4.9.04

Blood Of The Pyramids

French Egyptologists Defend Pyramid Theory A pair of French Egyptologists who suspect they have found a previously unknown chamber in the Great Pyramid urged Egypt's antiquities chief to reconsider letting them test their theory by drilling new holes in the 4,600-year-old structure. ... "There are 300 theories concerning hidden rooms and other things inside the pyramid, but if I let them all test their theories they will do untold damage to the pyramid, which was built with the blood of Egyptians," said [director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi] Hawass. "I will not let Egyptian blood be damaged by amateurs."

I don't know the first thing about Egyptology, so I have no idea who's right in this. But I found it interesting how Hawass framed his objection. To me, the idea of drilling 300 holes in the pyramid would seem problematic because it would damage an important relic, which has value as a source of data and tourist revenue. But Hawass is concerned that it would disrespect the sacrifices of the people who built the pyramids. We tend to think of the ancient Egyptians as a distinct people from modern Egyptians, since the culture of the region has changed so dramatically since the pyramids were built -- much as I wouldn't feel much of a personal connection to the Vikings, since they lived so long ago and so differently than me. But Hawass's invocation of "Egyptian blood" seems like a claim to continuity with the pyramid builders, similar to Native Americans charging that archaeologists here disrespect their ancestors, and by extension them.
Stentor Danielson, 13:08, ,

Give Biomass Burning A Break

Forest Burning Is A Net Contributor To Global Warming, Scientist Says Of forest burning, about 80 percent results in permanent deforestation - meaning the land is now used for some other use, such as grazing, agriculture or buildings. The remaining 20 percent of trees are regrown. When forests are permanently replaced by other plant types - shrubs, grasses, crops, all of which contain less carbon than do trees - the carbon difference accumulates in the atmosphere. "The total carbon dioxide emission from permanent deforestation is on the order of 7 to 10 percent of global fossil-fuel-carbon-dioxide emission," Jacobson says. ... Eliminating all biomass burning would reduce the global average temperature by 0 to 0.2 degrees F over 100 years, which is comparable to the increase in global temperature of 0.6 to 0.7 degrees F since pre-industrial times, Jacobson says. Reducing permanent deforestation, especially in tropical regions of Africa and South America, would be the most effective means of reducing the effects of biomass burning. ... "With this information, policymakers are on firmer ground when they consider control of biomass burning," he says. "Such control is also beneficial from a public health point of view, since the particles from biomass burning are health hazards."

I think this article draws the wrong conclusion from the finding about the impact of biomass burning, lending support to the longstanding demonization of all fire. Widespread permanent deforestation is problematic (for climatic and other reasons), but ceasing to burn is not the only solution -- in many cases, enabling regrowth is a better policy (a la a swidden system). Certain forms of burning are extremely beneficial to most ecological and agricultural systems, and so restricting them in order to shave .2 degrees off the climate is likely to be a net loss from both environmental and human wellbeing standpoints.

What we need is better discrimination between good and bad fires. Wildfires in tropical rainforests provoked by irresponsible logging practices are bad, contributing to global warming without any offsetting benefits (except perhaps to the logging companies' bottom lines). Pasture-improvement fires in the Sahel -- such as those highlighted in the illustration accompanying the above article -- are sustainable and useful.

Even the article recognizes that biomass burning contributes only 7-10 percent as much greenhouse gas as fossil fuel burning. It's fossil fuels -- which introduce huge formerly-sequestered masses of carbon into the atmosphere -- that we really need to focus our attention on.
Stentor Danielson, 10:34, ,

2.9.04

Top-Down Organizations And Their Blogs

In addition to "can men be feminists," there's been a second big conversation going around the feminist blogosphere. This one is about reactions to a post by Matt Stoller revisiting the question of "where are all the women bloggers?"* After observing the last few go-arounds on this question, I know better than to get involved. But my interest was piqued by the fact that he drew a parallel to environmentalist blogs:

That said, there's a top-down style to the feminist movement that leaves little room for flat hierarchies that blogging needs to flourish. This is a cultural issue, and can be reflected in a lot of the strategic missteps of these groups. It's very similar to the lack of blogs in the environmental movement, which is also somewhat identity-oriented, top-down, and reactionary. This is not a slight to these organizations - there are very good reasons why message control was critical and direct mail was a lifeblood, but the era of the atomized organization is coming to and end. And these groups know it, and are changing already. Still, the residual culture is still antithetical to blogging.

