The Anthropocene, a Stoic, and Identity Politics

We're a tribal species, more or less developed in order to interact with 150 others.  We grew up only interacting positively with members of the same tribe.  Others were to be shunned, resisted, or subjugated.

Today we live in a globalized world and a radically different worldview is no farther away than the next cubicle.  The farthest corner of the world is less than an hour away by submarine base ICBM.

Welcome to the Anthropocene.

I bought a tee-shirt thinking it would be great to wear on one of our average 8, monthly 16, or annual 26 mile walks with the terriers.  The day it came I ran it through the wash and without thinking about it started my day.

Driving to the school for flag football practice and a parent/teacher conference, I remembered that the teacher in question is a Creationist.

Now I like this teacher well enough.  She runs a tight ship.  It is elementary school so the science is pretty simple.  I'm glad my child is in her classroom.  She is a good fit for the kind of kid he is.  Ironically, she's doing more for science than my other two kids' teachers are currently.

I'm not above the odd bit of trolling, at least when I think it might have some positive purpose, but I try not to troll in my hometown, or anywhere it is hard to conceive any good resulting.  What is the saying, "don't poop where you eat" or "A prophet is without honor in his hometown."  Luckily the evening was cold and I had a vest in the back seat of the car.

Funny thing is, how it might be perceived never occurred to me when I was buying it.  

I admire those who can take on the Cynic style of life, throwing a culture's subjectivity into its face.  The Stoic difference, however, is that while acknowledging the subjectivity, realizing that meaning is something we create and our creations are by necessity subjective, we see homo sapiens as a tribal species.

We do not exist only as individuals.  We live life together. We have more in common with the dog and her pack than the cat and her solitude.

Consequently, the Stoic view of virtue values, or at least accounts for the social as well as the individual.

I am not ashamed of my shirt.  I will happily wear it around town, or on the trail, or even when doing therapy dog visits but Prudence, Temperance, Courage, and Justice are restraints as much as direction. 

The Stoic sees the excellent life as one lived in community.  The individual and the social live together.  I have no problem being myself.  I have no compulsion to throw who I am in the face of others.

Hello, my name is Daniel.  I am an atheist.  I understand some find Darwinian Evolution threatening.  I find it enlightening and sometimes humorous.  I don't understand why is should be conceived as a threat to anyone's worldview since prior to Darwin Christians and Jews widely believed the first few chapters of Genesis were allegory, but I don't feel a need to have an argument over it either.

I can not help it if some find me offensive, but I can control if I am needlessly and sometimes if I am incidentally offensive.  That is, perhaps, more difficult than it has been at other times in our history.  In an age of identity politics, many have been trained to of "know thyself" less as a way less of finding a way toward a satisfying life and more towards knowing whom to embrace or reject.

I am not afraid of being seen as, gossiped about, or treated as if I am an asshole.  Been there, done that, and it didn't matter.

I am not, however, compelled to act like an asshole, even incidentally.  If it is just about expressing myself, that too doesn't matter.

What is prudent?  Will good result?
What is temperate?  Am I sailing between the extremes the social and individual good?
What is courageous?  Am I avoiding folly as much as cowardice?

What is just? Am I treating the other as they ought to be treated?

In this case that is the crux of the matter.  How do our fellow citizens, how does the alien in our midst, deserve to be treated?

Anyhow, it is a nice shirt.  The quality is good and maybe you want to get yours here.

Settling the Estate

There has been a lot of change over the decades, and the past decade more than most.  Change, however, is not the same thing as progress.

If you're sympathetic to the plight of homosexuals in the United States, you've seen progress.  If you subscribe to a Judeo-Christian worldview there has been regress.  The idea of progress, the only way to distinguish it from just ordinary change depends upon a preconceived notion about where we are, or at least ought to be, going.

Then we have the problem of determining the data set you are measuring.

If you are a Christian, Yazidi, or just not radical enough of a Sunni Muslim in Syria, Iraq, or Lebanon, you would say the world is in a state of regress, regardless of how much progress American homosexuals have experienced.

Progress is a Judeo-Christian idea.  Made necessary by progressive revelation, a god who both keeps on writing and disagreeing with himself is the well spring of innovation.  Eventually it was decided this god had a plan and was moving his people toward that plan.
First the Jews, then a splinter group of Jews called Christians.

If we want to set aside a religious worldview and still talk about how to constructively approach the problems we face we'd be wise to apply the observation by economist Thomas Sowell, "There are no solutions, only trade-offs."

TANSTAAFL, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."  If you want to achieve change, there will be a cost, usually our ideology.  When we start talking soberly about costs and benefits we are taking a step away from unspoken pre-conceived notions of progress toward an ideal based on more romantic vision than reality.

