East-West, good-evil, right-wrong? Roland Kelts Roland Kelts 87 The Big Ideas of 2010 confucius_t.jpg Splash Image:  Still from “BKK Siam Square, Bangkok 03-12-02, 2002” | courtesy Beat Streuli (www.beatstreuli.com) and Murray Guy, New York

This summer, just three days before he was elected prime minister of Japan, Yukio Hatoyama published an op-ed article in the pages of the New York Times that ruffled more than a few feathers, both at home and abroad. “A New Path for Japan,” a critique of American-style capitalism and its failings and a call for a greater regional integration of Asian nations, was seen by many as a diatribe against the perniciousness of the selfish West and a sentimental, quasi-socialist embrace of the more benign, communally sensitive East. In a way it was.

Voices rose on both sides of the world – even before Hatoyama was officially elected. American commentators decried the weakening or potential collapse of the US-Japan security alliance, a postwar deal rooted in Cold War politics that has largely reduced Japan to a compliant host of American military bases and a reliable supplier of American consumer goods: America’s impotent little brother, or in artist Takashi Murakami’s formulation, a reconfigured “Little Boy” (from the codename of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima). Some were even snarkier, questioning Hatoyama’s fitness for governance and claiming his party would ruin Japan’s economy.

On the Japanese side, officials clamored to suggest that the article was never intended for publication in the Times, claiming the op-ed was a truncated version of a longer essay (true) whose original template was far more nuanced and America-friendly (debatable). At one point, rumors emerged from Tokyo that the article had been published by the newspaper without permission, raising copyright-infringement concerns and the suspicion that it had been leaked by members of the opposition party, whose very America-friendly members were on the verge of losing power for the first time (with one brief exception) in 55 years.

I happened to read the story in New York, where friends and colleagues who had no reason to know the name of Japan’s then prime minister were becoming increasingly aware that the nation was about to undergo an historic electoral and paradigmatic shift. But I found the borderline hysterical reactions on both sides of the world amusing and also intensely revealing. For what Hatoyama seemed to be saying to readers in the West from his soon-to-be-pulpit boiled down to this: We’ve tried your way. We’ve been trying it most strenuously since the end of the war. We’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly. But things have changed, and it’s time to do it our way now.

The principles of the “our way” Hatoyama outlines wouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with Japanese culture or with the broader tenets sustained in many Asian societies. Cautioning against “the dangers inherent within freedom,” he calls for a return to the Japanese concept of yuai: a sense of love, friendship and brother/sisterhood that binds communities together and gives them a sense of purpose, meaning and security. Contrasting this with the loss of human dignity resulting from an economic system in which “people are simply personnel expenses,” Hatoyama especially focuses on the need to shrink economic disparities and embrace a new era of multipolarity, in which no single nation – pointedly, neither the US nor China – holds all the cards.

Sound familiar? US President and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Barack Obama sounded very similar notes on the campaign trail and in his acceptance speeches: espousing the restoration of dignity to the American worker, the value and virtue of community-building, healthcare for all citizens and respecting all national leaders, be they friend or foe, in a multipolar 21st century world.

I suspect the overblown reaction to Hatoyama’s op-ed – anxieties and accusations in the West, denials and dust-ups in the East – ensued not because of his vision for Japan’s imminent new path, but because he clarified a paradigm shift that is now fully under way. The winds of change are today blowing East to West; the new path is already here.

Permit me, for a moment, to get philosophical about portability – specifically, the Sony Walkman, which celebrated its 30th birthday earlier this summer, exactly two months before Hatoyama’s election.

When the Walkman emerged in the US, massive, multilayer component stereo systems were still de rigueur in America, maximizing the sonic boom in your basement or bedroom, but also standing as a brute physical monument to your tastes and fiscal prowess. Visiting a friend’s home and admiring his chest-high monolith of stereo components was akin to oohing and aahing over the gleaming fins and fenders of his massive American car. The consumer product was an extension of the self, and size, not to mention price tags, definitely mattered.

To be sure, Japanese brand names soon edged in on the heft. Pioneer, Panasonic and, yes, Sony eventually displaced Magnavox and Zenith. But the arrival of the Sony Walkman and its successful penetration of Western markets heralded a new set of priorities. The Walkman didn’t boast of its owner’s wallet or individual acumen. Sleek and small, you didn’t look at it, you listened to it. It sounded, to early users at least, like a million bucks. It was an affordable inconspicuous and unobtrusive portable device. I shared tapes and earphones with numerous pals on school buses and in hallways and locker rooms. I was no longer showing off my equipment or expertise to a single visitor, but building a community through personal contact.

What I only dimly knew then, of course, was that the Walkman was produced by a nation low on national resources, limited in space and keen on reinvention. A nation much like the world we are all living in now.

Ten years ago American journalist T.R. Reid wrote a book called Confucius Lives Next Door, in which he tried to make a compelling argument for the West’s adoption of Asian ways. I read it when it first appeared and thought what many critics wrote: Are you crazy? His itemized lists of Japanese virtues read like a laundry list of American phobias: respect your elders, don’t question authority, do your work obediently, learn to live with adversity, don’t challenge the status quo.

But rereading the book now, ten years after its publication, I realize Reid was on to something, however poorly timed his analysis. We are living in a world of declining expectations and aspirations, so the cliché goes, but only if our goals are based on a dying paradigm. If we are living in a world of real possibility, where egalitarianism can coexist with capitalism, where selfhood doesn’t collide with community, then maybe Asia can show us where we’re going.

Shortly after September 11, 2001, my Japanese mother flew from Boston to Tokyo to visit me. Though her flight was nearly empty, she said she wasn’t worried. Once you’ve lived through relentless B-29 firebombing raids, as she did during World War II, you can bear one day of terror attacks and get on with your plans.

Together we flew to Okayama Prefecture in southwestern Japan to meet one of her cousins for a tour of the island-studded Inland Sea. Her cousin collected us in his new car, which he was clearly very proud of. It was a Toyota (of course), and a bit boxy in design, but it had a sleek dashboard with digital readouts that lucidly registered every atmospheric and automotive tick. The ride was smooth and the seats were comfortable, but every time he braked for a red light, the car’s engine simply stopped. It was entirely silent.

“This is a hybrid vehicle,” he explained, “a mix of electric and gas. It’s called the Prius. It’s the least wasteful car in the world.”

My mother peered back at me over the headrest. “Do you think this could ever be popular in America?”

I didn’t hesitate. “Never,” I said. “It’s too quiet.”

Americans, I believed, stake their claim by being loud, individualistic, even borderline obnoxious. Excess is the point – and is often prized and celebrated. A vehicle with tailored wings or Humvee mass has to purr, hum and roar when it stops and starts at a traffic light. This Prius, whatever its technological assets and environmental soundness, was simply too timid and conscientious for the bright and mighty West.

But that was then. Neither my mother nor her cousin nor I could have anticipated the absurdity and impotence of America’s ongoing “war on terror” and its increasingly Pyrrhic and pathetic invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq. None of us could have foreseen the economic collapse that has laid bare the rickety assumptions the American mythology of selfhood and selfishness was precariously erected on. And in the days after 9/11 we didn’t yet realize that the West and its romantically errant ways were fast becoming unsustainable: fodder for fools who still think the good life, defined by commerce, is forever.

What’s happening in America and in other Western nations is as simple as it is necessary: We’ve begun looking to Asian models for cues to shape our intertwined futures.

Today the Toyota Prius is one of America’s top-selling cars. Toyota can barely keep pace with American consumer demand, and the Prius comes with lengthy waiting lists. Today China manufactures every bit of clothing you and I own, with the possible exception of an Italian suit or French dress for formal occasions. Sushi is in the supermarket, chopsticks are at the ballpark.

“Asia is undergoing a renaissance,” says Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, speaking to me in downtown Tokyo about his decision to let a Vietnamese-French director, Tran Anh Hung, film his novel Norwegian Wood. “The entire region has changed because we now have money and power. And we do things differently than the West. It’s a different sense of time, sound and vision. This is a tremendous opportunity for us to be leaders rather than followers.”

Asia is far from perfect, of course. The cronyism, corruption and lack of transparency that have plagued regional politics, for example, need to go. And to varying degrees many Asian societies have incorporated positive values we associate with the West: critical independence, selfhood, entrepreneurship and thoughtful irreverence. But is it time now, a decade after Reid’s book on the virtues of Confucianism, for the West to adopt some good news from the East: community, calm, reverence and egalitarianism? And do we even need the hackneyed binaries of East/West, good/evil, right/wrong, socialism/capitalism, or can we finally proceed without them?

As we move into the next decade of the new century, I propose that we in the West embrace Asia’s successful societies– not as exotic mysteries, but as new potential paradigms. The West has contributed to Japan in spades. There would arguably be no Osamu Tezuka, Hayao Miyazaki or global anime explosion without artists like Walt Disney and Max Fleischer, and probably no Walkman without the advancement of stereophonic sound technologies in Europe and America. Today’s laptops and iPods, cell phones and other mobile devices are better understood as products of Japanamerica: a hybrid source from which we’ve all benefited.

Let’s listen to our neighbors in the East. A culture that prizes quiet contemplation, self-abnegation, community and stability should not threaten us in the West. We can do better if we learn from one another. And with our entire planet threatened by extinction, we need to.

Roland Nozomu Kelts is the author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US. He is a lecturer at the University of Tokyo, a contributing editor for A Public Space magazine and a columnist for the Daily Yomiuri. His forthcoming novel is called Access.

Why not look to Islam for a bit of restraint? Sarah Nardi Sarah Nardi 87 The Big Ideas of 2010 87-engman-teaser.jpg Splash Image:  Charlie Engman

Most of us, whether we’ve experienced it directly or not, are familiar with the idea of a comedown. A comedown is what happens when a drug, usually a stimulant, begins the long, painful process of withdrawing from your system. As the euphoria of the high begins to wane and the anxiety washes in, you suddenly start to feel dizzy and disoriented. The drug, previously situated between you and reality, is wearing off and, as it goes, you’re left to navigate the void created by its absence. That means going through the process of reconnecting to yourself, to your body’s natural rhythms and your mind’s natural pace. And when it’s finally over, you’re left feeling listless, lifeless and blank … the soaring high replaced by a crushing melancholy.

That’s how I feel every year after Christmas.

Once the cheer I’ve been mainlining since the day after Thanksgiving dries up, I’m left with an emptiness I can’t quite describe. There’s nothing like the sight of Christmas decorations after the holiday has passed. Walking into a room strewn with yuletide detritus is like returning to the scene of Bacchanalian excess the morning after, when all you’re left with is a headache and a vague sense of shame. The thought of candy, cookies, credit cards – consumption in any form – invites feelings of guilt and disgust. I can’t wait to eat a salad, go to the gym. I vow never to go to the mall again. I just want to get clean. Coming down from Christmas – reconnecting to my body’s natural rhythms and my mind’s natural pace – takes days.

I doubt I’m alone. Most people seem a bit pallid and disconnected, not quite themselves, in the days following Christmas. It’s as if we’re all trying to traverse the void that the holiday, with its attendant excess, has left in its wake. But what if we were to introduce some elements of Ramadan into our celebration of Christmas? Muslims, during the month-long observance of the Islamic holiday, abstain from eating, drinking and sex during the daylight hours. The practice of fasting is meant to teach patience, humility and restraint. It is meant to inspire empathy and appreciation. It’s a way to achieve “God-consciousness” and repent for past sins and misdeeds. Above all, fasting is meant to bring one closer to one’s spiritual self. By denying the body, practitioners are strengthening the soul and the mind. It is an exercise in discipline and meditation that, once completed, should leave one feeling more connected, more whole.

