Issue 3

GADFLY

Fall 2019 Columbia University Undergraduate Philosophy Magazine

GAD

DFLY

EDITORS EDITORS-IN-CHIEF CECILIA BELL ALICE McCRUM MANAGING EDITOR SAM WILCOX CHIEF ASSOCIATE EDITOR NICHOLAS ALLEN DESIGN EDITOR RACHEL SHERR ASSOCIATE ARTICLE EDITORS NICK GAUTHIER LUCIANO NAON ISAAC SCHOTT-ROSENFIELD ASSOCIATE INTERVIEW EDITORS NICK ERICHSON TZAR TARAPORVALA DEPUTY EDITORS SAM HOSMER EMMA JAMES REPRESENTATIVES SOPHIE CRAIG PEDRO SIEMSEN JONATHAN TANAKA

CONTENTS A LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

02

WRETCHED IS THE EARTH BENJAMIN DUBOW

06

THE SPACE WE SHARE EMMA JAMES

14

ON INERTIA NICK RIBOLLA

20

INTERVIEW: MICHAEL ROTH TZAR TARAPORVALA & NICK ERICHSON

28

ALL THE WORLD'S A COURT MADDIE WODA

36

"FROM NATURE" ARGUMENTS DANIEL DRISCOLL

42

WHO IS THOMAS STOCKMANN? HARRISON STETLER

50

ARTWORK

60

ADVERTISEMENTS

61

A LETTER FROM THE

O

n a hot Friday afternoon in September, many gathered in Foley Square and the streets around City Hall in lower Manhattan to hear Greta Thunberg, the 15-year-old climate activist from Sweden, speak. Above a sea of colorful handmade signs—“I cry for the trees,” “nature always wins,” “we are running out of time”—Thunberg reminded us that, for a while now, we have been running out of time. Perhaps, as many environmental scientists have indicated, we already have. Her words incited the furiosity in the air. “What do we want? Climate Justice! When do we want it? Now!” erupted through the crowd. This was a collective recognition. This was, echoing Aristotelian tragedy, our anagnorisis; this was our tragic realization that, through human folly, the earth is shuddering.

“Nowadays,” Timothy Morton writes in Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, “hardly anybody likes it when you mention the environment.” At the risk of sounding “boring or judgmental or hysterical, or a mixture of all of these,” Gadfly wants to pause and think about the environment. Likening the environment to the unconscious, Morton suggests that just as “nobody likes it when you mention the unconscious,” because when you do “it becomes conscious,” nobody likes discourse about the environment because it provokes an uncovering. When you mention the environment, it ceases to be the environment, the background, the liminal space between. “It stops being That Thing Over There that surrounds and sustains us.” In this issue, we bring environment into the foreground.

In “Who is Thomas Stockmann,” which traces the social and political history of environmentalism, Harison Stetler shows that the contemporary understanding of the “environment” has ebbed and flowed. What has historically been “there”—milieu and background, or habitat and weather—is now, increasingly and urgently, “here”—the Earth. While Morton investigates ecological systems (just as this issue explores elements of trees and Shakespearean greens), he also discusses texts, writers, composers, and artists. Indeed, Morton writes, environmental philosophy “delves into all types of ideas about space and place (global, local, cosmopolitan, regionalist).”

Following this broader, historically rooted definition, we also consider “environment” not just as ecological space, but as social, literary, artistic and economic space. In an interview with Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, we look to the campus as embedded in its own various other environments. Likewise, Benjamin Dubow links our relationship with the natural world to the relationships between colonial and imperial bodies, suggesting cyclical patterns across time and geography. Where past intellectual move-

03

ments might have identified problems of meaning, where the physical and abstract are kept separate, “environmental crisis” is a collapse: it is a problem of space, both physical and abstract.

However pervasive the problem, we hope not to catastrophize in broad strokes. While the environmental crisis has become, at times, an empty trope of political discourse, we do not wish to merely decry the disaster, nor to divine its solutions. In this issue, instead, the writers look to the roots and repercussions of the problems we have inherited. Drawing from Ibsen to Fanon, Aristotle to Hegel, economics to deep ecology, the articles, together, offer a multifaceted, shifting picture of our relationship to the natural world.

Words might not be the answer; sometimes they are a part of the problem.

The idea of the “natural,” as Daniel Driscoll explains, has been used to justify capitalist ideologies. The seemingly innocent concept of “emotion,” Emma James argues, reinforces an underlying anthropocentrism. And the expression “mother Earth,” Nick Ribolla suggests, points to a disturbing parallel between the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of women. Indeed, writing about nature—speaking about nature—is itself, as Maddie Woda explores, inherently confined to the realm of man, and therefore limited to artifice.

A LETTER

But words, or a closer look at them, can be a start. This issue is an attempt at a start—a start to dispelling misunderstanding, to confronting exploitation.

We filter through various environments as we go about our daily rituals, and as we move through life: we experience internal and external space, “intellectual environments,” and the often tempestuous environment of emotions. By addressing how these environments transform, contaminate and are contaminated, this issue attempts to look directly into the environmental unconscious.

We are grateful for the opportunity to publish our first fall publication. Specifically, we thank Columbia University’s Department of Philosophy for helping us produce Gadfly. We also thank the Arts Initiative for their generous support. Finally, most of all, we thank our wonderful contributors and board.

To end this preamble is not to end the ongoing global discussion. As we enter a new decade, we offer a call to action. At the climate march in September one sign particularly resonated. In bold black letters, accompanied by a swallow in flight were the words, “Grieve Then Act.” As you read the following, acknowledge both the weight of grief and the imperative: act.

04

THE EDITORS

05

WRETC

BENJAMIN DUBOW

CHED IS

“All this wreckage, all this waste, humanity reduced to a monologue, and you think all that does not have its price?”

—Aimé Césaire, “Discourse on Colonialism”

WRETCHED IS THE EARTH

T

hough it is possible that Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire did not have the climate crisis in mind when they wrote in the mid-20th century, their words provide an excellent, if disheartening, language with which to speak about our current situation. For greed of ever-greater profit, humans have conquered, colonized, oppressed, and exploited various ‘Other’ peoples of the planet on a scale never seen before, owing in large part to new industrial technologies. Yet over and above this stark historical reality, to say nothing of the disguised or ignored forms of slavery and oppression of peoples that still very much exist, there is also a broader manifestation of humanity’s insatiable and rapacious hunger. In fact, it is difficult to read their words—Césaire’s in “Discourse on Colonialism” in particular—and not feel a connection to the environment: “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.

A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.”

This resonance should not surprise us. Perhaps the same system of thought that blinded us to the evils of colonialism continues to conceal the more-than-human world’s suffering from our myopic and self-centered vision.1 Césaire’s words’ uncanny relevance stems from the reality that colonization and the climate crisis are but differently manifested results of the same invidious modality. This modality underlies both the project of colonialism (past and present) and the domination of the industrial-capitalist West. It requires, among other things, the categorization and division of the world along hierarchical lines, with predictably disastrous consequences for the bodies on the lower half.

These divisions are partly responsible for our inability to deal with, or even grasp, the magnitude of the problem we have wrought. Various aspects of the climate crisis may seem, if

1. The phrase “more-than-human world,” coined by David Abram, a philosopher, attempts to counter humanity’s instrumental (and solipsistic) view of the world in favor of one that recognizes the world’s intrinsic value. i.e., the world is not our property or rightful domain: there is more to this planet than just us and our desires; we are not all that is significant.

08

BENJAMIN DUBOW

09

WRETCHED IS THE EARTH

not quite neat, at least comfortably distinct and differentiated: floods are floods, which are certainly not droughts, and neither floods, nor droughts have much to do with the annihilation of coral reefs. But the natural world, where everything is intimately and intrinsically connected, does not care for our categories.

Feedback loops and climatic cascades will continue to build on themselves and on each other (in a kind of dialectical motion of development), undermining not only the narrow definitions into which they’ve been siloed, but the entire interdependent system that is our Earth.2 The problems are all part of one big problem.

And our inability to see the web in its entirety is what opened the door to the unimaginable cruelties of colonization in the first place: Western man would never have intentionally perpetrated such violence on himself. Harm inflicted on the ‘Other,’ though, is a different matter.

T

his framework help explains why exploitation of peoples came hand-in-hand with exploitation of land: for who cares about the well-being of these ‘Others’? The same brutal, alienating logic of extractive capitalism drove both.

These two forms of exploitation, especially in the later phases of colonialism (e.g. Belgian exploitation of the Congo and its inhabitants in the

late 19th century to supply the West with rubber and exorbitant wealth), even supported one another in service of “Progress”––a thoroughly unimpeachable end in the West. Césaire demonstrates this relationship: They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks. I am talking about thousands of men sacrificed to the Congo-Océan. I am talking about those who, as I write this, are digging the harbor of Abidjan by hand.

