Tag: theory

An Inconvenient Attitude

Warren Tang6 Comments

This month David Suzuki has kicked off a year’s schedule of talks across Canada. If you are fortunate enough to be able to get to one of the venues and hear him talk it is well worth the while. I saw a televised speech of his in Australia and I was changed by it. It is statements like this following one by him that made me understand what is wrong with the way we are living:

The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are our biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity – then we will treat each one with greater respect. That is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective. (From A David Suzuki Collection)

I think respect is the key word here. We simply do not treat the world with respect. He mentioned earlier in the same piece I quoted from that if we could see how the world has changed in four billion years to become a life sustaining planet for all life including ours then we will be humbled by what we have, and understand that is not for us to indiscriminately take as though we own it, but to share with all other life.

This week I also saw An Inconvenient Truth. It was a little late in coming to Japan (early this month, to my neck of the woods). I was also too busy with final reports to make the seventy minute drive to see it in town.

The film had stated much of what I already knew. So I do not think the film is there to convince people like me. But rather it was a film to preach to those yet to be convinced or have not heard the message yet. In that sense it is a necessary film. But why does it have to be from a former politician before we will listen? Anyone could have said it with the same evidence in hand. People are already saying it. People like David Suzuki have already said it. So it must necessarily say something about the culture of America, to whom much of it was aimed, that they will only listen if it is from someone important.

Mr Gore did make one point which I have always harped about here – that disinformation and deliberately confusing the public by false talk has prolonged the problem. We have not been playing on a level field when it comes to information dissemination. By scare tactics and other means the public has been split into two or more minds. And it comes back to the concepts of propaganda, advertising and commercialism.

So how do we deal with the agenda of others which are not the best for sustainability? In the West that is dominated by advertising, a kind of capitalist propaganda if you will, the highest bidder gets to persuade us that buying is good, not just their product but any product. This idea is therefore not about just one producer but about producers as a collective. I don’t want to sound Marxist but Karl Marx had a point. What scares me is not the fact we don’t have choices, but that we are only seemingly making free choices when we are not. So Capitalism is no better than Communism, if you look at it this way. Personally both systems fail. There are only two choices in our current paradigm so we must only choose between the two evils.

The pseudo-choice concept isn’t new of course, but it needs to be remembered or recalled. Those studies of the 1970s and 1980s on advertising have all but been forgotten. My favourite books from that period have to be Ways of Seeing by John Berger and On Photography by Susan Sontag. It has a lot to say about our use of images and imagery still relevant (if not more) to today’s advertising-polluted world.

And just a final note: the strategies used in Mr Gore’s “award winning” documentary also come from this same well-honed philosophical logo-technology (as in “logos” or “word”). It is slick, almost too slick, but you can notice its agenda if you look hard enough.

Mind your language – Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness

Warren Tang11 Comments

You are what you speak.

We have come to understand in our postmodern age very well that words can betray your ideology. For example, Hegelian view on history on as a series of thesis, antithesis and synthesis reveals a preference to the idea of progress as something unidirectional and upward, when it is that goes both ways and possibly more. The very word ‘progress’ shows this. Or the Structuralists’s liking for concrete descriptions and fixity. Roland Barthes try as he may to go beyond the the restrictions of talking about things in terms of codes only gets stuck in the terminology which lack freedom.

This understanding is nothing new, of course. We have stuggled with this problem, seen through it, and returned to blindness by forgetfulness by being swept up in the heat of the moment. Our attention had been distracted for one moment and we have lost sight of the task at hand.

The rigor with which Derrida took to task was a guiding example of how language refuses to stop to deceive us. And his passing is also an example how we revert back to the norm all because of the nature of language – that things do not last forever. It hides its very nature like an entity which cannot perceive itself from where it stands. We must simply speak outside of language.

And in the same way the Buddha showed us that we must be mindful of what we do and what we say at all times simply because we are prone to inattentativeness.

So why am I not happy about Bhutan’s King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk’s philosophy of Gross National Happiness? If language was a guide to our internal beliefs then this term says a lot about where its ideas come from. Having studied in Oxford the King has an “understanding” of the Western culture and ideas. But the choice of the term necessarily betrays that he may not understand the power of language.

