Economic 'growth' and true freedom: A few quotes

The logic of exploitation can creep into "environmentalism":

Curtis White:

Environmentalism consorts with the enemy when it makes science and quantitative reasoning its primary voice, and when it agrees – as it does in the utterly failed Kyoto protocols – that economic growth is a desideratum of the future and that any negative environmental consequences will be handled by wiser bureaucracies, laws, and technological fixes.

We need, first of all, clean air and water. Next, healthy food, which must be grown or gathered.

Clara Price:

When it comes down to it, would you really choose economics over environment? Where will you be when there is no clean air or water? Screw economics. I want to live.

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You may be interested in my essay:
Earthpocalypse Isn't a 'Marginal' Cost (Despite What Economists Say) (Oct 15, 2022)

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Some environmental conservationists were racist.

Leah Penniman:

White supremacy was built into the parks system from the outset. The US national parks comprise eighty-four million acres of land that were stolen from Native communities through forced treaty agreements under the genocidal project of Manifest Destiny. Among these displaced Native people were twenty-six Indigenous groups living in Yellowstone. They were fired out in the 1870s in a settler effort to create, then protect, ‘uninhabited wilderness.’ This became the blueprint for the ‘fortress conservation’ strategy that has displaced Indigenous people across the globe, ignoring the fact that Indigenous communities currently protect around 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity.

Some of the founders of the Western environmental movement espoused eugenics and white supremacy. Madison Grant was instrumental in creating the Everglades, Olympic, Glacier, and Denali National Parks as a strategy to strengthen the ‘Nordic race.’ Adolf Hitler referred to Grant’s 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, as his ‘Bible.’ The first head of the US Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, was on the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society and a delegate to the International Eugenics Congress. John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, referred to Black and Indigenous people as ‘dirty, lazy, and uncivilized.’ John James Audubon, famed ornithologist and scientific illustrator and namesake of the Audubon Society, owned slaves and stole human remains for a pseudo-scientific study claiming white superiority.

We are part of nature, and both humans and nature must be free.

Leah Penniman:

Among the Free Soilers, whose framework included opposition to the westward expansion of slavery, was Frederick Douglass (b. 1817/18). Douglass critiqued capitalism’s alienation of workers from the land and expropriation of the commons, arguing that ‘liberty achieved its truest expression when free people mixed their labor with nature in the pursuit of self-reliance.’ Paying tribute to the agrarian ideal, Douglass advised Black people to own land, forgo urban wage employment, and turn toward agriculture as a means of true independence. * * * Consistent with the African conception of humans as part of nature, Free Soilers believed that the oppression of people on the land had cursed the American soils themselves. Redemption of the land could be achieved through emancipation, and absent that, free soil would be sought across the ocean.

Sources

"Pants on Fire." Curtis White, interviewed by Cheston Knapp. UTNE. March-April 2010. p. 77.

Clara Price. Quoted in "Sunbeams," The Sun. January 2010. p. 48.

Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023. Chapter: “Reading the Sky.” [on the parks system]

Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023. Chapter: "These Roots Run Deep." [on Free Soilers]

Please also see

Texas Agriculture Commissioner sounds the alarm, says Texas is running out of water: In a recent op-ed, Sid Miller outlined the problem and offered possible solutions. Michael McCardel, WFAA, September 8, 2024.

And this:

U.S. humanists & atheists: Urge Congress to reauthorize USCIRF

From the Center for Freethought Equality, the advocacy and political arm of the American Humanist Association, in an email today:

"The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), statutorily-established by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, is charged with examining religious freedom violations and making recommendations to the President, Secretary of State, and Congress. ... Each year, USCIRF publishes an annual report that provides designation recommendations to the State Department on how to best assess the state of religious freedom in every country. ... Congress will soon be considering whether to approve the continuation of this very important Commission. The bills (respectively H.R. 7025 / S.3764) simply reauthorize USCIRF through Fiscal Year 2026. You may read the House bill here, and the Senate bill here."

Tell your representative and your senators to reauthorize USCIRF.

Quotes: Choosing - and being allowed to choose - your own direction

Men on individuality

When I was in high school and college in the late '90s and early '00s, I wrote down these passages to ponder.

