letters to anyone, self-published

A couple of letters I may have well have just put up here and saved sending to the Times Magazine, but I have a hard time leaving stuff like this unchallenged, even if I'm just talking to myself for now.

Latest:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/magazine/19Religion-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

Mark Lilla (Aug. 19) represents Muslims as the only true threat to the Great Separation, Americans (people from the United States) instead settling their "potentially explosive religious differences. . . within the bounds of the Constitution." He fails to consider current US Christian fundamentalists' aim to destabilize the Great Separation through a religious network heavily engaged in electoral politics. The army of the Lord has adapted to modern instruments of state, but it has not ceased to be interested in the fate of the material-political world. The fruits of their labor, of course, can be seen in the election of their man, and in the worries of primary candidates who must determine how to relate to faith in a campaign process which has become increasingly a contest about image (of which faith is a part) and not about policies (which can be judged on their merits independently of the religious identification of the author).

Later, maintaining the distance of one "coming upon an ancient inscription written in hieroglyphics" he discusses Muslim renovationists working from within a community of believers to create a renewed faith compatible with the coexistence our diverse world requires for peace. While understanding that they are allies, he presents these people who believe that their faith should guide their actions in the social and political world as inherently inferior and alien to his reader: "Their reasons are not our reasons. But if we cannot expect mass conversion to the principles of the Great Separation. . .The best should not be the enemy of the good."

This is an article written to promote understanding of the so-called "Opposite Shore" which ends up marking Them more strongly than ever as foreign and unknowable and perhaps insults them. It ends with the words of the great Academic Man, bastion of Reason in a world of savages: "All we have is our own lucidity, which we must train on a world where faith still inflames the minds of men." As a young woman who is, perhaps, more intimately familiar with belief, and also committed to rational political organization dedicated to just protection of the well-being of all citizens, I wonder if he might more accurately analyze the religious-political nexus from a nearer place than that of the old anthropologist gazing at the wild men.

And the one before that:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20370

Freeman Dyson’s giddy biotech salvation fantasy demands a response from a human being with a more broadly communitarian vision for the future of our species and others, particularly given then way he couches his piece in the language of community interdependence.

Dyson’s invocation of a glorious evolutionary past, before the “evil day” when a certain one-celled organism stopped sharing and became a species to get ahead, back when horizontal gene transfer made evolution “a communal affair” aims to ally his vision with justice and equality. Similarly, his talk of biotech solutions for “the mainstream of economic development” presents biotech as the way forward to equality through greater production, enough for everyone. Reading it, I was reminded of an old episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, robots in space laughing at the hilariously naive voiceover man’s thrill about the future of the last green revolution.

His is a paternalistic mission to “ameliorate the human condition all over the earth” without addressing inequality, except with a naïve or calculating claim that because sunlight is more equitably distributed than oil, the benefits of harvesting it will be, too. This claim however founders against all the evidence that at this stage in the game, the physical location of resources in a particular community has little to do with who reaps the rewards from the sale of the energy—that’s why we call mining an extractive industry. The boom in corn production for ethanol isn’t providing the rural poor with enough profits to sustain rural livelihoods because large-scale consumption of energy requires large-scale production and history hasn’t provided the rural poor with democratic access to land and capital. Technological fixes are not meant to fundamentally shift power dynamics, they are meant to preserve them; and yet Dyson giddily suggests that in allowing us to burn more, faster, cleaner (efficiency) biotech will also lift up the rural poor simply because “bio” is a sort of naturally rural prefix. And what on earth makes him think that broad access to “small and domesticated” biotech will not go right alongside corporate control and massive capitalization for the already-rich on all these new products? Or maybe that is not what he meant to imply when he said, “It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations.” For Dyson, given our moment in the awesomely fast cultural evolution (“a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution”!) of our species, profiteering on the production of new life-forms must be nothing more than the natural response of our system to the technological wonders men manage to produce while the housewives are at home with the babies.

He talks democratization and community empowerment, but he’s selling an approach that offers nothing but more and faster play in the same game, the god-game he joyfully recommends to all of our grandchildren (the ones who are already playing with their PCs), the god-game which turns on our exclusion from the global community of organisms (in his world “species other than our own will no longer exist”) to take the seat to the left of Jesus and manage (exploit) the rest right down to their very genetic material in our quest to stay ahead of our limitless needs.