I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their lands, their habits, their life—from life, from the dance, from wisdom…I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted—harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population— about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries; about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials.

With the destruction of men came the destruction of the Earth. They are co-incidental, not accidental: both are part of a whole, and the health of one directly influences that of the other. The forces of colonization even realized this truth to some degree; they strategically destroyed the grounded economies and traditions—modes of being in the world

2. For a detailed scientific introduction to the interconnectedness of the global system, see Tim Lenton, Earth System Science. For a more spiritual introduction, go outside where there are trees and birds and water and open sky and, for a moment, suspend your disbelief.

10

W

hen first I read Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, I was unable to stomach the work’s call for violence.

Upon returning to Fanon’s words, however, I realized that I’d missed his crucial point. Violence is not desirable, it is rather the unavoidable and inevitable synthesis of colonialism’s dialectic. “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.” In the environmental realm, this same phenomenon might show us how the current climate crisis will inexorably unfold. As feedback loops, now kicked into gear, begin to spiral out-

ward, we will feel the repercussions of a planet that has suffered long enough. But it is unclear if we can stop these loops merely by dropping our still-smoking guns and offering pittances of remuneration, for they now have their own momentum. The dialectic has tipped; as it asserts its own existence, the world fights back.

We might even be tempted to think, in Fanon’s terms, that the Earth is coming to consciousness.3

BENJAMIN DUBOW

carefully developed to work in harmony with the immediate environment—in order to better control the local populace. Crucially, both the exploitation of land and its peoples required a startling blindness to the reverberations of violence.

We must be careful not to confuse this dialectical development of the Earth’s consciousness with Hegel’s development of History or World Spirit, an anthropocentric idea.

Hegel (to whom Fanon is indebted) sees the evolution of History as driven by Reason and tending toward a perfected telos for mankind; catastrophes that occur along the way are regrettable but necessary

3. Of course, one might respond that it has been conscious all along—we just didn’t, couldn’t or refused to understand how many shapes consciousness can take.

11

WRETCHED IS THE EARTH

stages of development toward this end. But contra Hegel, the logical and seemingly necessary culmination of the Man-World dialectic discussed here is not meliorative but destructive; rather than pushing history toward the realization of Geist’s self-standingness, our dialectic tends toward the devastation of humanity or the world (or both). That the Earth reacts to our violence is clear to those who bother to look. It is a reaction we naïvely thought we could avoid—if ever we thought of it at all.

It is as though we tunneled into the dark void beneath our feet in search

12

of oil and gold and then decried the ground for collapsing.

If the nature of climatic cascades bears a marked formal similarity to Fanon’s or Hegel’s immanent evolution of Spirit or national consciousness, what’s at stake in the offing ought to parallel the people. For, after all, Fanon thought like a proper Marxist (at least he did where the masses were concerned). The masses and their ability to violently upend the colonial system that oppressed and ignored them were the key to the revolution.

So the multitude’s violence, which Fanon foresaw as the inevitable development, indeed as the driver, of decolonization, is replicated and magnified by the planet as it struggles to find a new equilibrium.5 Instead of riots, guerilla warfare and retributive attacks, we face ever fiercer hurricanes and floods; instead of decimated populations, starvation and disease, there is extinction, desertification, and pollution. Ecological devastation will exacerbate human tendencies for violence and our own vulnerabilities; once again, the seemingly discrete aspects of the problem are entangled. Unlike colonization of peoples, however, which prolonged its abuses by quashing incipient rebellion through force, envi-

ronmental colonization is different; neither guns nor bombs will subdue the Earth.

T

he only hope I see, then, is to relate to the world not through violence and exploitation but through love, respect, and recognition. Perhaps akin to Hegel’s formulation of Recognition, our subject at last sees itself reflected in an object, one that is itself also a subject (and thus can withstand negation). And once our initial subject realizes that the object is also somehow not other, possibility blooms.

Following this Hegelian possibility, so might we also see ourselves revealed in the Earth, clearly other, even alien, but also clearly not other; so might we also see the Earth revealed in us. Like two mirrors, we endlessly reflect each other.6 The cruel face of Nature we see today is merely the reflection of our own monstrosities. To see another, less frightening image, we must first find it in ourselves. To quote Césaire once more, “A significant thing: it is not the head of a civilization that begins to rot first. It is the heart.”

BENJAMIN DUBOW

In my reading of Fanon, the people are Earth itself. It is no wonder it has been overlooked for so long: the world is everything, and so we see it as nothing—evidence so evident it paradoxically vanishes into the background. We need it to be this way. What actor could play Shakespeare’s Hamlet if he felt the stage to be alive and writhing underfoot?4 We would be unable to breathe so freely, so carelessly, if we thought too deeply about this air, where it came from, where it went.

4. I am indebted to Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth for this image.

5. For more on the Earth as a holistic system that seeks equilibrium, see Lovelock and Margulis, “Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: the Gaia hypothesis” (1974).

6. Hegel’s picture is complicated further in this instance, as the object of our aufheben makes possible our own existence (and thus, of course, any possibility of realizing self-standingness).

This concept is beyond mere Recognition.

13

THE SPACE WE

EMMA JAMES

E E E

If a tree falls in a forest, does another tree feel heartbroken?

H

umans define the experience of “emotion” in their own terms, and exclude non-humans from this definition on the same grounds.1 Does this reflexive understanding of emotion as human-exclusive really have merit?

Trees are not humans, that much is true. But if our emotional and intellectual superiority lies in our cognitive capacities, it doesn’t help this claim to superiority that there’s much we still don’t know about the human brain, or any brain for that matter. We still understand relatively little about how consciousness arises, so certainly we cannot epistemically claim that our perception of the world is more real, smart, or emotional than that of other species.

And yet, as scientists begin to uncover data on everything from dolphin to extraterrestrial intelligence, we still cling defensively to what we might call our final frontier: the capacity for emotion. The premise that we and we alone reserve the ability to “feel” emotionally (and arguably also sensationally) seems contrived.

A problem of parts even arises from the equivocal term “feel”: namely, what facet of emotion is essential to its existence? To explore the essence

of what could be a contentious, dare I say “emotionally loaded,” topic, I will attempt to limit the domain of my argument to a narrower, physicalist space.

Through the lens of this reductive physicalism, one that reduces emotions to their physical qualities, our understanding of “emotion,” therefore, can be reframed as an effect of the corporal mechanisms.2 In her Theory of Constructed Emotion, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist, claims that “emotions have ontological status as causal entities… [effecting] changes in sensory, perceptual, motor, and physiological outputs.”

In other words, emotions exist in so far as they cause physical outputs via the body. But where Barrett leaves flexibility for the coexistence of “feelings” in the input of emotions, Andrea Scarantino, a neuro-philosopher, eliminates their consideration altogether. In The Motivational Theory of Emotions, Scarantino continues to boil down Barrett’s teleology of emotions as existing entirely by their function: to prepare the body for a correct (re)action. Scarantino conceives of emotions as links in a reactionary chain of inputs and out-

1. The most common view of scientists studying animal cognition is that animals experience simple emotions, but lack the breadth of emotions that humans experience.

2. Reductive physicalism is the idea that mental states derive from and can be reduced to physical states.

15

THE SPACE WE SHARE

puts; and the additional reductive constraint of “correct” or “incorrect” imposed upon each link eliminates any possible coexistence of “feelings.”

Therefore, all emotional interactions, whether between people, places, or memories, exist without “feelings.”

Neuroscience, specifically experiments featuring chemosignals, offers confounding evidence that “consciousness,” another abstract sensation, might also be irrelevant to emotions. These experiments with chemosignals, social chemical signals detected through chemical senses, suggest different creatures can emotionally connect and synchronize outside of conscious awareness. This physical medium, independent of our mental cognition, further implies that the hardwiring to transmit and receive “emotions” is a more relevant description than that of “feeling.”

The medium of chemosignals also introduces the idea that emotions do not just affect, but associate with and “take up” space. In Space and Emotion: Building to Feel, Margrit Pernau, an emotional historian, connects emotions and physical spaces as “mediated by the body and its senses.” Specifically, Pernau writes, a space incites emotional knowledge, memory that the body stores. The experience of a space is processed through Barrett’s input-output emotional mechanism, where preexisting

emotional knowledge informs Scarantino’s test for a “correct” reaction.3 So, emotion is a schema physically built from memories of the spaces the body has experienced: it is not just fundamentally tied to physical space, but requires and occupies it.

Pernau’s paper focuses on cultural geography with respect to city planning, which extrapolates well into the burgeoning, busy spaces of inter-tree network infrastructure.