"He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. ... Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing."
John Stuart Mill, "Liberty and Individuality," from On Liberty (1859)

"[Living in the eternal moment] means, rather, making one's decisions in freedom and responsibility, in self-awareness and in accord with one's own unique character as a person."
Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself (1953), p 272

"The degree of our freedom and self-determination varies with the level which we realize to be our self — the source from which we act."
Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman (1958), p 135

Women say

Later, I noticed these:

"Leading transies is like trying to herd cats."
Cathy Platine www.gallae.com
Note: I found this c. 1998. As seen in 2023, the website says: "Established in 1998 with public rituals held at the Serpent Mound in south central Ohio we moved to New York in 2002 with the purchase of an ageing Silver age Catskill resort inn. We incorporated in 2005 with the formal dedication of the Phrygianum property and transfer of the deed to the corporation."

"Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you're wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn't love you anymore."
Lady Gaga, quoted in the Gulfport, Miss., Sun Herald, quoted in The Week, Dec. 21, 2012, p. 15.

It's not only about what you choose to do, but what you're allowed to do

Thing is, you can choose your own direction, but there are also social consequences to doing so. These consequences fall unequally on different sorts of people. And some people are punished no matter what they choose. In 2023, I think about things like this (April 23, 2023 tweet):

On sexual freedom

Beverly Harrison said, "If greater genital expression were really the solution to our social miseries, we would expect ours to be the happiest society around."

What would make us a happier society? Rod Dreher said that sexual liberation can go too far: "Liberals believe that what consenting adults do in bed with their bodies is immune from moral judgment. Social conservatives recognize the falsity of this view, understanding that immoderation in sexual matters corrupts individual character and can have deleterious social consequences." Mary Daly, on the other side, suggested that sexual liberation in itself does not go far enough: "The lifting of taboos on genital sexuality does nothing to liberate from sex roles."

Pssst: Rod Dreher is homophobic and transphobic. Mary Daly was transphobic.

"More recently, Rod Dreher fled the “collapsing imperium,” as he once put it, to seek refuge in Victor Orbán’s Hungary. Dreher was a long-time columnist and still is editor at The American Conservative. He is a prominent figure on the reactionary religious Right. Dreher has always been staunchly anti-liberal; since 2020, he has radicalized to a new level – and is now constantly raging against the 'moral horror' of 'trans totalitarianism,' in particular. He is the biggest fan aspiring European autocrats have among American reactionaries. Find someone in your life who admires you half as much as Rod Dreher admires Viktor Orbán. In 2022, Dreher moved to Budapest and keeps sending his dispatches from a place called “Hungary” that exists solely in the reactionary imagination, a kind of white Christian patriarchal wonderland, where men still get to be real men, where the 'woke' hordes and 'globalist' enemies are still being kept in check by 'the people.'"

— Domination or Dissolution, Rule or Ruin: The Right is fantasizing about secession, “national divorce,” and civil war – because they will not, under any circumstance, accept pluralism. Thomas Zimmer, Democracy Americana (Substack), Feb 7, 2024

I wrote about his "trans totalitarianism" essay here.

Conversion therapy:

Alan Watts, in his day, reflected that these sorts of answers are opposite poles of the same question, and the question may not always be the right one to ask. That is: Since sex is not entirely good nor entirely evil in itself, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to whether and how it should be permitted.

"But if puritanism and cultivated licentiousness are not fundamental deviations from nature, they are simply the opposite poles of one and the same attitude — that, right or wrong, sexual pleasure is the great delight....When sexuality is set apart as a specially good or specially evil compartment of life, it no longer works in full relation to everything else. In other words, it loses universality. It becomes a part doing duty for the whole — the idolatry of a creature worshipped in place of God, and an idolatry committed as much by the ascetic as the libertine."

People take sex differentiation most seriously when they have sex, wrote John Stoltenberg, "as if their identities or lives depended on it. For males, generally, it tends to be their identities; for females, often, it is more a matter of their lives." Elizabeth Abbot wrote that many sex therapists "say (or they mean), in Carolyn Gage's bitter words, 'We just want to help you get to the place where you will want to fuck,' instead of the words that would begin to heal a woman's chronic pain: 'You don't have to fuck. You never have to fuck.'"

Sources

Beverly Harrison, quoted by Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990. p 206.