Based on my admittedly unsystematic knowledge of the blogosphere, Stoller is simply wrong about the health of the feminist blogosphere. Yet he's right to point out that the environmentalist blogosphere is relatively anemic. There are environmentalist blogs out there, but they don't form the same kind of community with the same kind of cross-blog discussion that you see in the feminist blogosphere or the "partisan talking points about the latest CNN headlines" blogosphere**,***. Stoller is also right that the major environmental organizations are hierarchical and top-down.

But I don't think the latter explains the former. Consider the case of the CNN-headlines blogosphere, which is the standard for comparison in Stoller's post. Where the feminist blogosphere has NOW and Planned Parenthood and the environmentalist blogosphere has the NRDC and the Sierra Club, the CNN-headlines blogosphere has the Republican and Democratic Parties. Now, short of the Roman Catholic Church, I have trouble thinking of an organization more top-down than the major parties. If having top-down offline organizations is a barrier to a vibrant blogosphere, Kos would have been DOA.

But in the case of the major parties and their supporters in the CNN-headlines blogs, having top-down offline organizations was a factor encouraging the growth of the blogosphere. Top-down organizations tend to stifle the formation of social capital -- the social networks of trust that help society function. It doesn't really connect me to anyone else to write a check to the Kerry of Hoeffel campaign. I don't have the feeling that anyone that matters really hears what I think, or even knows who I am. That deficit of social capital has become a festering sore in American democracy. What we saw very acutely with the Dean campaign was the way that blogging can help to fill that gap. A bottom-up network of people built itself, energized by the idea of having an alternative forum to the old party hierarchy. I have no idea whether the feeling of being just a number on NOW's mailing list has done anything to inspire the feminist blogosphere -- indeed, I know next to nothing about the institutional affiliations of the feminist blogs I read -- but the example of the CNN-headlines blogosphere should be enough to falsify Stoller's contention.

So the management style of the Sierra Club is not the problem. Unfortunately, I don't know what is -- I'm hoping for "you just weren't looking hard enough."

*Answer: Not in the "Advisory Committee" section of my blogroll -- I was actually a bit surprised when I counted it up, since for whatever reason my much-larger "Favorites" list on my computer is much better gender-balanced.

**I'd be thrilled if someone can prove me wrong on this.

***I forget where I heard the "CNN headlines" characterization -- I think one of the feminsts discussing Stoller's post -- but it's an apt one, and helps get away from treating people like Kevin Drum and Glenn Reynolds as if they're the archetype of "political" blogging.
Stentor Danielson, 10:44, ,

Male Feminists And Straight LGBTrightsists

There's been a bunch of talk recently about the longstanding question of whether men can be feminists. The consensus, among both female and male bloggers, seems to be "no." They have some weighty arguments behind them. A couple years ago, when I first really engaged with feminism as such, I came across such arguments early enough that I never made the mistake of trying to label myself a feminist -- or of labeling myself "not a feminist," since the latter would require the same problematic declaration by a man of what feminism is or should be. Given the dispute among feminists about the nature of their own movement, agnosticism seems to be the only consistent choice for a man.

But it has occurred to me recently that I never extended that careful agnosticism to other issues of identity politics. Most notably, I never really questioned the legitimacy of being so outspoken (in print, at least) about gay rights despite being as heterosexual as they come. If I knew of a word parallel to "feminist" for this issue, I would have gladly applied it to myself. But really, who am I to make declarations about the struggles of a group I'm not part of? If anything, we in the dominant group need to be even more careful about appropriating voice and power with respect to LGBT people than women, since LGBTs suffer from a numerical disadvantage (they're less than 10% of the population, while women are half).

There's always what we might call the ampersand clause -- it's quite possible that, if I didn't say certain things about LGBT rights, my readers would never hear them. But even if everything I said was exactly what a gay version of me would say, there's more to it than simply getting the ideas out there to be considered on their own merits. The point of the "men can't be feminists" argument is that, independent of the message, oppressed groups need to be able to speak for themselves. It's problematic for me to get in the habit of pontificating about this issue, and for my readers to get in the habit of listening to a straight guy tell them about LGBT rights.