Right speech is one of the basic beliefs of the Buddha and Buddhism. And in choosing to continue to use the psuedo-economic terms, to dress it in the langauge of money, is to fall into the linguistic trap. The idea has the potential to become a wolf in sleep’s clothing.

And this months signing of a new and “updated” treaty between India and Bhutan has, in my opinion, taken the country “three steps back”. In it Bhutan now has more freedom to control its own foreign policies and, in particular, the freedom to purchase non-lethal military arms means the country is ever moving closer to the Western ideals of nationhood, and moving away from the Buddhist ideals of self-control and vigilance. That the Pandora’s box had been open by the introduction of television and the internet in the last decade has caused unprecedented changes within the nation, its people and its thinking.

Some have called this a bold experiment but really I think this is just the beginning of a mistake. When people start to talk differently, talk like they are businessmen, then you know there is a problem. Again, it is not easy to see where careless wording can lead. Democracy is not about freedom of choice, it is really about the ability to sell you something you do not need. Democracy has been tied to capitalism more than liberalism. Freedom is only an excuse for opening up potential markets. And if the King cannot see this how can the nation.

Perhaps some have seen this and are hoping to profit. But that is only because they – the West – are “poorer spiritually” or “morally bankrupt” to use economic metaphors. It should be clear by now that finance, money and economics dominates our (Western) culture and it is “on the march” (military metaphor) globally.

Enough said. I think I’ll end all this metaphoric mumbo jumbo here.

Will science save the planet?

Warren Tang1 Comment

My father came to visit recently. As a habit we try to see each other once a year. As he works for a multinational company he is always on the move flying around globetrotting to meetings. So getting together for a couple of days is usually all we can manage.

This also means he is very much a person who believes in business as a way of life. His business life is something I am not particularly fond of. Personally I want to be a teacher or academic even though these jobs are not without its own politics. It is really a pick from a bad bunch of livelihoods.

So it is during these couples of days that I get to talk to (read: argue with) him about business ethics and philosophy. This time we talked about the relationship between science and sustainability. We agreed that global warming that is happening right now and that something needs to give. However he believed science will create new technologies which have less impact on the environment, that it will eventually save the planet from death by consumerism.

And it is this belief in science that we differ.

To me there are two types of scientists – Observers and Manipulators. To the Observer science is a tool for investigating the nature of the universe. Observers want to know the fundamental laws of motion. So they invent things like calculus and telescopes to gain this knowledge. The object of their investigation is the world. It is to be looked at, to be learned from and to be understood. Observers do not touch the object that is under investigation. By contrast to the Manipulator science is a tool for tampering with the very nature of the universe. The Manipulator wants to know how much they can get out of the world. So they create things like machines for mass production and the electric light bulb for personal, and often short-term, gain. The objective of their investigation is to find ways to apply their knowledge for gain and to see how efficiently something can be produced for consumption. To the Manipulator the world is to be played with, to be harnessed and harvested, to be made a slave of its technological master.

Observers are the astronomers, the oceanographers, the meteorologists of this world; Manipulators are the research scientists, the inventors, the designers of this same world. So it is really a choice as to how we want to relate to the environment, what we choose to do with it or to do to it.

We need science to solve all the problems we wouldn’t have if there were no science.I believe that much of our problems are from the application of science in the form of technology, and that it has snowballed into something bigger because we have tried to use more science to solve these problems. So the advent of science is akin to opening Pandora’s Box or starting a vicous circle. While both seem to imply we cannot reverse the course, I do not believe science’s blunders are irreversible. It may be difficult but not impossible. And certainly using less technology and reverting to a simpler lifestyle will help.

So whether science will save the environment really depends on when we will listen to the Observers over the Manipulators. By nature Observers are the silent type and Manipulators are the loud type, and so their seems to be only ever one discourse – that of the Manipulator. This seems to mean it is not only important for the Observers to scream their silent scream as loudly as they can, but also for us to be listening for it.