Westerners have a long tradition of borrowing from other cultures to temper an immoderate nature. Yoga brings us calm, Tao brings us balance – so why not look to Islam for a bit of restraint? Maybe we can begin this year at the height, rather than the depths, of self.

Sarah Nardi

Could they now amalgamate? Richard Bulliet Richard Bulliet 87 The Big Ideas of 2010 islamo_ch_teas.jpg Splash Image:  nanna kreutzmann – nannakreutzmann.com

Richard Bulliet is a professor of history at Columbia University who specializes in the history of Islamic society. Adbusters contributing editor Micah White talked to him about his book The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization.

ADBUSTERS: Why is the “clash of civilizations” thesis so popular and why did it come about?

RICHARD BULLIET: If you go back to the early days of Islam, it is a fact that the majority of all the Christians in the world in the year 600 ended up having grandchildren who were living under Muslim rule. Islam really did come close to snuffing out Christianity because the most populous Christian provinces – Egypt, Syria and so on – were conquered. So you had a fear that was built in very early. And that fear generated distortions and stereotypes that still get mined from time to time for contemporary usage.

But over time it turned out that the division between the Muslim world and Europe was not continual warfare. You had trade. You had Christians and Jews living in the Muslim world without difficulty. You had a massive flow of cultural influences from the Muslim world into Christian Europe to the degree that the culture that developed in Europe is based on things that came in from the Muslim territories. This has never been fully recognized.

Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis did not reach prominence until after 9/11. At which time it was the most convenient shibboleth to encapsulate what the Bush administration was trying to make everyone fearful of.

AB: Why do you believe it is necessary to reunite Islam and Christianity?

RB: Well, let me take America as an example. If you accept a Clash of Civilizations hypothesis then you either find a way to exempt Americans of Muslim faith from the civilization their faith represents or you have turned them into an irreducible internal enemy. We have a long history in the United States of demonizing groups – whether it’s Protestants demonizing Catholics or old immigrants demonizing new immigrants or everybody demonizing Jews or whites demonizing blacks. And the best moments in American history have been those moments when we have said: “We don’t accept that.” These divisions no longer stand out as eternal divisions in our society. But what the Clash of Civilizations thesis does is say, “There is one division that is eternal. And therefore there are some Americans who are by principle, by birth, hostile to our country.” This is something that goes back to the Know Nothing Party and other bigoted groups in this country. If you are a Muslim in this country, which I am not, then you are very sensitive to the fact that there is a very powerful ideological push to turn you into an unacceptable citizen. That is wrong, fundamentally wrong.

AB: Do you think Ramadan feels spiritually alive while Christmas has been denigrated into a spiritual emptiness?

RB: Everyone I know who fasts for Ramadan feels enriched. It is really striking. People I know who fast are proud they have the self-discipline to do it. I can’t think of anything we do in this country that leaves people thinking, “Gee, I’m glad I had the self-discipline to do it,” except stopping smoking. But nobody has been able to turn that into a movement. It is a matter of exhortation and then each person goes through that hell alone.

Probably the closest thing to Ramadan is Lent for really believing Christians. I know believing Christians who will give up something for Lent. But it is not as taxing an experience as Ramadan.

AB: What are some of the positive ideals of Islam that you think the West could benefit from?

RB: The Muslim parties today are the political trend most oriented toward the notion of social justice and social services within the national community. For people who see the world economic system as one of massive exploitation, in which globalized business and the great financial powers basically extract wealth from non-privileged countries, the idea of having a political ideology that puts an emphasis on delivering benefits to society and being supportive of society is very appealing. And we have seen it happen again and again where there is a crisis in some country, whether it be Turkey, Egypt, Algeria or wherever, and the people who come through and deliver relief are the Muslim parties. It reached a point where ten years or so ago there was a severe earthquake in Turkey and the government immediately prohibited Muslim groups from offering any aid. They knew the Muslim groups would be much more effective than the government. This is a pattern.

It could be that if those groups came to power they would be as self-serving and corrupt as any other political group. But ideologically what they stand for is the idea of a faith community in which brothers and sisters help one another. It is analogous to the early days of Christian democratic parties in Europe.

AB: How do you imagine an Islamo-Christian America would look?

RB: What seems most plausible to me is that Muslims who stand for strong family values and a moral society would hook up with already existing groups, especially religious groups. From a secular liberal standpoint this may not be terribly appealing. On the other hand, it might be a good thing in the long run. It is hard to know whether the personal freedoms of the late ’60s and ’70s are really destined to be the shape of society forever. Or whether we’ll see a different trend altogether.

If you were to see a Muslim influence on America in the long run, it would probably be through the Sufi side of Islam.

We live in a mythical era, a time that surpasses legend. Richard Bruce Anderson Richard Bruce Anderson 87 The Big Ideas of 2010 Adbusters_87_apocalypse_t.jpg Splash Image:  MAURO GUZMÁN (ROSARIO, ARGENTINA – 1977)
LA HISTORIA DE AMOR MÁS BELLA, MÁS GRANDE Y MÁS HEROICA DE TODOS LOS TIEMPOS
COLECCIÓN MUSEO CASTAGNINO+MACRO, ROSARIO, ARGENTINA.

We live in a mythical era, a time that surpasses legend. We’re witnessing a dazzling triumph of technology, an archetypal summoning of powers that are indistinguishable from true magic. But that triumph is hollow and destructive to much of what we value. The more we humans use our powers to impose order on the world, the more disorder there is. There are wars, and premonitory shadows of wars to come, as the world economy becomes ever more leveraged and dependent on scarce and finite resources. In the background there’s a steady slippage toward irreversible climate change and ecological collapse. And the astounding material success of the human endeavor hasn’t brought happiness, wisdom or enlightenment; instead there’s a profound disturbance in our collective human psyche. The best evidence of that disturbance is to be found in our suicidal abuse of nature, but we can also see its effects in the narcissism and desperation that are endemic in our society. Something is wrong at a very fundamental level – something that’s causing us to behave maladaptively.

What could have caused this imbalance? Given our brilliance and our accomplishments, what makes us behave so stupidly? Our innate human failings, our pride and greed and narcissism, must have a major part in it. But that’s not necessarily the whole story. In addition to human nature there’s another causal force at work, a force that we ourselves created: the industrial machine.

We humans have organized our economic affairs in a variety of ways in the past, but the way we make our living now is new in human history. Over the past five decades we’ve created an economy based on ever-increasing consumption, an economy that does not simply satisfy needs, but sets out to create them. We’ve left necessity and restraint behind to enter a world in which gross excess is the norm. This way of organizing life originated in the United States, but it’s spreading rapidly all over the world. It’s the principal threat to the natural world that sustains us and to the health of our culture our minds and our souls.

A self-organizing system, the consumer economy is a force all its own, an entity separate from ourselves. We built it, but we don’t control it. As the Dalai Lama remarked in Ethics for the New Millennium, “Modern industrial society often strikes me as being like a huge self-propelled machine. Instead of human beings in charge, each individual is a tiny, insignificant component with no choice but to move when the machine moves.” The machine operates by its own rules, rules that only indirectly involve humans.

The first rule is that the economy as a whole must grow. A steady-state economy might be possible in a physical sense, but when growth slows, problems like unemployment emerge, and so far no one’s been willing to undertake the tinkering that would be necessary to correct the problems. At present there’s no room in our way of thinking for anything but growth. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in A Journey Through Economic Time: “In modern times growth … has become the accepted test of economic performance. An economy, like a healthy adolescent, is assumed to have an inherent commitment thereto … For economists and many others, the rate of growth is the dynamic of modern capitalism.”

The second rule is that the purpose of economic activity must be to maximize profit for nonhuman entities. The primary actors in the consumer economy are not people but corporations. Corporations are “fictitious persons,” having all the rights of individuals to own property and transact business. But corporations are not human; they don’t suffer and bleed, they don’t have consciences or souls, they don’t go to jail. They are legal fictions. Nevertheless they act as if they were individuals, individuals possessing immense wealth and power – and tunnel vision. A corporation is governed by a “fiduciary duty,” which requires that every act must have the aim of maximizing profit. Stop, halt, end of story. So by law, ethics and moral responsibility are irrelevant in matters of corporate policy. Profit is all that matters. The corporation is mechanical, a simplistic construct without a human capacity for nuanced choice. Think of a ratchet and pawl or a conveyor belt – the degrees of freedom within the system are few, relative to the complexity of the living world.

The imperatives for growth and profit drive the behavior of the whole system. Like a machine, the economy has all the awesome power of mechanism but also its inhuman indifference to consequence. The machine isn’t evil, any more than a shovel or a hammer is evil, but it is complex enough to have its own agenda, which is not a human agenda. Because it’s inhuman and because it has amassed so much power, it is, in mythic terms, the Juggernaut, beyond control, growing ever more vast and more destructive.

The machine has a reflexive quality that gives it power over mind and soul. This artifact, our creation, acts on us and changes us. To fulfill its simple imperatives for growth and profit, the machine must create insatiable desire. It must cause us to want more than we need, more than we’ve ever wanted before, and it must continue to do this forever in order to grow and generate profit. As a result, the machine, through its human agents, exerts an enormous influence on our individual thoughts and beliefs. We are constantly subject to a bedlam of manipulation, slogans and images, tales and fancies whose only objective is to stimulate desire. As years pass we bend to the constant barrage; we become “consumers,” assuming our place in the machine, performing our industrial function.

The influence of the machine is responsible for much of the psychic pain and dysfunction we encounter. Logic and reason have little effect on how it operates. To change our minds and hearts, the machine appeals to the worst aspects of human nature. Greed, pride, fear, sloth, lust – the deadly sins – are the openings, the doors to demand for more products. The machine exaggerates the normal human tendency toward materialism. It encourages narcissism and self-indulgence. It displaces and subtly discredits healthy human attributes and practices such as compassion and thrift. This influence is more than sufficient to account for the malaise in society, in the same way that the physical effects of the machine’s operation are sufficient to explain the destruction of the natural world.

Ecology derives from adaptation. An ecology is an interrelated community of organisms that have adapted together to life in a specific habitat. The nature of adaptation affects the success of an ecology, whether in a specific place or on the whole planet. The psychology of ecology, or ecopsychology, should study and understand the nature and effects of our adaptation to the machine. The consumer-industrial economy is the elephant in the human living room – omnipresent, almost omnipotent, yet almost invisible because it’s simply taken for granted. Yet it affects the whole physical environment and the psychic environment as well, from spirituality and ethics to therapeutic practice. This is the frontier of psychology, the place for inquiry that will yield the deepest insights.

An example of the utility of this idea of the machine can be found in its implications for therapeutic practice. Counseling professionals are used to considering their clients as individuals or families, often without regard for the larger human-generated and natural contexts in which they are embedded. But considering the nature of the machine and the way it affects us, it seems inevitable that there are deleterious effects on psychological health and that those effects are most marked on the weakest and most disordered individuals. We often ask how much of the dysfunction we observe is due to past life experience alone or to endogenous causes. But it may be equally important to consider how much mental and emotional disturbance is in fact the product of living in an alien environment – of stress, anxiety, time pressure and the relentless pressure to have and to earn, to “succeed,” which are the bedrock realities of life within the industrial machine. It may be impossible to parse this question, to determine what caused what, but it seems certain that whatever problems clients present must to some degree be caused or exacerbated by our present specific context, by the circumstance of being embedded in a world that is ruled by an inhuman and unnatural logic.