If emotions occupy space, wouldn’t creatures that document physical social connections—with more permanence than chemosignal exchange— qualify to “feel” for more than us?

Only two decades ago, Suzanne Simard, an ecologist, discovered that trees are nearly universally connected by what the media has called the “Wood Wide Web.” More formally, these webs, or mycorrhizal networks, are underground systems created through the symbiotic relationships of mycorrhizal fungi connecting similar and different plant species.

Since her initial discovery, Simard has continued to advance the frontier of research in mycorrhizal networks.

In her 2018 paper, “Mycorrhizal Networks Facilitate Tree Communication, Learning, and Memory,” Simard draws similarities between the neural network of the brain and the topology of mycorrhizal networks, suggesting that trees can communi-

3. The reductive approach assumes this data must be stored in a physical place, like the growth of dendritic spines (neural pathways) in the brain.

16

If this idea seems unreasonable, consider the irrationality of the human superiority complex. The idea of sentience as human-exclusive, to which generations of theologians and scientists alike have defensively clung, implies a hierarchy of species. The

most substantiated argument that sets humans above other animals is that of “cumulative culture,” our ability to build upon the cultural progress of our predecessors, but even that has given rise to counterexamples in the habits of homing pigeons and Koshima monkeys. The anthropocentrist illusion, namely that we have a monopoly on emotions, results from the winning of a game for which we set the rules.

“D

eep ecology,” an environmental philosophy that realizes nature has inherent value apart from its utility

EMMA JAMES

cate and create collective memories.

Trees can even process information like humans can, to learn schemas to prepare the correct reactions to the physical space (“emotions”) from it in the form of interplant signaling, and create associations with their space in the form of the mycorrhizal network.

17

18

THE SPACE WE SHARE

Perhaps, though, reducing emotion to its physical qualities does not satisfy the problem of parts, and especially not for melodramatic ideas such as “heartbreak.” After all, the word itself, associated with the loss of one’s love, is uniquely and metaphysically positioned to bridge the two components (physical and abstract) of “emotion.” To avoid falling into another epistemic rabbit hole, I offer Annette Baier’s definition of love as “a complex tying together of emotions that two or a few people have… a special form of emotional interdependence.” Forests do not exist without mycorrhizal networks, that is they are entirely interdependent and the closer two trees are, the more mycorrhizal connections they share. On the contrary, following Baier’s definition, heartbreak must be an emotional reaction to severed ties. So, if a tree falls in a forest, its

closest partner, having lost the companion tree with which it communicated intimately, shared essential resources, and grew (physically) close to, might well feel “heartbroken.”

This is not to make a pathetic fallacy out of creatures and systems far more complex than we know. Rather, my aim in thinking about trees and mycorrhizal networks in human terms is to refute our exclusive conception of emotions themselves.

Ultimately, I want to undermine our anthropocentric dominance over other species and their emotions.

EMMA JAMES

to humans, establishes an “ecological self ”: the self-realization that humans are embedded in the interconnected, equal fabric of the ecosystem. Arne Naess, the father of deep ecology, writes that in the “inescapable process of identification with others… not only other humans [but also to all organisms]... the self is widened and deepened.”

In recognizing and embracing the ecosystem’s metaphysical holism— that we’re not much different, even in how we technically “feel”—we gain a new layer of empathetic depth and appreciation.

S

till, it might be useful to translate this new, biocentric conception of emotions back into the human realm, specifically regarding this “feeling” of heartbreak.

Though people we love tend to take up space—in our brains, our schedules, our beds— they also teach us new dimensions and languages.

They certainly lighten our load. The more load they lighten, though, the harder the task of filling their absence. The space that someone (perhaps they were a little over 6’0”, perhaps, at times, they were a little hysterical) filled will always remain emotionally colored by those memories. Like a tree fallen, logged, or rotted down, it takes some time for the one closest to the fallen tree to recover. Nevertheless, the forest still stands because it can.

19

ON

NICK RIBOLLA

“Even as a tree, Apollo loved her. He placed his hand against the trunk, and felt her heart still beating under the new bark. Embracing the branches as if they were limbs he kissed the wood, but, even as a tree, she shrank from his kisses. Then the god said: ‘Since you cannot be my bride, surely you will at least be my tree.’ ” —Ovid, Metamorphoses

I

ON INERTIA

n October 2018 it felt like something might burst. Over the course of one weekend, Congress held a Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a crisis report. While the report found that some things change––300 years of industrialization will catch up with us much sooner than we’d thought––Kavanaugh’s hearing confirmed that others stay the same.

22

That week, everyone talked about the hearing. We formed societies of scandal, squeezing in as much outrage as possible before professors arrived and dimmed the lights.

This wasn’t a complicated policy issue; it was sex. But I was certainly caught off guard when my art history professor entered the classroom and mumbled: “Before we begin, I’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about the news this week.” I thought he meant the Kavanaugh hearing; he meant the IPCC report, the first I’d heard of it. And as anxiety transfers from one thing to another without friction, it didn’t matter. We

spewed worries about widespread food shortages, rising sea-levels, and wildfires with the force of a discussion about sexual assault. One of my peers, with medium hoops and a polite gray sweater, confessed, “I feel like the only option is to leave everything, get a cabin in Montana and prepare for shit to hit the fan.” I couldn’t disagree.

After some time, we returned to art history, now a seemingly flat topic.

That week’s painting was Gustave Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio. In the image, Courbet sits before a canvas in the center of a studio so grimy and crowded that one can practically smell the mingling of body odor and mildew. Even the walls look unhappy to be there. I looked around the classroom; the grains of the wooden table, the metals inside the projector, the fabrics draped over our bodies––all of it was no longer neutral.

Somehow, somewhere, they’d come from Earth, and the getting-themhere was part of something slow and unstoppable.

Back to the painting. Courbet’s profile sticks out virile and fresh as he

The class ended quickly (we’d spent half of it talking about the impending apocalypse) and I rushed off with Courbet’s figure seared into my mind. As I power-walked through the October chill to yet another stuffy room, I returned to how the Republican National Convention (RNC) referred to the Kavanaugh

hearing as a witch hunt. It’s a typical phrase that Lindsey Graham types throw out in furious disbelief at someone who is held accountable.

But the more I thought about it, the more I thought the RNC description was unintentionally right.

H

istorically, witches were hunted out of fear that their rituals overturned God’s natural hierarchies. Until the 17th century, Earth was seen as a goddess, the female soul of the world. Nature, Earth, and matter were feminine; ideas and the higher mind were masculine. And so the human body, indeed more often the female body, was the medium for understanding nature. Earth’s fluids were likened to mucus, saliva, sweat; rivers flowed in circuits and veins much like those of the human heart.

And this understanding of Earth as a motherly body also constrained

NICK RIBOLLA

works at his canvas, paying no mind to the filthy walls and huddled figures around him. Behind the artist, clutching a white silk robe, stands a voluptuous naked woman, breast exposed, head tilted. She stares longingly, not at Courbet, but at his canvas, an idyllic landscape of emerald pines and crystal waters, far from the stench of urban Paris. This is Courbet’s portrait of a Rousseauvian idealism that has no reference point in this dank studio; none, that is, except the woman’s milk-white body.

23

ON INERTIA

how that body could be treated.

Edmund Spenser, the 16th century poet, and John Milton, another poet, writing a century later, for instance, condemned the rapid growth of mining practices across Europe as a sinful penetration of the maternal Earth, a perverse digging into her “holes and cracks.”

24

There was no difference between the witch and the object of her will, Caroline Merchant notes in The Death of Nature. These mystical wills accessed the spirits of all animals and plants, usurped the higher realm of masculine ideas and controlled natural forces, causing plagues, hailstorms, and famine. Witch trials, therefore, allowed a tormented public to gain a sense of stability. Surely there’s someone to blame for this disorderly world. In a sense, then, the Kavanaugh hearing was a kind

of witch trial. Wouldn’t this man have incredible power over nature?

Couldn’t he rule on offshore drilling, emissions, clean drinking water? Wasn’t this a man determined to reach the object of his will––to rule, to frack, to fuck?

For all of its pornography, American culture retains a strangely puritanical bent. We’ve placed our sexual energies elsewhere: we triumph, take-what’s-yours, erect buildings, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, we rise-and-grind. Sex, however, remains hush-hush. That is, of course, until it goes horribly wrong. When American politicians are revealed to be sexual aggressors, all this suppressed tension bursts forth. Sex suddenly becomes much more important than politics. Nobody asked Brett Kavanaugh about his position on carbon emissions, offshore drill-

ing, fracking, or nuclear energy. How could we? It was almost a moment of release, a macabre sexual snuff film, a chance to burn somebody at the stake because it was visceral, it was real. And God, it felt so good.

Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne appeared on the screen at the front of the room. The sculpture depicts the climax of the myth, when Daphne escapes from predatory Apollo by turning from a wood nymph into a laurel tree. According to Ovid’s retelling of the myth, Apollo tells Cupid he will never be a warrior. In response, Cupid, denied his manly violence, decides to torment Apollo with a different kind of violence–– insatiable desire. He pricks Apollo with an arrow that makes him long for Daphne. When Apollo sees Daphne, he is set aflame. In the story, as she flees, Apollo cries out: “Stay, sweet nymph! You flee as the lamb flees the wolf, or the deer the lion, as doves on fluttering wings fly

NICK RIBOLLA

S

till picturing Courbet’s porcelain-white woman and deep green canvas, I arrived at my next class. I reconsidered the affinity between natural and bodily bounty. Something about blooming, sprouting, spreading, dripping, dewy forms. The natural-sexual equation was now doubly illuminating. To compare your lover to a summer’s day says arguably more about the summer’s day than about the lover.

The warmth, the humidity.

from an eagle, as all creatures flee their natural foes! But it is love that drives me to follow you.” Apollo insists that he is not a ravenous beast, but rather the thinking, loving god of music and art, pinnacles of culture and human progress. Just as this Renaissance Man is about to quench his desire, Daphne implores the other gods: “If you rivers really have divine powers, work some transformation, and destroy this beauty which makes me please all too well!”

In his sculpture, Bernini captures a woman who morphs into a tree to remain unsoiled. Really, she just changes from one object of desire into another, as Apollo, undeterred, reaches for Daphne’s waist from behind, pulling her close. In turn, she recoils in horror, mouth agape, hands flung upwards in prayer. Her delicate fingertips transform into twigs, her fair skin into scaly bark, her legs into the furrowed roots of a laurel tree. Bernini transforms hard marble into soft fluid forms.

From the side, Apollo and Daphne’s bodies are indistinguishable helixes.

Though the scene is one of sexual denial, attempted rape and escape, Bernini depicts victim and predator as two parts of an inseparable whole.

I

n the 17th century, when Francis Bacon posited that violating nature was akin to violating a human body, he irrevocably changed the framework of ecology. The English philosopher and godfather of the scientific method theorized man

25

as a pioneer who wrestled nature’s secrets to master her operations.

Far from the animist goddess of the middle ages, Bacon wrote in The Masculine Birth of Time, nature was now a “common harlot,” with an appetite for chaos, who man must “subdue” through technology. “Bind her to your service and make her your slave,” he added of nature. And if we “restrained” nature, he continued, we would find “many secrets of excellent use” inside her “womb.”

ON INERTIA

If science was now an endless inquiry into the Earth, and if nature was a corpse to be plundered, investigated, subdued, then witches no longer posed a problem. In fact, Bacon thought science might emulate witches’ by “entering and penetrating into the holes and corners” of nature. Once again, the language of sex became the language of certainty. It was no longer a constraint; barely veiled under scientific jargon, sex was a sanction.

26

Francis Bacon’s philosophy of science was quickly absorbed by philosophies of consciousness and government. René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, two 17th century philosophers, championed the view that nature should correspond to predictable behaviors, mathematical laws for man to act upon. Force was not an occult quality inherent to bodies, but a measure of their mass and velocity. Nature was not an immanent, self-actualizing, liv-

ing being but a system of dead, inert particles to be manipulated and understood. For Hobbes in Leviathan, nature was an indifferent machine: For, seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life: For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels.

Descartes and Hobbes saw man’s conquest of nature as ordained by reason. Like Apollo, they insisted that they were not sexual beasts, but rather thinkers and cultural stewards. However, there is something distinctly hungry and indulgent in this Hobbesian idea that bodies are moved only by external contact with another moving body.

O

ne implication of the current climate change debate is that we are misbehaving gods and that our abuse of reason and science has steered us towards apocalypse. But rather than admit this, rather than admit that our basest parts pull us forward, we instead continue to reach out and grab invisible forms in the soil; soil that, in time, we will all return to; soil that also once wanted to laugh, to eat, to scream, to push, throb, pulse, grind, to fuck, fuck, fuck.

NICK RIBOLLA

27

INTERVIE

TZAR TARAPORVALA & NICK ERICHSON

EW:

The following is the transcript of an interview by Tzar Taraporvala and Nick Erichson with Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University. Roth’s interests center on how people make sense of the past, and his research explores intellectual and cultural history, as well as philosophy and psychology.

This conversation, which focuses on Roth’s new book, Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech and Political Correctness on College Campuses, aims to foster a broader discussion about Roth’s understanding of safe spaces and the climate on college campuses. The interview has been transcribed and edited for brevity and clarity

by Taraporvala and Erichson.

INTERVIEW

GADFLY: Safe spaces, or “safe enough spaces,” seem to rely on the idea that there is a boundary or threshold of harm or distress that is acceptable, and one that is not. Pragmatically, at the university level, who do you see as the individual that adjudicates this and determines where the boundaries lie?

30

ROTH: My position is that there isn’t a clear definition of the boundary: it is in different places for different people, and there is no algorithm that will get you to a rational definition or picture of the threshold. I think that in many places it will be the teacher. We can easily think of examples where the teacher becomes the problem, and then the student becomes the authority. But most of the time it will be the teacher’s responsibility to convince the students that they should speak openly about the things that matter most to them, even though [the students] might encounter the reaction that they are wrong.

Then there are times when the teacher becomes the problem. Let’s take a morally neutral example: the professor is really ill and doesn’t teach the class.

Well, the students then have to go find someone else to get relief. This is very unusual, but nonetheless a high impact example. You can think of morally charged examples where the professor does something wrong. Who adjudicates that? It depends on the campus; in some campuses [adjudicative responsibility] will go to a dean or some administrative office. You would want the professor to be protected against harassment, and the student to be protected against harassment. [...]

As someone who interacts with students and administrators (people on all sides of this debate), I’m curious what sorts of cultural, political, and other structural factors you think shape this discussion, particularly the intensive focus on the discursive you see in both demands for representation/inclusion and calls for the protection of absolutist “free speech.” What larger machinations do you think are behind this focus, and how do you think it realistically manifests on campuses today?

MICHAEL ROTH

If you are living in a town where you expect certain services from the town, and they do not meet your satisfaction, what do you do? In some towns you might call up the town manager, and in others you go to the service provider and talk to them about doing a better job of picking up the garbage, and in other cases you might sue. The similar thing [analogy] in universities is that normally, in a healthy classroom environment, the threshold of harm becomes something that is discussed, and people try to find a way to be as open as possible, so as to discover better ways of thinking and discover different ways of thinking that might not be better for you. This is the product of a classroom environment where people feel respected but not just treated as customers who have to always be placated or treated as if they’re right. Ultimately there just isn’t one locus of authority for determining this.

Again, I think it’s very hard to generalize. I try to go to things that will make me uncomfortable, and I find the rhetoric of many of my faculty colleagues extremely closed to ideological difference. And I’m not telling you anything I haven’t told them—my arguments for intellectual diversity get eye rolls from faculty as much as from students, because I do think it’s a real problem [when] lectures by people who think of themselves as radicals [are met with] no questions that come from alternative ideological positions or conceptual frameworks. So my job, the job I’ve taken on, is to talk about it, and to get other people to talk about it, even though usually they talk about it so as to disagree with me or say I’m wrong about this. But so long as they’re talking about what I think of as ideological differences, I think they’re less likely to activate that bias automatically. So my work is not so much to bring those alternative ideologies to the mix but to call attention to their absence, and to have people reflect on that. [...]

When I went to college in the 1970s, the right wing talked about the “welfare queen,” the cheat on welfare, and everybody could rally in opposition to this figure, this scapegoat, or trope, against which the mainstream culture defined itself. And I think the “woke student,” who is so sensitive and lashes out at everybody—I mean, there were people who cheated welfare, and there are

31

students who are “holier than thou” and all the rest, but I don’t see it as as widespread as some of my colleagues do. And I do fear that there’s a certain thing that middle aged men especially do when they get outflanked by students, and that’s to start complaining that students are not what they used to be! It makes me very nervous. I think when teachers start complaining about students it’s time for them to retire. You have to deal with the people who are there. And complaining about “they’re not learning from me” or “they don’t agree with me anymore”––that I think is a sign of age, not of insight. And so that doesn’t mean that I agree with the positions taken by every one of my students (they would tell you themselves that they call me very bad names) but I do try to have the conversation. I guess the job is, as a teacher, to create a situation where you can create a conversation that might turn out to be productive. And the term I use, “safer space,” is a place where that could happen.

INTERVIEW

And I think that on many of the campuses that I visit I do see this happening.

