Great post John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask]
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of john foster
> Sent: Thursday, 6 July 2000 01:48
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Minteer on Callicott and intellectual slipperiness
>
>
> Dear Gentle Folks,
>
> Callicott (1994) has also in the past made the claim of
> misanthropy against
> the Land Ethic. Callicott actually states that this claim is based on
> logical inference but he in fact supports the land ethic of Leopold.  In
> 1994 he writes " I know longer think that the land ethic is misanthropic."
> And quoting from Leopold himself "All ethics so far evolved rest upon a
> single premiss: that the individual is a member of a community of
> interdependent parts.... The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of
> the community to include soils, water, plants, and animals, or
> collectively
> the land."
>
> Callicot is agreeing with this premiss and clarifies that
>
> "The biotic community and its correlative land ethic does not replace our
> several human communities and their correlative ethics - duties and
> obligations to family and family members, to municipality and
> fellow-citizens, to country and countrymen, to humanity and human beings.
> Hence the land ethic leaves our traditional human morality quite
> intact and
> pre-emptive....Second in importance, I now think that we do in fact have
> duties and obligations - implied by the essentially communitarian
> premisses
> of the land ethic - to domestic animals, as well as to wild fellow-members
> of the biotic community as a whole. Farm animals, work animals, and pets
> have long been members of what Mary Midgley calls the 'mixed' community.
> They have entered into a kind of implicit social contract with us which
> lately we have abrogated."
>
> Callicot further explains that we as humans "belong to several
> hierarchically ordered communities, each with its peculiar set of
> duties and
> obligations...."
>
> The interesting conceptualization here is *hierarchical*
> [modifying] order.
> The term hierarchic  literally means in ancient Greek something
> like sacred
> principles since arche means principle. However the implication
> is much more
> involved than the simple assertion of an order of sacred principles
> (ultimately in the form of patrinlineal/matrilineal systems), it means as
> well *cosmos* since the word in Greek for order is *cosmos*, or
> order of the
> whole. What Callicot is attempting to describe is the reality of *kinship*
> structures in human societies that actually extend from the primary human
> relationships of parent-child, and child-parent and child-child,
> and so on.
>
> In the book "The Education of Little Tree" which describes a boys life
> growing up with his grandparents who are Cherokee Indian there is a deep
> reflection of the boy apon all kinds of interelationships with
> nature. Even
> though the boy is not the son of the parents, he is given a *good*
> upbringing and learns implicitly the same land ethic that Leopold is
> espousing through a generalizing practice. In my mind this
> upbringing is an
> expression of a *pre-archic originary* experience. In one episode the boy
> buys a horse. He loves animals and buys this horse, but the sad thing is
> that the horse dies because it is sick. The boy is aggrieved at
> the death of
> his pet horse who he cannot love anymore. Grief is the absence of feeling
> (Cowboy Junkies). But the feeling exists now in memory for the
> lost love of
> the horse felt as bliss.
>
> Now to my thinking the pet horse is part of the family. Otherwise
> how would
> the boy become sad because the horse had died? The point is relevant since
> kinship and marriage are said to be premissed on 'consanquinity'
> and what we
> have here is a non-human animal being loved similarly as a human would be
> loved. The proof is in the grief of the boy.
>
> Robin Fox writing in "Kinship and Marriage" maintains
>
> "In many societies, both primitive and sophisticated, relationships to
> ancestors and kin have been the key relationships in the social structure;
> they have been the pivots on which most interactions, most claims and
> obligations, most loyalties and sentiments, turned. There would have been
> nothing whimsical or nostalgic about genealogical knowledge for a Chinese
> scholar, a Roman citizen, a South Sea Islander, a Zulu warrior or a Saxon
> thane; *it would have been essential knowledge because it would
> have defined
> many of his most significant rights, duties and sentiments. In a society
> where kinship is supremely important, loyalties to kin supersede all other
> loyalties, and for this reason alone ***kinship must be the enemy of
> beaucracy***."
>
> Bipedalism in the primate human has some consequenes: a relatively smaller
> than average pelvis that does not favour birthing as an easy
> endeavour which
> leaves the human species required and be able to drop its young
> at an early
> age, rather than to allow its young to continue to grow a very large head
> inside the womb. Dropping the young early at 9 months means the head can
> grow large outside the womb.
