$70 Worth of Five Dollar Words

I ran across this charming passage on a section of the ACLA website titled Diasporan Ecofeminisms: Towards a Nomadology of Eco-Ethical Resistance:

As contemporary ecofeminist scholarship asserts, the trajectory of globalization is predicated on an inherently patriarchal ethos that creates environmentally racist and misogynistic geopolitical spaces, spaces that systematically divide the population according to racial and gendered hierarchies. Consequently, it is essential we expose the corporate geopolitical hegemonies that are causal to the worldwide spread of human suffering and environmental destruction.

This isn't just bad writing, it's also untrue. The global emergence of free markets is probably the most efficacious antiracist, antimisogynist phenomenon on the planet right now. If "contemporary ecofeminists" did any serious, competent field work, they would find that the vast majority of indigenous populations have the same kinds of racial and gendered hierarchies as the rest of us. Environmental pollution and destruction of biodiversity are indeed worrisome, but history has shown that non-market systems (e.g. Chinese and European socialism) tend to be even worse for the environment--at least in market economies efficiency is profitable. Regardless, such a opaque, jargon-heavy style virtually guarantees that no one but "contemporary ecofeminist scholar[s]" will take this gobbledygook seriously.

John Brockman, in short piece titled Edge: The Third Culture, predicts that the traditional literary intellectual will soon become marginalized to the point of irrelevancy. Given the current state of affairs in literary theory and criticism, it's not hard to see why.

(Image from farm2.static.flickr.com.)

Black Box Pluralism

"Despite its claims, 'pluralism' is in itself, paradoxically, a unifying perspective, but a rather procrustean one. What it does is reduce all cultural differences to a sort of grid of cultural black boxes laid out over an infinite plane, boxes whose external form is safely measurable but whose contents are incommensurable and thus unknowable, and which are, as it were, the fundamental monads or quanta of reality. Geometrically it resembles the characteristic grid-design of the American city, or the relationship between departments in the American multiversity. Though pluralism forbids any attempt to perceive one cultural box as containing another, and thus revealing a comparable and measurable internal structure, it is itself a kind of gigantic box containing all other boxes as its subordinate material. Thus, like relativism, it contains a subtle hegemonic ambition of its own.

"One way of describing what is the problem with pluralism is to say that if the universe is curved, even a simple sphere, no grid of equal rectilinear blocks can cover (or 'tile') it without overlap. Specialization, and the definition of smaller and smaller cultural units, might be seen as the desperate resource of an intellectual culture trying to solve exactly this problem. If the world's squares are small enough, perhaps the distortions of the world's curvature will somehow go away" (Frederick Turner 1991, Tempest, Flute and Oz: Essays on the Future pp. 30-1).

(Image from blog.jovoto.com)

H.P. Lovecraft on Church

This passage is taken from H.P. Lovecraft's short story, "The Silver Key":

In the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly faith endeared to him by the naive trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic avenues which seemed to promise escape from life. Only on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal race confronting the unknown (Lovecraft 54).

I don't go to church. I find Christianity philosophically and aesthetically interesting, but in my experience its public practice, at least in this part of the world, is rather uninspiring.

Shakespeare's 7 Ages of Man

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
(As You Like It 4.7.143-70)

(Image is of Da Vinci's famous "Virtuvian Man").

E.O. Wilson on Civilized Termites

Our cultures and values seem highly variable to us but in fact are very specialized and very epigaic [living and foraging above ground] and diurnal [active during daylight hours] mammalian. Here, for example, are several of the values that we could expect to characterize termite cultures if they had attained the intelligence threshold of civilization: loving dank darkness, photophobic, with a refined taste for lignin and cellulose and for music consisting of sophisticated phermonal song, faithful to the taboo against reproduction by any caste but royalty, and devoted to the duty of consuming injured and dead nest mates. Civilized termites...would consider the very conception of human existence a nightmare.

From E.O. Wilson's foreward to The Literary Animal (p. ix).

Saruman Does Not Approve

"Your love of the halflings' leaf has clearly slowed your mind."