouldn't we, in effect, be killing ourselves with kindness? In Joost's neo-Eden, the human population would explode; the increased resource demands would inevitably lead to collapse (that is, if we didn't first find it in our reptilian spines to loathe "the other" as passionately as we have for time immemorial). Attractive though Joost's notion was, I remained ambivalent about the prospect.


Joost's prediction was recently called to mind when, reading Grist, an online environmental news journal, I stumbled upon a provocatively titled Gristmill thread initiated by Jason Scorse.  Many challenging questions are advanced in the dialogue generated by Scorse's "So, environmentalists support whaling?" Notable among them are:

- Is an environmentalist morally obligated to support animal rights?

- Are regulated, luxury hunts that fund conservation projects ethically or morally defensible?

- Are free enterprise and sustainable development mutually exclusive?

- Should the conservation and preservation camps be distinct from one another, promoting different agendas, or should they work together toward a compromised, common goal?

Scorse's answers to the above questions are 'Yes,' 'No,' 'Yes,' and 'Yes/No,' respectively. Yet any approximation of a complete answer to these questions requires some degree of ambiguity, and even contradiction.  Normally I find contradiction and ambivalence agreeable, because they edge closer to objective "truth" than any ideology might; in matters of environmental policy, however, the grey areas trouble me. Apparently, they trouble Scorse, too, as he jettisons nuance in favor of ideological certainty. Prompted to choose between ideology and reasonable pragmatism, I'm tempted to follow Scorse up the moral high road; the ideological path appears straight and true. But while moral certitude, the black hat/white hat conception of life and thought, is the path favored by activists and fundamentalists, I am made uncomfortable by it, particularly when it informs legislation.

Reasonable pragmatism, the preferred approach of post-Enlightenment thought, has its own problems, however. As Benjamin Franklin wrote of his vegetarian experiment(1), "so convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do." Franklin's observation at once celebrates and skewers reason, revealing it to be a wholly relative enterprise. This chink in reason's armor is worrisome.

So what will it be? Are the complications and sacrifices of reasoned compromise better or more effective than ideology? Or do we have clearly defined "good guys" and "bad guys"?

Craig Nelson's recent biography of Thomas Paine serves as my subway reading these days, and I find the following observation relevant.

"Beginning with Franklin and Washington, every successful American leader would balance the pragmatic with the Utopian.  Where Franklin the master politician would be almost entirely pragmatic, Paine would be too fervidly Utopian in ways that would not just damage him financially, but imperil him physically... Paine would...always be too ardent with his religion of the lights, a Savonarola of reason and liberty, and as inept a political operator as any fervid Christian saint...The success or failure of any leader in U.S. history can be judged through his of her successes or failures at reaching the pragmatic Utopian paradox that remains at the heart of the American experiment."

Nelson's words ring true.  "The pragmatic Utopian paradox" is not uniquely American, but it is central to the American experience.  For confirmation, we need look no further than the glut of contemporary, progressive American politicians striving to develop a decidedly centrist track record, even as they contradict themselves (and their conscience) in doing so.  By contrast, it's easy to discard compromise and contradiction if you are a committed revolutionary, an individual willing to die for your cause, or a monkish loner operating in an intellectual/philosophical vacuum, as did Theodore Kaczynski.  Outside the D.C. beltway, ideologues are a dime a dozen, but exceptionally gifted ideological rhetoricians like Paine or King, Jr. make a sociopolitical impact only rarely.

Not surprisingly, many environmental activists are ideologues, Jason Scorse included.  To be fair, Scorse, a professor of environmental economics at the Monterey Institute, is not so much making a stump speech as he is asking a provocative question. From his "So, environmentalists support whaling?" post:

"I have tried to make what is essentially a straightforward case that environmentalism at its core is about respecting life and that separating this from our behavior towards individual living beings doesn't make much sense. Since many environmentalists reject this notion and insist that environmentalism only includes preserving biodiversity and promoting resource sustainability, this suggests that one of the defining elements of environmentalism no longer holds: an opposition to whaling...So are those who argue for the minimalist view of environmentalism willing to go on record in support of whaling and the killing of other advanced mammals?"

Money can do a lot in the way of protecting individual species and imperiled ecosystems.  Regulated hunting operations and animal farms, worldwide, generate substantial revenue, a healthy percentage of which is used to fund conservation measures.  For example, a buyer pays a tiger rancher (yes, they exist) an impressive sum - $40,000, say, sometimes much more - to obtain tiger parts for use in traditional Chinese medicines.  A substantial percentage of that price is then used for habitat preservation, conservation education, and tiger breeding programs.  It's a simple ethical equation; one animal's death results in improved species survival rates in the long-term (assuming that the habitat can be protected from the trespasses of our burgeoning human population). My short answer to Scorse's question, then, is 'Yes.' The more complete and complicated answer, though, leads down a rabbit hole of uncertainty.