Rod Dreher, "Porky Populism," The American Conservative, Aug 6, 2012 (archive 2022)

Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, p 156-7

Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973. p 176.

John Stoltenberg. Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. New York: Meridian, 1989. p 28.

Elizabeth Abbot. A History of Celibacy. Da Capo Press, 2001 (originally 1999). p 414.

Quotes on love and freedom

Barbara Chase-Riboud:

"Love demands freedom. Love exists only in freedom – not only of choice, but place, gender, race."

Rollo May:

"Hatred and resentment are destructive emotions, and the mark of maturity is to transform them into constructive emotions. * * * Furthermore, if we do not confront our hatred and resentment openly, they will tend sooner or later to turn into the one affect which never does anyone any good, namely, self-pity. Self-pity is the "preserved" form of hatred and resentment. One can then...refrain from doing anything about [the problem]. * * * No one can arrive at real love or morality or freedom until he has frankly confronted and worked through his resentment. Hatred and resentment should be used as motivations to re-establish one's genuine freedom: one will not transform those destructive emotions into constructive ones until he does this."

Starhawk: "The self-hater is the literal embodiment of structures of domination.
"

Michael Keeling:

"As one of the participants in the SCM conference put it: 'Love is the right to protect the freedom of the other'."

Fernando Pessoa:

"How wearisome it is to be loved, to be truly loved! How wearisome to be the object of someone else's bundle of emotions! To be changed from someone who wanted to be free, always free, into an errand boy with a responsibility to reciprocate these emotions, to have the decency not to run away, so that the other person will not think one is acting with princely disdain and rejecting the greatest gift the human soul can offer. How wearisome to let one's existence become something absolutely dependent on someone else's feelings; to have no option but to feel, to love a little too, whether or not it is reciprocated."

Clive James:

"Was he [Arthur Schnitzler] right about the impenetrable mask? Wrong at the start, and right in the end: because love, unlike loneliness, is more of a process than a permanent condition. In the German, the "most impenetrable masks" are undurchschaubarsten Masken – the masks you can't see through. (We might note at this point that "loneliness" is feminine: arbitrary genders really are arbitrary, but in this case it's a nice coincidence.) When love comes, there is no mask: or shouldn't be. There is nothing to see through, because you are not lonely. There really is another person sharing your life. But later on a different truth – one you are familiar with, but hoped to have seen the last of – comes shining through. Unlike light in space, it needs a medium to do so, and the medium is the mask itself, seen in retrospect. You are lonely again. You were really lonely all along. You have deceived yourself.

It would have been a desolating view if Schnitzler had been quite sure of it. But if he had been quite sure of it he would not have gone on worrying at it. On the same great page – great books have great pages, and in this book page 117 is one of the greatest – he tries again. "That we feel bound by a steady longing for freedom, and that we also seek to bind someone else, without being convinced that such a thing is within our rights – that is what makes any loving relationship so problematic." The question here is about possessiveness, and the first thing to see is that there would be no possessiveness if there were nothing real to possess. So this is not loneliness concealed by an impenetrable mask. This is the other person, whom you love enough to be worried about her rights. You are worried, that is, about someone who is not yourself. You want to be free, and assume that she does too: but you want her to be yours. You could want that with a whole heart if your heart were less sympathetic. There have been men in all times, and there are still men all over the world, who have no trouble in believing that their women belong to them. But those men are not educated. If Schnitzler's writings on the subject can be said to have a tendency, it is to say that love provides an education. What is problematic about the relationship is essentially what tells you it is one. It might not be an indissoluble bond, but as an insoluble problem it gives you the privilege of learning that freedom for yourself means nothing without freedom for others. When you love, the problem begins, and so does your real life."

Sources

Character of Naksh-i-dil. Barbara Chase-Riboud. Valide: A Novel of the Harem. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986. p 316.

Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself. New York: W.W.Norton & Co., Inc., 1953. pp. 151, 153, 154.

Starhawk. Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery. New York: Harper Collins, 1987. p 96.

"A Christian Basis for Gay Relationships," by Michael Keeling, in Towards a Theology of Gay Liberation, p. 106

Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet. Edited by Maria Jose de Lancastre. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent's Tail, 1991. p. 161. (It is a collection of writings that were unorganized upon Pessoa's death in 1935).

Clive James. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. (2007) New York: Norton, 2008. p. 702.