Thursday, April 16, 2009

metaphormosis

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3 comments:

  1. DillonApril 19, 2009 at 6:06 PM

    To put it bluntly, this metaphor of Elisabet Sahtouris is inherently racist and is yet another example of new age bullshit designed to give us the illusion of making change while giving us an excuse not to make change, not to act decisively to protect the earth, and not to stop this culture from killing the planet.

    Sahtouris’s work, according to her website, “shows the relevance of biological systems [sic] to organizational design in business, government and global trade.” She gives such topics as, Why biology is good for business; How organic models can meet corporate needs; How quality of life and profits can improve together; and The Internet: self-organizing system and key to human evolution. She, like William McDonough (who designs eco-groovy headquarters for Nike, plants native grasses on truck factories, etc.), attempts to naturalize industrialism. One can see why both New Agers and corporate sponsors would nuzzle up to her.

    Sahtouris insists, as do so many New Agers and Green Businesspeople, that, “The Globalization of humanity is a natural, biological, evolutionary process.” (Elisabet Sahtouris “ELISABET SAHTOURIS BIOS and PRESS PHOTOS,” http://www.sahtouris.com/INFO/) Once again, she’s trying to naturalize—justify—this culture’s destructive activities. Further, this statement of course repeats the racist and imperialist notion of cultural maturation leading inevitably to this culture’s transformation into some greater state. This is outside ecological reality and ignores what is most central to every sustainable culture: place. Two impolite words for “globalization” are genocide and ecocide in that globalization is by definition a singular society across the entire world, and is by definition not based on place (which means it will never be sustainable).

    Capitalism—and more broadly industrial civilization—is based on globalization. I have never heard an indigenous person endorse or support globalization. In fact, all I ever hear from indigenous peoples about globalization is deep (and often violent) opposition.
    Now to the allegory. As Sahtouris says, “If you see the old system as a caterpillar crunching it's way through the eco-system, eating up to three hundred times its weight in a single day, bloating itself until it just can't function anymore, and then going to sleep with its skin hardening into a chrysalis. What happens in its body is that little imaginal disks (as they're called by biologists) begin to appear in the body of the caterpillar and its immune system attacks them. But they keep coming up stronger and they start to link with each other. As they connect, as they link with each other, they mature into fully-fledged cells and more and more of them aggregate until the immune system of the caterpillar just can't function any more. At that point the body of the caterpillar melts into a nutritive soup that can feed the butterfly.
    “I love this metaphor because it shows us why, first of all, we who want to change the world are co-existing with the old system for a while and why there's no point in attacking the old system because you know the caterpillar is unsustainable so it's going to die. What we have to focus on is “can we build a viable butterfly?” (http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Articles/AfterDarwin.html)
    So we finally get to the point, which is the same point these people make every time: “There’s no point attacking the old system.” Anything, anything, to justify not stopping this system. Anything, anything, to keep people from actually fighting back to defend those they love. Anything, anything, to justify cowardice.

    There’s really nothing new here: it’s nothing more than a New Age retelling of the same old Christian rapture story: things suck now, but if you are a good person and don’t fight back, if you’re Christian enough, if you accept what this culture does to you and the planet (which after all is natural since caterpillars are so voracious), then someday Jesus—or in this version the Great Butterfly—will magically appear and make things all better.

    Further, as I mentioned before, this metaphor of the caterpillar and the butterfly is extraordinarily racist, in that it states explicitly that this culture’s consumption of the planet is natural. The metaphor’s point is the notion that this destructiveness is the necessary prelude to a transformation to some seemingly better state—this implies that traditional indigenous peoples are stuck in some primitive or immature caterpillar phase. I would be surprised that people don’t see the obvious ethnocentrism and racism of this progressive perspective, but I’m not because people will do anything, say anything, to avoid looking at the fact that this culture is killing the planet, killing all who are wild and free, including indigenous humans.

    I apologize if this was a bit rantish, but I needed to get this off my chest. I just come into contact with this new age stuff not to get at least a bit annoyed.

    -Dillon

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  2. ScotApril 20, 2009 at 8:02 AM

    yeah! I love it! Thanks
    s

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  3. ScotApril 20, 2009 at 8:02 AM

    I will clarify, i love what your saying
    s

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