dougald on a way out
dougald hine on a review his book – at work in the ruins – by john foster – beyond the fish tank – via dougald fb share [https://greenhousethinktank.org/beyond-the-fish-tank/]:
As a writer, you count yourself lucky when you have made a reviewer think and they make you think in turn. This essay from John Foster has given me a great deal to think about and connects with various conversations I’ve been led into since writing At Work in the Ruins:
“Hine’s instinct for where renewed creative life-energy to dislodge scientism must come from feels broadly right … but he has left out what has been since before Aristotle the only reliable means of getting conceptually upstream of science’s assumptions about reality: he has left out the metaphysics.”
also .. via comments on that post:
Elizabeth Slade: Reading that review, I’m left with the feeling that what he points to you having left out, is not left out of your work at all, but what you’re pointing to all along. So it’s interesting to notice that he didn’t find it in the book – I guess I read it there between the lines
Dougald Hine: Thanks, Liz – your “pointing to” feels like significant wording, along the same lines as “gesturing towards (decolonial futures)”. As you say, it’s not left out of my work as a whole, but there’s a sense in which this book leaves off at the place where a plunge into the metaphysical is called for. Alastair said something along these lines when he read the first draft, encouraging me to pick up on the “surrender to the mystery” passage near the end and take this further. (Funnily enough, another of the book’s most generous reviewers was a specialist in Kierkegaard, from whom we get the idea of the “leap of faith”.) So yeah, reading Foster’s review, I don’t feel like, “Oh dear, I’ve not thought about metaphysics at all!”, so much as, “Ah yes, you noticed”, and I’ll take that as further affirmation that this is the direction to head out into, while retaining a sense that “pointing to” may be the limit of what we can achieve in such deep waters.
if only we let go enough.. ie: has to be sans any form of m\a\p.. and to me.. via ai as nonjudgmental expo labeling
Elizabeth Slade: there’s probably something along the lines of writing books about metaphysics being like dancing about architecture, too
notes/quotes from article:
John Foster considers the illuminating thought-experiment and homely but compelling analogy in Dougald Hine’s book ‘At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics, and All the Other Emergencies’.
It (dougald’s book) poses a question which the climate and environmental movement, as leading edge of humanity’s deep instinct for self-preservation, ignores at its peril: what do we do when the recognised ways of addressing our predicament in fact serve to reinforce it – or, more bluntly, when the offered routes out of insanity are themselves insane?..t
As he presents the issue, his thought-experiment reveals that we have landed in our present plight ‘because of an approach to the world, a way of seeing and treating everything, that would always have brought us to such a pass, even if the climate system had been less sensitive to our industrial emissions’ (p.42).. t
nothing changes till we find a way out of sea world
In characterising this dislocated and dislocating approach, Hine does not *explicitly diagnose insanity. He has, however, a striking image for modernity’s loss of touch with the reality of its human-natural situation, a condition in which (just insofar as it is a loss of touch with reality) insanity is plainly incipient. This is the homely analogy which I mentioned at the outset. It is what, prompted by a friend’s thoughts on the experience of keeping cold water fish, he dubs the ‘fish tank world’. **A surprising amount of work, his friend observes, is involved in keeping a handful of such fish alive in their tank: ‘“the rituals of cleaning and water change, the electric filter with its own maintenance cycle, the whole chemistry kit that goes into testing and adjusting half a dozen key indicators of the condition of the water. All this to do a small part of ‘what a river or a lake does for free and with ease’ .. t(p.147)
*this is sea world ness
**this is where takes a lot of work ness comes from – cancerous distraction
Now of course, as the analogy is also meant to bring out strongly by contrast, the Earth is not a fish tank, and being unable reliably to see this is a dangerous form of derangement – precisely, an incipient insanity. It is especially dangerous because, while the project of making the Earth into such a controlled arena, deploying along the way systems thinking often presented as a source of hope, is really “a road to hell”, he takes that project to be “the default future, seen as both necessary and desirable by those we have been calling ‘the adults in the room’” (p.152). But by the same token, and here making plain its essential congruence with the ‘resources’ model,: ‘“the fish-tank mindset is only an extension of a logic that goes deep into the history of modernity, an approach to the world as a mechanism to be optimised for particular human ends”‘ (ibid)
to date.. all of us.. always been in sea world
His motivation for writing the book at all, so he tells us at the beginning, was recognising that after fifteen years of talking to a wide range of audiences in order to raise awareness about climate change, he suddenly realised that the words which he had been using were failing him. This, he now sees, was because *to talk about climate change – and indeed, to take climate change as the principal ‘environmental’ issue needing to be talked about – is to enter into a conversation framed by science:.. t the concept itself is of a set of processes which can be neither objectively identified nor described in detail except by the natural sciences. Many issues then arise as it were downstream of the science: those about what to dowith the information which it provides must call in engineers, economists, psychologists and a raft of others, not least the politicians who are now being so relentlessly urged by activists’ placards and Ms Thunberg’s speeches to ‘Unite Behind the Science’. As that slogan makes plain, however, the scientific framing of all this is just being taken for granted. But: “there are also questions that lie upstream of the work of science and take us beyond the frame it draws. These are not about what needs doing and how, but about how we got here in the first place, the nature and implications of the trouble we are in” (p.16).