The Earth, its environment and resources

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Recently I had to evaluate a writing textbook for my Teaching Writing class. It was a textbook for teaching English writing to second language students for academic purposes. So the articles were all social related.

The chapter I chose to examine was called Our Earth, Our Resources, Our Environment., a chapter obviously about sustainability issues. Yet the title struck me as problematic. Not that the Earth the resources and the environment are unimportant words (they are undoubtedly “trend words” for today) but it was how they were determined. The other three words or to be exact the other word repeated three times – our – was just begging for criticism.

Of the three possessive cases that occurred in this short “punchy” title resources stood out for me. What are resources and who owns them? These are questions I would like to answer here. The Oxford English Minidictionary on my desk defines resource as “a supply of an asset to be used when needed”. A fair and straightforward definition. But what about the assumptions of the word. The use of the words supply and asset are interesting here because they are not words usually associated with the environment, especially the protection of it.

And what about the verb form? It is in the passive. Passive sentences have a feature which make it a favourite of some writers because of what it can hide or ignore – the doer. To complete the definition it omits the doer partly because it is assumed and partly because it wants to obscure its negative impact. Let me put it another way: I do not know of too many animals that see the trees and mountains as “supply”, “asset” or “resource”. These are wholly human terms.

Habitat may be a better word to describe the areas we term resource. But that too has its problems. It is always “the dwarf mongooses’ habitat” or simply “their habitat”. usually it is not an area human inhabit but always a step removed from, or to look at from the outside. In other words, it is the The Other world or place and not ours.

About five minutes drive from my home is a quarry. I literally drive through it almost everyday to get to and from college. Every time I do so I shudder. Slowly what once was a mountain, a forest and habitat for animals is now bare yellow sandy rock. The huge bulldozers power shovels and dump trucks that sit by the roadside has gradually been transported away to some factory somewhere for use, for human consumption. The mountain face that once dominated my peripheral vision as I drive now opens up to a dusty sky. How sad. I wonder if the workers don’t feel any loss by this. I do. But I guess it represents food on the table for them.

Last year I wrote a very short piece about Proudon’s famous statement “property is theft”. In this piece I deconstructed the term property and turned it on to itself, saying we are really stealing from ourselves. I still feel the same way now but I must qualify it. Not that I am an anarchist or believe in anarchy (not in the popular meaning of the word anyway), rather the things in the environment do not belong solely to us, the human species.

Animals, I feel, have the right to the use and protect their home and the place which feeds them. This may be a mountain or a forest, the very place we call a resource, our resource. Yet they literally do not have representation. Animal rights groups may attempt to speak for them but it may seem – to the other on the other side of the fence – futile and naive to try to protect them.

It reminds me of the scene in Seven Years in Tibet where the monks were shown spending an entire week removing all the worms they could find from a plot of land being prepared for a new building. This was so they do not harm life or kill. Jainism, another religion that developed in India practices similarly.

And it is this fundamental respect for life – that is lacking in Western thinking, economy, politics, philosophy, etc – that I would like to point out.

When I was in 21 I became a monk. In preparation for my move I sold everything I had. At first the lack of possession was rather unsettling but I slowly felt liberated by the loss of the burden toward my things. I do not know when but I had come to understand why Buddha taught this way of living and what it means to be living as a monk.

Once I had renounced possessions once I felt I did not need to have more. Nor do I feel nowadays the sense of loss when something is taken or given away. I now question whether it is really necessary for me to have something before I buy or receive it. And I look at the mountains not as something for me to enjoy but that the joy given to me is by its grace and its non-possession of me.

Spinsters and Hinayana Buddhism

Warren Tang4 Comments

Right now I am readng Paul Baker’s excellent book Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. A corpus or corpora are linguists’ tool to uncover hidden agendas within language use. I was particularly interested in the chapter about collocation where Baker focused on the use in English of the words bachelor and spinster. But it wasn’t so much how these words are used but rather who uses these terms that caught my attention.