Then there's the About page clause. Under the "about" link above, I state that my purpose here is not so much pontification -- declaring "this is how it is, and you'd better agree with me" -- but a sort of public brainstorming. (Indeed, this very post skirts being self-contradictory if it's taken as pontification, for the same reason that declaring myself not a feminist would be.) Public brainstorming is about getting my own thoughts in order, so it's not as problematic as far as trying to claim control of the debate over LGBT issues. But of course my motives are not always so pure, particularly on an issue like this where I feel so strongly (I'd be far more likely to make a tentative musing on, say, tax policy, where my voice isn't confronted with any identity issues). And we have to keep in mind not only how we mean something, but how it's likely to be read. The dominant type of post for "political" blogs like mine is one of pontification, so readers are likely to take my writing that way. And the fact that I'm a straight white middle-class male doesn't help, as society is used to treating us as authority figures.

I guess it's appropriate that I don't really have a conclusion here. This is just something that's been on my mind, and as the About page says, it can be helpful for me to write it down.
Stentor Danielson, 09:55, ,

31.8.04

Protests And Comments

With the protests at the RNC in full swing, there's been a lot of talk -- typically disparaging -- about the diversity of messages within a single protest. The modern paradigm of mass protests, drawing on the dispersed-cell organizational model of the anti-globalization movement, are especially prone to this diversity (contrast them with candidates' rallies, where unofficial signs are prohibited and troublemakers are escorted out by the organizers).

In some ways, I think modern protests are like comments sections of major blogs. There's an overall theme of each thread set by the blogger (protest organizer), and commenters (protesters) generally stay on-message enough that the length of the thread (size of the protest) can be a rough guage of the importance of the theme. But commenters and protesters are often less polished and cool-headed than the blogger or organizers, both because the formats draw out extremists and because being shocking is necessary to get your voice heard in a crowd. Then along come the people with different issues to promote, who in a sense exploit the attention generated by the main event. Only a handful of people will read this post here. But if I were to go put it in the comment section of a post at Political Animal, I could take advantage of that blog's traffic to draw more attention to my message. Likewise, few people would notice if I were to go out on the corner by myself with a "free Tibet" sign, but if I take my sign to New York City, I can get it seen by all the people that come to watch the protest.

I wouldn't necessarily say that this openness to attention-hijacking is all bad. Certainly it can dilute the message, and leave moderates open to being tarred with guilt by association. But there's something to be said for the way that comments sections allow successful bloggers (disproportionately successful, due to the power law) to share the wealth, and similarly for effective protest organizers.
Stentor Danielson, 14:36, ,

Protecting Children

Rivka has an interesting post up describing the pregnancy advice industry, and the way it preys on mothers' anxieties about their children to lay down a host of rules, violation of which is threatened with miscarriage or birth defects. As I read it, I felt an echo of the "think of the children" argument that's deployed against same-sex marriage. Anti-SSM pundits threaten dire consequences if a child is raised outside of their ideal two-heterosexual-parent model. People who would decline to comply are portrayed as selfish, putting their own lifestyle and desires above the well-being of the children.

Parents are naturally protective of their children. In part this is a useful instinct, and in part it serves to respect the child's rights (as children aren't able to make informed consent to risky parenting choices). But this protectiveness can go to seemingly irrational extremes -- for example, I know some people who have been arguing that they wouldn't allow their child to sit on an HIV-positive person's lap because of the miniscule risk of the kid catching the disease. And it can be exploited, on the one hand by parenting "experts" looking to sell books, and on the other by culture warriors looking to enforce their moral ideals.
Stentor Danielson, 14:07, ,

30.8.04

Environmentalist Animism

(This post has been sitting on my desktop for a few weeks as I try to make it really work well. I don't think that's going to happen, so I'm going to get it onto the blog for now.)

Thinking about how to integrate environmentalism into her lifestyle, Lauren wonders:

There seems to be a goddess-worship or animism that is emphasized in environmental theory, a rhetoric I don't understand considering that science backs this issue to the fullest degree. Considering the scientific support that environmentalists have, and considering that far more Americans would be likely to listen to science and not the gentle thrum of frogs and geese, it seems to me that a scientifically-based argument would be far more convincing to induce a change in behavior.

I'm not an animist, but I've encountered enough deep ecology/ecofeminism/nature worship to have a few outsider's observations on the topic. My first response is that there is an awful lot of science-based environmental theory. You won't see the Sierra Club or NRDC, or even Greenpeace, talking about "mother earth" in any way other than metaphorical. The second point is that science alone is not enough -- there must be a moral component, which can come from transcendental religion or secular moral philosophy as well as from animism.