There are certainly pockets of students—there always have been—who don’t want to hear from people who disagree with them. I mean, when I was in college in the 1970s, there were plenty of students like that, maybe including myself. I think that what’s happening today is certainly amplified by social media, and other technologies of group reinforcement that contribute to this polarization. But college campuses, especially classrooms, can be places where people are not just gathered together like they are on their Instagram feeds, by affinity and by mutual dislikes [...] or likes of others. In a classroom you actually have the chance to get people to talk to each other who have very different views, who may come from different races, who have different economic status—unless your department just attracts a certain kind of student.

32

I do fear that at some universities and some departments, they actually do aim for that kind of insularity, and that’s terrible! And people in my kind of position, administrators and presidents, we should push back against that as best we can. Freedom is a precious thing, and we have to be careful, but I think we have to press back against what I call choreographed parochialism, whether it comes from the left or the right.

I couldn’t help but interpret your notion of parochialism in a Foucauldain light. If all environments, including universities, impose a molding structure on how people think, how do you reconcile your notion of parochialism with a real and genuine progress, and what is the role of things like fact, knowledge, debate—how would those shape our views moving forward?

Nonetheless, I think it’s my responsibility to cultivate spaces in these institutions where change can take place and where reinforcement is less likely to be the outcome. I say this knowing that a sophisticated Foucauldian would say that itself is an institutional disciplining that you re-code in a liberal point of—[laughs] and I don’t know if I can really get into all that. But I believe in creating spaces where affection, solidarity and transitory mutual agreement on specific goals can allow for personal and collective change. Whether the outcome is really progress or not, I guess, is always post-hoc judgement. And that’s fine; I make those judgements sometimes, but I think the role of a professor as a sort of institutional leader should be to cultivate those kinds of spaces. It’s difficult for me in a way because those spaces can take an anti-administrative stance, and often do, and here I am, the administrative daddy of the university. I suppose that’s where my psychoanalytic background comes in; I think the job of the teacher is really to allow for a rejection of a teacher’s authority, so that people can not just depend on that instruction. [...]

MICHAEL ROTH

That’s a great question. I was actually a student of Foucault’s, and worked with him a little bit in France. My early work was on French Hegelianism, and Foucault was very modest: he would always say he didn’t know anything about it, but he knew all these people who did—because really, I was interested in his teachers’ generation. This is all to say that I do take very seriously the Foucauldian point that institutions like universities mold the thinking and create the criteria for things like truth that they then enforce; I’m fond of rebellion and hacking in this regard, creating the kinds of knowledge and certain kinds of people through these institutions.

I do have to play my role, I think, both as an authority figure and a teacher who thinks that authority should be undermined by a thoughtful consideration of alternatives to that authority.

That leads nicely into another subject––the role that exclusion plays in these debates. For example, in your New York Times article about safer spaces, you never touched on one of the most controversial aspects of the question, namely that safe spaces are often structured around not just sets of discursive rules, but as affinity spaces structured around exclusion, usually around an axis of identity or lived experience. Considering that federal law currently prohibits the formal recognition of “affinity spaces” like these—for example, I feel a lot of people are unaware of this, but, say, a black students’ group formally affiliated with any US college or university [that] receives federal funding (so, anywhere you would fill out a Free Application for Federal Student Aid—private schools included) wouldn’t be

33

legally allowed to exclude a white student from membership on the basis of their race. I’m curious what you think about the necessity of these spaces of exclusion for solidaristic or intellectual work, or if you think there should be a moral demand to circumnavigate them; or to try to build people into the process universally and not reconstitute the logics of exclusion that led to peoples’ historical marginalization in the first place?

INTERVIEW

As you might expect, I have sort of a wishy-washy pragmatist’s answer to this—which is that it’s really up to the people who claim the need for the space to make the case why that is necessary. So, I don’t think all exclusions have an equal moral value: to give you an example at Wesleyan, five or six years ago, we required all the residential Greek organizations to become coed—before then, we only had fraternities, so we said women had to be allowed to be full and equal members. I’m still being sued—I actually lost a lawsuit—over this, but I also said, if you want to have a club on campus that is, say, for Christians, or for men, that's fine. That’s not the university’s business what your club is. But it is our business for residential life.

So I think there are times that—as you put it, for purposes of solidarity or self-protection—some exclusion is important, I think that the logic of exclusion is also extremely dangerous, so that when you suspend a sort of open rules that sometimes seem desirable in order to protect yourself through exclusionary practices, that one has to [be] really aware of some of the side effects of such practices—but they may be less dangerous than, you know, compromising solidarity. [...] I don’t think there's an effective formal procedure to locate the threshold of when you should be integrationist or exclusionary. So much depends on the specific political and social circumstances under consideration.

So, I think freedom of association really is important, but when you replicate structures of exclusion that participate in the historical dynamics of racism or intimidation of queer people or other forms of historical violence, then I think universities shouldn’t allow that. But I think we should actually be very thoughtful about allowing some groups some modes of exclusionary organization because of their historical experience. So there you have it again, I don’t have a consistent procedural approach, it’s more of a historically and contextually informed approach.

That leads into some problems that you mention in your books—I’m interested in how we construct the “intellectual environment” in the Academy, and how the Academy is necessarily this tremendous space of exclusion,

34

Oh my. I don’t feel like I can answer that question except to say that the American landscape in higher education has the potential to actually provide a very positive example in this regard. That is, some institutions could provide a very high quality education to anyone who applies. In other words, there are public institutions like community colleges where anyone who meets some threshold conditions (a high school diploma, whatever) could attend with little financial barrier, and professors are paid adequately.

MICHAEL ROTH

and relies upon a model with tremendous structural contradictions. As you mention in your book, there’s often a tension between, say, admitting more low-income students [and] funding them better while they’re there, and other such conflicts where the academy is forced to navigate these sorts of constraints. What larger political and structural changes would need to take place to really ensure an “ideal” or just intellectual environment?

For example, you did some work with the Massive Open Online Courses?

Yes, one could do this all online. I also think it’s important to have small places and other kinds of universities where there are admission criteria that create a different kind of academic environment for students who want it— that can be quite positive. For several years I was the president of an art and design school—it’s a very different environment, and I think it’s really good actually, that there are design schools for people who learn mostly through making, and want to be surrounded by makers. But having affordable, high quality alternatives is where we fall short in the United States—and we could do that, but our government doesn’t choose to do so.

35

ALL THE

MADDIE WODA

ALL THE WORLD'S A COURT

S

38

hakespeare’s As You Like It is a comedy of errors. In gorgeous poetics, it tells the story of Duke Senior, a French courtesan whose position is usurped by his younger brother, Frederick. Duke Senior is banished to the Forest of Arden, and his daughter, Rosalind, follows with Frederick’s daughter, Celia, her loyal cousin and best friend. In the forest, a mystical realm of disguises and sunlight, Rosalind meets Orlando, an aristocrat in hiding from his brother, Oliver, who desires Orlando’s title. So as not to be recognized, Rosalind costumes herself as a young man, Ganymede.

She is in costume when she meets Orlando. While this Midsummer-esque comedy turns on the misplaced love of Rosalind, Orlando, and even some local shepherds, Duke Senior and his attendants’ monologues provide literary heft and eloquence.

Even after his exile to the forest, Duke Senior cannot escape the court. In his opening monologue of Act II, he uses the contrasting languages of court and nature to assert that the “natural world,” although equally dangerous as the world of the court, is more virtuous because nature inherently rejects artifice and deceit. Duke Senior’s declaration is ironic, as he claims that the institutions he labels as evil exist in nature as forces for good. Duke Senior’s vocabulary in this unfamiliar environment—Arden—fails him; he is confined to the language of court to

praise its opposite.

Immediately, Duke Senior designates the forest of Arden as an “exile,” an inherently political word that implies the removal of one from their home. “Exile” distinguishes the court, where the political decisions are made, from the forest, where the “old customs” make “life more sweet.” The forest is prelapsarian.

“Here feel we not, the penalty of Adam,” Duke Senior muses, at once conflating Arden with Eden, suggesting that there is fundamental goodness to be found in the forest that is not to be found in the court, where the consequences of Adam’s sin are evident in betrayal, quarrel, and loss. The court and the forest are clearly demarcated: “these woods”

T

he court and the forest exist in binaries: one pre- and one postlapsarian, one old and one new, one safe and one dangerous. Within these descriptions, it is necessary to ascertain what Duke Senior means by the “natural world.”

Clearly, as a man of the court, he does not spend much time in nature.

He is exiled to an unfamiliar world.

He speaks not only about physical objects particular to the forest’s environment (“trees,” “brooks,” and “stones”), but also intangible forces like “the seasons” and the “icy fang…of the winter’s wind.” He includes “the toad, ugly and venomous,” as an example of nature’s goodness, even if it is not as beautiful as “painted pomp.”

