Essential Empathy

This weekend, a family member called my attention to the performance artist “Reverend Billy,” who, along with his “Church of Life After Shopping Chorus” and the “Not Buying It Band,” puts on shows denouncing the “Shopocalypse.”

#lasthurrah

In The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert stated the situation of environment and human in a more objective, or even pessimism way, which led me thinking that nature and environment are meant to be mutually exclusive, doubting that if there is ever a solution we could find to balance the relationship and avoid us from the self-destruction path. However, as the concept of ecological intelligence came up, it reminded me of a novel way to reflect on the relationship between human and nature. Ecological Intelligence means reading and embracing the world, thinking of the effects in a broader ecology, including the natural and cultural one. It’s important for us to read the world in an equal way, with our experiences instead of language and without superiority and deanimation.

I know that one particularly demanding part of Latour's essay on "Agency @ the Time of the Anthropocene" involved his reflections on time. He observes that rationalism is "all about" time flowing from past to present (p. 10),  whereas "in the real world time flows from the future to the present" (p. 13); or, as he explains later, "Matter is produced by letting time flow from the past to the present via a strange definition of causality; materiality is produced by letting time flow from the future to the present, with a realistic definition of the many occasions through which agencies are being discovered" (p. 14).

In Bruno Latour’s “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene”, he introduces the idea of subjectivity and objectivity. “It is impossible to read such a statement as an “objective fact” contemplated coldly from a distant place, as was supposed to be the case, in earlier times, when dealing with ‘information’ coming from the ‘natural sciences.’ There is no distant place anymore. And along with distance, objectivity is gone as well.”(2) Latour says. According to him, objectivity means distance. Only in a distant place, people are able to see the “facts”. However, Latour is being too over generalized. Sometimes good objectivity involves closeness, and objectivity is still needed for the world.

     As humans, we’ve developed a cultural tradition that evolved through a body of words. The system of cultural tradition is described as a language. Although, based on geographical area, the language in which people communicate may differ. However, most ideas and concepts that were birthed in the United States can be founded in places as far as China and India, which is known to be the act of Westernization. Due to Western style influences, people have been taught to think and communicate in a language that was based on previous leaders who were ignorant to the importance of nature and its limits. Thus constraining any further progress for a more efficient environment. 

When speaking of intelligence, there is no singular category. Intelligence, in it of itself, is not defined by a finite application. It is not an object to be held but a capacity to be attained. The ability to reason, relate, learn and understand is what dictates intelligence. To apply this idea of intelligence to the world around us, we would be reforming the way we think about the world around us. Thinking of the world as something to be reasoned, related, learned and understood would be to give the world an agency and complexity not yet fully realized by man before. This gift of agency by man is a revelation of understanding that is key to a new kind intelligence that is all too necessary for our environment, an ecological intelligence.

The intersection of disability and age came through repeatedly during my reading of Good Kings Bad Kings in terms of the dichotomy between childhood and adulthood for the residents. For starters, there are the technical ways that age shapes the residents' lives as far as legality goes. Some are wards of the state, so they receive no say in being placed there; additionally, because of the regulation that people with certain disabilities are still legally minors untill age 22 instead of 18, there were diversified ages of those living at ILLC. Conversely, disability complexifies one of the major themes of anyone in the young adult age group--living independently.

self explanatory