But there is a strong tradition of animist environmental theory. The idea that we ought to think of nature as sacred is a popular one. In some cases there's a cynical functionalism at the root of it. Some environmentalists don't believe that the sacred nature thesis is actually true, but they believe it's a useful way to get people to do the right thing. It's easy enough to rationalize away the weakening of the food web and damage to the watershed caused by cutting down a tree, but it's harder to rationalize killing a being with a soul -- or so the thinking goes. This way of thinking fits nicely with functionalist theories in anthropology. Functionalists look at the religion of more environmentally sustainable societies not in terms of its truth or epistemology, but as an adaptive mechanism that, unbeknownst to the faithful, keeps their actions in line with what would be required for ecosystem maintenance.

The "noble lie" tactic of functionalism is not a particularly attractive one (or an anthropologically well-justified one). Most animist environmentalists are not noble liars. Yet there are echoes of it that crop up, for example in the oft-repeated contention that in order to save the world, we must reconceptualize it as sacred.

The biggest root of animist environmentalism, however, is a sense that science has failed, that it would not "back this issue to the fullest degree." One dimension of science's failure is causal. It's a straightforward fact that we wouldn't be doing so much damage to the environment without the technology that science enabled. The bison can be thankful not just to the plains Indians' religion, but also to their lack of guns and manpower -- they believed that providence would supply them with unlimited herds, and they had a bit of a rude awakening once the fur trade allowed them to test that theory. And if science is part of the problem, how can it be part of the solution? Animists are skeptical that science can be reclaimed for sufficiently radical environmental protection. There's a yearning for a knowledge base that explicitly welds together "is" and "ought" in order to keep knowledge from being used for evil.

The other dimension of science's failure is conceptual. Science, say the animists, is cold and demistifying. In one sense this is true -- science won't allow things to remain as mysteries to be meditated upon and wondered at. Scientists like to answer questions. Science is often written in a dry fashion. That rhetorical convention of dryness is not the only way science can be, though -- just read anything by Carl Zimmer to disabuse yourself of any simplistic ideas of how dull scientific explanation is. What science does lack, though, is personal experience. At its root, animism consists in treating non-human entities as if they were human, posessing that very human capacity for communication and mutual understanding. What drives many environmentalists' concern for nature is personal experience of communion with the land and its inhabitants, which is not felt in the "artificial" environment*. It's a natural outgrowth of our tendency to indentify with places and things. This experience can be described with the vocabulary of animism, but not that of science -- not because science believes that it doesn't exist, but because scientific reductionism breaks the and estranges the experience, so that a reader's sympathetic response to the scientific explanation is not evoked in the way it is when the experience is related in animist terms.

*Some environmentalists make the mistake of assuming that all other people find nature easier to commune with than artificial environments.
Stentor Danielson, 23:46, ,

29.8.04

An Interesting Tidbit

Today I learned that medieval European peasants deliberately made use of "initial composition floristics"* succession. When they prepared a new farm field, they would sow acorns along with their wheat. That way, the oak trees would get a start during the few years that the farm was used, and be well on their way to producing forage for pigs once the field was left fallow.

*There are two major theories about ecological succession, i.e., the change in what organisms live in an area as it recovers from a disturbance. The classic view is called "relay floristics." Under this model, each generation of plants prepares the way for the next -- for example, sun-loving conifers rapidly grow up in sunny disturbed sites, but then are unable to reproduce in their own shade, so shade-tolerant deciduous trees take over. This theory was developed based on observations of farms that had been abandoned and allowed to regrow forest. In contrast, "initial composition floristics" theory claims that all of the plants that will live at a site are present from the beginning. Later successional stages are just plants that take longer to mature. So it seems that when farmers plan a short-term abandonment of a site, they establish an initial composition that will create a favorable succession.
Stentor Danielson, 18:55, ,

Standing Behind Your Pseudonym

Taking on the perennial topic of pseudonymous blogging, Scott Whitlock says:

To me, and I don’t pretend to speak for everyone, by not attaching a real person to those ideas, it is much like throwing a grenade in a theater and then running. In short, it is not fair to the idea, to the reader, or to the act of writing itself. But more than anything, it wreaks of fear. Although this might sound idealistic, we are in a profession of idealism. Because if we in the academe cannot stand behind our writing, our creations, and our rants, the obvious question then is this: Who can? Followed perhaps by a less obvious question: In a space where I’ve told my students a thousand times that their ideas were important and should be “stood up for,” are we hypocrites if we do not do so ourselves?