Despite claiming that the natural world is “more free from peril than…court,” Duke Senior clearly understands the forest’s dangers.

The wind isn’t just cold, it is personified as a dangerous animal with an “icy fang” that “bites and blows upon [his] body.” The wind seems to understand the harm it causes, blowing “even till I shrink with cold,” Duke Senior observes. He also describes its

movement as “chiding,” as if intending to punish. Nature is less perilous than court, then, not because it’s less dangerous, but because its danger is worth the toll it extracts. “This life,” Duke Senior declares, “exempt from public haunt,” is indeed filled with “adversity,” but this adversity is for a purpose. Its “use” is “sweet” for those who learn from it, presumably crafting a more durable individual through straightforward challenges.

In Duke Senior’s mind, nature uses adversity to teach its inhabitants, perhaps because natural forces are impartial bystanders that do not care about exacting revenge or favors. On the contrary, the forces of the court are the forces of men, those “counselors” who use “flattery…[to] feelingly persuade me what I am.” In the court, men use artifice and deceit to influence others. Unlike the ugly toad, who makes no pretenses and holds its jewel inside its head, these men dress in fancy clothes and use sycophantic phrases to convince Duke Senior to subscribe to an ill-advised plan. This lack of artifice establishes nature as the more virtuous place, one where men learn from adversity rather than be constantly tricked. This claim, that nature is more virtuous than court, harkens back to Duke Senior’s description of court as “painted pomp,” a seemingly esteemable place that is actually hollow and virtueless.

MADDIE WODA

are “more free from peril than the envious court.” Envy, one of the seven deadly sins, reminds us both that the court is a den of vice compared to the forest and that, though the court can strive to be natural and holy, it will only ever be envious of Arden.

39

ALL THE WORLD'S A COURT

T

40

he court though, does not always strive to exist independently of nature. The elements Duke Senior praises—nature’s lack of insecurity, lack of even a self to be conscious of—are sought after by many courts. In Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, written over half a century before Shakespeare’s As You Like It, this elegant negligence, this absence of self-consciousness, was awarded its own term, which described the perfect courtier: sprezzatura. The perfect courtier displays “a certain nonchalance that shall conceal design,” an utterly unconcerned sophistication. Just as Duke Senior adopts the language of the court to describe nature, the court adopts the language of nature to describe its ideal courtier. The paradox, though, that defines sprezzatura, only emphasizes nature’s true indifference to human triviality. Sprezzatura, when performed by a master, is so well practiced that the practice is invisible. Nature has no need of practice, of rhetoric so careful as to seem casual, to display the very nonchalance for which the best courtier strives.

Though Duke Senior waxes poetic about the forest’s virtues and condemns the court as a place of shallow artifice, it seems he has no way to assign meaning to the space he believes to be so valuable without using the language of the court. In the last two lines of his speech, he asserts that one can find “tongues in

trees, books in the running brooks, / sermons in stones, and good in everything.” Instead of leaving the institutions of the court in court, he inserts them into the forest. “Tongues in trees” alludes to his chatty counselors, those who can’t help but lavish words on their better in hopes of winning his favor. “Books in the running brooks” refer to the education of courtier’s minds; “sermons in stones” refer to the religious systems that educated their spirits.” Even if Duke Senior believes that there is no artifice in nature, and therefore nature is a more virtuous arena than the court, he does not have the language with which to properly praise it.

Duke Senior is a man of the court.

Arden is not his home, and he does not reside there voluntarily. Though he might believe that nature is more valuable, more virtuous than court, his language is structured around the worthiness of institutions inherently important to court life. While Arden, with its uncomfortably icy winds, may produce sturdier individuals, this process never breaks out of the language of manmade institutions, “books” and “sermons.”

MADDIE WODA

41

DANIEL DRISCOLL

"FROM N

NATURE"

E

"FROM NATURE" ARGUMENTS

mblematic of much Aristotelian thought, “from nature” arguments, which aim to justify dominant social ideologies by appealing to nature, the natural, or human nature, also appeal to order. Before examining how “from nature” arguments vindicate certain social values, then, we must establish the connection between nature, order, and the environment.

44

Until the 17th century, Aristotle’s Physics was the intellectual basis of scientific belief for educated classes. His project was to discover the nature of motion and change, so he identified and described the natural.

“Of things, some exist by nature, others through other causes,” Aristotle writes in the Physics, adding that “animals and their parts exist by nature, and so do plants and the simple bodies, for example, earth,

fire, air, and water.” Here, Aristotle distinguishes between “things” that are natural and “things” that are not.

He distinguishes these “things” by motion: “All things existing by nature appear to have in themselves a principle of motion and of standstill whether with respect to place or increase or decrease or alteration.”

The principle of motion is either inherent in a thing, in which case the thing is natural, or it arises as a result of the thing’s natural components.

Beds or shoes, for instance, have no capacity for motion, but insofar as they happen “to be made of stone or earth or to be a composite of these,” they have “a tendency [toward motion] and only to that extent.” And, to Aristotle, motion, whether inherently natural or not, always tends towards order.

Aristotle’s principle––that motion is

The “natural,” then, includes all things that have a capacity for motion that tends towards order. Deserts, tundra and rainforests—biomes that maintain themselves without outside influence—are all natural.

Joel Kaye, a Barnard College history professor, calls this ability of self-maintenance “systemic self-ordering.” That is to say, even biomes seem to have this capacity for motion in that their component parts (namely plants, animals, features of the natural environment like rivers and lakes, weather, and climate systems) change, or rearrange themselves of their own accord. Contrary to what some may believe, the weather is not being controlled; no autonomous will or entity causes rain. Rain, however, is essential for environments—tens of thousands of

plants and animals rely on rainwater to survive. Without it, the order of the environment is at stake. If not for the rain, or, more broadly, any necessary elements, the environment falls into disorder and chaos.

This is what it means to say that a system is self-ordering: it provides the necessary elements with which to maintain itself. It is systemic because these elements are generally needed on a regular basis. Rainforests need rain every day, just as human bodies need food.

The systemic self-ordering characteristic of “the natural” may have roots in the observation of various biomes, but it is not only confined to the “natural” world. “From nature” arguments, which are used to justify values and ideological commitments, are also characterized by this systemic self-ordering.

DANIEL DRISCOLL

integral to the natural and that natural motion always tends towards order––informs his physical and metaphysical understanding of the world. But this key principle also extends beyond his interpretation of the material world, informing other areas of his thought, including moral philosophy. In his Ethics, Aristotle claims that since natural order necessitates equality, it ought to be maintained. Inequality, which is unnatural, is unjust. For Aristotle, nature has moral authority. The idea of nature as motion towards order is the necessary link between his metaphysical understanding of nature and his ethics.

Who is most likely to assert a “from nature” argument? From which social class, for instance, do they originate? I believe there is a proclivity for the dominant social classes to describe their contemporary social arrangements as systemic and necessary, as natural. Consider, for example, Appleby, Hunt and Jacob’s description of American historical writing before and after WWII in Telling the Truth About History. Before 1939, they explain, historical categories––gender, race, sexuality, and class––were all rooted in the dominant social tradition of their

45

"FROM NATURE" ARGUMENTS

moment, namely, white Protestantism. After WWII, with “increasing emphasis on the diversity of ethnic, racial, and gender experience,” these categories were called into question; in a way, they were de-naturalized.

Due to critical analysis, their status lost authority.

46

“From nature” arguments generally justify the values and decisions of the powerful few. Little else explains the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a minority except the frame of an intelligent design, rational order, or a systemically self-ordering nature.1 Thus, these types of “from nature” arguments are central to the construction of many ideologies of power and dominance.

And nothing fuels contradictory logic quite like ideology. As Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob note, “It is one of the great strengths of ideologies that they defy logic and hence are able to weld incongruous, even conflicting ideals.”

M

ercantile economics, for its part, highlights this interplay between dom-

inant social values and “from nature” arguments. Even in Ancient Greece, “the natural” was connected to commerce. Economies were considered to be systematically self-ordering.2 However, Aristotle understood that greedy acquisition resulted in disorder: first, by directing virtues and talents towards financial gain; second, by allowing unbridled desire to rule profit-seekers. Notice how the “from nature” argument works here: the system of exchange which forms the economy approaches disorder— thus, it is not systemically self-ordering—thus, it is not natural— thus, it is unethical. Later, in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas, a Domincan priest, took up the question of nature and the economy, agreeing with Aristotle that exchange and price regulation are determined by nature. In Summa Theologiae, he identifies indigentia, or human need, as the quality associated with a good that determines its price. Since indigentia is in some sense natural to the human, so too can exchange be ascribed to nature. But Aquinas perceived this economic order in contrast to the hierarchy established by

1. This sort of argument comes from a Marxist historical lens, which argues that the bourgeois will, in an unself-conscious way, seeks to normalize their ideal social arrangement as the ideal social arrangement for society at large. As Patrick Gardiner writes in Theories of History, “The dominant ideals are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas, and thus of the relationships that make one class the ruling one; they are consequently the ideas of its dominance.” This occurs because the means of material and intellectual production often yield to the same monopoly.

