April 1, 2011
More on Races, Genders, and Brains
Reading Cordelia Fine’s most excellent work of popular neuroscience, Delusions of Gender, reminds me once again of the importance of opposing the reactionary scientism that has taken hold in increasingly large sections of the population.(1) This way of thinking manifests itself in a revival of many old stereotypes, clichés and damaging rigidities of cultural and social roles that once seemed on the verge of eradication, but are now back in vogue. What has given them a new lease on life is the supposed support they have in intuitive appeals to scientific knowledge and the bamboozling use of neurology, sophisticated statistical testing, and social psychology in order to underpin them. In the New Left period of Western politics it was seen as obvious that we would soon not only do away with racist and sexist structures and beliefs in our society, but overcome gender and race as parts of our conceptual apparatus altogether. Now very few indeed seem still to be interested in such a proposition of politics or even to deem it feasible. This is because the great counterrevolution in the West from the 1980s to now has been accompanied not only by a new pseudoscientific orthodoxy in economics and statecraft, but also in ideas about cultural norms and roles. ‘Scientific racism’, once seemingly utterly banished, is now making a creeping revival, and ‘scientific’ sexism is sold everywhere in mass market paperbacks. Few on the left, even in the radical parties and groups, make any real attempt at countering this or even providing a serious analysis of the arguments at hand. Instead, the focus is all too often on the outward sexist appearances of certain religious or cultural practices. This is justified enough of itself, but we must win the battle on all fronts, and that includes dispelling certain important ‘intuitions’ many people, even the middle class intelligentsia, now (again) have about gender and race. Read the rest of this entry »
August 21, 2009
The Red and the Green I: Capitalism and Ecology
It is, or ought to be, by now a familiar fact that the world is in a state of great environmental crisis. While there is no need to believe in the myth of the perfectly virtuous native living in complete harmony with his environment, it is clear that the development of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution so-called have drastically and fundamentally altered the relationship of man to his biosphere. In fact, so much so that it is estimated this century may see the greatest single increase in man-made global warming in all of the memory of humanity as a species, as a result of processes begun only two centuries ago at most. Our impact upon the global network of ecosystems is now so great that the current period of civilization is now by biologists considered to be a Great Extinction Event, one of the very few in our planet’s entire history – the last one took place approximately 65 million years ago. Moreover, the current Extinction Event is also the fastest ever recorded. A consensus predicts a future scenario in which between 20% and 50% of all species on Earth may go extinct.1 Read the rest of this entry »