The whole of ecopsychology is connected to context in a similar fashion. Every discipline – therapy, psychological theory, spirituality, ethics – and every human concern is in play with the machine. The Juggernaut is pervasive, comprehensive, inescapable and definitive. Its fate is our own. It is present on the freeway, in the airport, at the mall. To live with eyes open to this objective reality can be terrifying, but it’s necessary to understanding most of the things we care about.

To confront this overwhelming reality with open eyes is to glimpse the apocalypse. No wonder we behave blindly and maladaptively, when the alternative is to watch the mythic force of the machine bearing down on us. But psychologists, especially therapists, are familiar with the challenges of living with bad situations, and we know that it’s possible to live authentically and with some measure of pride and pleasure even when confronted with the most difficult realities. And who’s to say that nothing can be done, that we’re helpless in the face of the Juggernaut? Our challenge in this time is to live with integrity, to face reality and to save and heal whatever we can.

Richard Bruce Anderson is a leader in the voluntary simplicity movement and a senior fellow at the sustainability think tank For the Future. The essay “Resisting the Juggernaut: The Wild Frontier of Ecopsychology,” copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Bruce Anderson is from Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind, edited by Linda Buzzell and Craig Chalquist. Reprinted by permission of Sierra Club Books.

Why the Copenhagen debate doesn't make any sense. Kalle Lasn Kalle Lasn 87 The Big Ideas of 2010 87-ihelen-teaser.jpg Splash Image:  I.HELEN JILAVU, SEDNA, 2005 JILAVU.ORG

Anyone who has been following climate science or has read the terrifying scenarios foretold in Gwynne Dyer’s book Climate Wars knows that we’re standing on the threshold of an ominous age. The Arctic caps are melting and sea levels are rising at a much faster rate than predicted, and now new research has uncovered that a number of planetary feedback mechanisms are amplifying the effects of our greenhouse gas emissions in frightening ways.

Scientists have long known that any melting of the permafrost – the permanently frozen soil under and around the Arctic ocean – will cause high levels of carbon dioxide and methane to be released. There are about one million square kilometers of permafrost, and new studies have shown that it contains much more carbon dioxide and methane than we thought: three trillion tons in fact – more than all the CO2 we’ve pumped into the atmosphere over the last 100 years. If even a tiny fraction of that were to be released, the planet would be sent hurtling into a catastrophic warming cycle.

Other studies show that as the Earth warms, the oceans are actually able to hold less carbon dioxide. It’s the same principle that causes warm beer to go flat. The oceans, which have always absorbed about one third of the CO2 that humans pump into the atmosphere, are increasingly unable able to do so; and our carbonated oceans are slowly going flat with every ton of carbon we emit.

The concern is that we don’t really know where the tipping points are … scientists tell us that two degrees warmer will probably not trigger runaway scenarios, but they admit that’s just a guess … we have no idea how many degrees warmer is enough to get the permafrost bubbling and the oceans fizzing in unstoppable ways. Even two degrees could do it … and once that scenario is triggered, we would suddenly find ourselves on an escalator that would carry us all the way up to five or six or even 12 or 15 degrees hotter, with no way to get off.

How come we’re not furiously debating this? The mainstream media largely ignores the issue of unknown tipping points; it’s relegated instead to the distant fringe of scientific journals. There is a number – somewhere out there – that once hit, will send the Earth into a planetary tailspin that it will be impossible to recover from. Wouldn’t you like to know what that number is? Until we do, nothing on this planet – or in Copenhagen – will make much sense.

Kalle Lasn

Have we reached systemic collapse and civilizational crisis? Micah M. White Micah M. White 87 The Big Ideas of 2010 Adbusters_87_philosophy_zero_point_t.jpg Splash Image:  NATHANIEL MELLORS - GIANTBUM, ANIMATRONIC HEADS, 2008
3 ANIMATRONIC HEADS WITH SOUND
10 MINUTE LOOP
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LOMBARD-FREID PROJECTS

For disciples of Western philosophy, the gathering of the sages happens each year in a Swiss Alpine resort. Secluded among the peaks where thin air brings reverie, the world’s most prominent intellectuals welcome an eclectic mix of students – artists, thinkers and eccentrics – into their midst. Only here, at an experimental institution known as the European Graduate School, is one granted access to Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Avital Ronell, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt, Jacques Rancière and Jean-Luc Nancy among others. This congregation of masters lasts for three weeks of seminars, night lectures and communal dinner discussion. No other school in the world boasts a more exceptional faculty whose calling is to philosophize. But ultimately what makes the European Graduate School unique is the educational style. Eschewing the approach of traditional academia, the European Graduate School encourages professors to come without a syllabus in favor of speaking extemporaneously about the ideas they are currently wrestling with. What one grasps at the European Graduate School is a reflection of the subterranean ideas bubbling up in our historical moment.

In the four years since I began my studies at the European Graduate School, I have always returned home with a deep insight into the direction of our culture. My first year was the summer of 2006, in the midst of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The air was charged with political intensity and the most frequent subject of discussion was anarchism. The next year conversations tended toward discussions of political violence. Together, these years anticipated the reemergence of insurrectionary anarchism as a cultural force and heralded the publication of The Coming Insurrection. In my third year, the flock seemed divided over what constitutes an organic human, suggesting increasing anxiety over the post-human era and the consequences of our continued cyborgization, themes which have yet to be addressed by society at large. In my fourth and final year, from which I just returned, discussions did not circle around a single point but seemed to be fleeing from some truth none were willing to speak of.

What a surprise that big name philosophers, who in previous years did not hesitate to share their profound wisdom in a language that was philosophical but plain, nuanced but direct, now seemed to be hiding behind words. It was as if there was something they could not say. Their presentations became more academic, their focus more narrowed. The absence of a theme was obvious and that, I believe, was the only theme.

We are in a moment of cultural stagnation where the only thing to say is that we have nothing to say. The great contemporary philosophers of our age are in intellectual retreat. Something about this historical moment is leaving the discipline of Western philosophy blind. The great minds seem aware of a presence, but unable to get to it directly. So they fill the air with empty words that, while philosophically interesting, simply serve as a placeholder, a time-filler while events unfold.

It wasn’t until the year was drawing to a close that I caught a glimpse of what had rendered us all so speechless. Žižek, in his nightly lecture, remarked that we are reaching a “zero-point” of systemic collapse and civilizational crisis. And although he did not go so far as to say it, I believe that we have become paralyzed in the face of the imminent ecological, economic and cultural catastrophe facing humanity. We are staring into the abyss and we see nothing on the horizon to save ourselves. Is this the end of philosophy?

Nothing will change without a revolution. Sam Cooper 87 The Big Ideas of 2010 Adbusters_87_insurrection_t.jpg Splash Image: 

The instability of meaning within the society of the spectacle is such that a statement can contain two opposing messages simultaneously. In the overdetermined world of media representation, condemnation and commendation can be indistinguishable from one another. So when French Minister of the Interior Michèle Alliot-Marie warns that a book is “a manual for terrorism,” or when the Glenn Beck pantomime, with its usual hamfisted outrage, labels that same book “a call to arms for violent revolution,” the book is not blacklisted into obscurity but instead – thanks to what amounts to a savvy advertising pitch – enjoys a massive increase in sales. The book in question is The Coming Insurrection, authored by the anonymous Invisible Committee, allegedly the Tarnac 9, the group purportedly responsible for sabotaging train lines in France last year.

The coverage of the case against the Tarnac 9 has ranged from fearful predictions of the return of Action Directe-style “ultra-left” militancy to support from a number of big name academics, who denounced the state’s disproportionate response to the threat posed by the group of commune-living young graduates. Giorgio Agamben, friend of alleged ringleader Julian Coupat, has described the situation as tragicomic, revealing the French government’s paranoid and hysterical treatment of people too easily labeled “terrorist.” Certainly The Coming Insurrection prophesies increased violence of the type seen recently in Greece and in the Paris suburbs, but the weakness of the case against the Tarnac 9 – which Alberto Toscano called the “legal obscenity of basing arrests on a text” – indicates that this has become a symbolic battle for the Sarkozy government: a propagandist gesture made to maintain a state of fear that instantly criminalizes any radically oppositional voice. As Gérard Coupat, Julian’s father, said: “They are turning my son into a scapegoat for a generation who have started to think for themselves about capitalism and its wrongs.”

The Coming Insurrection is insistent that things are soon to change. Everything is at the point of collapse, of overflow, of transition. These changes are to be met by new forms of activism, forms that discard older logics of protest, visibility and organization and embrace instead spontaneity and invisibility. Where social control is predicated on the visual, invisibility is a tactical necessity, offering a safe space, however temporarily, for maneuvers beneath the spectacle. Meanwhile the recent uprisings in Paris and Greece reflect the wildcat spontaneity that will fuel The Coming Insurrection itself. This volatile political energy has spilled over the remits of orthodox politics to constitute a negation of politics or – more precisely – a politics of negation:

“No one can honestly deny the obvious: this [the 2005 French riots] was an assault that made no demands, a threat without a message, and it had nothing to do with ‘politics.’”

Capitalism, as we are hearing more and more regularly, is in crisis. And as this perpetual state of crisis becomes more acute, insurrectionary violence will follow. The point is to harness these energies while also recognizing that a destructive principle must precede construction. Such destruction is not to be feared: The Coming Insurrection proposes an active nihilism informed by a libidinal energy, an affirmative self-belief and a willingness to throw off the shackles of both capitalist society and outmoded forms of opposition. “Attach yourself to what you feel to be true. Begin there.”

Attempts to locate the genealogy of this curious text have frequently drawn comparisons with the provocateurs of the Situationist International. While the tactics of mobilization and resistance offered by The Coming Insurrection are abstract and often vague, the Invisible Committee has clearly been influenced by the Situationist directive to create situations – moments of life directly lived – that undermine the dominant logic of passive consumption and alienated representation. Although the text is closer to the affective and rousing tone of Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life than to the dense Hegelian logic and historicity of Guy Debord, The Coming Insurrection takes for granted many of the theses of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. However, the pretense of substance and vitality that the spectacle once afforded us has now expired, and we live on the corpse of spectacular society, deceiving ourselves that it still lives and breathes.

The Coming Insurrection has three sections: first there is an introduction to the exhausted state of modern life in the endgame of late capitalism. Then there are seven chapters that – as in Dante’s Inferno – are labeled circles. Each circle analyzes a different aspect of society (selfhood and subjectivity, schools and hooliganism, work and leisure, the metropolis and the network, the economy, the environment, the nation-state and the West). And four final chapters take a more pragmatic approach: signposting avenues for contemporary activism and spaces where opposition can still be mounted. Here The Coming Insurrection maps out a spatial politics of urban guerrillas and occupied territory. Drawing on accounts of the Paris commune, the Algerian War of Independence and the conflict in Iraq, the Invisible Committee argues that the West has honed its methods of domestic control through its history of imperialism. They claim that the most effective forms of resistance have not arisen through demands made of the state or through conventional forms of political organization but through a military urbanism that reappropriates space and redraws the parameters of conflict. So, contrary to the “official” discourses, the 2005 Paris suburb riots were not a moment of control being lost, of “dispossession,” but instead a moment when territory was (re)possessed:

“People can burn cars because they are pissed off, but to keep the riots going for a month while keeping the police in check – to do that you have to know how to organize, you have to establish complicities, you have to know the terrain perfectly and share a common language and common enemy.”