To begin with, I find Scorse's moral framework - do unto your neighboring species as you would have done unto yourself - fundamentally agreeable. I'm troubled by the scalae naturae and other moral or physiological hierarchies. Because human life is, in my estimation, no more or less valuable than that of an earthworm (and, lest you mistake that statement for hyperbole, my inner ideologue assures you otherwise), the farming and killing of a tiger, no matter the result, is immoral. So, too, is the farming and killing for food of any animal species. In a truly enlightened world, then, we would witness a continued shift toward vegetarianism, sustainable consumption, and the extension of natural rights to other species. But the rate at which such values are adopted is of critical importance, and I feel Scorse is not at all pragmatic in his consideration of the real-world application of his moral imperative.  I fretted about this in the earlier post:

"From a strictly pragmatic perspective, morality is a denial of our existential [and by this I meant all species, not just human] sameness; like all other species, our principal drive is one of survival and propagation. Even our human urge to classify, as seen in the periodic table, clothing labels, and taxonomy, is a violent instinct, evolved to make us better able to ward off 'the other' and to flourish as hunter-gatherers, a lifestyle no longer suitable for our global, industrial species. [Therefore], it could be argued that [the] extension of human rights to all races, cultures, and creeds was but one more victory in our campaign to deny human nature.

But an inclusive, caring society, even if inconsistent, results in a population explosion and exaggerated life expectancies. Moreover, as our species’ requirements are increased, so are our demands on the environment. By embracing one another, we in fact make it more difficult for future generations to survive. When even more populations (in this case, other species) enter our moral and ethical peripheral vision, we will find ourselves facing a very interesting philosophical and pragmatic dilemma. Are we overloading of the circuitry?"

It seems clear that we would be "overloading of the circuitry," but there is a more immediate concern, one that does not bode well for Joost's expanding ethics: we have proven incompetent in our attempts to achieve parity among humans.

In the course of the Gristmill conversation, Scorse writes, "Thank goodness...humans aren't treated with the same level of abstract notions about 'sustainability' that you advocate that we subject every other living thing to."  Oh, but how we are! One need look no further than the morass of muddled litigation generated by today's vitriolic debates over abortion, civil rights, or assisted suicide to comprehend just how reluctant we are to treat fellow humans with the respect we reserve for ourselves and for our loved ones. As I wrote in March 2005, "one can barely imagine the ensuing cacophony when considering similar issues for sharks, birds, and turtles."

Ever since Homo sapiens adopted an agrarian lifestyle, we've been a top-down animal, a pyramid ladder of the very few haves and the countless have-nots.  I'm not altogether opposed to the felling of this pyramid in the name of populism and moral ideology (although, let's not kid ourselves punkers, anarchy ain't Utopia), but when similar tinkering and protest is extended to Nature, an entity of which we, as a species and complex-compound social beast, are but an insignificant part, we're not only risking collapse on a Mayan or Roman scale.  We're also gambling with the fate of the human species at large and, importantly, that of the many hundreds of thousands of species inextricably attached to us.  Those who herald the imminent expansion of our ethical embrace would do well to think on this.



The natural algebra can not evolve apace with our ethical code. Believing this to be true, I suppose I'm something of a determinist. I don't doubt that Earth's carrying capacity will increase as we adopt more sustainable lifestyles, but such a change occurs in geologic time, not generational or historic time. E.O. Wilson, the celebrated Harvard entomologist, makes a similar, if distinct case in his landmark book, On Human Nature.

"Can the cultural evolution of higher ethical values gain a direction and momentum of its own and completely replace genetic evolution? I think not. The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior - like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it - is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function."

I'm inclined to agree...to a point. But what hand really holds the leash? Wilson assigns control to genes, our evolutionary chaperones. Genetics is indeed powerful, but the brain is as much a product of cultural evolution as it is physiological evolution. Therefore, I believe nurture can outpace nature at the societal level. In other words, genes have less control over moral and ethical evolution than Wilson would have us accept. In fact, it is the "eco," the greater whole - the Everything and the No-thing, from which we are inseparable - that grasps the leash. I trend toward the mystical here, but the skeptical scientists in the room can call this leashing by holistic natural law (as opposed to Wilson's evolutionary imperative).


Despite my attraction to the moralistic, and my belief that our ethical purview will inevitably expand, I must conclude that is necessary to distinguish between long-term aspiration and present policy. The American Civil Rights Movement may be portrayed as a historical artifact in high school text books, but racial prejudice and bigotry are no more history than is the Cold War. Our aims are ahead of our practice, and we should take care not to neglect incomplete cultural "mutations." Today being the anniversary of his death, take another listen to John Lennon's "Imagine." The words and images of artists are vital. Without them, our shared cultural imagination (or our memes) would be starved, but we shouldn't ride the moral high horse if it means we won't reach our destination. This is the critical distinction between morality and ethics.

Progress - if loosely defined as our stumbling effort toward the betterment of humanity and the world we belong to - is best served by pragmatic rationalism and a conservative code of ethics. As my father stressed to me from a young age, good economics - literally translated, "management of the household" - begins with good ecology - "study of the household." A promising future awaits humanity if we are imaginative enough to forge our ethics from the moral, the aesthetic, the ecological, and the pragmatic.

Turning to Bill Cronon's writing, as I so often do, and did when considering these ideas before:

"The choice we face is not to leave no marks – that is impossible – but rather to decide what kinds of marks we wish to leave."

So to Jason Scorse, and all ideologues: my heart is with you, but things simply aren't so clear as might like them to be.

Image credits: Ahab illustration by Sam Weber; ethics diagrams from Peter Joost's March 2005 New York Historical Society lecture; timeline diagram by Hungry Hyaena

(1) Franklin abandoned the diet eventually, as the smell of cooked seafoods, particularly fish, proved too much for his dietary resolve. No problem, though, as he was able to use reason to account for why fish were a viable exception!