Do the philosophical roots of the New Left hamper the enactment of environmental policy?

[kezboard]

I dunno. I think there's a lot more that this line of thinking has in common with nineteenth-century romanticism, which just takes the modern faith in material progress and turns it around. I mean, the fetish for the natural, for instance. It would take a postmodernist one second to look at that and say that that category is totally cultural, that there's nothing more essentially or authentically human about chewing a leaf or living off the land than there is in taking a pill or living in the city.

Granted, postmodernism is responsible for a lot of pseudo-intellectual denial of the rationally provable, but that doesn't mean that it's responsible for all of it. Similarly, I don't think that because the postmodernist would question the statement "We should make things better for the human race" that means that only postmodernists would -- the romantic environmentalist would say "Why should we make things better for humans and not trees?" but the postmodernist would probably say "What do you mean 'make things better', and what do you mean 'human race'?"

The question of what it means to make things better is probably where postmodernism does come into the things you were talking about, specifically the essay in The Nation about how the US supported the Green Revolution so people in poor countries wouldn't be pushed into communist uprisings by starvation. On the one hand, I definitely think the appropriate answer to this argument is "So what, at least they got food". On the other hand, I sort of think (without having read the essay, of course) that the writer would rather characterize it as "By giving the world's poor somewhat easier access to cheaper food, the Green Revolution helped perpetuate the system that created the conditions of exploitation that made these people poor and hungry in the first place". I'm somewhat sympathetic to this view (which I guess earns me my 'far left' card) but I understand that it's fairly impractical and really more interested in moral consistency than practical solutions.

It reminds me of this bit I read in Zizek (yeah, I know) once, where he said that George Soros was the worst person in the world because he spends the first part of his day making money off an unjust economic system and the second part of his day throwing money at people trying to fix the bad effects of that system, and at the end of the day the system is the same. Again, you kind of see the point -- at least I do. But would it be better if Soros just spent his whole day making money and then willed it all to his dog? Is what he's really saying that Zizek is the worst person in the world because he's not authentic?

I think the answer is that postmodernists are just suspicious of technocratic solutions, both because they depoliticize and dehumanize the problems (the world's poor aren't hungry because they're oppressed or because other people are exploiting them, they're hungry because they don't have them food, so let's just give them food) and because they turn systematic problems into discrete ones, which allows them to not address the underlying structures which are causing the problems -- and which the technocrats are often benefiting from.