The text is full of echoes of disparate voices from the last 60 years of critical and cultural theory, including Agamben, Theodor Adorno, Gilles Deleuze and Manuel Castells. One recurrent theme is that capitalist society can no longer suppress the irreducible antinomies that it has fostered for so long. Following The Society of the Spectacle’s assertion (and détournement of Hegel) that “in a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false,” The Coming Insurrection tells us that “the future has no future,” “from left to right, it’s the same nothingness,” and “it’s only against voting itself that people continue to vote.”

Unfortunately the relationship between The Coming Insurrection’s theoretical analysis and its calls for mobilization is not untroubled. On the one hand, for example, we are told that The Coming Insurrection is so inevitable that “it’s the privileged feature of radical circumstances that a radical application of logic leads to revolution. It’s enough to say just what is before our eyes and not shrink from the conclusions.” On the other hand we are told repeatedly that it is useless to wait, that we must intervene even if “we can no longer even see how an insurrection might begin.” The Coming Insurrection’s uneasy alliance of a Situationist critique (so concerned with the visual) with anarchist direct action (based on a retreat from visibility) can thus sometimes feel rather impatient. Yet such discrepancies are bound to arise when the Invisible Committee’s project is so esoteric.

The text’s critique of ecology and the green movement is equally opaque. The various arms of the green movement – especially negative growth and associated doctrines of voluntary austerity – are convincingly identified as capitalism’s self-reform, the birth of eco-capitalism. Cultural interventions like those made by Casseurs de Pub (the French equivalent of Adbusters) and the exhortation to “revalorize the noneconomic aspects of life” are written off as the testing out of new social ties that will lead to capitalism reestablishing itself in the green era. Here the Invisible Committee creates rivalries where alliances are necessary, disapproving of nearly all organized contemporary anti-capitalism and cultural opposition yet never clearly differentiating itself from these entities.

In 1962 Scottish Situationist and novelist Alexander Trocchi published an essay entitled “A Revolutionary Proposal: Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds.” Trocchi’s intentions were similar to those of the Invisible Committee. They both imagine networks of individuals working behind the scenes to attack structures of alienation: Trocchi within culture and the Invisible Committee within everyday dissent. Both projects rely on invisibility: The refusal of clearly demarcated boundaries and visible social presence give the movements an amorphous invulnerability. The danger, however, is that the Invisible Committee’s project will fall at the same hurdle as Trocchi’s did. The invisibility that can evade surveillance is the same invisibility that can render a project perpetually vague and indecipherable to sympathizers.

The Coming Insurrection cannot provide activists with an insurrectionary how-to guide. Instead we must recognize the spirit that motivates the book, the sense that things have been deteriorating for too long, and we must move from contemplation to action. Underdeveloped theory will mature, answers will arise spontaneously; the task now is to mobilize, communicate and make connections. Though often obscure, this is a brave and ambitious book. It is not a manual for terrorism, but it is a call to action. It is an attempt to foresee the libidinal content of a change that has to come.

Sam Cooper is working toward a PhD at the University of Sussex. His research focuses on the adoption of Situationist theory in Britain.

Hitting Israel where it hurts – its economy. Adbusters Adbusters 87 The Big Ideas of 2010 bds_t.jpg Splash Image: 

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign was launched in July 2005 by the Palestinian BDS National Committee and is endorsed by over 170 Palestinian organizations from the occupied Palestinian Territories, from Palestinian citizens of Israel and from the vast diaspora of Palestinian emigrants and refugees. The campaign calls upon “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”

In June 2007 the committee outlined a detailed plan for action when it published the “Unified Palestinian Call for BDS,” a call for a massive boycott of Israeli projects and products. It asked universities, cultural institutions, sporting franchises and consumers to break their ties with Israel. It urged personal, institutional and corporate divestment from Israeli companies and from multinational corporations complicit with occupation and apartheid. It demanded widespread sanctions to isolate Israel both politically and militarily. The call for BDS has gained support from around the world and is endorsed by international Jewish peace groups, labor unions, student groups, faith-based organizations and an increasing number of European, African, Latin American and Middle Eastern political parties.

The fact that this campaign has inspired such prolific international support indicates that, for the first time in the history of the conflict, the world is listening to Palestinian calls for action. The BDS campaign is an effective nonviolent tool against a small trade-dependent nation like Israel. It is a tool of resistance, one that allows us to act politically without wading into the mire of corruption, scandal and infighting that mars Palestinian party politics. And rather than imposing sanctions that punish the lowest strata of the population, the campaign targets those financial and political institutions that profit most from the occupation. A similar strategy proved highly effective in South Africa when grassroots activism effectively shutdown the apartheid economy and overpowered Western support for a racist regime.

BDS has logged a string of successes in drawing attention to the complicity of companies like Caterpillar, Nokia and Indigo Books and Music. Its power lies in naming names – in speaking the truth about who is shamelessly profiteering at the expense of an occupied people. As the fight wages on, international courts are proving to be important battlegrounds. When threatened with action from the courts, the French company Veolia Transport, which was contracted to build an illegal light rail line connecting occupied East Jerusalem with Jewish colonies in the West Bank, announced it was pulling out of the project. Lawyers for the West Bank village of Bil’in brought charges against Canadian-based Green Park International and Green Mount International in a Quebec court for building settlements in the territories. Though the courts eventually refused to hear the case, the increased internationalization of legal action has proved a powerful tool and a promising new avenue for action.

Hitting Israel where it hurts – its economy – is the best chance we have for breaking down the wall of Israeli intransigence. Diplomatic relations have failed, and the violence promoted by certain Palestinian factions is not the answer. In BDS we have the potential to build a truly international coalition through completely legal and ethical action – a nonviolent means to strike against a system of asymmetric power and high-tech violence. And the beauty of the strategy is that it’s a multipronged attack: It’s not only though large-scale institutional divestment and international litigation that we can bring real pressure to bear on Israel – we push back every day simply by paying attention to the products we consume and the companies we support. BDS has worked before, and it will work again. The key is inspiring people and showing them that through solidarity and perseverance, we can end the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

To get involved, visit www.bdsmovement.net. See who’s profiting from the occupation at www.whoprofits.org. For international coordination, see www.icnpalestine.net.

I was painting a rich white man’s house … Cliff Weber 86 The Virtual World / The Natural World Adbusters_86_the_painter_t.jpg Splash Image: 

I am a painter, not much else. Houses are what I mostly work on, sometimes apartments. It’s not glamorous but it pays the bills and puts food on the table. I have a wife and two boys. Eight and twelve. They really grow up fast, shit. I paint and I eat with my family and I go to sleep. Things are steady. I love my wife and my kids, but I am angry. I am tired of all of this. I paint. I eat. I hug my kids. I go to sleep. I wake up and repeat six days a week, and I am angry. I can do better, for them at least. I can do better. But I am tired. I paint and I paint and I paint and I sweat – and I get a check. No one congratulates me and no one notices me. I kind of … blend in with the paint. I don’t like my work, but I am good at it. I am quick and I am efficient. I am a hard worker, but I get tired like the rest of you. Sometimes I just want to hop off the ladder, remove my overalls and walk – doesn’t matter too much where. I want to walk until everything is all right. I paint houses for rich white men who enjoy the feeling of masturbation. Men who want the house painted because their wives want the house painted. “Change,” she says. “Change is good, so let’s accept it. Let’s paint the house, honey.” Men with nice black slacks who drive nice black cars. Men who define success as blind attention – devotion for the sake of devotion. I don’t want to be like that. I want success and money for my family, but I can’t become someone I am not. I am a painter, not much else. My family is my everything, my only motivation. A little selfish isn’t it? To bring two more people into this world so you’ll care about yours enough to keep going. It’s what we did though. Now we have two boys and I work for them. I put up with horseshit for them. And for her. She is the only woman I will ever love. 

I was painting a rich white man’s house last week when he came out of the back door and mentioned a spot I had missed. He pointed to it and became angry. “Why haven’t you gotten that spot yet?” He held a beer with his right hand and pointed the tip toward me, snapping his jaws and stripping me of dignity. He was lowering his moral standards just talking to me. “When are you going to paint that spot?” I told him I was getting to it, that it was just about to be painted. “I want that spot painted and I want this house to look good. I want to look good, yes. Yes.” He walked away. “Stupid nigger,” he mumbled under his breath as he opened the patio door. That was all I needed. That was it. He shut the door like the cocksucker he was, and I went to my car to grab a can of black paint. I brought it back and began painting over the white coat I started earlier. I painted like a man possessed. I slammed the brush against the wood and watched the bristles spray off in every direction, spattering black paint everywhere. I dipped my entire brush in paint again and drew a thick, black line across the wall. I stuck my hand into the bucket and soaked it in the paint. Then I punched the wall until my knuckles bled, which didn’t take long. I hopped off the ladder and threw the dripping bucket at the wall. The man came outside but I was already gone. I walked away.

—Cliff Weber

Paul Ormerod Paul Ormerod 85 Thought Control in Economics 85-whogrowsuphappier-small.jpg Splash Image: 

“Do you need math to study economics at university?” is a question I often get asked. Here is a cautionary tale for anyone who still has illusions about the relationship between the two disciplines. A friend of mine teaches economics at Cambridge, England. Recently she had a first year student who was very good indeed at math. So much so that he complained there wasn’t enough of it in his course. For his second year, he was sent on an exchange to the other Cambridge: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Emails of an increasingly desperate nature began to whiz back to my friend across the Atlantic. The final one said simply: “Help! Please let me back home. There isn’t any economics in this course. It’s all math.”

Things are not quite so bad in most places, but math is becoming increasingly pervasive in economics. Just for the record, at the right time among consenting adults, I too use math. There are both good and bad reasons for employing it in the service of economics. So far mainly the bad ones have prevailed.

It wouldn’t matter much if policy makers didn’t take economics so seriously. Hardly anyone bothers about some of the lunacies in literary theory, for example. But economics matters and, at the frontiers of the discipline, a subtle but profound shift is taking place. Economics is starting to become more realistic, more rooted in institutions, in history, in the real world and, as a result, more useful.

That is, in fact, how economics started off in the first place. Only then it wasn’t called “economics” but “political economy,” symbolizing the fact that economies do not exist independently of political systems and institutions.

Economics is starting to become more realistic, more rooted in institutions, in history, in the real world and, as a result, more useful

Adam Smith single-handedly founded the discipline of economics over 200 years ago, and his influence is profound even today. Yet his seminal book The Wealth of Nations contains no equations at all. Instead Smith uses carefully constructed arguments supported by a wealth of historical evidence. English stockbroker David Ricardo, author of On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), is less well known – but the standard economic theory of trade is still based on his work. More than a century later, two figures from opposite ends of the political spectrum made wide-reaching contributions to economics. John Maynard Keynes was trained as a mathematician at Cambridge, switching later to economics. Friedrich Hayek, the intellectual inspiration for Thatcherism, had deep insights in psychology as well as in economics. Ricardo, Keynes, Hayek and a host of other key figures in economics studiously avoided math. Instead they used thoughtful arguments backed up by evidence.

