Pachamama versus the UN

It is easy to ridicule Evo Morales. While most politicians surround themselves with po-faced assistants and swivel eyed interns, the Morales delegation is a notoriously riotous and colourful affair. A street scene from La Paz painted on the dour belly of the UN.

At Cancun, Morales delivered a polemic as radical as the wardrobes, a polemic easily dismissed by the West and sometimes engendering anger from Western leaders. At COP15 last year then Prime Minister Gordon Brown accused Morales of holding the
conference ‘to ransom’.

The underlying schism between Morales and the West though is not simply between ‘reasonable’ and ‘radical’ political discourse, but rather that between coloniser and the colonised.

Ours is an era of profound change. The political and economic global order forged amidst the smoking ruins of two world wars is being challenged ever more convincingly by countries that were, in the first half of the twentieth century, merely the outposts of empires past. Nations, argued Edward Said, which were only figments of an Imperial imagination.

Morales stance at Cancun is perceived as unpalatable not simply in terms of policy, but also because it is rooted in a postcolonial mindset. This mindset, through its personifying of nature (Morales says nature should have rights) pays homage to God’s whom the Western world buried long ago, deep in its subconscious.

These god’s are coming back to haunt us though. Ecological science today is ever more defined by the Gaia hypothesis – named after the primordial Greek goddess of the earth (who manifests as Pachamama for many of the native peoples of South America). When first proposed this hypothesis aroused suspicion and amusement but, despite the ongoing protestations of Richard Dawkins and his macho populism, it is an ever more useful theoretical framework for understanding the earth and our place on it.

The Gaia hypothesis flies in the face of enlightenment philosophy, questioning the human/nature dichotomy that the enlightenment ingrained in the Western mindset and the privileged place that humankind has assigned itself on the planet. Morales question, therefore, of whether nature should have rights is probably the most fundamental question of our age.

For the Empire the question is sacrilege. The history of the twentieth century though is one of those progressives who dared to ask and, now it is time to ask again. When women asked for rights, they too were deemed too close to nature to be trusted at the Ballot box. Likewise the black, Asian and ‘other’ residents of the colonies, were once considered akin to nature – savages or primitives – unworthy of humane treatment.

Great progress has been made; today the rights of all are enshrined in law (though this law is not always practiced) and, as postcolonial theory has argued, the empire has ‘written back’. Today ‘world’ music, literature and culture (world generally meaning not emanating from the UK or the US) abounds and is greatly celebrated.

For the environment however the logic of Empire persists. This logic sees the earth and its non-human inhabitants as somehow ‘ours’; a resource, sustenance, food. All our efforts to mitigate cataclysmic climate change are infused with this logic and whatever measures we take they better not get in the way of our democratic right to consume, to eat burgers whenever we want and relentlessly travel the globe populating it with identikit high streets and good consumer ‘offers’.

This is where the UN process is going horribly wrong. It is trying to square the circle of limited resources with an economic and social model based fundamentally on perpetual consumption. International efforts to mitigate climate change are obviously commendable but the principle idea seems to be to put a price tag on resources which were once free; forests, carbon &c.

Merely integrating ecology and economy however fails to develop a blueprint for learning to live on our planet. The answer is economic sacrifice. Work less, consume less, have a lower GDP.

Such a proposal is outrageous to conventional logic, but why? I for one could happily work a little less, earn a little less, buy a little less and spend a little more time with my baby daughter. Relentless economic activity and the destruction it wreaks on the environment are the result of one thing only; greed.

The teleology that underpins the Western conception of history implies economic sacrifice is society in reverse – heading backwards. It is though the only answer. Morales rightly accused the world of an incredible lack of ambition. For the heartlands of the Empire this lack of ambition will have merely cosmetic effects but, for countries like Bolivia and so many others, it will be devastating.

Marriage, Totems, 1982

Working in the London newsroom of a right of centre Japanese newspaper has its highs and lows. Highs; there are always plenty of delightful seaweed flavoured snacks about the place.