>
> "Consequenctly, unlike most other animals, the human infant was born, in a
> sense, far too early....In the long stretch between his rude and premature
> awakening from the womb, and his full physical maturity, he could amass
> skills and knowledge, and so this otherwise unpromising-looking creature
> prospered and finally conquered, to become the dominant animal on
> earth. But
> to get this precious creature to adulthood required a good deal
> of care and
> effort on the part of the mother....For the successful rearing of
> the young,
> then, and so for the survival and success of the species, the
> mother had to
> be protected....there is no reason to think that man differs from other
> social animals in this. All primates developed society as a weapon in the
> struggle for survival."
>
> So getting on to my point regarding kinship, and consanquinity it
> should be
> rather obvious to know that kinship means "simply the relations
> between kin,
> i.e. persons related by real, putative or fictive consanquinity.
> [Fox]." Fox
> says that pinning down consanquinity is "difficult of course and our own
> scientific notions of genetic relationship are not shared by all
> peoples and
> cultures. Who does, and who does not count as 'blood' kin, varies
> considerably."
>
> Marriage involves relationships consisting of affines, or affinities to
> people not related by blood as is also obvious. "Affines, then, are people
> married to our consanquines." Therefore the descent systems which
> resolve as
> 'duties, obligations and sentiments' have for their pre-archic originary
> existence a sense or feeling about intention and meaning involved in the
> relationship. The idea that societies evolved to protect the female of the
> species who carries its young, and rears them, is sound enough.
> Whether the
> descent system is patrilineal or matrilineal is of consequence since the
> land ethic has the same origin as does the feeling or sentiment
> that affines
> or consanquines have through marriage and mating. So there is a saying
> amongst the Bantu tribesmen:
>
> "Cattle beget children."
>
> Fox comments that "[s]ometimes the rather weak anthropological
> joke is made
> that the term 'childprice' or 'childwealth', as it is essentially rights
> over children - especially sons - of the woman that are involved." The
> connection between the ownership of cattle and reproductive rights to have
> children are obvious here since the person with sufficient
> numbers of cattle
> may be able to purchase childbearing women (or fathers) and establish a
> descent system which confers advantage onto males (or females)
> primarily in
> this example.
>
> "In a patrilineal system, a man gains complete rights over the
> possession of
> his own children: in a matrilineal system he has no rights over
> them." [Fox]
>
> Thus as far as the ecological context of the idea that the family as a
> feeling or value may extend to animals is obvious in clans and hordes of
> neolithic cultures, in sophisticated cultures. The notion that the land
> ethic is logically 'fascist' in a sense is true, since what is
> good for the
> cattle is also good for the owner of the cattle, and the responsibility to
> protect the land from erosion, is also the responsibility to protect the
> women during pregnancy, during childrearing, and so on. As long as the
> exchange of women between hordes and clans is to take place the
> exchange of
> cattle - for example - is also necessary. To say therefore that
> the feeling
> of the family (the family has no concept since the concept of time is
> annulled in feeling of the family), what it means to be a member of a
> family, thus is to say that the child is not a member of the
> state that can
> be stolen from the parent. In the fullest sense the statement by Fox is
> correct: "kinship is the enemy of beaucracy." So whatever affinities the
> children of parents have for both wild animals and domestic animals, there
> will be a sense of feeling that extends beyond the immediate family to the
> non-human animal 'mixed' community. In the "Education of Little Tree" the
> Cherokee grandparents sympathize with the boy for his love of the horse
> which he purchased with money obtained by the *father* and the
> boy made from
> the sale of moonshine during prohibition in the US. The implication is of
> course suggestive of Fox's statement: "kinship is the enemy of beaucracy"
> and the de-sensitisation of the feeling about the effects of moonshine,
> owning a sick horse, etc., are overcome because of the necessity  of
> lifestyle preferences if we may say. The authorities learn that
> Little Tree
> is being raised by a grandparent involved in the manufacture and sale of
> illegal moonshine, and the government attempts to take the boy from his
> adopted grandparents. "Beaucracy is the enemy of kinship."