So how has math come to be so pervasive in economics, when so much was achieved without it? The worst reason is that the use of math makes economists feel like they are proper scientists. They suffer from deep “physics envy.” Physicists have to use math. (Try doing quantum physics in words.) And they are real scientists, who really have explained how lots of things really do work. So if we use math, that makes us real scientists, doesn’t it? Well, the logical error in this last sentence is pretty obvious. But it doesn’t stop the inner glow of satisfaction that most economists feel when they cover the page in mathematical symbols.

So how has math come to be so pervasive in economics, when so much was achieved without it?

There is a more serious and more damaging reason why math, or at least a particular kind of math, is used in economics. This is inextricably linked with the concept of “economic man.” Economics is essentially a theory about how individuals behave. And the standard theory not only assumes that individuals are self-interested, but that they behave like some sort of supercomputer – always gathering every bit of information relevant to a decision. These individuals then make the best possible decision out of all available options. Not just a good decision, but the very best. Or, as economists like to say, optimal.

There is a whole branch of math devoted to optimal solutions: differential calculus. It is the ideal tool for a theory stating that individuals behave in a way optimal for them, given their tastes and preferences. So, for example, if you eat junk food and weigh 300 pounds as a result, or if you drink heavily and destroy your liver, or if you smoke and get cancer, hey, that’s your choice. You must have been making what you believed to be the best possible lifestyle choice for you, and calculus can prove it!

This is still the basis for a lot of the economics taught in university. Yet, paradoxically, it has been precisely the use of math within economics that has undermined this view of the world. It’s also a reason why the subject is moving on dramatically.

Math can be very useful in economics provided that we think of it simply as one tool among many. It is a tool that can assist us in logical thinking. It’s like another language – it can help us find our way around.

Math can be very useful in economics provided that we think of it simply as one tool among many.

Math has helped economists understand the implications of the economic man theory of behavior. After more than a century of research, economists determined that the theory is a marvelous intellectual construct, but a completely empty box. It has no testable implications. When economists say “demand curves slope downwards” or “people are paid what they are worth,” they have no theoretical basis for making these assertions. We cannot logically deduce from the theory of economic man behavior that either of these statements, both widely used by economists, are true.

Pioneers like the 2001 Nobel laureates George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz moved the subject on in the 1970s. They realized something else was needed, so they abandoned the idea that people have perfect information when they make decisions. They developed the concept of “bounded rationality”: the idea that though we may try to make the best decision, we may not succeed due to a lack of vital information. So in a world of bound rationality, people who binge on junk food or smoke heavily are not necessarily seen as making the best possible decision for themselves. The work of Akerlof and Stiglitz was a huge step forward in making economics more realistic.

Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith, the 2002 Nobel winners, made even bigger strides with their work. They actually went out into the world and conducted experiments to see how people really do behave. Observing and deducing just like real scientists! And they found that most of the time people don’t behave like the economic man at all. In his Nobel lecture, Kahneman stated: “The central characteristic of agents [people] is not that they reason poorly, but that they often act intuitively. And the behavior of these agents is not guided by what they are able to compute, but by what they happen to see at a given moment.”

In other words, the whole concept of a rational, calculating economic man is being abandoned completely. The economic man theory postulates that people have all the relevant information to make the best possible decision. In this new approach people have – at best – imperfect information … they stumble along, trying to make reasonable decisions, sometimes succeeding but often failing.

“An economist who is only an economist cannot be a good economist.”

The rules of behavior people use depend on the specific time and place. When the Soviet Union fell, for example, the policies forced on Soviet markets – based upon economic man – were disastrous. They led to theft and asset stripping on a stupendous scale and a massive fall in living standards. The policies failed to account for the fact that Russia and the other nations of the Soviet Union had little or no experience of how markets worked. Above all, they failed to take into account that in the West there are very few pure “free markets” – institutions, law, custom and practice all mediate the workings of markets. An outdated view of the world forced these tired policies on the Russians.

The new approaches that have developed to replace the economic man, perhaps surprisingly, make economics much harder. Instead of just manipulating some equations, we have to think hard about what the relevant rules of behavior are in any particular context. And we have to restore the importance of institutions and history. In short, we have to restore the idea of political economy in a totally modern guise. Hayek is mistrusted by many, but there is a profound truth in his remark: “An economist who is only an economist cannot be a good economist.”

All this makes economics more humble. Instead of claiming a completely general theory of behavior – applying to all people at all times in all places – economics is now much less grandiose. But ultimately, these changes will serve to make the discipline more realistic … and potentially more powerful as a force for helping to understand and improve the human condition.

Paul Ormerod studied economics at Cambridge University and did a postgraduate degree at Oxford. He is the author of The Death of Economics, Butterfly Economics and Why Most Things Fail. Download some chapters from his website, www.paulormerod.com.

THE CREATIVE DESTRUCTION OF NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS

Deep in a recession and with scary ecological scenarios looming, now may be the ripest moment we’ll ever have to power-shift global capitalism onto a new path. Adbusters #85 asks economics students around the world to join the fight to revamp Econ 101 curriculums and challenge the endemic myopia of their tenured neoclassical profs. Go to KICKITOVER.ORG, read a few texts, download the Kick it Over Manifesto (and other posters) and whack them up in the corridors of your campus. Make sure your university is at the forefront of the paradigm shift from neoclassical to ecological economics now underway. If you’re an economics student, email kevin@adbusters.org to receive a half price copy of Adbusters #85.

What happened to just thinking? Jordan Romanus Jordan Romanus 84 Nihilism and Revolution 84-Rebecca-Wolsak-small.jpg Splash Image:  Rebecca Wolsak, Inter Pares

With only one class left, my degree from the prestigious philosophy department of the University of Pittsburgh is not far away. Since my first class I have muscled my way through philosophy’s greats. Plato’s Republic? Piece of cake. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason? Easy as pie. Even phrases like panta rei and cogito ergo sum are pushovers to me.

Yet despite all of this heavenly knowledge that has been bestowed upon me, I am left unsatisfied. My professors amaze me with their ability to clearly elaborate on any subject, but they never apply their timeless wisdom to reality. Instead of rigorously debating the problems of today, my professors lull the class to sleep with lackluster lectures on trivial topics. Do I possess a priori knowledge? What is the form of me? Am I a thinking thing? Let’s be honest: being lost in the clouds never saved a child from starvation and it never will.

My grades are determined by how well I can regurgitate uninspiring thoughts. I had a class last year, for example, which covered modern philosophy. One of our main subjects was Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. We found several flaws in Descartes’ arguments but instead of constructing our arguments against his conclusions, we were forced to merely summarize them. Such mediocrity and mental garbage drives me to one simple conclusion: philosophy is extinct.

If we are to believe that philosophy is some guy’s opinion, then we have forgotten the essence of philosophy. Philosophy is the touchstone of all progress. We must remember that philosophy is the purest form of dissent. If we do not ask questions, if we do not question authority, if we do not pressure ourselves, then society will never advance. All progress comes from change, and philosophers used to be the backbone of change. Whether we go back thousands of years to Socrates’ “corrupting the youth” or more recently to Bertrand Russell’s condemnation of the Vietnam War, it is obvious that philosophers used to take a stand against a callous system. Now they simply summarize and overanalyze all the irrelevant aspects of life.

This “magnificent” philosophy program I have experienced is a glorified course in writing book reports. Philosophy has been badgered to death by dogmatic opinions and shallow thoughts.

What happened to just thinking?
What happened?


Jordan Romanus

A post-moral fable. Douglas Haddow Douglas Haddow 86 The Virtual World / The Natural World drone_t.jpg Splash Image: 

For years now a debate has raged within the US government concerning the use of military drones: unmanned, remote-controlled aerial vehicles with long-range missile capabilities.

Opposing arguments vary, from those based on moral grounds to pragmatic criticisms, with experts saying that “surgical killings” are good for taking out key personalities but have little effect on the long-term viability of terrorist organizations.

From a diplomatic perspective the drones are highly detrimental to Pakistani/US relations. As tribesmen value bravery above all else and see the drones as a symbol of American cowardice.

But at this point, protesting the drones on the basis of their relevance and immorality has become moot: In early August a drone got a confirmed kill on one Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban. Mehsud had a $5 million bounty on his head before being sniped by joystick with a Hellfire missile.

In the West we are gradually becoming pro-drone and anti-flesh. Just like our nonalcoholic beer and “I can’t believe its not butter,” we want our war sans casualties – conflicts fought through computers so as to not get a drop of blood on our soft, Palmolive hands. The rationale is somewhat altruistic, albeit selfish: fewer troops will die, fewer mothers will cry, and the horrors of war will become a thing of the past.

The US military predicts that in less than 40 years they’ll have autonomous drone units that can make all their own decisions, completely eliminating the need for human guidance and observance.

Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, citizens and politicians were constantly embroiled in a battle over what was moral, what was acceptable and what was necessary. Guantanamo Bay, rendition flights and torture all served as benchmarks for Westerners to gauge their moral pulse against. Each new assault on what we considered to be our humanity deserved to be challenged and inspired fierce debate.

But when we remove the humans from the equation – when war becomes literally inhuman – what’s left to debate? War crimes will become guiltless: a mere twisting of knobs. Slowly, with each OS update, innocent casualties will be curbed to an acceptable level. The Marine will be replaced by the computer programmer – a meek nerd so far from the action as to be absolved completely of its consequences.

With robots off fighting our wars for us, we’ll have nothing left to do but quietly sip our lattes and listen to our iPods. While somewhere, far off in the distance, a drone may or may not be dropping 50kg units of hellfire on some yet-to-be-named combatants. It’s not even post moral … it’s a Zen algorithm that melts steel.

This is a strange indicator of our retreat into the virtual when you consider that our so-called enemies are willing to sacrifice everything, their own bodies and very existence for a chance to kill one or two of our soldiers. We see their tactics as irrational, and they see us perhaps as we already are: machines.

– Douglas Haddow

Lives spent lurking too long in the shadows of the virtual. Roland Kelts Roland Kelts 86 The Virtual World / The Natural World 86-mareen-fischinger-small.jpg Splash Image:  Mareen Fischinger

Late last year when Japan’s master animation artist Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Totoro) addressed a room of mostly Western journalists in Tokyo, many of us were expecting him to talk about his latest fantastical feature film, Ponyo, which was just about to open worldwide. Instead, the 68-year-old director spent 15 minutes issuing a stern warning about the dangers and delusions of living through virtual media. “All of our young people today derive their pleasure, entertainment, communication and information from virtual worlds,” he declared. “And all of those worlds have one thing in common: They’re making young Japanese weak.”

Miyazaki ticked off the usual suspects – cell phones, emails, video games, television – and he also included two more categories: manga and anime. “These things take away [young peoples’] inherent natural strengths,” he continued, “and so they lose their ability to cope with the real world. They lose their imaginations.”

Japan has long been recognized as a global leader in the development of virtual realms. A land of limited physical space and, yes, very active imaginations has applied artifice to often highly sophisticated uses in order to enhance livability. Traditionally, the artful arrangement of a tokonoma – a raised alcove displaying seasonal flowers and hanging scrolls in a teahouse – created an artificial environment where samurai warriors could temporarily duck the realities of ongoing warfare and engage in peaceful meditation and reflection. (Battling enemies would allegedly set aside their swords and hostilities for a few quiet moments of matcha, Japanese green tea.) Similarly, rock gardens, carp pools and bonsai trees take elements of the natural world and reshape them into objects of visual and spiritual refuge: escapes from the otherwise chaotic and untamable world of the actual.

