As a way of organizing our thoughts, we have been asked in this blog to... "Identify one concept per reading that you find especially useful for helping to understand trends you see at work around you or in a wider global context. Explain the idea in your own words and briefly reflect on the insights the concept provides or the dilemmas it helps to explain and/or resolve," and "list ideas you find personally useful here, whether as tools for understanding your own experiences or for analyzing contemporary issues that you find particularly interesting." Alright then.
Reading "Hearth Surgery" opened up my eyes to an aspect of climate change and global emissions that I had never even considered before. When the article began, it broke down the carbon emissions generated by Third World cooking fires as being commensurate in carbon dioxide emission to a car, as well as producing substantially more black carbon. When I read the sentence, "Given that cooking fires each release one or two thousand grams of soot in a year, and that three billion people rely on them, cleaning up those emissions may be the fastest, cheapest way to cool the planet”, I think my jaw dropped, both from the sheer lack of information available on this topic in the mainstream and the lack of funding this work seems to be getting. So often climate change is framed as a problem solely the product of industry in developed nations, a byproduct of economic privilege that the entire world must now sacrifice to correct even though most have not reaped the economic benefits it provides. While it is undeniably true that the onus of cleaning up our environmental irresponsibility should fall on wealthy nations, why aren't suburban Americans loathe to give up their SUVs being informed that there are research directions that we can take that don't (yet) involve them sacrificing any part of their lifestyles to do good things for their environment and their fellow man? A stove! It's a stove. It seems like it would be anathema to environmental workers to cater to the self-interest of the privileged to advance their goals, but perhaps if it was framed more like this, initially, they could get more funding for what they want to do. Reading that article first helped to frame the breadth of subjects we are going to be looking at as well as the unexpected directions we will be taking.
The central message I got from "The Bottom Billion" was "Narrow the target and broaden the instruments". So many of the problems we are facing in the world today seem insurmountable, in part because there are so many goals that seem to be in conflict with each other. However, if we begin to focus on specific issues and expand our arsenal of tools to address them, I think we will achieve successes beyond our wildest dreams.
"Fear of Small Numbers"... So much of my limited graduate work so far at TC has overlapped with work that my partner did in her undergraduate career. I studied film and literature and a bunch of dead European white guys who wore funny outfits... she studied queer theory, modern social movements, political organizing and mobilization. So starting reading like this means a lot of me raising my head from the screen and saying, "Hey, Amy, I have a question for you..." It's good to have someone like that next to you when you're trying to figure this out. That being said, I think that one of the more interesting ideas posited in the article is found on page 43-- "Given the systemic compromise of national economic sovereignty that is built into the logic of globalization, and given the increasing strain this puts on states to behave as trustees of the interests of a territorially defined and confined ‘people’, minorities are major sites for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few megastates, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties. Minorities, in a word, are metaphors and reminders of the betrayal of the classical national project. And it is this betrayal- actually rooted in the failure of the nation-state to preserve its promise to be the guarantor of national sovereignty- that underwrites the worldwide impulse to extrude or eliminate minorities. And this also explains why state military forces are often involved in intrastate ethnocide.”
Here's where my clearly defined separate paragraphs on each reading/piece we studied will blur, because this feeds directly into things said by both Sachs and Pachauri about the perpetual political destabilization and violence of impoverished regions.
It is very difficult to step out of my own frame as a liberal New Yorker to understand this at a visceral level. Each instance of minority violence, particularly intrastate, that immediately comes to mind, whether in Serbia, Rwanda or of course Nazi Germany, has its own rationalization, but when framed like this, particularly with the overshadowing issues of resource scarcity, anxiety and need for an 'other' to blame your lot on, the similarities all become chillingly clear. It seems that the more that wealthy nations and liberal idealists project a notion of global citizenship and our responsibility as citizens of the planet, the more violent and visceral the need is to cling to smaller, more easily locatable labels-- labels of nation, religion, ethnicity, tribe. So what happens to the state when they can no longer adequately define their 'people' is that they define their minorities and persecute them, thereby defining themselves as separate in the process. With so much of human history being defined as a struggle between 'us' and 'them', I think it is fallacious to pin so much of this hostility on the failures of the national project. It's just easier to organize persecutions of the 'other' when you have a military, a state authority and a sense of legitimacy on your side.
I highly doubt that we will see the collapse of the nation as an organizational identity in our lifetime. Identifying one's self as a global citizen is too big and as a religion, ethnicity or tribal affiliation too small for economic function and viability in a global marketplace. So will we see things moving more towards the mega-state (European Union, etc.), with several smaller countries with less in common in terms of smaller identity groups, banding together for economic competitiveness against countries that have a more... "coherent" sense of self (America, China, India, for the most part)?
Cellular organizations as exemplified both in the direction of terrorist organizations and internet sensibilities do represent a very potent new evolution in structuring conflicts (and other interactions) with the nation-state, but do they have the economic viability to compete in a global market in any way that isn't solely destructive or based on individual transactions? Will Al-Qaeda ever behave as a nation? Can it engage in treaties with countries? Can it trade in scale with nations? Will it ever want to? How will the definitions of legitimate global players change based on these evolutions?
On page 28, Appadurai says, "This double character of global capitalism in the era of the Internet is what allows us to understand better the cellular nature of the new terrorist networks. Connected yet not vertically managed, coordinated yet remarkably independent, capable of replication without central messaging structures, hazy in their central organizational features yet crystal clear in their cellular strategies and effects, these organizations clearly rely on the crucial tools of money transfer, hidden organization, offshore havens, and nonofficial means of training and mobilization, which also characterize the workings of many levels of the capitalist world. Indeed the grayer areas of the world of banking and finance are clearly complicit with the workings of the networks of international terror.” Is this to say that Al-Qaeda should be more properly thought of as a mega-corporation? And if so, has global capitalism (see recent Supreme Court decision re: campaign financing and the legal status of the corporation) reached a point where we are moving more towards corporations over countries? If so, we reach additional troubling considerations with the ideas of minority and majority, as well as self-definitions of identity. Also, we begin to wonder who exactly we should be negotiating with when needing to develop global consensus on global issues.
That was a lot for a first reading. I look forward to the class discussion tomorrow to address some of these ideas and concerns.
Also, probably next week, depending on the size of the reading, I will return to limerick prefaces.