>
> I might add to and I can only quote a very great thinker on this, Joseph
> Campbell, who says as far as the divinities are concerned
>
> Initiation: the ultimate boon
>
> Humour is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct
> from the more
> literal-minded and sentimental theological mood. The gods as icons are not
> ends in themselves. Their entertaining myths transport the mind
> and spirit,
> not up to, but past them, into the yonder void; from which perspective the
> more heavily freighted theological dogmas then appear to have been only
> pedagogical lures: their function, to cart the unadroit intellect
> away from
> its concrete clutter of facts and events to a comparatively rarefied zone,
> where, as a final boon, all existence - whether heavenly, earthly, or
> infernal - may at last be seen transmuted into the semblance of a lightly
> passing, recurrent, mere childhood dream of bliss and fright. "From one
> point of view all those divinities exist," a Tibetan lama recently replied
> to the question of an understanding Occidental visitor, "from another they
> are not real." This is the orthodox teaching of the ancient
> Tantras: "All of
> these visualized deities are but symbols representing the various things
> that occur on the Path"; as well as a doctrine of the contemporary
> psychoanalytical schools....The gods and goddesses then are to be
> understood
> as embodiments and custodians of the elixir of Imperishable Being but not
> themselves the Ultimate in its primary state. What the hero seeks through
> his intercourse with them is therefore not finally themselves, but their
> grace, i.e., the power of their sustaining substance. This miraculous
> energy-substance and this alone is the Imperishable; the names
> and the forms
> of the deities who everywhere ermbody and dispense, and represent it come
> and go....It guardians dare release [the ultimatel illumination]  only to
> the duly proven."
>
> "Clear away the brush from this level field of ours so that we may contend
> together in friendly rivalry."  [Maui].
>
> Thus Callicott is reflecting about as much on kinship as the enemy of
> beaucracy as he is about any 'pre-archic originary' experience that is
> emblematic in the child's relationship with an animal kin, as well as the
> Bantu poverb that "cattle beget children."
>
> Therefore to have lots of children means lots of work in obtaining land to
> raise cattle. And lots of work means no time for play, not time to invoke
> the love and fascination of the gods. Thus what is indicated by Callicott
> and many others is a form of 'friendly rivalry' which may be understood as
> the cultivation of a sense of ecological virtue that is a moral
> extension of
> the feeling of family, or 'mixed' communities, since what is good
> for cattle
> is also good for children in the future. More time spent in leisure means
> more time communing or visualizing the dieties who bring bliss
> and harmony.
>
> The family that plays together stays together.
>
> The idea that a large dieback of the human population is required makes a
> great deal of ecological sense for the future of one's own children. The
> majority of men that I know who have had children have gone and got
> visectomies so as to relieve themselves of having to work even harder to
> obtain incomes to feed and cloth and educate more children.
> Sometimes these
> men have been scolded by their wives for now making themselves infertile.
> This is interesting since the communitarian ethos, or what
> Callicott claims,
> is the moral extension of placing the land on the same
> egalitarian level as
> people really derives from the love of one's own children, and
> their future.
>
> Placing a 'quota' on the number of one's own children by cutting the
> seminiferous tubule is hardly different than placing a quota on the number
> of 'mallard ducks' that beaucracy is limiting for hunters to take
> (question
> of sustainability and conservation of the resource) is hardly
> different, but
> the absurdity of not placing a quota on one's own number of offspring is
> equally ridiculous. Value for value in the exchange.
>
> With 6 billion people on this earth, and growing each second, I think
> everyone can agree: that taking pleasure from the taking of life
> without any
> forethought of the consequences is a refutation of the sapience and
> intelligence of the human race. It is in the words of Fox implicating the
> enemy of beaucracies (both corporate and state) against the feeling of
> family. The land ethic is 'philanthropy' not misanthropy.
>
> john foster
>
>
> >Callicott directly considers the fact that others have
> (mistakenly, in his
> >view) accused the land ethic of environmental misanthropy.   After first
> >laying out the conceptual foundations of the land ethic in his essay, he
> >addresses the charge of misanthropy head on.  For example, Callicott
> >writes:  "According to William Aiken, from the point of view of the land
> >ethic, therefore, 'massive human diebacks would be good. It is
> our duty to
> >cause them.  It is our species' duty, relative the whole, to eliminate 90
> >percent of our numbers.'"  Thus, Callicott adds, "according to Tom Regan,
> >the land ethic is a clear case of 'environmental fascism' " (92).
> >
> York Press.
>
>



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