Adding technology to the mix has expanded Japan’s virtual zones exponentially, of course, and its related exports have arguably transformed lives far beyond its shores. The world’s first digital answering machine came from Japan, allowing us to forever exist in the virtual state of being perpetually “at home.” The Sony Walkman helped us shut out our physical surroundings, wherever we might be, to indulge in the concert halls and recording studios of our minds. Virtual pets like the Tamagotchi gave us a portable, ever-present someone or something to feed, clean up after and keep alive through anthropomorphic love. As author William Gibson, one of the first Western writers to see the face of the 21st century in Japan, notes: “If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technology-driven, you pay attention to Japan.”

The Japanese have also proven particularly adept at cultivating private virtual worlds amid very crowded public realities. Author and translator Frederik L. Schodt, a veteran authority on Japanese pop culture media, has used the term “autistic” to define the characteristics of a comparatively inward-looking, narrowly focused sensibility. I often find myself trekking between Japan and the US, and the differences in spatial perceptions and public behaviors have become glaringly obvious.

For Americans accustomed to traversing space, reaching out across the vast distances to “touch someone,” as an old AT&T ad campaign once exhorted people to do, speaking out to a stranger in a subway car or on an elevator or sidewalk is practically de rigueur. Arriving at a US airport, for example, I am often peppered with spontaneous questions from a cab driver or fellow traveler about my port of departure, my work and my preferred airline. It’s often coupled with chitchat about the local weather and sometimes more intimate disclosures about the speaker’s family and personal histories – all this from someone I’ve never met before and likely won’t meet again.

Arriving in Japan, by contrast, involves only the most necessary exchanges with customs and immigration officials and baggage handlers. And most of the time, the voices of jet-lagged conversationalists on the bus or train entering Tokyo issue from non-Japanese. An elevator in Japan is a womb of silent transport; a subway car is equally hushed: a train’s muted whoosh down a tunnel is broken only by the occasional clicks, bleeps and jingles of passengers’ cell phones – their vivid screens held mere centimeters from their users’ mesmerized eyes. With the exception of the oft-muttered “sumimasen,” or “excuse me,” as passengers jostle for space, no one says a word.

The sum effect of being surrounded in close quarters by people whose thoughts and attentions are deliberately displaced through willful distraction or digital media, is that privacy is not simply sustained, it’s thrust upon you. Even the stray pair of eyes that might fix upon you momentarily will soon flicker away out of politeness or sheer discomfort. Directness – let alone contact of any kind – is to be avoided.

Miyazaki’s comments about this very issue resonated against a backdrop of unsettling news. Cases of hikikomori, or socially withdrawn youths, who seclude themselves in their rooms and rely exclusively upon digital communications in order to avoid any kind of public interaction, were reportedly on the rise. The same with so-called “parasite singles” (young women who refuse to get married, get pregnant or move out of their parents’ homes); hakken and arubaito workers and internet homeless (part-time, contract laborers who often seek employment during overnight stays in internet cafes); internet suicide pacts (online suicidal meet & greets); and the recently branded soshoku-danshi (grass-eating/herbivore men) young males who reject the very tenets of masculinity – from eating meat to the fleshly pursuit the opposite sex, from following career paths to buying in to brand-name consumerism.

Just six months prior to Miyazaki’s appearance, Japan suffered one of its worst killing sprees on record when 25-year-old Tomohiro Kato plowed a rental truck into masses of pedestrians, then began to indiscriminately stab passersby, slashing 17 and killing seven. Even more chilling was the way Kato conducted his attacks. He committed his crime at midday on a Sunday, primetime for Japan’s shopping masses, in the heart of Akihabara, Tokyo’s locus of digital media marketing (electronics, cell phones, video and computer games) and virtual realities (anime, manga and porn). And he posted a running commentary in the hours and minutes leading up to the murders on an internet Bulletin Board System (BBS) from his mobile phone.

Subsequent police report revealed that Kato had made some 3,000-plus internet postings in a span of 30 days, many of which complain of loneliness, unattractiveness and social failure. “I’m tired of life,” Kato told the cops by way of an explanation.

Scholars, sociologists and commentators East and West have identified a generation-wide malaise in Japan following its late 20th-century economic juggernaut. University of California Berkeley professor Michael Zielenziger argues in his book Shutting Out the Sun that post-bubble Japan has created its own “lost generation” of the young and aimless. The grafting of capitalism onto Japan’s unique “social architecture,” writes Zielenziger, has resulted in a Japan with “nothing to believe in,” a spiritual crisis whose only balm is sought in cycles of materialism that neither satisfy nor heal.

What the pathologies affecting Japanese all have in common is a rejection of active engagement, a refusal to participate in the actual world beyond the confines of specifically tailored, intimately controllable private spaces – a bedroom, a booth in an internet café, an online chat room or a bulletin board site. It’s something I’ve taken to calling Japan’s “Bartleby rebellion,” after Herman Melville’s eponymous 19th-century law staffer in his novel Bartleby the Scrivener, whose refusal to accede to societal expectations eventually results in his rejection of sustenance itself. He starves himself to death in his prison cell. Bartleby’s irreverent mantra? “I’d prefer not to.” Tell that to the cops.

But Bartleby didn’t have a wired virtual world at his disposal – no multifunctional cell phone, Wi-Fi laptop or any of the other conduits of an enticing, seductive and infinitely elaborate digital reality – nowhere to air his darkest insecurities and perceptions. One can only imagine the beleaguered legal scribe in contemporary Tokyo posting thousands of complaints about the inanity of his boss’s requests, the stupidity of his colleagues and the increasing loneliness of his isolated outpost. The question is: would anyone listen or, better yet, reply?

Consumer and cultural critic Mariko Fujiwara believes that one of the most dangerous deceptions of virtual life, especially for lonely and isolated individuals like Kato, is that it creates a false sense of belonging. Internet communities, she says, are fundamentally different from communities in the real world, largely because they are so fleeting and fundamentally insubstantial.

“When we talk about communities, there should be a certain amount of commitment,” Fujiwara says, distinguishing between participants in online forums and offline groups of like-minded individuals. “When we talk about quote-unquote communities on the internet, some people are very committed, while others are simply casual visitors to the site. They say whatever they feel like saying at the moment in five words … and then go on surfing the web for a few hours, never paying attention to what other members of the online community might go through in the next five hours.”

Kato’s thousands of postings made him feel like he was connected to others, she adds, “but he didn’t really have any connections to the real communities around him, like his coworkers or neighbors, or even his divorced parents. Only on the internet was he somebody who could talk and hope that other people would respond. But his virtual community didn’t exist in a way that could really support him – especially at the moment he so desperately needed support.”

Japan’s virtual communities are vast and very active. While Japan ranks third behind the US and China in overall internet usage, it is home to what is often cited as the world’s largest public internet forum, the now famous 2-channel, a Japanese language-dominant social networking site (SNS) called Mixi and a Japanese language-only, YouTube-styled video sharing site called Nico Nico Douga – plus a host of other forums, BBSs and chat rooms devoted to nearly every topic imaginable. Japanese internet users have access to the fastest consumer broadband connections in the world at 160 megabytes per second, meaning they can post, watch and download high-quality media and multitask with comparable ease.

But the one thing most Japanese won’t do in their virtual lives is reveal anything about their real lives – or even tell you who they are.

An AP report published last year stated that “the vast majority of Mixi’s roughly 15 million users don’t reveal anything about themselves,” using fake names, ages and addresses to maintain privacy, but also anonymity, a crucial factor in a culture where standing out and drawing attention to oneself is still frowned on. The same article revealed that less than half of the Japanese customers of the dating site Match.com were willing to post their own photographs, a practice gleefully undertaken by the site’s American users. And on YouTube Japanese users are far more likely to submit videos of their pets than themselves. When Google released the mapping application Street View in Japan, which has close-up photographs of specific addresses and locales, many Japanese cried foul, citing an invasion of privacy in photos featuring actual people, residences and license plates. The issue eventually wound up in the courts, and Google made several concessions to protect Japanese citizens.

The clichéd Japanese saying, deru kugi-wa utareru (the nail that sticks out gets hammered down) remains as relevant to the virtual world as it does to the real one. But in a group-oriented culture where conformity and consensus maintain the prized sense of wa – social harmony – in the daily life of the actual world, the anonymity of the virtual space can open numerous Pandora’s boxes. Anonymous contributors to 2-channel, for example, often unleash virulent diatribes betraying archly nationalistic sentiments, bigotry and slander, issued from behind the shield of a fake moniker – an identity chosen for the needs of the moment.

Obviously, this is hardly exclusive to Japan. The banal swill of anonymous postings oozing down the commentary sections of politically or celebrity oriented blogs and news sites worldwide is often crude and obscene enough to make one give up on civilization entirely. The displacement of the self and all of its earthly responsibilities affords us numerous opportunities to engage in careless, lazy or just bad behavior in the virtual realm, even as it may feel liberating, at least at first. But what if, as Miyazaki suggests, the very real self issuing such pronouncements via its virtual counterparts, its simulated selves, is not so strongly developed to begin with.

Japanese-American blogger and journalist Lisa Katayama, author of Urawaza, a book about Japanese household solutions to everyday problems, published a recent article in the New York Times about so-called 2-D love – a subculture of Japanese men who seek romantic relationships with illustrations of their ideal partners, sometimes in the form of manga or anime characters, doll-like figurines or, in the case of the main subject in Katayama’s story, a life-sized portable pillow featuring a drawing of the object of his affection. “In an ideal moe relationship,” Katayama writes, citing the slang term for the fetishization of hyper-cute, two-dimensional female characters, “a man frees himself from the expectations of an ordinary human relationship and expresses his passion for a chosen character without fear of being judged or rejected” (emphasis added).

This last phrase brings us back to Fujiwara’s use of the word “commitment” when comparing real-world relationships to their virtual versions. Committing oneself to a task, to a relationship, to a goal of any type naturally involves risk. But the manifold seductions of virtual realities – anyone can join, anyone can post and you can be anyone, anywhere, at any time – reduce our sense of risk, promising to banish our insecurities, imperfections and uncertainties, if not finally being able to eradicate them entirely.

Fujiwara uses a baseball analogy to describe the collapse of Japan’s actual communities in the face of global competition and expanding technologies. Japan was competing in the minor leagues during its developing years post World War II, she argues, when its future continued to improve by dint of diligence, sacrifice and pragmatism. “Ganbaru, motto ganbaru” (“work hard, work very hard”) parents would tell their children and bosses would tell their employees. For a while, it worked: “Japan became a champion in minor league baseball.”

The nation’s social institutions, including families, worked well enough to propel Japan onto the world stage, or into the major leagues, as Fujiwara puts it. But once it got there, the communities failed to evolve.

“‘Work hard’ is just advice,” she says. “It’s not a real strategy for a complex future. We now have well-trained unemployed and under-employed young people, and the gap between their expectations and their realities is huge. And as a result of affluence, the largest type of household in Japan is a single-person household. These are older people living alone after their spouses have died, but also a rising tide of young individuals. And they feel isolated and alienated, and they think that maybe out there, in the virtual world, you would find someone more sympathetic than you find around you physically.”

Fujiwara notes a critical difference between the communal behaviors of her generation and that of Japan’s digitally-bound youth. “According to our research,” she says, “they just want to have as many friends as they can. It’s very important to have lots of friends in your cell phone address book or on Mixi, but to have a very casual and noncommittal relationship is even more important. The experience of having a best friend, your best friend in life to whom you can confide everything seems to be long gone. They think that sort of deep relationship is just too much … It’s too heavy, too much effort to maintain and too scary.”

