NOT FOR SALE: KIRKPATICK’S VISION
Kirkpatrick Sale’s return to the campus which he and few other luminaries like Richard Farina and Thomas Pynchon single-handedly propelled into the winds of the Nineteen-sixties-- elicited unvanquished reflections from the author whose most recent activism is centered around political sucession as a solution to the dilemma of American empire. Introducing himself to a small group of Ithacans and Cornell students gathered in Alice Cook House on Friday afternoon Sale recalled that when he grew up in Cayuga Heights in the nineteen-forties it was “a village surrounded by farmland. My father, William Sale, was a professor of English at Cornell, so I remember meeting and seeing figures like Professor Carl Becker and President Day. In those days the President of Cornell not only knew the names of all the faulty-- but the names of their children as well. So my earliest experiences convinced me of the value of human scale in both community and environment.”
After a few introductory remarks positioning himself not so much as a “leftist” as an “anti-authoritarian”, Sale began to talk about his twelfth book After Eden. In this book, published in 2006, Sale locates “Eden” somewhere beyond the Homo Sapiens environmental-degradation-horizon of 70,000 years ago. “Altogether, the one and half million year run of Erectus is the most impressive example in history of a creature attuned to its environment”, he said. “Erectus saw Nature as force to be co-operated with, not as an object to be overcome. But wherever Sapiens appeared the environment took a turn for the worst and species-extinction began. We are now at the point where our species consumes forty per-cent of the photosynthetic energy of the planet, controls seventy per-cent of fresh water, and species-extinction and pollution have brought us to the point of ecocide. There are now 300 million of us in this country alone. It simply isn’t working.”
“It seems that we only have two choices. Either we try, maybe unsuccessfully-- to control both technology and our environmental footprint, or we try to use technology toward the elimination human of human suffering,” offered one student.
“But technology is not value-neutral. You may save lives in Africa—while there remain simply too many of our species on this planet. By introducing yet another technical innovation you only cause the overall diminishment of our own, as well as other species-- somewhere else on the planet. It’s what I call the law of unintended consequences,” Sale replied.
“There was a cartoon I saw not long ago in New Yorker” countered Cornell alumnus and former-SDS activist Professor David Burack. (Sale himself wrote a history of The Students for a Democratic Society published in 1963) It depicts a businessman saying to another: ‘I don't buy this for future generations stuff--- what have they ever done for me? But I wonder if we should really overlook the work of people like Pedro Sanchez—himself a Cornellian—who has been able to generate a 300 per-cent increase in crop yields in several African countries, thus saving many lives. I think each person can still make a difference.”
Asked about the demonstration which he led at Cornell in 1958 against the then University policy of acting In loco Parentis against “Petting and Sexual Intercourse” by students-- Sale asks for a show of hands: “Does anyone here even know what Petting is, or was? The room erupts into laughter.
Afterwards the students grow more restive. Shadows cross their faces. The logic of Sale’s argument seems unassailable-- but can there be a present where there seems so little to hope for in the future—the faces seem to muse. Nature, in the last analysis, is not cuddly and warm. It has its own logic that even nature-lovers must beware. Who will side for nature’s adamantine laws instead of an escape to Mars, where a wiser, more ecologic human adventure could perhaps begin again? Who doesn’t nurse the grandiosity of even the most spectacular failures of humankind-- when compared to the cold laws of evolution? Even the Apollo astronauts have admitted that you can never appreciate the beauty of the human faces in the local strip mall until you have lived on the moon. But Kirkpatrick Sale permits his audience no easy escape.
“Don’t you see any hope? I mean we are a country of laws. There is a Congress and a Supreme Court. Change can happen.” another student pleads.
Kirkpatrick Sale’s return to the campus which he and few other luminaries like Richard Farina and Thomas Pynchon single-handedly propelled into the winds of the Nineteen-sixties-- elicited unvanquished reflections from the author whose most recent activism is centered around political sucession as a solution to the dilemma of American empire. Introducing himself to a small group of Ithacans and Cornell students gathered in Alice Cook House on Friday afternoon Sale recalled that when he grew up in Cayuga Heights in the nineteen-forties it was “a village surrounded by farmland. My father, William Sale, was a professor of English at Cornell, so I remember meeting and seeing figures like Professor Carl Becker and President Day. In those days the President of Cornell not only knew the names of all the faulty-- but the names of their children as well. So my earliest experiences convinced me of the value of human scale in both community and environment.”
After a few introductory remarks positioning himself not so much as a “leftist” as an “anti-authoritarian”, Sale began to talk about his twelfth book After Eden. In this book, published in 2006, Sale locates “Eden” somewhere beyond the Homo Sapiens environmental-degradation-horizon of 70,000 years ago. “Altogether, the one and half million year run of Erectus is the most impressive example in history of a creature attuned to its environment”, he said. “Erectus saw Nature as force to be co-operated with, not as an object to be overcome. But wherever Sapiens appeared the environment took a turn for the worst and species-extinction began. We are now at the point where our species consumes forty per-cent of the photosynthetic energy of the planet, controls seventy per-cent of fresh water, and species-extinction and pollution have brought us to the point of ecocide. There are now 300 million of us in this country alone. It simply isn’t working.”
