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

Thu Sep 19 14:25:12 PDT 2019

Sure, Henry--I'll try. And then you must explain to me about Epicurus and
atoms (I thought it was Democritus!)

I never liked the formulation "survival of the fittest": it always sounds
too much like "if you are so smart, how come you are not rich".

Darwin actually doesn't include "survival of the fittest" until (I think)
the fifth edition of "Origin of Species" in 1870, and it is originally from
Spencer (Herbert Spencer and not Herbert Spender Jennings), who is really
interested in "proving" that all humans are equal (in the good old American
sense of not recognizing noble blood) but some races are more equal to the
tasks imposed by the natural environment than others (in the good old
American sense of considering some humans racially consigned to hewing wood
and drawing water).  .

Darwin's original formulation was "modification through descent and natural
selection". Now, Darwin DID get this idea from Malthus. Malthus noted that
plants tended to reproduce at more or less replacement level, but animals,
including humans, tend to double or even triple with every generation. He
concluded that dearth and death were inevitable, unless the poor could be
taught to practice chastity and moral restraint (he was a parson, and the
clergy do spend a lot of time thinking about how not to think about sex).

Malthus was taken up by his students, the utilitarians (James Mill and his
son John Stuart), who used it to argue against famine relief in British
India. The argument was that if you provide famine relief, you are staying
Adam Smith's invisible hand and preserving races which naturally deserve to
die out and offer their land and resources at fire-sale prices to
those notable guardians of the environment, the British East India Company.
The direct result was millions of deaths from hunger, which only really
ended with Indian independence.

There were indirect results too, in the intellectual sphere which are still
more persistent. Mill was taken up by Spencer, who used it to argue against
public education, hygiene, post offices, and marrying George Eliot (who
was, Spencer felt, just intelligent enough but not sufficiently sexually
attractive, and this,for reasons he was not very good at explaining, was
disqualifying in women but not in men).

But of course it's not enough to say that Spencer was ugly, vain, and
unaware of his own true motives. The Mathusians were wrong--empirically
wrong, in precisely the way that Malthusians like to say that Marx was
proved wrong.

Darwin actually showed that Malthus was right--but only about bacteria,
paramecia, plants, and (some but not all) animals. Marx showed that
Malthusians were completely wrong about humans, because .humans have learnt
the trick of adapting the environment to their own needs: herding and
farming instead of hunting and gathering. Once humans have learnt this
trick, the Malthusian bet is off. On the contrary, we see that it's
precisely the societies that do care for the old, the sick, the weak, the
biologically least fit for survival which develop, societies which
do develop public education, hygiene, post offices and literature, which
are most capable of solving even the problems that troubled Malthus, Mill,
and Spencer, namely dearth, famine, and high birth rates.

One of the byproducts of turning the tables on the environment in this
way--adapting the environment to human needs instead of adapting human
needs to the environment--is certainly the kind of environmental
destruction we can see in the Amazon.  But another one is language, and
language does allow us to act on our own "nature", bringing the ideal into
the immediate and the real and adapting to that instead of simply
struggling directly with the real.

The Penan, in Borneo, became guardians of their forest not by hunting and
gathering but by trading and coming into confict with logging companies and
local farmers. Our own tribe, whatever you want to call it, preserves
hunting and gathering modes of production in only two domains, commercial
fisheries and strip mining. Neither domain is notable for its stewardship
of natural resources. So I don't think we are naturally born guardians
of the forest. But I do think that historico-culturally we can learn to be.

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

public education, health services, post offices, hygiene et

On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 12:31 PM HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:

> David and Andy,
> Thanks for taking seriously my cyborg question and refining the idea. I
> think I do remember Vygotsky saying something about humans creating new
> organs through technology. This thread is interesting to me not least
> because I will be meeting next week with friends to discuss Epicurus’ views
> on atoms and the good life. This follows on a discussion several weeks ago
> of an overview by Engles of the enlightentment science and the social
> upheavals of the 19th century.
>
>  But I’d like to ask you what David means in the last paragraph of this
> most recent post: "The ability of humans to flout Malthus--our ability to
> make the means of subsistence increase "geometrically" and not just
> "arithmetically"--is not simply a matter of altering the environment to
> suit ourselves and our own reproductive proclivities. It is also a matter
> of altering ourselves to suit our better natures.” What is the path to
> altering ourselves to suit our better natures? How much of it is activist
> and how much contemplative?
>
> Henry
>
>
>
> On Sep 18, 2019, at 3:03 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Andy--
>
> Engels not only accepted the existence of atoms (Dialectics of Nature) he
> offers us a proof of their existence that pre-dates Einstein's (which
> actually only proves the existence of molecules). Engels used the fact that
> the properties of moles of elements could be deduced from their atomic
> weight to demonstrate Hegel's "passage of quantity into quality"; there
> isn't any way to do this without the understanding that atoms exist.
>
> Henry--
>
> The term "cyborg" didn't exist until 1960. But I think it's a little like
> the way that Vygotsky and Buhler use "Lamarckianism" or "a synthesis of
> Larmarck and Darwin" to refer to what we would now call epigenesis: the
> term is new, but the concept is definitely there in Vygotsky: in the form
> of the "Jennings Principle", or rather Vygotsky's criticism of the Jennings
> principle.
>
> Herbert Spencer Jennings (despite the unfortunate name his parents
> christened him with) was a progressive eugenicist (which at the end of the
> nineteenth century must have been like being an airplane pilot with a fear
> of heights). He was mostly interested in paramecia (because he wanted to
> work out the real mathematics behind Mendel's discoveries--you know that
> the numbers Mendel came up with for dominance and recessiveness are really
> WAY too convenient). But he used his knowledge of genetics to argue against
> the 1924 anti-Chinese immigration act, a piece of racist legislation which
> is still the basis of American immigration law (immigration quotas are
> designed to preserve the ethnic composition of the USA).
>
> In the course of  his work on paramecia, Jennings says that the sphere of
> activity of any organism is a function (in the mathematical sense) of its
> organs. Vygotsky is skeptical, and not simply because the activity of an
> organism is greater than the sum of the actions of its organs. Vygotsky
> says that humans have the peculiar ability to create their own organs:
> artificial limbs, eye-glasses, ear-trumpets, and of course the numerous
> prosthetic devices that our brains use, chief of which is language. This
> means that humans do not obey the Jennings principle.
>
> The ability of humans to flout Malthus--our ability to make the means of
> subsistence increase "geometrically" and not just "arithmetically"--is not
> simply a matter of altering the environment to suit ourselves and our own
> reproductive proclivities. It is also a matter of altering ourselves to
> suit our better natures. I think that the only real hope for the Amazon
> lies in that latter possibility, although I think I would resist
> physicalizing it as "cyborg nature" the way that Donna Haraway does. I also
> think that "cyborg nature" essentializes matters: the ability to flout the
> Jennings principle is anything but essential to humans. It's a fluke of
> exaptation: taking an organ that evolved for one thing and using it for
> something quite different (e.g. taking organs that evolved for breathing
> and eating and using them for talking about philosophy).
>
> 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 Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 12:32 AM HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> David,
>> Does biology include the cyborg nature of humanity? I mean the way in
>> which technology has changed human consciousness, what it is like to be
>> human.
>> Henry
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sep 17, 2019, at 11:56 PM, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:
>>
>> David, I seem to recall that Engels also took atoms to be an unprovable
>> hypothesis. The point for Hegel though is that the question of atoms or not
>> is not a philosophical question, but one which can only be resolved by
>> experiment, and like Engels, he simply failed to imagine that such a thing
>> was possible. Einstein observed atoms c. 1905 via a mathematical analysis
>> of Brownian motion. Another great philosopher, maybe you remember who,
>> claimed that although we could see the Sun, we could not, in principle,
>> ever know what it is made of. Optical spectrometry of course put an end to
>> that,
>>
>> In general, Hegel underestimated the potential for expansion of the
>> domain of natural scientific and technical discovery. But he updated his
>> philosophy as new insights became available, as we all do.
>>
>> Andy
>> ------------------------------
>> *Andy Blunden*
>> Hegel for Social Movements <https://brill.com/view/title/54574>
>> Home Page <https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm>
>> On 18/09/2019 2:50 pm, David Kellogg wrote:
>>
>> 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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