Quoted: Naomi Klein on the de-politicization of human rights

I've been reading Naomi Klein's excellent book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which is basically a re-telling of the history of neoliberal economics. Klein's thesis is essentially that every country which has adopted neoliberal, Chicago School economic policies (privatization, trade liberalization and dramatic cuts in government spending) has done so via fundamentally undemocratic means, and that enforcing these policies has often required brutal repression. Here, she talks about the Pinochet regime in Chile: how the brutal torture and murder carried out by the government was condemned by the Ford Foundation and human rights groups, but how none of these groups drew the connection between the repression and the economic policies served by it.

“When Ford rode to the rescue, its assistance came at a price, and that price was—consciously or not—the intellectual honesty of the human rights movement. The foundation’s decision to get involved in humans rights but “not get involved in politics” created a context in which it was all but impossible to ask the question underlying the violence it was documenting: Why was it happening, in whose interests?

That omission has played a disfiguring role in the way the history of the free-market revolution has been told, largely absent any taint of the extraordinarily violent circumstances of its birth. Just as the Chicago economists had nothing to say about torture (it had nothing to do with their area of expertise), the human rights groups had little to nothing to say about the radical transformations taking place in the economic sphere.”

Derrick Jensen vs. Ayn Rand

I have an account on Library Thing, a site that lets you catalog, tag and manage your books. I was browsing through my library and decided to take a look at my author cloud, which is basically a weighted list of all the authors you own books by (more books means the author's name looks bigger). A lot of the huge names were favorite childhood authors--Orson Scott Card, JK Rowling, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. But outside of that field, two of the biggest names were Derrick Jensen and Ayn Rand.

I cannot think of two people whose written works are more diametrically opposed. Derrick Jensen is an anti-civilization deep green activist who believes that we need to return to a level of technology and population closely resembling the Stone Age if we ever want to live sustainably on this planet. His books are incredibly lyrical, and link the pervasiveness of rape and child abuse in our society to deforestation, mining, climate change, imperialism and almost every other global problem you can think of. Reading Derrick brings you to your knees in tears because he shows you simultaneously how awful and abusive our culture is, and how beautiful the world is and can be if we have the courage to fight back.

And then there's Ayn Rand. Somewhat better known, Ayn's books are thick and pay homage to human genius in its many forms. Atlas Shrugged is her thousand-page ode to capitalism, an economic system which allows the brilliance of one man (say, someone who invents the lightbulb) to benefit the masses of humanity. The Fountainhead is her tribute to the individual going against the conventions of society and having the courage to be brilliant. And Anthem is a dystopian novel in an entirely collective world where one man and one woman rediscover human curiosity and the concept of self and run away together.

A lot of people have a lot of bad things to say about Ayn Rand, as they should. Her no-altruism, no-government world leaves a lot of people out, and she's completely incapable of understanding and addressing concepts like privilege, racism, sexism, learning disabilities and the like. All of the sex scenes in her books are either outright rape or distinctly rape-esque. She is the right of American intellectual discourse, taken to its logical conclusions and stripped bare of any pretense.

And what Ayn is for the right, Derrick is for the left. Environmentalists get accused of being anti-capitalist, anti-growth, anti-business and anti-technology all the time. Most of them awkwardly backpedal and retract or soften statements they've made, trying to find some compromise between two fundamentally irroconcileable systems. Derrick doesn't lie and he doesn't compromise. He draws his lines clearly and picks a side. The living health of the planet is more important than economic growth and production. Production is just another name for turning living things into dead things, and civilization is sustained only by widespread violence. Come over to the side of the living planet, and fight like your life depends on it, because it does.

I'm drawn to both of these stories, both of these worldviews. Obviously, I'm more in the Derrick camp than the Ayn one. I'm an environmentalist. I'm not that into capitalism, our culture, or really civilization itself. I'd rather we spent most of out time growing our own food and making clothes ourselves. I'd like to keep the Internet and Western medicine, and I'm not sure where all that fits in. But I like where Derrick is going. I want to be there.