“It seems that we only have two choices. Either we try, maybe unsuccessfully-- to control both technology and our environmental footprint, or we try to use technology toward the elimination human of human suffering,” offered one student.
“But technology is not value-neutral. You may save lives in Africa—while there remain simply too many of our species on this planet. By introducing yet another technical innovation you only cause the overall diminishment of our own, as well as other species-- somewhere else on the planet. It’s what I call the law of unintended consequences,” Sale replied.
“There was a cartoon I saw not long ago in New Yorker” countered Cornell alumnus and former-SDS activist Professor David Burack. (Sale himself wrote a history of The Students for a Democratic Society published in 1963) It depicts a businessman saying to another: ‘I don't buy this for future generations stuff--- what have they ever done for me? But I wonder if we should really overlook the work of people like Pedro Sanchez—himself a Cornellian—who has been able to generate a 300 per-cent increase in crop yields in several African countries, thus saving many lives. I think each person can still make a difference.”
Asked about the demonstration which he led at Cornell in 1958 against the then University policy of acting In loco Parentis against “Petting and Sexual Intercourse” by students-- Sale asks for a show of hands: “Does anyone here even know what Petting is, or was? The room erupts into laughter.
Afterwards the students grow more restive. Shadows cross their faces. The logic of Sale’s argument seems unassailable-- but can there be a present where there seems so little to hope for in the future—the faces seem to muse. Nature, in the last analysis, is not cuddly and warm. It has its own logic that even nature-lovers must beware. Who will side for nature’s adamantine laws instead of an escape to Mars, where a wiser, more ecologic human adventure could perhaps begin again? Who doesn’t nurse the grandiosity of even the most spectacular failures of humankind-- when compared to the cold laws of evolution? Even the Apollo astronauts have admitted that you can never appreciate the beauty of the human faces in the local strip mall until you have lived on the moon. But Kirkpatrick Sale permits his audience no easy escape.
“Don’t you see any hope? I mean we are a country of laws. There is a Congress and a Supreme Court. Change can happen.” another student pleads.
Sale’s jaw drops. “A country of laws? What happened in the last election? The people made their views clear enough. They consider the Iraq War a fiasco. Have you seen anything change? Even the Pentagon recently predicted climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. They say European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. This will vastly surpass any threat from terrorism. They predict a world where conflict will be endemic and warfare will define human life. Where do you find the change? You are twenty—and it is possible for you to believe in electoral politics because you have not seen much of it. In poll after poll Americans say that the country is going in the wrong direction. In polls taken in Vermont 12% of the residents actually favor sucession from the United States.”
“Is such a possibility real?” someone asks.
“I think so. There are now secessionist movements in thirty-six states. Vermont was an independent republic before it joined the Union. If sucession were to occur peaceably on the basis of an overwhelming majority vote, and federal interests were compensated, I do not see the President being able to bomb Montpelier, Vermont into submission.”
Approaching a few students after the event they I find them shaking their heads. They don’t seem to have anything to say against the message or the messenger-- but something flint-like and abrupt is written over their faces. No, real change is coming, their faces, subsumed in silence, seem to speak. “Just you wait and see, just wait—” they finally say. Are the sons and daughters always born only by surpassing and defying their parents, or can civilization finally learn--somehow—to bypass Oedipus?
It’s odd how times change. In the old paradigm the parents rescued the young from the fire, and gave them the skills requisite for the wilderness. Then came the Sixties when children rebelled against the entire social order. Now comes the final phase-- in which the children of those rebels must, in an act of Hegelian inversion, put the entire climate of the smashed house in order. The generational rampage between those-- like the Republican Party-- who have now finished taking their revenge on the Sixties radicals’ supposed wrongs against ‘tradition’-- is grinding to its irrational halt. This leaves, to the side, their thought as yet unanswered-- that smaller minority of 'Neo-Luddites'-- ‘Rebels against the Future’ whose relationship to the Sixties was altogether more creative, quieter, quixotic.
When the wisdom of age has become the path of even more absolute rebellion, then the 'folly of youth' can only become an apologetics for history, that which urges a final dissolution of all categories into their opposites. "Liberals" will still spin straw into gold by finding the silver-lining in an irrational march of events occluded by the reactions they engender, while "conservatives" take refuge in the familiar pieties of church, state, family, community. This dialectic becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in which no view that seeks an escape from stereotype can draw a first breath free from Blake's "mental strife", free to perceive the simultaneous truth at each pole. But such a vision is only possible for a courageous men like Sale, those who are willing to stand by what their experience has taught them regardless of where the wind is momentarily blowing.
Yet if the best of the current generation were to join forces with these rebels —those who have remained consistent in their skepticism of the paradise awaiting us if we will merely put our entire fate into the hands of technology—then both generations might spark a new renaissance that might address the unanswerable losses and contradictions of history----that abyss James Joyce described as “The nightmare from which I am struggling to awake.”
Will Morgan
Will Morgan is writer and resident of Ithaca
willmorgan@hotmail.com
posted by Will Morgan @ 2:42 PM
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