Spinster is almost always used by someone else who is usually not a “spinster” to refer to someone who is. An unmarried person would almost never use this term to refer to herself. The same could be said of bachelor but it has a more positive meaning. Depending on factors like age and social status being referred to as a bachelor does not necessarily have a negative connotation. But the term spinster invariably is negative.

So you may be wondering what does Hinayana Buddhism has to do with the term spinster? Bare with me for a moment. My introduction into Buddhism was through Zen. I actually became a lay monk. Zen has some very good aspects about it. But like most religions or sects it constructs itself to be the norm. It was years later before I would take a step back and look at Zen from the “outside”.

When one looks at Buddhist history one will definitely come across the terms Hinayana and Mahayana. Hinayana literally is the “lesser vehicle” and Mahayana is the “greater vehicle”. The type of Buddhism practiced in Japan comes under the umbrella term of Mahayana. Historically it is a kind of Buddhism developed later. As the term suggests it is “superior” to the Hinayana.

But this is really strange. Why would anyone – the Hinayana – want to make derogatory their own practice. This is fact is not the case. The Hinayana Buddhists never use the term to refer to themselves. They usually use the term Theravada. Theravada Buddhism is the only surviving Buddhism of the early form. They pride themselves in being the closest to the original teaching of the Buddha (and whether this is a necessarily a good thing or not is another debate). So like spinster it is a term used to refer to The Other. This of course has a lot to do with power play and legitimation of one’s own discourse. The term Mahayana really has no meaning other than in contrast to its binary – Hinayana.

I have had dialogues with Zen Buddhists who think these terms are not an issue. But I believe they are and they need to be looked at in order to understand what their own beliefs are because to not question one’s position is to be blinded by it. I would hate to think what would a spinster Hinayana Buddhist would think of all this?

Postmodernism2

Warren Tang3 Comments

In my last post about Postmodernism I mentioned that it is not dead but very much alive. And in academia if you are trained to pick it up you will. So let me give you just a few examples from my first week back in university.

In my Teaching Writing class we started reading the first chapter of Second Language Writing by Ken Hyland. This is what Mr Hyland had to say:

So, while [English Language Teaching is] often treated as historically evolving movements (e.g., Raimes 1991), it would be wrong to see each theory growing out of and replacing the last. They are more accurately seen as as complementary and overlapping perspectives, representing potentially compatible means of understanding the complex reality of writing.

The “next replacing the last” is a dead give away of Modernist ideology. And anytime one thinks and believes that everything is complementary one is leaning towards Postmodernist ideas. Here is another example from a textbook on the history of English Language Teaching:

If we examine each of the [three language teaching] principles in turn, we can see how they generated unexpected consequences, some of which turned out to be more controversial than they seemed at first sight.

Here we see how wrong someone can be eventhough he or she was sure of their methodology. Actually this is somewhat like the statement in the first example where they believe it replaces what has come previously. This kind of thinking was typical of the early twentieth century. It is a firm believe – wrongly – in the idea of progress.

But even life is not a continual march toward some pinnicle, a straight line to the top. If life was that simple then we would be there by now. Or as the author John Barth put it: like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back. Life is not a straight line. Even if it is windy it is not always mean we are getting closer. We must travel away from it sometimes to get close to it.

So Postmodernism may sound complicated in the end it really is not dissimiliar to “good ol’ fashion commonsense”. But don’t let a Postmodernist hear you say that. You would be accused of being Modernist.

Human/Nature

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I have just started a course on the understanding of the natural environment. In it we are to given firsthand experience in observing what nature not just in the photographs or in the classroom. The aim of the class is also to show how to make our own instruments for the observation of natural phenomenon.

After the class and during the long drive home I recalled a question that has been puzzling me for two years now – what is the natural environment? It seems to me that every time we talk about the natural environment we talk about it without us – human beings – being involved in it. But are we not a product of the environment? Are we not really just another animal within the animal kingdom?

Sure we separate ourselves from the rest of the animal world. The binary opposites we, humans, use is animal and human. And with these terms we pretend to be rulers of some sort. Our practices show that we feel we have the right to choose how animals live (or die). We simply rank ourselves higher than the animals over whom we believe we own. In short, the world is our slave and property.