Lows; the constant instruction from Tokyo to rattle sabres in China's direction and pursue every interview, piece of research or avenue of journalistic enquiry with the sole intention of slagging of China or, failing that, Russia.

But never mind! Right now, as I am sure is the case in every newsroom up and down the country, everything has been dropped so that we can focus on the royal wedding. The Palace put out a brief (6 sentences) statement earlier today and we have all been banging on about it ever since and bound to keep doing so until the end of the week. Glory be!

Here at Goodanimalbadanimal though we like to look beyond the headlines. For now we will ignore that all of a sudden it is OK for the BBC to ask royal historians whether or not it is acceptable for a ‘commoner’ to marry into the Royal Family. After all we are a meritocratic society! If a commoner like Kate Middleton, ma’am, an ordinary middle class girl (multimillionaire family, a flat in Chelsea, finishing school!!), can marry Royal then we must be doing something right.

We will also ignore the media’s celebration of the fact that Kate seems to have spent her entire life fantasising about marrying Wills and that how only now, after so many years of upwards socialising, she can finally define herself as she has always desired – as a grinning appendage of her hubby to be.

There are two more interesting forces at work here. The first is the gearing up of the history and news industries to generate a readymade narrative of the unfolding events – even though very little has so far unfolded. The second is the making of the sacred, defined by Durkheim as being opposed to the profane.

A strange mobius loop has enveloped the nation – cart wheeling us backwards in time to 1982. Nirvana have gone back in utero, oasis back to baggy Manchester and simply red is rolling back the years. I myself am rapidly regressing and find myself once more a babe in the arms of my mother, infant eyes transfixed by the riots on the streets of Toxteth.

Eric Hobsbawm put events such as this succinctly when he said;

“Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.”

So, as the nation slowly wakes up to the fact that it is defeated in Afghanistan, and as people prepare for the strictest economic contraction of a generation – destined to leave a trail of social dystopia in its wake – what better opiate than a royal wedding to ease the pain. The perfect glue for a fragmenting British identity.

What better a chance to articulate a sanguine nationalism and dilute the bitter, violent and racist working class version that, as sure as eggs is eggs, accompanies economic downturns? Yes, it’s the 80’s again.

The New Statesman are having a Thatcher special, the Tories are in office (with their lib dem interns making the tea), the Falklands are once again under threat and the rusting remnants of British industry are being priced up ready for auction.

Already the wedding has taken on an aura of the sublime, the sacred. As citizens we are either with this sacred force or against it.

As the Prime Minister has said; “I am sure the whole nation will want to celebrate.” Nick Clegg, the intern, dutifully echoed; “Like everybody I am so thrilled. Everyone will be united in delight and joy about this.”

To be a public figure and say that you are in any way not delighted, or even indifferent, about this news – is political suicide. And so, through the distilling process of hegemony, the same eulogy finds its way to the flapping lips of a hundred TV hopefuls who want to rearticulate the message. And so, we have a narrative.

Newscasters and historians are slowly piecing together a tale of ‘special romantic destiny’ (BBC), class barriers buckled (wasn’t Diana common as well?) - a hegemony to take all our eyes of the bankers bonuses, the wars and, of course, the Prime Ministers about turn on his photographer. And, let us not forget, the very real issue of class and social mobility in the UK.

So, as I write these words I cast a wary eye over my shoulder – fearful of being seen and causing a moral panic for being on the wrong side of the sacred/profane dichotomy. Just remember to repeat – I am so happy, I am so happy ; )

A word of thanks

Massive thanks to Will and Shamik over at Left Foot Forward for kindly adding me to their blogroll!

Slowly but surely Goodanimalbadanimal is finding a place for itself amongst the busy annals of the blogosphere....

Thanks again to LFF and, to read my own work with that most prominent of blogs, click here...

Bankers, Golf and Bombs

As the Prime Minister’s mission to China continues apace Mr Cameron, along with a number of his senior colleagues, has been drawn into an embarrassing row with a number of high profile bankers.