2. The bulk of Aristotle’s discussion of the ethical obligations of economic actors is found in Book I of his Politics. Here, he argues that it is ethical to trade in order to satisfy natural human needs.

He describes barbarous nations that still exchange “the necessaries of life and nothing more” with one another, while arguing that “this sort of barter is not part of the wealth-getting art and is not contrary to nature, but is needed for the satisfaction of men’s natural wants.”

DANIEL DRISCOLL

47

"FROM NATURE" ARGUMENTS 48

an intelligent creator. If God’s order (the natural order) was maintained, “a mouse, which possesses sensitive life, would be priced higher than a pearl, which is inanimate.” Due to his theological commitments, Aquinas did not consider human need as self-ordering. In this sense, the sphere of economic activity does not merit its classification as natural nor is it fit to establish a just price for exchange.

The use of the “from nature” argument drastically reordered 13th century conceptions of mercantile economics. Referring to the theories of Peter of John Olivi, a Franciscan scholar writing in the same century as Aquinas, Joel Kaye explains that “Market price came to be seen as an aggregate product—the concrete (if ever-changing) numerical representation of a complex, supra-personal system.” Peter of John Olivi wanted

to show that economic realities were as natural as celestial motion or physical arrangement. To this end, Olivi attributed price to common estimation, which, though not natural in and of itself, was nonetheless a composite of natural things: the composite of many individual human needs. Indigentia, now translated as a working aggregate of natural human wants, satisfied the requirements of nature laid out by both Aristotle and Aquinas. According to Peter of John Olivi, then, common estimation of price and value were natural. All that was required was an apologetic rationalization of contemporary economic realities and a new conception of the relationship between order and natural motion.

But why call for such a rationalization? What accounted for this drastic shift—from unnatural to natural––in economic philosophy over the 13th century?

Of course, “from nature” arguments find their way into economic decision-making in other ways, perhaps most notably in arguments about “human nature.” These egregious arguments assume that human beings have essential characteristics, whether physical, mental, intellectual or emotional, and are readily made with respect to ability, gender, race, sexual identity, and nationality. Consider, for example, the false dichotomy of gender, the supposed element of criminality present in the nature of some specific minorities which results in their mass in-

carceration, allusions to natural rules of procreation or an essentialist understanding of sexual intercourse, or any other form of prolonged and sustained systemic injustice, oppression, marginalization, or erasure.

These are some of the most obvious and pervasive instances of this kind of social dominance and of the elevation of certain values and orientations through the use of “from nature” arguments. As this erasure and marginalization is enacted, it normalizes attitudes of essentialism.

“From nature” arguments at once establish and maintain a status quo.

Indeed, even our understanding of the “natural” functioning of the human brain and the notion of reason has been colored by the dominance of the neuro-typical class of society.

Be sure to recognize these sorts of arguments in your own life, and to address them as the instruments of power that they are.

DANIEL DRISCOLL

The Franciscan Order, founded by St. Francis of Assisi, with an extreme commitment to poverty, was in those decades becoming notably more elite. As the historian Neslihan Senocak notes, “illiterate or poorly educated brothers were increasingly alienated and officially not wanted.”

Dominant classes were increasingly represented in the order. Could it be that Olivi, a Franciscan, projected the ideal social arrangement of the dominant class as necessary and universal, or synonymously, as natural? Though this article traces the philosophy of “from nature” arguments, not Mendicant history, this example nevertheless demonstrates how these arguments were used to justify various social positions. The winning arguments are those in support of the dominant social order: in this case, a burgeoning mercantile class.

49

WHO IS T

HARRISON STETLER

THOMAS

T

WHO IS THOMAS STOCKMANN?

here is a seductive yet misleading version of the history of environmentalism.

It recalls the exploits of an enlightened few and their efforts to alert an a-ecological society to the reality of its embeddedness within a tissue of delicate ecosystems and biological processes. As honest history, however, this narrative simplifies a tragic and potentially useful past.

52

The notion of an “environmental crisis” is not new, and has experienced many ruptures over the past several centuries. For instance, this notion has contended with competing conceptions of the relationship between the social and the environmental, because our definition of the “environment” can only be in crisis so long as it threatens the social realm of human relations. In “Modernity’s Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity,” the historians Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher therefore prefer to speak of our environmental “reflexivity,” and how modern history has long been “saturated with multifaceted reflections and profound worries over human impacts on the climate.”

The crucial phrase here is multifaceted reflections. While a dominant language of environmentalism today is that of anxiety, this language (as it has been previously) also continues to be one of cautious opportunity and outright enthusiasm. The histo-

ry of environmentalism has a place for jeremiads, from transcendental romanticization of untarnished nature to committed activists and cautionary earth scientists. But the story must also accommodate the guarded excitement with which many thinkers imagined a dominant human position in the natural world. Likewise, our understanding of the “environment” has ebbed and flowed over the years. Before it was in crisis, however, it was an opportunity.

By the late 18th century––against the backdrop of European colonization, globalizing capitalism, an emerging economy predicated on expanding human needs, and an exchange of ideas about political liberty, legitimate government, and equality— many Europeans had become obsessed with humanity’s imminent preponderance over nature. In 1778, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, the natural historian, remarked that “the entire face of the earth now bears the imprint of man’s power.”

Ironically, Fressoz and Locher write, this was the moment to rejoice that we might one day “alter the influence of [our] own climate, thus setting the temperature that suits [us] best.”

Humanity’s newfound position in the natural world could, according to Buffon, lead to our creative emancipation from the constraints of stagnation and subsistence. But the environmental history of civilization had other warnings, Buffon

HARRISON STETLER

added; this was also a story of man’s unthinking domination of nature, not its reasoned exploitation. For Buffon and his contemporaries, the decadence and decay of the Ottoman Empire (compared to the newfound strength of Western Europe) reflected man’s regrettable tendency to dominate, rather than rationally exploit, a pliant natural world. What happened to the Edenic forests described in Genesis? Millennia after millennia of crude domination by despotic regimes—the Assyrians, Babylonians, the Pharaohs—had eroded the ecological foundations of civilized human life.

This all was absurd, but Buffon was participating in heated debates about what many thought was an existential threat to European life: the steady disappearance of the continent’s forests. The risks of de-

forestation were diverse. One conception, which emphasized the importance of forests for humidity and rainfall, allowed easy contrasts to be drawn between the supposedly arid and backwards Middle East and the temperate climate of Western Europe, which provided the necessary conditions for legitimate states and cultural flourishing. In the 18th century, one of inter-imperial conflict, a steady supply of wood resources was essential to construct the massive warships protecting transatlantic European empires. Indeed, many of the first civil administrations of these new states were forest registries, designed to oversee and regulate the exploitation of wood resources, as lumber was an essential source of energy. The existence of hidden troves of fossilized energy, namely coal, and their rapid exploitation starting at the end of the

53

18th century could be considered the first green energy “transition.”

WHO IS THOMAS STOCKMANN?

This detour is not meant to relativize contemporary forms of environmental “reflexivity.” The belief that a supposed Middle Eastern decline was initially an “environmental” crisis linked to deforestation and soil erosion had much to do with a European appetite for colonial expansion.

But it should not lead to skepticism of real threats to organized human life posed by our three century-old experiment with fossil fuels. Rather, this history forces us to consider that contemporary environmental reflexivities are embedded in political history; “environmentalist” ideas were woven into an emerging science of modern political life.

54

To be sure, it’s anachronistic to describe Buffon as a “democrat.” The

world of 1788, the year that Buffon died, was sociologically and intellectually closer to that of Thomas Aquinas than to our own. In fact, it’s possible to read some proto-environmental reflections in Aquinas’s unfinished treatise on the nature of royalty, intended as a gift to the king of Cyprus. What were the inconvenient truths that the well-intentioned monarch of the High Middle Ages should consider? The monarch must, Aquinas warned, “choose a place suitable for the construction of a city. It seems that this means, first and foremost, clean air. Effectively, civil life is founded on natural life, which itself is preserved by clean air.”

But Buffon’s aristocratic world quickly turned into the sulphurous and revolutionary one described by Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocque-

“Environmentalism” grew out of and was thus woven into new principles of democratic self-governance and a developing sociology of human needs. The emancipation of the modern subject requires his protection from the pathologies of social life: unemployment, economic misery, and deprivation. The ability to self-govern and harmonize one’s own autonomy with the autonomy of others, the cornerstone of modern pluralism, requires society’s unprecedented mobilization of the natural world. But this mobilization is dangerous: to what degree can the planet sustain our political ambitions?

