metapolitical

Skill in living, awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals... Relationship among all things appears to be complex and reciprocal - always at least two-way, back and forth. It seems that nothing is single in this universe, and nothing goes one way.

“Fascism is not a danger because it is ruling class policy or is about to be adopted as policy. Not even because it could have major influences on this policy. Nor is it a danger because of the “rahowa”, racial holy war, that is advocated by some fascist factions. The policies of official capitalism carried out through the schools and the criminal justice and welfare systems are both a far greater and a more immediate threat to the health and welfare of people of color than fascist instigated racial attacks and their promotion of racialist genocide. The real danger presented by the emerging fascist movements and organizations is that they might gain a mass following among potentially insurgent workers and declassed strata through an historic default of the left. This default is more than a possibility, it is a probability, and if it happens it will cause massive damage to the potential for a liberatory anti-capitalist insurgency.”

“The springs of religion are completely familiar to me. I’ve been there. It’s just that I was brought up completely outside all sects. My father was an anthropologist, a man trained and by nature relativistic about religions, disbelieving that there is one true one. So I don’t have this feeling I “need” religion. Some people think they must have some “belief.” I don’t. But I do know that, whether it’s a great work like the Bach B-minor Mass, or just a gospel song, I know where it comes from; I understand that. I know what that feeling is. So I would never say I was antireligious; that would be an incredibly cheap, stupid thing to say.”

“[L]iberalism also tends toward an abstract, idealist way of approaching social issues that leaves untouched substantive inequalities, unfreedoms, and restrictions on self-determination that derive from pervasive, embedded, and normalized social practices. Recognizing the existence of such inequities, liberalism trusts that firm and consistent commitment to abstract principles is the best the polity can do to challenge them.

“In early-colonial Australia, invading colonisers regularly marvelled at the local environment’s park-like aspect, counting themselves multiply blessed that ‘nature’ (including divine providence) should have come to furnish them with ready-made grazing runs. In fact, the Australian landscape’s benign aspect was the cumulative consequence of millennia of Indigenous management, in particular the use of fire to reduce undergrowth and to contain spontaneous conflagrations within local limits. Within a few years of Europeans taking over the country and discontinuing Native fire-management practices, the current cycle of massive bushfire disasters was set in train. The land that settlers seize is already value-added. There is no such thing as wilderness, only depopulation.”

“I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island if the choice was between saving me and saving an arbitrary non-disabled person. I have been told it would be wrong for me to have my biological children because of my disability. I have been told that, while it isn’t bad for me to exist, it would’ve been better if my mother could’ve had a non-disabled child instead. I’ve even been told that it would’ve been better, had she known, for my mother to have an abortion and try again in hopes of conceiving a non-disabled child. I have been told that it is obvious that my life is less valuable when compared to the lives of arbitrary non-disabled people. And these things weren’t said as the conclusions of careful, extended argument. They were casual assertions. They were the kind of thing you skip over without pause because it’s the uncontroversial part of your talk. Now, of course, no one has said these things to me specifically. They haven’t said “Hey, Elizabeth Barnes, this is what we think about you!” But they’ve said them about disabled people in general, and I’m a disabled person. Even just thinking about statements like these, as I write this, I feel so much – sadness, rage, and more than a little shame. It’s an odd thing, a hard thing, to try to take these emotions and turn them into interesting philosophy and careful arguments. My first reaction isn’t to sit down and come up with carefully crafted counterexamples for why the views I find so disgusting are false. My first reaction is to want to punch the people that say these things in the face. (Or maybe shut myself in my room and cry. Or maybe both. It depends on the day.) It’s a strange thing – an almost unnatural thing – to construct careful, analytically rigorous arguments for the value of your own life, or for the bare intelligibility of the claims made by an entire civil rights movement.”