The financial wizards, most prominent amongst them being Sir Philip Hampton of the Royal Bank of Scotland, gave a stark warning to ministers yesterday that, should bonuses be capped or interfered with in any way, the ‘top talent’ will up sticks and move to Asia.

This blog has a radical proposal of how best to approach this sensitive issue; let the bankers go!

The ‘top talent’, who operate from favourable alcoves of the globe where taxes are low and there is an abundance of expensive restaurants and strip clubs, should be allowed to spread their wings and find pastures new if blighty ain’t good enough anymore.

And from these new and sunny groves they can continue to wilfully invest pensions etc in infrastructure etc around the world, unencumbered by the rigid laws of physical geography that seem to so affect everyone else. Most of the investments made by these RBS are abroad anyway and, in a country with of creaking infrastructure and ghetto regions such as our own, perhaps if Philip and his merry band were elsewhere they might feel inclined to invest in us?

One fantastic investment being courted by RBS at the moment is in the exploitation of ‘tar sands’ in the unspoilt wilderness of Canada. A solution to our energy needs described by Greenpeace as “an environmental scandal on a massive scale”.

Tickle your fancy? If not perhaps you might be more interested in investing a bit of your filthy lucre in the production of cluster bombs – a means of murder described as “Shameful and indiscriminate” by Amnesty International who revealed that RBS, along with other high street banks, are underwriting their production to the tune around £800 million.

Whether you fancy these investments or not it doesn’t matter anyway because RBS is, of course, almost entirely owned by you, the taxpayer! A situation that came about when the ‘top talent’ got their investments muddled up by assuming that investing in an 8 bedroom house each for the rural underclass of Mississippi and Alabama was a sure bet!

I think now is the time for the UK to stop trying to remain one of banking classes favoured alcoves. Goodanimalbadanimal for one would rather see a country that produces actual things (yes, you heard me, things), with an economy that extends beyond the boundaries of the M25 and where the partaking in the economic life isn’t an action with, at its core, the kind of inherent and systemic evil exhibited by RBS’s investment portfolio.

Call us old fashioned if you like but it’s just the way we feel!

So, was Sir Philip’s tantrum yesterday a warning to us or a courtship signal sent to the Chinese establishment? China after all seems the perfect place for the ‘top talent’ to go. It has a huge, disenfranchised and minimum wage less strata of poverty stricken individuals who can be put to work along with plenty of excellent golf courses.

Dissenters can be locked up at will and there will be no pesky protests when you decide, for example, to sell arms to African states poised perilously on the brink of war! Winner!

One word of advice though, if the shit does hit the fan again you might want to expect a slightly less benevolent reaction from the powers that be on mainland China. Compared to us softies in the West Beijing can get rather vengeful when upset, just ask Liu Xiao Bo!

Gaudi, Bees and the Pope

Yesterday, the great unfinished Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, was officially consecrated when the Pope visited and delivered mass.

The visit opened another front in the Pope’s battle against the ‘aggressive atheism’ which, the Church argues, has left a spiritual void at the heart of the modern west. It is also hoped the visit will fast track the beatification of ‘God’s Architect’ Antoni Gaudi, the troubled genius behind La Sagrada Familia, to whom several miracles are attributed.

There is no doubting that Gaudi was a man of great faith, and the church is a heavily garlanded monument to it, but why has the Pope chosen now to Basilicise the church?

Gaudi’s architecture, in concurrence with the art of the modernism movement in general, has at its core a subtle fear of modernity. An unease with the creeping influence of an economic model that, when Gaudi was at the height of his powers, was turning ancient, independent Catalonia, into an industrial outpost of the Spanish state. It was this brave new world that eventually killed Gaudi, when he was run down by a tram.

In La Sagrada Familia we see a protest against this industrial modernity rendered in stone. Fiercely natural shapes, internal as opposed to linear geometries, animate the building lending it an air of unreality. These natural forms however don’t present a clear preference for nature over society. Gaudi’s vision of nature has an alien quality. It is a nature, not of vernacular styles, but of the hive and the insect.