Even given this, Ayn isn't wrong about everything. At its core, much of her writing is about the beauty of human curiosity and innovation. This is the oldest cultural myth of Western civilization, and I'm aware that it's problematic. The lone man bravely staking out new ground gets to conveniently ignore the workers who make his lightbulbs and build his railroad and all that. And more to the point, because of inherent inequalities in the world, some of those railroad workers and lightbulb factory employees could probably find the cure for cancer or something equally important if they weren't trapped in an economic system where they have no other options for work and can't have agency in their own lives. But even with those problems, I find something incredibly inspiring about the heights that the human imagination has reached to. We've built a transcontinental railroad, gone to the moon, mapped the human genome and invented the Internet. I think a lot of that is built on collaboration, but there have definitely been people throughout history who had a vision, an incredible mind, and the resources to go with it.

The problem with these two worldviews is that they can't coexist. I think Derrick is right about what needs to happen. We need to un-grow, depopulate, re-learn to take care of ourselves and our landbases and live much more simply than we do now. But the curiosity that had fueled Ayn Rand's work is something fundamental to human nature. People want to understand how the world around them works. They want to make an impression or a discovery that will change the course of history. That desire might be rooted in Western cultural conditioning. But human curiosity is universal. And curiosity is going to push future humans, even if they're living in sustainable earth-dwellings, to wonder about us. It's going to push them to rediscover the technologies we came up with. It's going to push them to lightbulbs, cars and computers. It's going to push them towards machine-based technology.

Reading these two authors, I've had to come to terms with many false beliefs that I've held. Derrick has gotten me mostly past the idea that we can somehow technologically engineer ourselves out of the violence and environmental destruction that fuels our economic growth. But Ayn has also gotten me over the idea that we will ever go back to a place where we don't have that drive to discover and develop. No matter how bad peak oil is or what happens to the planet, people will still have that curiosity.

I don't know what to do with this realization. It doesn't speak well for the future of the planet, or ultimately the human race. And it makes it so hard for me to pick a side. I know, feel and understand that my health is ultimately dependent on the land the sustains me--clean water, breathable air, healthy soil, functional ecosystems. I've slept under the stars for months at a time. I know what it is to feel completely at peace, and the only times I've ever felt that way was when there was nothing separating me from the stars. But I'm still seduced by the terrifying beauty of industry. Walking through the sixth-largest coal plant in the country, I was awestruck by the scale of human imagination. I find factories haunting and poetic. When I see smokestacks, I think of the end of civilization, but they look so beautiful that I want to sit there, transfixed, and watch the apocalypse unfold.

I exist, day in and day out, praying that there will never be a moment when my life is on the line, when I truly have to choose between the two.

Regional, day four: Boquillas del Carmen

This entry was originally written in my journal during a regional geology trip to West Texas from March 12-19, 2011. For the complete list of regional geo blog posts, click here.

day 4: in Big Bend National Park

Backstory: Big Bend National Park is right on the US-Mexico border—the Rio Grande, which runs through the park, is the official dividing line between the US and Mexico. Across the river, there’s a town in Mexico called Boquillas del Carmen. The people there used to make their living off of tourists from the park—they would take people across the river on horses and sell crafts and food to visitors. However, in 2002, the border was closed due to security concerns after 9/11, making all commerce between the town’s inhabitants and Americans across the river illegal.

Since the closure, most of the families have left, and the inhabitants are forced to leave crafts out on the trails around the Rio Grande and ask for donations, all while surrounded by signs instructing park visitors that buying anything from a Mexican national is a crime. The federal government has announced plans to re-open the border sometime soon.

While hiking in the park, I had a brief conversation with a man from the town named Felipe. This entry is based on that conversation.

* * *

I have no words to even adequately begin to apologize to the people of Boquillas del Carmen for the US’s idiotic, criminally insane culture and the security, immigration and anti-drug policies that come along with it.

And then if I really think about it, the list of people I need to apologize to stretched so far I can’t see the end anywhere in sight. I owe an apology to the indigenous communities here before me, to the descendants of black slaves who worked backbreaking days to amass wealth for my ancestors, to the people of the Niger Delta, to the women raped in the Congo because of civil unrest caused by the curse of having resources my country needs, to every salmon dead so I can charge my phone with cheap hydropower, to the natural communities that lived on the land my house is on, to people who starve to death or die of malaria because they can’t afford health care or food that costs 1/100th of what I’m willing to spend on a smoothie or another piece of clothing I don’t really need…

And I know guilt does no good. I know I didn’t create these systems. I know that focusing on the big picture is far more important, and that the most self-serving, awful thing those in power have done to keep us from fighting back is to convince us that our individual choices can somehow, magically, save the world.

