CC licensed image by David Shankbone

The phone hacking scandal in the UK is moving quickly. Senior media and police resign, and the storm starts gathering around Downing Street. The immorality of the gutter press is shocking but unsurprising; their illegal dealings with the police is likewise no news to anyone half-awake. The fact that it’s all been aired in public at last, with some genuine repercussions, seems astonishing. What’s happening seems somehow far more important than a general election in terms of shaping the political landscape of this country.

But John Pilger reminds us that a far greater Murdoch scandal remains mostly hidden Down Under:

The most enduring and insidious Murdoch campaign has been against the Aboriginal people, who were dispossessed by the arrival of the British in the late 18th century and have never been allowed to recover. “Nigger hunts” continued into the 1960s and beyond. The officially-inspired theft of children from Aboriginal families, justified by the racist theories of the eugenics movement, produced those known as the Stolen Generation and in 1997 was identified as genocide. Today, the first Australians have the shortest life expectancy of any of the world’s 90 indigenous peoples. Australia imprisons Aborigines at five times the rate South Africa during the apartheid years. In the state of Western Australia, the figure is eight times the apartheid rate.

Political power in Australia often rests in the control of resource-rich land. Most of the uranium, iron ore, gold, oil and natural gas is in Western Australia and Northern Territory—on Aboriginal land. Indeed, Aboriginal “progress” is all but defined by the mining industry and its political guardians in both Labor and coalition (conservative) governments. Their faithful, strident voice is the Murdoch press. The exceptional, reformist Labor government of Gough Whitlam in the 1970s set up a royal commission that made clear that social justice for Australia’s first people would only be achieved with universal land rights and a share the national wealth with dignity. In 1975, Whitlam was sacked by the governor-general in a “constitutional coup”. The Murdoch press had turned on Whitlam with such venom that rebellious journalists on The Australian burned their newspaper in the street. [...]

Using the language of its soulmate the London Sun, the Australian derides the “abstract debate” of “land rights, apologies, treaties” as a “moralizing mumbo-jumbo spreading like a virus”. The aim is to silence those who dare tell Australia’s dirty secret.

Read the full article here.

Poet, activist and Dreamflesh Journal contributor Claire Fauset has prepared an excellent report for Corporate Watch titled What’s Wrong With Corporate Social Responsibility?. The stall I was doing at the recent London Anarchist Bookfair was next to Corporate Watch, and I overheard someone perusing their stuff, talking to Claire. He said he worked in CSR until recently. He read this report and it was the last straw; he quit.

George Monbiot has observed that those who actively deny the reality of human-caused climate change are now in a tiny, shrinking minority. However, the danger now comes in the form of those who acknowledge the problem, but are only prepared to make cosmetic changes to their lives in response to it. Similarly, the damaging effects of the modern corporation are now seldom brushed aside casually. But the danger remains in the form of CSR, a complex system of measures that corporations have evolved in recent decades as a response to increasing activist attacks.

CSR is (naturally) preferred to exterior regulation. This way, companies can police themselves—or, as is inevitably the case when you are legally obliged to maximize profit for shareholders, weave a disabling web of spin and half-measures that aims to sideline coherent attacks on corporate power and perpetuate the bottom line.

As climate change and resource depletion start making plain the fundamental flaws of business with profit as its prime motivation, and economies predicated on perpetual growth, there’s a rush to save our illusions. There’s much to learn from sites like WorldChanging.com, but the basic premise found there, that profit and growth on the one hand, and the environment and social justice on the other, don’t have to be in opposition… well, it’s one of the few “both/and” arguments that I just don’t buy.

I’m far too muddled and cerebral for committed activism, so I’m not on a soap box here. But activist or not, all of us act, and at least some of these actions are informed by the information we have at our disposal (zombies excluded). And this report is essential information for anyone who even pretends to be a citizen of a democracy today. It’s a radical critique, aiming for the heart of what’s wrong with corporations, but you won’t find any of the wild rhetoric or naive posturing that “neo-greens“—in tandem with corporations themselves—often like to see as characterizing environmental radicalism. It’s clear, succinct, and meticulously referenced.

If you’re suspicious about CSR, but haven’t managed to articulate it, check this out for ammo. If you’re not suspicious about CSR, you have to ask yourself: does a world like ours really need a new definition of “naive”?

While I concur with the spirit of this attack on essentialism, there’s a particular aspect of Dvorsky’s post that is a transhumanist refrain that always makes me stop in my tracks, suddenly conscious of questions that don’t seem to be raised:

Fukuyama describes transhumanism as "a strange liberation movement" that wants "nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints." He goes on to state his usual argument, which is that suffering and other negative aspects of humanity is necessary in order for us to retain our human "essence" and properly function as individuals in society. He believes that without aggression, for example, that people wouldn’t be able to fend for themselves, or that without jealousy there could be no love.

As I said, I’m no essentialist. And I’m not sure about Fukuyama’s specific examples of "positive negatives". But I baulk at the casual dismissal of suffering. I have to tread very carefully here—precisely because it’s other’s refusal to tread carefully that concerns me. I agree with neither Fukuyama nor Dvorsky, and their debate seems to me to be polarised into the inevitable abstractions of theoretical polemics. As I put one foot forward, I may be attacked by transhumanists; the next step may draw fire from "bioconservatives"; it requires focus to just use both feet and walk.

So, why caution at the dismissal of suffering? Isn’t this what we’re all after from cradle to grave? Am I a masochist? A sadist? Stupid?

I was talking last night in Cambridge to a friend whose depression has been greatly helped by Prozac. Hell, one of my ex-girlfriends was one of the UK’s earliest trial subjects for Prozac use—her condition was deemed severe enough to override the early concerns regarding side-effects. Needless to say, I wholeheartedly support both the right of these wonderful people to alleviate their suffering using chemical technology, and their act of doing so.