There is a horror hidden in this architecture, an approximation of nature’s alien forms. It is nature imagined against at a time of increasing urbanisation when people and the resources of the countryside were being increasingly pulled into the cities and the natural rhythms of the seasons were being replaced by the strict ticking of the mechanical clock. It is nature, not of the wild sea or noble steed, but the automaton society of insect colonies.

As argued by Juan Antonio Ramirez in The Beehive Metaphor, architects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were heavily influenced by the perfection and balance perceived to lurk in the design of Beehives.

Gaudi’s work is a beautiful manifestation of this instinct but when it re-emerged in the 20th century, through the extreme functionality of Le Corbusier, it left an architectural legacy often far less benevolent or majestic that that of La Sagrada Familia.

The references to alien, insect nature seen in Gaudi’s work strike a chord deep in the human subconscious and his strange forms have haunted the popular imagination ever since. In Pan’s Labyrinth for example, Gaudiesque spaces become the home to monsters as fantastical as the architecture itself and in Metamorphosis, Kafka articulates perfectly the fear that the human spirit is being subsumed to an ever more hive like society.

Likewise James Cameron’s Aliens directly addresses the fear of the hive. In the film the aliens have no individual identity; each being merely a part of the whole – mindless and murderous subjects of the queen, devoid of will. And the landscape they inhabit? An indistinct maze of non linear, organic geometries, heavily reminiscent La Sagrada Familia.

In Gaudi’s architecture we see modernity’s analogy of nature, as machine bent to the will of man and his industry, extended to dominate human life also. This concern is reflected in the type of Catholicism that Gaudi chose to embrace.

Gaudi’s Catholicism was one of rich imagery and archetypes rooted firmly in the mystic tradition. Making La Sagrada Familia a basilica is therefore a moment of enormous symbolism. The rash of modernist Catholic churches, best exemplified by Liverpool’s Catholic cathedral, tell of an age when the church was at one with the shifting tides of modernity.

Today though, in a world left battered by the collapse of Western economic and political orthodoxy and facing the moral and physical questions posed by ecological imbalance, the church is articulating itself anew, calling on society to find a motive other than the economic. La Sagrada Familia then, a powerful dialogue between society and nature, is a good place to start

Battles for the Mind

As extrapolated by Mary Ann Sieghart in yesterday’s Independent , the next Presidential elections in the US may well have, at their core, the ever contentious question of ‘the war on drugs’ and the battle lines may well be about to be redrawn.

Americans go to the polls today for the US mid-term elections to deliver their verdict on Barack Obama’s first two years in office. Away from questions about the economy, defence and the wild protestations of the tea party, a question is being put to voters in California which could mark a sea change in US drugs policy.

Californians will today vote on Proposition 19 – the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010. If the electorate return a yes vote, cannabis will for the first time be decriminalised in the state and local government will be able to tax and monitor its consumption.

The vote will be watched intensely by a Democrat party struggling to reenergise the voters who swept Obama, typically those sympathetic to article 19, young, liberal, black and Hispanic voters, are sympathetic also to the democrats and Obama. Surprisingly though, as observed by Sieghart, the right wing of the US are also increasingly seeing the potential financial and law and order benefits of easing restrictions on marijuana and are framing the right to smoke as being fundamental to the US constitution – currently a favourite document for rallying the right wing.

On this side of the pond meanwhile Professor David Nutt, thorn in the side of drugs policy in the UK, has once more ruffled feathers. A report co-authored by Nutt and appearing in the Lancet, has claimed that alcohol is more harmful than heroin, reigniting the debate he began this time last year when he, and many of his colleagues, quit his position as drugs advisor to the UK government.

What does all this mean however philosophically speaking and where did the relationship we now have with drugs come from – why, in other words, are developments such as the above – especially the hyperbolising of David Nutt – viewed as being, not just controversial, but dangerous.

The criminalising of mind altering substances is as old as the human, and animal urge, to consume them. To understand the particularly zealous approach to this issue seen in the Western world however we need to go back to the enlightenment.