E

dward Bellamy provides a convincing case for the new configuration of the social and the environmental that emerged over the “long 19th century.” Though largely forgotten today after an early death in 1898, Bellamy was a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era in American history. One could argue that the jumping-off point of those decades of reform—bringing labor law regulations, progressive taxation, anti-trust law, and environmental regulations, before culminating in the New Deal of 1930s with the development of an American welfare state—was the 1888 publication of Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward, 2000-1887. One of the best-selling American novels of the century, it galvanized a generation of young reformers. Upon its publication, for instance, hundreds of “Bellamy Clubs” formed, uniting local workers, political organizers, and liberal professionals to discuss the democratization and rationalization of the industrial economy.

HARRISON STETLER

ville. Across Eric Hobsbawm’s “long 19th century,” an agrarian, feudal society gave way to an industrial one, in which an axiologically neutral state expressed the sovereignty of all (male) citizens, equal by right and before the law. The gears of modern history, according to Hobsbawm, were churned by a “double revolution” that redefined political and social life. The Industrial Revolution steamrolled local economies and agglomerated a single world capitalist market. What the combustion engine did to the traditional economy, the French Revolution would do to old political institutions and ideas: abolish absolutism and extend legal equality to men, all the while destroying the temporal power of religion in its way.

Written as a Socratic dialogue, Looking Backward is a masterpiece of sociology and moral philosophy about everything from the organization of economic production and education to the conditions for individual flourishing. In the story, Julian West, a well-off Bostonian of the late 19th century, wakes up after a sleepless night in his futuristic hometown. The year is 2000. Doctor Leete, who now lives in West’s

55

WHO IS THOMAS STOCKMANN? 56

former home, explains the underpinnings of this new society. The social inequalities that West knew, or ignored, in his day defied the formal political equality of the classical liberal state. The transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial one, monopolized by massive corporations, had solidified into modern feudalism. West tells Leete that if he had dreamed of the future, he would have predicted a “pile of rubble” as the only imaginable outcome of his century’s “social question.”

Fortunately, the wave of labor agitation and unrest that Leete recounts culminated not in a civil war, but in the nationalization of the economic institutions of the country. Boston now resembles a unified social or-

ganism. West tours the department stores and new cultural centers where citizens spend their universal credits on the fruits of industrial abundance.

We’ve lost our taste for utopian literature, which is probably why we dismiss Looking Backward. And that Bellamy compares the élan of the “industrial army” of 2000 Boston to the Prussian military doesn’t help his case for contemporary readers. But once we take off our Huxley-Orwell lenses, Bellamy’s novel expresses the fundamental moral principles of what the 20th century would eventually know as social democracy: economic life is collective, not individual; political rights and liberties are

insufficient without economic and social ones; extremes of inequality erode societies from within.

Nevertheless, if you asked anyone in the 19th century what should have been done about the “envi-

HARRISON STETLER

Bellamy is often critiqued for grounding a vision of democracy in unthinking abundance and endless production. This is an opportunistic and shallow reading.

Bellamy’s thought is innovative precisely because he articulated this vision—which is still largely our own, though we’ve strayed from his egalitarian fervor—while aware of its environmental risks. Looking Backward was a response to the social problem of modern society. As a journalist in Massachusetts, Bellamy took stock of the environmental implications of the Industrial Revolution; he described pollution desecrating rivers, smog hanging over mill towns, and regretted the fracturing of nature by a web of railroads. Echoing the worry about deforestation, he urged legal protections and federal regulation of forests. Bellamy realized that the fate of the social and environmental were intertwined. He believed egalitarian institutions within society and a rational, sustainable mastery of the natural world could reconcile them. This is still the framework behind visions such as the Green New Deal, as well as other honest, democratic solutions to the global warming crisis.

ronmental crisis,” you would have gotten a blank stare. There were, of course, the particular concerns that would eventually make up our understanding of the environment, from resource anxiety to fears of the black smog hanging over European and American factory towns. We even owe the earliest theories of the greenhouse gas effect to 19th century scientists. But there was no all-encompassing sense of anxiety that is encapsulated in the phrase today.

This is also because the emergence of our contemporary forms of environmental “reflexivity” contended with and displaced other ways of imagining space, human needs, and their relationship to the democratic revolution.

W

illiam Morris, the English writer, anarchist, and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, was Bellamy’s most trenchant critic. News from Nowhere, Morris’s novel-length reply to Bellamy published in 1890, describes a pastoral utopia in which political liberation and democratic self-rule are rooted in communities modeled on medieval village life. William Guest, Morris’s protagonist, is horrified by the anomie and filth of 19th century London, describing the city’s new underground as a “vapour-bath of hurried and discontented humanity.” Guest wakes up to a world of liberated individuals engaging in small, open societies grounded in a moral econ-

57

WHO IS THOMAS STOCKMANN?

omy of altruism, gifts, and sharing.

58

The archetypal figure of this futuristic leap-to-the-past is the artisan, and Morris’s book could be read as a swan song for the independent craftsman’s extinction before the advance of the machine and factory.

The artisan the modern subject par excellence, Morris argued most clearly in his 1877 lecture “The Decorative Arts.” The ability to create functional beauty out of nature is, according to Morris, the origin of a democratic existence. By molding nature to one’s needs and tastes, work is tantamount to the creative mastery of one’s environment. If Bellamy’s democratic vision is of a promise redeemed thanks to a leap into the future––the extension of democratic institutions to a society’s economic organization—then Morris writes of an idyll irrevocably betrayed and recovered by resurrecting a reimagined past. The Industrial Revolution is not the harbinger of political modernity; it is the agent of its erosion and self-destruction. The extension of the machine and the crowding of mass societies in mega-cities combine to instill a sense of vertigo, uprooting individuals from their own lives, preventing them from achieving the artisan’s equanimous autonomy.

Morris’s idea of a fragile modern milieu is unrecognizable in our contemporary understanding of the environment. This is why Morris is important today. We Bellamyites

suffer from a shrunken conception of human needs. Our failure to articulate a positive idea of attachment and roots, as Morris did through his fantasy of an artisan’s democracy emerging from the dulling uniformity of industrial life, is a crucial element of the contemporary crisis in democratic politics. To be sure, Morris’s vision is not foreign. While he was a staunch, if peculiar, modernist, the tragedy is that his vision survives today as blood-and-soil nationalism, which sells a bastardized fantasy of rootedness as moral authority against creeping relativism, as well as racial and cultural homogeneity against the reality of multiculturalism.

It is too early to tell if the arc of history might still slouch toward some happy synthesis of Julian West and William Guest’s dreams. For now, at least, the tragic odyssey of another obscure literary character of the 1880s seems a more appropriate allegory for our broad environmental crisis. Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, which premiered in Oslo in 1883, tells the story of Tomas Stockmann, a doctor in a spa town in fin-de-siècle Norway. Upon discovering that a polluted spring close to a network of mine shafts threatens the water supply of the town’s new hospital, Stockmann resolves to alert the townspeople and ensure the necessary repairs. “The whole Bath establishment is a whited, poisoned sepulcher,” Stockmann cries, “the gravest possible danger to the public health!

HARRISON STETLER

All that nastiness up at Molledal, all that stinking filth, is infecting the water in the conduit-pipes leading to the reservoir; and the same cursed, filthy poison oozes out on the shore too…”

U

ltimately, Stockmann’s faith in liberal reform is quashed.

His brother, the town’s mayor, leads the opposition and denies the impending public health disaster by bribing and intimidating journalists into silence. The play ends as Stockmann descends into delirium, dreaming of returning to the northern reaches of Norway, where the life of an authentic individual, free from the mediocrity of the masses, is still possible. In a bout of proto-fascist misanthropy, he shouts:

It ought to be raised to the ground. I tell you—All who live by lies ought to be exterminated like vermin! You will be infecting the whole country; you will bring about such a state of things that the whole country will deserve to be ruined. And if things come to that pass, I shall say from the bottom of my heart: let the whole country perish, let all these people be exterminated!

Seeping out of the woodwork of an edifice shot through with unrealized promises, Stockmann’s cry is the nihilism that might still engulf us all.

What does the destruction of a community matter, if it lives on lies?

59

ARTWORK AMANDA BA 11 KEA DE BURETEL 17 EMMA JAMES 18 SOPHIE KOVEL 23, 24 VIVIAN MELLON 9, 56 ISABELLA NORRIS 5, 35 RACHEL SHERR 11, 49 DANIELLE STOLZ 44, 47, 48, 53, 54, 59 SAM WILCOX 27, 38, 41

60

61