Reducing global undernourishment is a goal, I hope, we can agree on.  Turning the world into a patchwork of small organic farmers is a romantic vision.  Returning marginal land to a wild state is a goal.   Humanity evolving into a peaceful vegans is a utopian dream.

That secular society has retained the mental habits of thinking in terms of progress but it gets in the way.  Christendom is dead.  Diversity of opinion is deeply rooted in our culture and the Tea Party and Black Lives Matter each have different visions of progress.  It is much more fruitful to talk in terms of individual changes we want to make in society.

Progress is not the only theistic idea to be retained in our secular present.  The idea of the apocalypse continues to make the rounds in one form or another.  One decade we're headed to an ice age, in the next, global warming will cause the oceans to boil, peak oil, Y2K, the population bomb, and on and on.

Yes, climate change is happening.  Yes some of that change is a result of human activity.  The idea that change will result in the apocalypse, however is a faith based jump and I have sat through too many arguments about the rapture to be easily sold; Al Gore's poetic attempt to pull at my heartstrings notwithstanding.

Getting a little greener each year.

God is dead, but we've yet to settle his estate.

Injecting theistic habits of mind into strictly secular debates serves only to make rationale discussion more difficult than it needs to be.

How does this figure into a blog about hunting, fishing, the natural world, farming, and food more generally?  These issues serve as well springs of pseudo-religious thinking.

 The anti-GMO crowd's continues to influence crowds as they attempt to universalize their faith-based food taboo.  Change from GMO could mean yields go up.  Combined with the decreasing rate of population growth this means fewer acres would be required to meet human needs.  Marginal acres could be returned to forest or prairie.  This would be good for carbon reduction, wildlife, rain forests, and the malnourished.  Instead we argue about food taboos and a romantic vision of what farming "should be" instead of what is, we listen to our fears rather than facts.

Because we assume technological progress is the enemy of nature we ignore evidence that land-based plant life is thriving.  The earth is greener now than it was when the first astronauts looked down upon the blue pearl.  This has happen because we have applied high tech to farming not in spite of it.

This is change that should be cause for rejoicing but it is a heresy in certain circles of foodies and environmentalists who put ideology before results.  The ghost of a moralizing god lingers in their arguments.  Their vision of the promised land obscures data that suggests positive change could be found in a direction other than their "one true set" of beliefs.

Global warming apocalyptic thinking leads to shrill calls to subsidize solar or wind power at its current immature state instead of allowing the technology to continue to develop until it is viable on its own. Biofuel nonsense continues to support the idea of ethanol additives to gasoline, tying up 25% of our corn acreage.  Acreage that could be used for soy, wood products, or returned to a natural state.

Apocalyptic thinking also leads the global warming debate to focus on mitigation instead of adaptation.  If we're not all going to die in some Cormac McCarthy deathscape, we'd better get to work adapting our coasts for higher tides.  But having become convinced that what we face is not change but the apocalypse, we're tied up in arguments about whether Canadian oil will enter world markets through the United States or it own Pacific Coast.

The ghost of the holy continues to haunt us but the first step towards exorcising that ghost is to recognize it when it disrupts rational debate.  By watching our language, we manage our thoughts.  We're living in the Anthropocene.  It is time we started acting like it.

Diana's Day

The days are still warm but I can't help but notice they are getting shorter and I am starting to get an itch for hunting season.  

There must be something deep in the genome about this time of year.  Long before the DNR or even the concept of conservation fall was a time to remember the hunt and its goddess: Diana.

I live in a diverse household.  I am an atheist.  My wife follows an Anabaptist style of Christianity.  The dogs are into Zen and the cat is a straight up Nihilst.

None of us are pagans in any meaningful sense of the word.

I, however, like the vast majority of other human beings can appreciate a good rhythm to the seasons of the year and think it is meaningful, or at least enjoyable, to commemorate them.  So despite the furrowed brow of my wife, the dogs and I do a little something to mark the approach of the absolute best time of the year.

For the sake of household harmony there are no sacrifices or candles lit before idols and only the canines are allowed to dance naked before consuming some roadkill deer hoof that has been parked in the freezer.  

We clean out the hunting gear, oil up any firearms that need it, repack the plastic tote which carries all the tracking and hunting supplies I might need for the dogs.  I will set out my deer hunting clothes so the scent can naturalize before the September opener.

I have often thought of going vegetarian for the month between Diana's Day and the opening of the deer bow season.  I recall some old timers telling me once how this was their tradition believing that carnivorous humans and herbivorous humans smell differently to approaching deer.  Color me skeptical, either way, you smell like a human.  Still, the discipline would be welcome and it would add to the suspense of the approaching opener.

Still, I wish I were enough of a romantic to be able to wax lyrical about Diana, chaste and fair but really, I just want to go huntin'.