*whalespeak ness.. no idea what legit free people are like
These will be, in his terms, attempts to step back critically from the prevailing fish-tank world-model and challenge both its necessity and its desirability. But science cannot deal with such doubts, indeed it cannot even raise them, because they put in question the grounding assumptions on which science itself operates, and those assumptions – this was the insight which came to silence him – already firmly commit us to the fish tank model, so that “any conversation about climate change that stays within the frame of science will lead towards this future” (p.152). And what all this means is that, insofar as any such dialogue purports to offer escape routes from insanity, they will have an essentially insane world-model coded into them...t
so ie: this is ridiculous as cancerous distraction
An account of why a scientific framing of our plight commits us to the fish-tank model would be a cameo history of modernity. While again Hine doesn’t offer this explicitly, it is strongly implicit in much of what he does say about the relations between human judgement and what he calls ‘calculative reason’, and about the lapsing of alternative narratives and visions of nature. *Science, as understood since the Scientific Revolution, deals only in the measurable, ..t Hence the scientism of taking the real to consist only in what science can talk about secures itself against ‘realistic’ challenge, and the fish-tank Earth-model closes round us..t
*literacy and numeracy both elements of colonialism/control/enclosure.. we need to calculate differently and stop measuring things.. any form of m\a\p
.. when the urgency of Extinction Rebellion and the school strikers at last revolted against this complacency, their core demand to ‘tell the truth’ was still a call to acknowledge the real state of those indicators: not, that is, a breakout from the scientific framing leading us into world-fish-tank management, but a cry of rage at the framing’s not having been taken more seriously.
then covid (et al) .. whatever efforts get made will be all about maintaining in operation as much as we can of a world which we are losing the language for asking whether we actually want..t
unjustifiable strategy ness et al
*So how do we break away from the fish-tank model as world-paradigm? An important resource would seem to be re-acquiring the skills in key areas of life – **education, food production, health care, dying…– which have been lost, both collectively and individually, through that learned general helplessness and subjection to experts which the counter-cultural guru Ivan Illich was calling out fifty years ago. Hine notes this possibility approvingly, but he is also keenly aware that before such pragmatic options can take significant hold, ***we need to get away from the fish tank conceptually – to free ourselves from the embedded scientism which keeps it dominant in our minds and imaginations..t The trouble is that he wants to undermine a culture of scientism by appealing to alleged insights from older and alternative cultures, and this is where the book is at its least satisfactory. But it is still very interestingly unsatisfactory, and given the vital importance of the issues it is worth, even in a review, stepping some way back from the book itself to consider how and why.
*need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature so we can org around legit needs
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
**cancerous distractions.. need to go deeper..
ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8bn today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8bn today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8bn legit free
***need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set so we can org around legit needs
what if we quit pretending
myth of normal ness et al
There is no escape from scientism in ditching science, any more than one could escape from one’s sexist outlook by forswearing sex.
yeah.. need a legit alt.. that 8b people can leap to.. for (blank)’s sake
Hine’s instinct for where renewed creative life-energy to dislodge scientism must come from feels broadly right, that is, but he has left out what has been since before Aristotle the only reliable means of getting conceptually upstream of science’s assumptions about reality: he has left out the metaphysics.
Metaphysics means fundamental thinking about the nature of the ultimately real, including critique of the assumptions which science has to make about that reality in order to be able to function. While a necessary intellectual condition of re-awakening human life-responsibility from its scientistic paralysis, however, it is very far indeed from being a sufficient one. For one thing, metaphysics as such can hardly hope for widespread attention, even in the revived ad hoccommunities of the imagination which Hine projects as his sites for ongoing retrieval. ..We desperately need to recover the idea of the world we inhabit as a human world, a world of real values and significances of which science is one expression; and we need to recover it in such a way as to put at the centre, not humanity but the deeper, species-transcendent, biosphere-pervading life..t which humanity expresses in its unique, species-specific life-form, and only lives meaningfully by serving.
in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows
And then, as I have argued elsewhere, we are going to need a robustly therapeutic politics – a politics for assisted emergence from insanity – to answer to that recognition. It would have to envisage the inevitable and by no means wholly unwelcome cumulative breakdown of the civilisation which has been built on denying our creative relation to the world. It would also have to commit itself to the unflinching demonstration of life-responsibility in the practical commandeering of power, by a revolutionary vanguard taking its acting from human wholeness and creativity as its full legitimation..t
Because Hine’s thinking goes only as far as it does, stopping short with essentially socio-cultural reconstruction work among the ruins, his book does not itself get near to broaching the idea of such a politics, and so does not succeed in charting a credible route out of the fish tank world..t But it has the very great merit of making these difficult issues much harder to ignore.
humanity needs a leap.. to get back/to simultaneous spontaneity .. simultaneous fittingness.. everyone in sync.. possible today via ai as nonjudgmental expo labeling
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be you. 