On the other hand, I’ve never chosen to take such drugs for depression, and I’m glad I haven’t. Frankly, while I’ve slipped into some pretty vile pits of torment, I don’t think these periods have been quite debilitating enough to warrant chemical intervention. But further, while pleasure, too, has moved my life on in astonishing ways, suffering has often been the furnace in which awareness and health have been forged in my life.

The crux here is that I think the term "suffering" should be complexified. There isn’t some universal pool of categorisable emotions and feelings that can be labelled "suffering", and emptied by smiling technophiles, or solemnly guarded by narrow-minded Luddites. There are forms of suffering that are inimical to life; forms that are to pleasure as dark is to light—defining counterbalances that give pleasure meaning and, indeed, make pleasure possible; and there are forms that shift between the two, now in danger of crushing vitality, now creating possibilities for its rebirth. Delineating these forms is, I believe, part of an ongoing debate in the evolution of sentience—a crucially important debate, but equally an open-ended, probably unresolvable one. I feel that termination of the debate, proclamation of absolutist victory by any party involved, can only lead to stagnation of life.

Dvorsky dismisses Fukuyama’s appeal to the "uses" of negative emotions and traits as "flowery mumbo-jumbo". Easy phrases such as this may well have bubbled up for you as you read the last paragraph. I’ve got no stats, I’m expressing my feelings, or my feeling-toned thoughts that have crystallised through experience. Luckily, I’m not hoping to convince any governments or institutions here; I can indulge in this ineffectual little corner of the blogosphere.

However, this Stats vs. Feelings opposition brings me to what I feel is a key underlying issue. The cartoonish polarisation (which unfortunately actually forms the backdrop for real debates on these issues) goes something like this: the Transhumanist Techno-Rationalists think our intellects are perfectly fine arbiters of what forms and directions our bodies, emotions, and other "lower" functions should take; the BioLuddite, Deep Ecology folk don’t trust humanity as far as they could through all six billion of them, and insist that we bow down before the superior wisdom of Nature.

I have to confess I have a bias towards the latter, given such a two-dimensional system of choices. But the system of choices that reality gives us has quite a few more dimensions. I do have some form of reverence for nature. How could you not, given the discoveries of science? As Alan Watts always patiently points out, the incredibly subtle operations of the body, from the complex, as yet ill-understood rhythms of the heart, to the digestion of food and wonderfully sophisticated structure of the brain, are all coordinated by some level of unconscious somatic intelligence that the conscious mind has no part in. The simple fact of our existence, and further, our ability to reflect upon it, is testament to the immense complexity, durability and adaptive intelligence of nature. After a couple of millennia of science, we’re only beginning to fully comprehend the complexity of natural systems, let alone comprehend the systems themselves.

It’s a mistake, though, to allow this concession, this necessary admission of nature’s long-term superiority, to bring our intellect to its knees in impotent awe. Our intelligence is nature’s latest development, and we would be treasonous in the extreme to castrate it. It seems silly to assume that this "rational mind" department, with its R & D timeline measured in hundreds of thousands of years at best, should really be given executive power over the whole company, which has amassed an immensely rich array of creations in its four billion year history. But which company ignores its R & D department? What is needed is communication, dialogue.

The crucial line of research, from this vantage point, seems to be the investigation of the continuities—and of the importance of these continuities—between non-organic and organic matter, and between non-sentient and sentient organisms. When we say "suffering", are we referring to something that is a tragic aberration, a "fall" concurrent with the flowering of such a delicate flower as sentience? Or is it the conscious successor to part of the processes of creation and destruction that have evolved in non-conscious life and lifeless matter to enable evolution itself? (I’ll leave the question of consciousness in inorganic nature for another time, though I should note that I think it’s worth asking.)

A while back I read an interesting article by an anonymous author, ‘Utopian Surgery: Early arguments against anaesthesia in surgery, dentistry and childbirth‘. The most significant of these arguments was the contention that the fact that we suffered pain obviously reflected God’s intentions, and to circumvent this distress was to go against God. The argument is easily demolished, and it’s hard to not chip in unless—whatever your "beliefs"—you’re prepared to forgo anaesthesia for the rest of your life. I’m not. But, replace "God" with "Nature/Evolution", and physical pain with emotional pain, and my contention that some emotional suffering may be necessary to emotional evolution seems to be in danger of a similar demolition. Or: it would if I was erecting an absolutist edifice, and not a provisional, pragmatic foundation.

Alongside dialogue, between the logic of the intellect and the maturity of nature, I would add choice as a necessary part of any sane future. Most transhumanists—certainly the democratic ones—would agree with the importance of choice. I would point out to them the significance of this. It’s an admission that you might not be right, and as such should feed back into your beliefs, and help you weed out any fundamentalisms. Many people gain deep insight from intensely painful practices such as ritual scarification—and they may well see no contradiction in getting a general anaesthetic when they have major surgery. Equally, the right to use anti-depressants to combat truly debilitating conditions must be weighed against the necessity of leaving the neural gates open to allow ourselves to fall through emotionally purgative holes. Such experiences, certainly repugnant to the upstart intellect, seem to have evolved to strip away dead and dying feelings in a way that unintegrated chemical intrusions can’t hope to emulate.

It seems quite short-sighted to view pain and suffering to be as monolithic as Christian beliefs are monotheistic, and to bind the two together in history, the inevitable collapse of the latter taken as a sign of the need for the abolition of the former. If your only experiences of suffering are inseparable from those slavish monotheistic experiences of passivity, subservience and conservatism, all I can say is that your experiences are impoverished.