This past summer the US had its own internet blogging murderer, who revealed his angst, loneliness and criminal intentions to the virtual world. George Sodini, a 48-year-old single male, opened fire in a gym during a female aerobics class, killing three and injuring nine before shooting himself to death. Expressing sentiments eerily similar to those posted by Japan’s Kato a year earlier, Sodini wrote: “The biggest problem of all is not having relationships or friends, but not being able to achieve and acquire what I desire in those or many other areas … Maybe all this will shed insight on why some people just cannot make things happen in their life.”

Granted, it’s often hard to make things happen in real life. Committing to a relationship or the achievement of an ambition is usually a lot more challenging than creating a sudden buzz on the internet, posting a blog entry, tweeting 140 characters or adding new friends to your Facebook, Mixi or digital address pages. But a retreat from reality poses its own set of risks: newly emerging anxieties and uncertainties that we are only now beginning to recognize and understand. Tetsuya Akikawa, a musician who unwittingly became a counselor to Japan’s suicidal youth when he hosted a radio call-in program, distills his listeners’ most common complaint: “A lot of teenagers said to me that they couldn’t feel the real feelings of living,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief. “They live a shadow of a life, rather than life itself.”

Divorced from the very human responsibility to contact and interact directly with other living beings, we may feel hollowed out, emptied of the sense of an evolving self that can make existence worth its painful bouts of adversity and growth. A life spent lurking too long in the shadows of the virtual world might turn out to be no life at all.

Roland Nozomu Kelts is the author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US. He is a lecturer at the University of Tokyo, a contributing editor for A Public Space magazine and a columnist for the Daily Yomiuri. His forthcoming novel is called Access.

We judge nations by their deeds rather than by spin. Craig Smith Craig Smith 86 The Virtual World / The Natural World isrealbrand_t.jpg Splash Image: 

Just Do It. Where’s the Beef? Yes We Can.

The public relations (PR) industry has made exceptional use of the communications revolution. But for all the globalizing effects of multinational campaigns, many brands seem inextricably tied to their home country. Injecting products into foreign markets has, to a certain extent, acted as a driving force in the way nation-states are perceived internationally. Coke, Marlboro and Starbucks are inseparable from their provenance, and Brand America is intimately tied to its products. But consumerism alone doesn’t tell the story of how America is perceived in the world; military adventurism and moral exceptionalism undermine the feel-good aspects of consuming Americana. A nation’s brand is inextricably tied to its actions in the world.

Nations, like products, are perpetually re-branded for the international market. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), for example, spends millions on targeted PR campaigns in a number of Western cities designed to shift associations away from war and occupation.

In March 2009 New York-based GfK Custom Research and British “place branding” consultant Simon Anholt released the global Nation Brands Index (NBI). It rates countries based on international perception of various categories, including tourism, investment, and immigration and governance. Germany ranked 1st overall, the UK 3rd, Canada 4th, the US 7th and China 28th. Iran placed 50th and Israel failed to make the top 50. While it’s tempting to dismiss nation branding as an example of the PR industry’s cynical commodification of the world, its assumptions can shed some light on Israel’s self-inflicted inability to re-brand.

Nation branding reveals the inherent contrivance of the concept of “nation” – a European invention born of a disastrous period of 15th-century religious warfare, leading to a centralization of violent power in the hands of a sovereign. Nationalism is a product of 18th- and 19th-century Romanticism, and every bit a human artifice. It helped radically reconfigure Western political identity toward our seemingly immutable system of nation-states. Israel came late to the game and has, from its beginnings, undertaken a conscious and very public project of constructing a national identity of godly strength. The pre-state Zionists dreamed of constructing the masculine “new Hebrew” of Palestine in contrast to the anemic “Galut Jew” of the diaspora – all at the price of creating the Palestinian refugee diaspora. Israel’s brand has suffered since.

Nation branding is also premised on the fact that no single actor can simply dictate political perception. People have to agree on, or be convinced of, political facts in order for them to become reality. Conscription and astronomical military spending project Israel’s tough guy identity to the world, leading to a dominant perception of violence and aggression. Go figure.

As Anholt admits, “Places can’t construct or manipulate their images with advertising or PR, slogans or logos … Places can only change their image by changing the way they behave.” Nation branding is doomed to failure unless action substantiates pomp.

• • •

In August 2008 the Israeli consulate in Toronto launched a one-year test market for a re-branding campaign. Roundly derided by human rights and peace groups, the campaign idealized Israel as a hub of high-tech research and development, cultural history and glitzy beach life. When asked directly about the goals of the campaign, Consul General Amir Gissin stated, “Israel’s branding process is first and foremost an internal process aimed at answering the question: Who are we as Israelis when we are at our best? The [Toronto] pilot was therefore not a PR campaign but rather an attempt to test the public opinion response to Israeli answers to this question.” While Mr. Gissin dodged questions about the impetus for the campaign, his public remarks are infinitely more candid. In September 2008 he told a group of supporters: “It’s not that our audience is ignorant. They feel they know too much … The Western media narrative is the poor Palestinians, Israeli tanks and Israeli guns. We’ve been portrayed that way for years.” He continued, “I offer you a framework for winning the public relations war.”

When Israel, with its influence on the North American media, complains of an overemphasis on its negative aspects, it proves the difficulty of reconstituting a national brand without real action. While portraying Israel as a single-issue country would betray a lack of knowledge, the fact is that in 2008 Israel spent $2,300 per person on its military – the highest in the world. When asked about this, Mr. Gissin rebutted, “[The] question reflects a school of thought that assumes that Israel is not allowed to be viewed outside the framework of the conflict. It is absurd. The conflict is a major part of Israel’s brand, and we are not hiding it. We believe, however, that Israel is more than the conflict, and we will continue to share information about that.” Perhaps.

Other than destroying southern Lebanon in the 1980s, clashing with Hezbollah and bombing Syria, Israel hasn’t fought anything close to a state army since 1973. So the world’s highest per capita military budget is arrayed toward the world’s longest-running occupation of an often indigent and defenseless population. The December 2008/January 2009 assault on the civilian infrastructure of Gaza was perhaps the clearest possible message Israel could have sent to the world.

It was easy enough to sell the assault to a society instilled with the belief that intergenerational war and occupation are normal. A Tel Aviv University poll showed almost 90% support for the slaughter, so Mr. Gissin’s worries about Israeli self-esteem seem misplaced. External perception, of course, has fared much worse. Spurred by international outrage, the United Nations has launched an investigation into war crimes and illegal use of weapons: the independent press and human rights groups (both Israeli and international) have brought serious allegations against Israel; soldiers who took part in the war are speaking out; and even the American State Department is beginning to understand the occupation as a detriment to Israel’s, and consequently its own, national brand. Bikini models and one of the world’s most accomplished high-tech sectors can’t grab the spotlight long enough to distract the world’s attention from the brutality of the occupation.

This hasn’t stopped the MFA from trying. In terms of Anholt’s branding criteria, human rights abuses cannot be taken completely out of the realm of international perception, but they might be superseded by generically sexier issues. Israel’s latest stunt to woo the Canadian audience – a Jewish hockey tournament in northern Israel – was dutifully covered in the mainstream press. That same week Amnesty International released Operation Cast Lead: 22 Days of Death and Destruction, a detailed and gruesome report of the various war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Israeli state against Gaza’s civilian population. It received virtually no mainstream media attention, but grassroots media, civil society and academia have refused to let the issue go.

The offensive on Gaza will continue to affect Israel’s brand. As the American political scientist and coauthor of The Israel Lobby Stephen Walt wrote after Gaza: “The way a country regains the world’s admiration in the aftermath of misconduct is to stop doing it, admit it was wrong, express regret and make it clear that it won’t happen again. Restoring Israel’s image in the West isn’t a matter of spin or PR or ‘re-branding’; it’s a matter of abandoning the policies that have cost it the sympathy it once enjoyed. It’s really just about that simple.” The dissonance between Israel’s re-branding campaign and its consistently negative image shows that contemporary reality matters. Mr. Gissin isn’t convinced. When pressed on Anholt and Walt’s emphasis on concrete action, he referred to Israel’s negative brand not as a reflection of reality but as the result of propaganda: “Israel is not a regular brand in the sense that there is an active and powerful worldwide campaign aimed at hurting Israel’s image. Few countries or places need to cope with such an environment, and taking [these] statements at face value in regard to Israel is missing the bigger picture.” Given Israel’s place behind Iran on the NBI, it would seem that the bigger picture of the world’s largest, most enduring refugee population and a destructive 42-year occupation is exactly what shapes the Israeli brand.

Our political opinion may now be the target of the same sophisticated marketing techniques that produced corn-fueled obesity and SUVs, but the difference is that nation-states are irreducible past their human components: our perception matters. Sixty-plus years of co-opting social and behavioral psychology to ram products down our collective throat have yet to overwhelm our political or moral compasses. We are still able to judge nation-states by their deeds rather than by their spin.

Craig Smith is a student in Toronto, Canada. He is celebrating a decade of TV-free living.

We'll live on ... not through our genes but through our memes. Gwyn Wahlmann Gwyn Wahlmann 86 The Virtual World / The Natural World synthetic_t.jpg Splash Image: 

For all the talk about the environment these days, I don’t think human beings have ever been more distanced from nature. And much as I hate to say it, I don’t think this trend is going to reverse itself. It just seems inevitable that people are going to continue to live more and more through technology. I think the gene-based, corporeal life we are familiar with is just the incipient stage of an evolutionary development of universal intelligence.

From the book Water: The Essence Of Life by Mark Niemeyer. Published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

From the book Water: The Essence Of Life by Mark Niemeyer. Published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

Already you can see signs of an advent of avatarism. Humans are happy to go through synthetic self-transformations … breast augmentation, Botox, plastic surgery, tummy tucks, etc. At the same time many others neglect their physical selves, adopting (sometimes false) computer identities. Altogether people are less and less resistant to the synthetic. At the same time people do more and more online: shop, work, socialize … Inevitably there will be huge market demand for the technology to create artificial selves, avatars, to function in the online world for us.

Richard Barnes | Murmur 21, Nov. 26, 2006 from the book Animal Logic. Published by Princeton Architectural Press, September 2009.

Imagine being able to make an avatar self that will look like whatever you want, do whatever you dream of. How ideal! Without depleting natural resources or harming the environment, we will be able to create whole worlds for our avatar selves to live in. There will be a thriving online market to dress your avatar, buy your avatar a house, decorate your avatar’s house, whatever. Every dream comes true, without death, illness, aging, consequences, repercussions, limitations of time or distance. You could create a self like James Bond or Marilyn Monroe. Your avatar could win the Tour de France, have sex with a thousand women in the Playboy Mansion or climb Mount Everest.

Photo by Noah Kalina.

Of course the big turning point will be when you and your avatar can meld sensory experience through virtual reality. Already neuroscientists are more and more able to pinpoint the location centers of the brain for very particular emotions, thoughts, physical senses, etc. Eventually we will be able to hook up to brain monitors and actually experience what our avatars experience.

Photo by Noah Kalina.

But as identity becomes more and more based on mind alone, identification with a body and its environment will also become outdated. Even the old human memes will inevitably become obsolete. And as hyper-connectedness makes us all more and more like one living brain, all ego identification of the “self” will fade as well.