The enlightenment sought to liberate Europe from the shadowy thought structures of the dark ages. No longer could arguments be made on the basis of divine knowledge or esoteric secrets. The enlightenment insisted upon the scientific method, faith not in unseen forces but in empirical evidence. A noble ambition indeed but one with unforeseen consequences.

This tradition invalidated knowledge that could not be readily isolated and experimented upon in a laboratory. Altered states of mind came to be seen as irrational and irrelevant. As argued by Michelle Foucault these definitions of rational/irrational soon came to control the parameters of human experience and more everyday definition flowed from them. The most notable being the definition of sane/insane.

Thus it was that the West was born, an entity that set out to capture the world from a dark and irrational natural world. Dualistic thought was enshrined and the greatest duality of them all, that between human (European) culture and wild, primitive nature was institutionalised. This duality persists to this day. As argued here, the schism between man and beast is as strong as it ever has been.
The desire to control states of mind is part of this continuum and popular, everyday discourses around drugs focus heavily on the notion that drug consumption takes you to another place, mentally speaking. It takes you out of the everyday, away from the system, ‘out of control’.

The government concerning itself with which herbs or mushrooms you choose to ingest or not ingest is therefore part and parcel of the dismissing of pagan religion, the definition of peoples against an historical timescale (developed and developing nations) and the perception, intrinsic to our society, that animals are somehow inferior because they don’t have the gift of consciousness as defined by enlightenment philosophy.

This is why this blog eagerly awaits the result of the article 19 vote. Should California say yes, and political elites in the UK and the US awaken to the expediency of legalising and managing marijuana and whatever else, the legal limits of human consciousness will be expanded ever so slightly and states of mind that were once considered to be within the realms of ‘mad’ will now be permissible in the comfort of the home.

Daleks, Magpies and Paul the Octopus

The nation mourns a slain stag while the unbearable emptiness of life without Paul the Octopus begins to settle like a dark veil across Europe. Conspiracy theories already abound. Some say the head of the Exmoor Emperor now adorns the wall of some wealthy European villa. His glazed eyes, we speculate, now stare abjectly as Pierre tucks into a choco croissant before jumping on the Metro down to La Defense.

Meanwhile a sole Chinese investigator is trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare, desperately telling the truth about Paul the Octopus. He has been dead for three months, we are informed, and replaced by a colluding doppelganger. Unpatriotic premonitions were too much for vengeful German football fans – and so Paul became Paella.

Why though do we care? Are Paul and the Emperor not mere beasts, simplistic genetic programmes to eat, sleep, shag and shit. Is not the only difference between them the differing vessels that their genes have involved to best meet the requirements of their respective environments?

It seems not for anthropomorphism is rife in coverage of their demises. Words like ‘noble’ abound with reference to the stag whilst Paul’s powers are as ever, a mystery in these sceptical times. Yet, despite all this, the systematic slaughter of numerous other beasts keeps its mechanistic pace, disregarded by the population at large. The only time I have heard people talking about the Emperor was in a greasy spoon.

Two snacking builders bemoaned his loss over a cup of tea and the fried and grizzled hide of a pig, lovingly slapped between 2 slices of white bread. The irony was as thick as the accumulating grease but, such contradictions are entirely symbolic of the world we find ourselves in.

A just launched initiative launched by the national trust goes to the root of this
disconnect. On the basis of the fact that 26% of teenagers believe that bacon comes from sheep, and that children are more likely to recognise a dalek that a magpie, the trust are tackling this issue head on;

“we can’t ignore the fact that, whether through pressures of time or physical access, as a nation we seem to be increasingly disconnected from the fabric of the country and there is a real danger of a ‘generational gap’ opening up where young people feel terrified at the prospect of going into the countryside.” says Fiona Reynolds of the Trust.

How then did we get to this state? Why is it that in the wired and febrile imaginations of the 21st centuries first generation the rolling downs and meadows of Exmoor are as likely to be populated by creatures from the BBC prop department as they are by magpies and sheep?

This is the great riddle of modernity and its answer is fundamental to our cognitive architecture.