[Xmca-l] Re: Fwd: The protectors of the Amazon

Tue Sep 17 21:50:59 PDT 2019

While I was (gratefully) checking out this material (and also the
previously sent material from Mike on the APA deep poverty challenge) I was
turning over in my head the last discussion we had on Hegel and social
movements. Andy's book prompted me to dig out my dog-eared copy of Hegel's
Logic and give it another go, and this time I did find it went a lot more
easily (for which to Andy many thanks).

But I had to cough a bit over Hegel's rejection of atoms. On the one hand,
he says, there isn't and can never be any empirical evidence for them. On
the other, he says, physics is just miring us in matter, distracting us
from our real task, which is a new kind of metaphysics that can overleap
mathematics, matter, and elemental sciences stuck in Being merely and
establish a true science of the whole (his encyclopedia of philosophy, of
which the logic is a part). As usual, when I come up against stuff like
this in Hegel, I try hard to imagine what the world really looks like to
nineteenth century German philosopher, where atoms are an unproveable
hypothesis and God is simply "pure" reality. It still seems to me that what
Hegel has to say about atoms is embarrassing, dogmatic, and downright
foolish--but as soon as we transfer what he says to sociology and
psychology, he starts making sense.

At the same time I've been rereading Darwin. One of the things that struck
me was how much Darwin was influenced by political economy, and especially
by Malthus. What Darwin is really up to is taking Malthus OUT of sociology,
where it really is not very good at explaining things like learning and
development, collaboration, and culture generally, and put him where he
really belongs, biology, where he really does help us to understand
precisely why learning doesn't seem to play much of a role in evolution and
speciation. It was Darwin's misfortune that many of his most ardent
epigones (e.g. Spencer) were essentially Lamarckians who were trying to
reverse what he did, putting his biology back into political economy. It
was all of our misfortunes that this resulted in a highly atomistic way of
looking at culture, history, sociology and psychology, in which the sole
supra-individual unit was a pseudo-biological category of race.

Darwin only makes sense when you ratchet him down from social theory to
biology. Human  culture really doesn't obey strict Darwinism anymore:
agriculture and husbandry mean we burn forests instead of hunting and
gathering like other species, and knowledge of how to do this is
essentially Lamarckian in the way it is handed down through language.
Similarly, Hegel only makes sense when you ratchet him up from physics into
social theory. Atoms exist, and carbon dioxide is made of 'em, but that
doesn't tell us much about how to stop global warming. Our, physics doesn't
really have to listen to Hegel--there is just too much empirical evidence
for atoms--and the proper name of the new kind of metaphysics that Hegel
had in mind is not metaphysics at all, but historico-cultural psychology.

(I have always wondered why my Geneva friends insist on
"historico-cultural" instead of cultural-historical, but I think I know
now...culture, e.g. guarding the amazon, is the emerging concept of history
and not the other way around....).

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article:
Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
understanding narratives by
Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663

Some e-prints available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663

On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 8:02 AM Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:

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> The Amazon Has True Champions
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> A season filled with intense, human-caused wildfires in the Amazon
> rainforest has burned thousands of square miles, turned the skies black and
> raised red flags on an international level. The number of fires is 85%
> higher than the previous year.
>
> The Amazon is both the lungs and the heart of our planet.  It takes in
> enormous quantities of CO2 and is thought to produce 12-20% of the
> world’s oxygen. It also acts as a biotic pump bringing rain into South
> America and all over the world.  Without rainfall, there will be cultural
> and agricultural ruin.
>
> Let’s credit those who have been and continue to act as its guardians.
> Over the course of thousands of years, the indigenous people of the Amazon
> have worked to preserve this diverse biome that has contributed immensely
> to the habitability of the planet.
>
> They are the ones who can show us the way, we must support and follow them
> in order to save this vital ecosystem.
> Help the indigenous people fight back
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> *We Mapped All The Fires That Burned In The Amazon In August - *In 2019
> there have been more than 90,000 fires throughout the Amazon rainforest. In
> August, smoke from the burns blackened the sky in cities as distant as São
> Paulo and caught the world’s attention.
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> *The Amazon is burning. The climate is changing. And we're doing nothing
> to stop it -* The Amazon shouldn't sting your eyes with smoke, soak your
> shirt with sweat, and turn the sky dark but that is exactly what is
> happening when humans set fires there. - *CNN
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> *9 numbers you need to know to understand the Amazon fires - * Thousands
> of fires burning across Brazil’s Amazon rainforest have captured
> international attention over the past week. The fires are mainly set by
> ranchers and farmers seeking to clear land for cultivation. - *PBS
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