Photo by Noah Kalina.

It will be like the Isaac Asimov story “The Last Question.” The mind will be a singular intelligence, eventually joining other intelligences in the universe and, as such, becoming the macro intelligence that is the universe itself: “God” in the ultimate Spinozan sense. This universal intelligence will exist as hyper-condensed energy in perfect symmetry until some outside irritant disrupts the balance and sets off the entire cycle again with the big bang.

“Let there be light.”

Perhaps it has already happened a billion times already.

Custom CSS:  synthetic.css

What makes a dissident stand up after being knocked down again and again? Ian Bullock Ian Bullock 86 The Virtual World / The Natural World reallife_t.jpg Splash Image: 

The life of dissident Fathi Eljahmi – who died this May after seven years in jail – remains a disturbing counterpoint to Libya’s apparent transformation from rogue state to darling of the West. Eljahmi was one of countless jailed human rights activists who have been left behind in Libya’s emergence as a Western ally.

Few people have stood their ground against so much. In 2004 de facto Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s thugs threatened to rape Eljahmi’s daughters unless he asked for forgiveness on national television for criticizing the Libyan regime. Eljahmi replied that he would rather die than apologize for speaking the truth. What makes a dissident stand up after being knocked down over and over again?

Born in Egypt in 1941, Eljahmi was the eldest of six children. His father – who came to Egypt from Libya to study Arabic and Islamic Law – was a stubborn man who lived by the laws he studied. His moral integrity was so fierce, for example, he once walked from the town of Asyut to Cairo (a distance of almost 200 miles) instead of borrowing money for a train ticket. He was forever reigning in his son, who was trying to find his own place in the world. “Fathi was strong willed,” his brother Mohamed explained to me over the phone. “My late father, who was equally strong willed, had trouble taming him.”

Once of age, Eljahmi moved to Tripoli to study civil engineering and eventually became the governor of the oil-rich Al Khaleej province. He enforced laws and governed the province according to his father’s code of ethics. In Gadhafi, Libya’s newly-minted dictator, Eljahmi saw a man with beliefs in stark contrast to his own. Eljahmi refused to participate in the bribery and corruption that marked the new government and spoke out at state-sponsored neighborhood meetings, called Basic People’s Conferences. In 1986 Eljahmi filed a lawsuit against the minister of education for closing Libya’s English schools. He won the lawsuit (after picketing the education ministry with his children), but lost the fight. The education minister, Ahmad Ibrahim, was Gadhafi’s cousin, so the case was dismissed. Eljahmi then wrote letters to Gadhafi about the failures of the legal system, injustices of the regime and the state of country. “Libyans are growing silent day by day,” he warned, “and apathy has become pervasive in society.”

This unswerving sense of moral duty pervaded every facet of Eljahmi’s life. After Eljahmi’s father died, his brothers, sisters and mother moved to Tripoli to live under his care. Mohamed – who is 20 years younger than his brother – remembers the day he brought home too much change from the corner store. Eljahmi marched him back to the store and made him confess and return the extra money to the clerk. “Fathi once told me, ‘if you promise to give your shirt to someone, you’d better take your shirt off and give it to him.’”

Eljahmi’s blunt criticisms soon became impossible for the government to ignore. A few years later, he refused a government posting by telling a senior regime operative, “I will not accept this appointment because, in the current political environment, only pimps and prostitutes thrive.”

Retribution came swift and brutal. Masked men invaded his home and held his family hostage for several hours. They stabbed Eljahmi and his wife, and terrorized his children by licking Eljahmi’s blood off the floor.

Why didn’t Eljahmi stay quiet after this? Why didn’t he go with the rest of his family to Benghazi instead of staying in Tripoli to continue his protests and calls for reform? Why, at another People’s Conference in 2002, did he call for a free press and democracy and the abolition of Gadhafi’s Green Book, only to be arrested on the spot and sentenced to five years in Abu Salim prison?

Eljahmi believed that Gadhafi had a fragile hold on power. He often claimed that enough sustained internal and international pressure would crumble the regime … and if it didn’t, Eljahmi feared that Libya would disintegrate into a lawless state. Ultimately he refused (with the same moral rectitude, perhaps, that led his father to walk to Cairo) to be changed by a corrupt and vengeful regime. He once wrote to Gadhafi, “I feel internal peace because I know every fate is predestined.”

In March of 2004, after diplomatic pressure from then-senator Joseph Biden, Eljahmi was briefly released. It afforded Eljahmi another opportunity to change his course, but he didn’t. As soon as he was released, he spoke to foreign journalists and international Arab-language TV stations about the state of Libya’s political prisoners and life in Libya. He told the Wall Street Journal, “All that is left for [Gadhafi] to do is hand us a prayer carpet and ask us to bow before his picture and worship him.”

The regime quickly rearrested Eljahmi, ransacked his house and terrorized his family. He spent the next five years, until his death at the age of 68, in Libya’s prisons, much of the time in an isolated cell. At one point Gadhafi’s son, Seif el-Islam, agreed to release Eljahmi if his family would guarantee his silence – they declined. “None of us would agree,” Mohamed later wrote, “to force our brother, husband or father to compromise his principles or to apologize for his outspokenness.”

Ian Bullock is a Vancouver-based writer of fiction and creative nonfiction.

By focusing on regulation and bonuses, are world leaders missing the point? Kalle Lasn Kalle Lasn 85 Thought Control in Economics fastmoney_t.jpg Splash Image: 

AP Photos – Charles Dharparak

In 1971 the late Nobel laureate James Tobin proposed enacting an infinitesimal tax on all cross-border currency trades. Though it could be as small as one-tenth of one percent, the tax would generate enormous sums of money due to the sheer volume of trades. A modern variant on the Tobin tax would levy an equally small tax on all market transactions. For the ordinary purchase of stocks and bonds, the cost would be trivial – with no perceptible effect on buyers or sellers. But for the more complex, highly-leveraged derivative transactions – the very ones that sunk our economy – the cost of the tax would add up quickly, helping to dampen speculative excess and temper the wild flows of global capital. It would break the cannibalistic cycle of derivatives feeding off derivatives and money feeding off money. And before long – trade by trade, dollar by dollar – the tax would steer our global system back on course … hard work and entrepreneurial zeal would become valuable commodities again.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is urging his fellow G20 leaders to introduce a Tobin tax, but his initiative is being largely ignored. Send an email to Barack telling him we need systemic change … tell him to take up Sarkozy’s proposal and start slowing down fast money with a Tobin tax.

– Kalle Lasn

“I am not ashamed of the West calling me a terrorist.” – Bassam Abu Sharif Sarah Nardi Sarah Nardi 86 The Virtual World / The Natural World sharif_t.jpg Splash Image: 

In Roman mythology, the god Janus is depicted with two faces – one facing forward, the other looking back. Equipped to gaze both into the future and the past, Janus was the patron saint of transitions: a symbol of the tension between two opposing states and an allegory for the distance that separates two points in time.

Bassam Abu Sharif, spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and former advisor to Yasser Arafat, has long been a man of two faces. To many he is a symbol of hope, someone who has devoted decades to fighting for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. To others he is the “face of terror,” the name given to him by Time magazine for orchestrating the Dawson’s Field hijackings of 1970.

“I am not ashamed of the West calling me a terrorist,” says Abu Sharif in an interview following the publication of his most recent book. “I have read much history of the world and colonizers have never once failed to call the resistance terrorists. George Washington was a terrorist to the British, the French called the Algerians terrorists. Even Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela were terrorists to some.”

“If that is terrorism,” he continues defiantly, “then I am proud to be listed with those people.”

As Abu Sharif speaks, it is impossible not to notice his injuries. In July 1972, he received a package in the mail from an unknown sender. The book inside (the memoirs of Che Guevara) had been rigged by the Israeli Mossad to detonate upon opening. The bomb blast tore apart Abu Sharif’s face, ripping one eye from its socket and leaving him deaf in one ear. One side of his face is now eerily static, frozen by the violence of the past. The other is spirited and alive, animated by the conviction that resolution lies somewhere in the near future.

Perhaps more than any conflict in modern memory, the Israeli/Palestinian debate is rife with dichotomy. Polarities like victim and aggressor, terrorist and terrorized often localize within one individual. And there is no better example to illustrate this point than the story of Bassam Abu Sharif. He is, by his own admission, a hijacker – a man who has resorted to violent means in an effort to achieve political ends.

In September 1972 Abu Sharif was working with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Palestinian nationalist movement known for its hard-line policies. The group hijacked three planes bound for New York (an attempt to commandeer a fourth plane was foiled and the would-be hijacker killed). Two of the aircraft were landed in Dawson’s Field, a remote airstrip in Jordan’s Zarqa’ Desert while the third was diverted to Cairo. None of the passengers on the hijacked planes were harmed and hundreds, including all the women and children, were quickly released. Those holding Israeli passports or who had served in the Israeli military were held as hostages and used to negotiate the release of Palestinian POWs. Abu Sharif, on the ground in Dawson’s Field, was the operation’s mastermind and spokesman.

Asked in a recent BBC interview how he could possibly justify the hijackings and their victims, Abu Sharif offers a logic that is difficult to assail: “Yes they were victims,” he says. “But victims who didn’t care about others being victimized by their own army or money.”

“We,” he continues, referring to the Palestinians, “are victims too. And when it comes to the issue of victimization, I always ask the question ‘who dispossesses whom?’ If a person came to your apartment and tried to take it from you, would you not defend yourself?”

At the time of the hijackings, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir had been quoted as saying that there was no such thing as the Palestinian people.

“It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them,” she claimed. “They did not exist.”

Dawson’s Field was the PFLP’s way of reminding the world that there was indeed such a thing as the Palestinian people – and that they were a people unified by a national consciousness who demanded the rights afforded a sovereign state.

What he describes as a “political catharsis” led Abu Sharif to part ways with the PFLP and its hard-line agenda in 1987 and throw his unwavering support behind Arafat, then head of the PLO and the one man Abu Sharif believed capable of navigating the turbulent diplomatic waters en route to establishing a sovereign Palestinian state. Assuming the role of adviser, Abu Sharif devoted himself to helping Arafat gain official international recognition for the PLO so the body could begin negotiating a two-state solution with Israel. The “face of terror” became the voice of diplomacy, even initiating the historic Oslo Accords of 1993.

Though it was intended to serve as the framework for the future relations between Israel and an eventual Palestinian state, the Oslo Accords ultimately failed. In the wake of the unsuccessful negotiations that followed, Arafat and the PLO began to lose popular support as more extremist factions such as Hamas gained strength and political legitimacy. The “peace process” of the last two decades has been a violent vacillation between tenuous ceasefires and broken promises. And despite renewed hope for revived diplomatic relations with the election of Obama, the two sides seem no closer to resolution today than when Abu Sharif began negotiating over 20 years ago.

Concluding his interview on the BBC, Abu Sharif is asked if the injuries he sustained at the hands of the Mossad imbues him with a particular sympathy for Israeli victims of Palestinian attacks. Abu Sharif stops short of saying yes. Instead, he tells the story of visiting land that belonged to his grandfather, only to be stopped by a teenage Israeli settler with an M-16.

“This land belongs to my family,” he told the settler. “It has been ours for generations.”

“No”, said the young man, “this land is ours – it was promised to us by God.”

And there, in one face, we see the terrorist and the terrorized, the problem and the solution.

Sarah Nardi