This is not new of course. Animal rights as a movement has already pointed this out. Animal testing is a contradiction in itself – the use of animals is justified they are similar enough to us (humans) to make the results valid, yet they are different enough from us (humans) to consider it not cruel to do the types of experiments we wouldn’t do to other humans in the first place. So which is it?

Assuming we are just another animal within the web of life, not one that is at its pinnacle, but one that is only one part of it. So what are we doing to this web and what is our role within this system? If we are to take our present way of living as an indicator then we are like a cancer. Ecosystems generally try to reach a self-sustaining mode. But humans try to destroy as much as possible for the sake of things called economy and nation. Sustainability seems to be the last thing on the minds of economies and nationhood, seeing not the larger picture but choosing a narrow view of life.

One has to ask are we higher creatures or just shortsighted animals within a capacity to not only deceive others but ourselves also? Or perhaps this is nature’s way of culling planetary overpopulation, or if you are religiously inclined God’s sick sense of humour.

Postmodernism1

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The question of whether postmodernism is alive or dead is really not an issue. Because it is all about perspective. And it is about how postmodernism is used and who uses it. To put it in the negative it is about how it is dismissed it and who dismisses it.

Postmodernism isn’t dead. It is very much alive simply because we are talking about it. We debating whether it is alive is in itself to give it life. It is however different to, say, Nietzsche’s “God is dead” proclamation because Nietzsche was making a statement about the end of religion’s grip on power over us. And it is also different to saying that Elvis is dead since this is a fact (or as some may want you to believe that he is living as an old man somewhere in Florida).

But if we are to take it to mean something like Nietzsche’s declaration, that is God has no power over us anymore, then I will still have to contend the point. While it would be ridiculous to say it is trying to become the dominant discourse, it never was trying to do so in the first place. And if it did try it isn’t postmodernism. It is only a modernism in the guise of postmodern sheeps clothing. Postmodernism must therefore always be an anti-thesis to a thesis (which was an anti-thesis to something else) without ever coming to syn-thesis.

So now do you care to argue about whether Elvis is alive?

The problem with trying to reduce greenhouse gases

Warren Tang3 Comments

You know the problem with greenhouse gas emissions and laws like the one passed by Governor Schwarzenegger is not that there aren’t people like him willing to do it but rather the process to see it through is a difficult one if not down right impossible. The BBC article raised two really good points about why it may not work.

Firstly, the rest of the US states and the federal bureaucrats must follow suit in order to have any effect. This is a big “if” which seems unlikely. The self-interest of America will always come first. And when George W Bush says it will hurt the economy the American public will believe him.

The second problem is that – according to the BBC again – is that those businesses which will be hurt by the law will simply pack up and go somewhere friendlier to their philosophy. That is why I do not see it making a big difference to the cause.

I may sound pessimistic but that has happened all too often before. And there is nothing different to this law being passed and other attempts like it.

So what is the solution? I do not know. But I know this much – our political practices must change. I do not know exactly what kind of political system needs to replace it (if it exists at all) but I know only it isn’t the one we have now. In short I am saying we need a new political paradigm.

How to host a world religion congress and become known to the world

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I really love the BBC. They may have their scandals and problems but they are still world leaders in news reportage.

So Kazakhstan hosted a conference for world religions this week. Religious leaders from around the world gathered in this small former-Soviet country to talk about harmony and tolerance. Yet the BBC is nice enough to remind us that the host country has neither.

Undemocratic elections, strictly controlled state media and religious intolerance are some of the problems the host country is currently facing. Yet it chooses to host an event like this in the face of criticism. This is nothing new of course. Countries around the world play host these kinds of events all the time in the hope that their country will come out in the better light.

That is why we have postmodern theory – to expose these fraudsters. And I really do not know how these people face themselves in the mirror everyday. Just what do they see in themselves? Perhaps a nice clean “well-suited” image of themselves but not the ugly heart beneath the sleep’s clothes.

In the end it was nice to have the conferences of this type but sometimes I just wish we do them in places with more integrity. Or may be this was a message for revolution in a small country with its own problems? The door swings both ways I guess.