To deal with this issue, I think we need to make a distinction between anonymity and pseudonymity. Anonymity means that there is no "person" attached to the post, no connections to any life larger than that one statement. While you can post anonymously on a comment thread or a message board, you can't blog anonymously. The blog format is defined by the succession of posts gathered together, so that each enriches and vouches for the others. Even if you don't sign your posts with anything, the very act of putting them all in the same place creates an identity as "the person who blogs at [URL]." A pseudonym is a handle that allows you to invoke that online identity in other contexts.

Because pseudonymy brings with it an identity, the author is forced to stand behind what he or she says. You can perhaps run from a tarnished identity (nymous or pseudonymous) more easily if switching to a new pseudonym is an option, but when that happens you're starting over from scratch. You have to rebuild the identity that will make your posts worth listening to.

By using your "real" name, you do extend that blogging identity, giving a marker by which interested parties can link your online presence to your offline one (or to other online enterprises in which you use the same moniker). That may be significant in cases where someone wants to persecute you offline for something you did online or vice versa. Whitlock seems especially concerned about this sort of thing, as he has in mind the case of a faculty member being fired for blogging unflattering to one's institution. It's concern about this very sort of spillover that drives many people to choose pseudonymy (though there are other reasons for the choice as well). I'm not convinced that, if an idea is worth blogging, it should be worth enduring real-life persecution for -- that seems to put up too high a barrier on honest and creative expression. It forces those who face such persecution to think in a secret and monological fashion until their idea is polished enough that they're ready to face the consequences for it, depriving both writer and readers of the benefits of dialogue and expression.

In situations where online/offline spillover is not an issue, the line between pseudonymy and nymy rapidly blurs. To anyone who doesn't bother to put my name into Google -- which I imagine is most of my readers -- I'm a relatively pseudonymous blogger despite having my real name on each post. Beyond a few locational and life-stage facts, this blog is unlikely to give you much information about what I'm like beyond my blog. The past couple years of this blog would be little different if I had used a pseudonym. We constantly partition our lives. My family, my professors, my blog readers, and people who know me from the Brunching board all know different versions of me, despite the fact that my free use of the name "Stentor Danielson" in all contexts would make it possible for them to link those various identities.

In comments Whitlock also mentions that, while he can't articulate precisely why, he feels that when he can get a sense of a blogger's offline identity, such as being able to put a picture to a name, he finds their words have more "oomph" to him. (These details are precisely the ones largely missing from my technically nymous blog.) My sense is that this feeling is an artifact of the newness of the internet. For millions of years of cultural development as well as most of our own lives (past and present), face-to-face presence has been the model of social interaction. So it's understandable that we're somewhat disoriented when we interact with people online in the absence of some of the information that's most obvious in face-to-face interaction, such a the person's physical appearance. I suspect that as society gets more used to online interaction, we'll develop a secondary paradigm of online identity that makes it cease to be merely a pale reflection of offline identity. I know I felt Whitlock's "oomph" concern much more strongly when I first ventured online than I do now -- there are even online friends who I'm reluctant to meet offline because their identity to me is so tied up in the online format that it's disorienting to imagine them as physical people. It's a bit like the kid who finds it weird to see his teacher at the grocery store. An intuitive partition grows up despite the superficial use of the same name across contexts.
Stentor Danielson, 13:30, ,

Bad Protest Messages

I find the "Republican convention in a blue state" theme in coverage of the RNC a little strange. Yes, there are a lot more liberals than conservatives in New York City. But it's not like there are no conservatives -- heck, their last two mayors have been Bush-backing Republicans. Yet there's this view that somehow liberals own New York, that for Republicans to come to town is tantamount to trespassing. It's well-illustrated by the rhetoric of the RNC Not Welcome group (link via Matthew Yglesias), who want to "remind them [Republicans] that these are our theaters, our streets, and OUR CITY."

It's great if protesters use the forum to point out that Republican actions have and will hurt Americans in general and New Yorkers in particular. And I can understand concern about the convention exploiting Ground Zero for political gain (though at this point it's not clear how much of that will happen). What I don't agree with is the idea that it's especially inappropriate for Republicans to come to, and praise their bad policies and wrap themselves in 9/11 in, a city that happens to have a larger number of liberals than conservatives.
Stentor Danielson, 12:06, ,