But then someone looks you in the face, and says nothing about this. He doesn’t talk about capitalism, immigration policy or NAFTA. He looks at me, hand on his horse, and says simply, “No hay mucho trabajo.” Is it hard to survive? “Si, es dificil.” And that’s all. He seems uncomfortable when my questions get more general, when they touch on illegal people, on migrant farmworkers. Maybe it’s my poor Spanish, or maybe he’s just tired at the end of the day. Maybe it’s just that I have the luxury to sit around and daydream about bringing capitalism down, but he’s too busy dealing with its daily realities to help a white girl feel less guilty.

In defense of capitalism, I think

This year, I've read a lot and tried to pay attention to the news. And everywhere I look, capitalism appears to be responsible for a seemingly endless list of atrocities. It's the economic system that brought us Bhopal, the military industrial complex, Superfund sites, sweatshops, the financial crisis, climate change and the Gulf oil spill.

Right now, we're witnessing what seems like the Last Days of capitalism. Every passing day brings new evidence that this system is unsustainable, exploitative and killing the planet. As our economy crumbles around us, people are taking it as evidence that the entire philosophy of capitalism is wrong. And though it might make me unpopular in some circles, I want to defend the core tenets of capitalism. Not because I don't agree with every single criticism people have made of the way our system operates, and not because I don't think we need radical change. Not because I'm harboring some illusion that our political system is capable of fixing the world's problems, and not because I'm defeatist and think we have to accept the current system and be "realistic". There's nothing realistic about pretending that changing our lightbulbs and waiting for Congress to pass an even more flawed version of Waxman-Markey will stop climate change.

Here's the thing: I think the core idea of capitalism--individuals coordinating their desires and abilities through a market--is actually a really good idea. On its most basic level, capitalism is about matching up someone doing or making something with someone willing to pay them for it. Capitalism encourages research and innovation--for drugs to treat HIV/AIDS, for alternative energy sources, for better water infrastructure in developing countries. Capitalism provides rewards for people who provide goods or services that meet needs. And I don't think there's another economic system that does that.

Where capitalism becomes problematic is when it gets large, global, industrialized and values maximizing profit at the expense of everything else, including human life or ecological health. Some people would argue these problems are inherent in the system, but I disagree. A woman in Ghana running a sewing business which makes traditional West African clothing for customers is still a capitalist enterprise, and one which, I would argue is fundamentally different from the likes of Dow Chemical or Monsanto. We need a system which will preserve those enterprises--the independent bookstores, clothing makers, hippie juice bars, creative dance teachers and farmers--without allowing corporate behemoths to commit state-sanctioned murder.

How do we get there? I'm not sure. I'm skeptical about the effectiveness of our political system to create change, especially on the scale we need in the time we have. I think overturning both Citizens United and its underlying precedent--corporate personhood--would be a good start. Holding corporations legally accountable for their actions would be better. That's a change that won't come from our legislative or executive branches, but a few rogue judges could get us somewhere. And if courts in the US won't hear it, we need to drag Coca-Cola, Nestle, Dow and anyone else we can think of in front of the International Criminal Court.

More than anything, I think we need to break the cycle of materialism and consumption. As Adbusters loves to say--"When you cut off the flow of oxygen to a person's brain, their brain dies. When you cut off the flow of nature to a person's soul, their soul dies. It's as simple as that." We need to get everyone in the developed world outside, starting at a young age. We need to resist media intrusion into our lives. We need to take down billboards, and any other ads that we're forced to look at. We need to remember how to value nature, and how to see ourselves as connected to it. We need to learn to be happy with what we have. We need to remember how to be people.

All of that's going to take a while. And it's not everything we should be doing, by any means. We need people sitting in front of bulldozers. We need people who won't come down from trees. We need anger and outrage and giant posters of people killed by methyl isocyante paraded in front of every single politician in this country. We need to find a way to take our government back, and I'm not talking "helpful tips" like calling your elected officials to tell them what you think. But when we get there, if we get there, and we get to re-write our world, I think capitalism should stick around. I don't mind paying someone to grow my food, as long as I know who they are and how they're growing it.

Capitalist activism?

So, we've spent the last two days in Post class debating economics, environmental issues, social change and activism. Which sounds like my cup of tea, except I keep leaving class wanting to kill someone. Because, these, essentially were the debates:

Day 1 : Environmental Justice

Issue: Are there always losers in a capitalist system and can you make progress in areas like this without destroying capitalism?

Sides:

Victor Lindstrom--You can't change things like high pollution areas without getting rid of capitalism, therefore you shouldn't try.

Darren Veit and others--You can't change without getting rid of capitalism, therefore we should get rid of capitalism because it's inherently racist and classist.

Me and nobody else--Capitalism and environmental/social justice aren't incompatible, you just need small amounts of regulation and government action which gives market incentives for positive change.


Day 2: Social Entrepreneurship

Issue: Can you make money without exploiting someone?

Sides

Darren--No, it's completely impossible, especially in the US because it's ingrained in our economic and political system.

Me--Yes--trade isn't a zero-sum game. You having a dollar means someone else has a dollar less, but that's not a bad thing all the time. If I sell you something for a dollar that you're willing to buy for a dollar, everyone wins. I get a dollar richer. You get a dollar of value. And this isn't just theory--Grameen Bank, case in point. It's an incredibly profitable business, and it benefits the poor who get microloans. Even Cranium. Who does that exploit? I'm not going to say it does no harm to anybody, and especially not the environment, but that's different than exploitation.

I'm so sick of feeling like the only activist who doesn't hate capitalism. Yes, it has its problems, but find me a better system. And people like Ms. Engstrom, who get mad about the fact that we're looking for alternative fuel technologies for cars, when we should all just stop driving in the first place..I'm sorry, but we as a society can't function that way. Progress doesn't have to be a bad thing. And while you might be ok with that, most people wouldn't be, and you can't force people to live a certain way.

And it occurs to me now that I'm conflicted about so many things, everyday. I have so many things fighting inside of me, so many different opinions about every single little thing in the world. Let me show you what I mean:

I have a deep respect for our women and men in uniform, and I believe that they are incredibly brave and loyal people. I think war is necessary sometimes. But I hate our military-minded complex, I hate that we fight other cultures first and negotiate later, and I hate the wars those brave soldiers have been involved in in the last few decades.

I believe everyone should have opportunity to advance and that companies should pay people living wages. I know that most people are poor through bad luck or birth, not because of laziness. But I also think companies have a right to hire people at market prices--what people are willing to work for, be it in third world sweatshops or here within our borders. After all, a sweatshop job is better than no job, as horrible as that sounds.

I love the earth and I would rather die than live in a world without mountains, trees, animals and functional ecosystems (and I'm pretty sure that's not an exaggeration for dramatic effect). I believe we all, collectively need to wake up and start reducing our consumption, building sustainable communities and taking care of the earth. But I don't think you can force businesses to be more green. You can't shut down the cattle industry, even if it is responsible for 25% of the world's carbon emissions. You can't make ExxonMobile stop spending billions of dollars to convince people that climate change isn't real. And you can't say that the better information will win, because the people with the money aren't usually the green ones, and it hasn't been working.

How can I change the world when I can't convince my own father to keep our thermostat below 70 degrees? How can I justify asking other people to change their lives when I live in the house I do, wear the clothes I wear, buy the things I buy? How can I, believing so much in the value of competition, the human spirit, the beauty of innovation, how can I tell somebody that their idea, their business, their profit-making method is not valid because the cost is too high to society?

To those of you who ask--how can you spend so much time thinking about these things, my only response is--how can you not? I've never known another way to think, to look at the world. I've thought this way since 2nd grade--my knowledge and opinions have shifted, my core values have remained the same. I believe our lives have no higher mandate, no higher purpose, than to work as hard as we can for as long as we can to make the world a better place, in whatever way we see that. Some people are scientists, giving us a better understanding of the world around us and its possibilities. Some are artists, making us think and adding beauty to a world that can seem bleak. Some of us are businesspeople, coming up with new ideas and finding better ways to make them. And some of us are activists, for the same reason--because that is our calling. Because that is the only way I know to make the world better.