Ulrich Beck on Risk Society, Individualization, and the Future of Jobs

Ulrich Beck quotes:

Risk Society
Modern society presupposes side effects that are spatially, temporally, and socially bounded. Without that condition, it can't function. Only against this background, when it was assumed that the side effects of modernization would always somehow be compensated for, could faith in progress become popular and widespread.

In is a general, institutional principle: in any case where a clear chain of causality cannot be demonstrated, there is therefore no risk. When the affected people take their case to the scientists, they find themselves talking to a group whose most identity-defining belief is that the canons of causal evidence and inference must always be strictly adhered to. When these criteria can't be satisfied, scientists can be depended upon to explain away any new risk as a mere fantasy without giving it any further consideration.

Individualization
Class analysis has always been in part an attempt to conjure up class solidarity, to postulate the collective subject as a historical subject, and then to build a political program around it. But as a utopia, and as a political program, class leads to a picture of society that is exactly the opposite of individualized society, and to politics that are exactly the opposite of political individualism. If you ask what are the new ideas and political strategies that class analysis can generate for the present situation, all you get is antiquated answers or total hopelessness.

Class concepts, no matter how subtle, simply can't capture the existing complexity of radically unequal living situations, either within nationstate societies or between them. What they do instead is deceive us with a false simplicity. The frame of reference has changed. Our model of class struggle and class society presumes the nationstate. The old marxist argument that the worker knows no nation has today been turned on its head. It is capital's activists, those who have made globalization their profession, who don't have any fatherland, while the workers and their unions call on "their" governments for aid... Marxists use class analysis in part as a means of finessing their way around the central problem facing us, the question of what we can find that can successfully serve as the basis of long-term, progressive solidarity.

Labor
Labor is a means by which the structure of power is internalized through everyday routines, each of which involves the positing of meaning and the submission to control. When every desire to build a life, an identity, an existence, is forced to be mediated through the labor market, what results is one of the subtlest and most refined systems ever invented for getting people to conform to the societal structure of power. People adapt themselves. They fit in. This self-activated conformity to rule constitutes the core of labor society. It transforms the control of rulers into self-control. Individuals integrate themselves into the system of labor, they makes themselves functional. The net of exploitation that binds them is experienced as self-exploitation, as drive, as something to be proud of.

The voluntarily unemployed say: Screw That. We are using unemployment compensation as a foundation to explore new forms of existence. We are the pioneers of a post-labor society. We are searching out activities that interest us, that we enjoy. We want a life where we an switch from one activity to another, because variety and change in themselves make all activities more enjoyable. We don't need the control claims of labor society to organize ourselves.

Paid labor has a monopoly on meaning (that is, for work to be considered significant, it seems it has to be paid for) and it has a monopoly on the means of existence. But labor society and its totalizing claims are really a very recent phenomenon. For most of history there was a wealth of alternatives. There still are. But these other activities are always practiced in tandem with labor and are often more necessary, though less visible. They form its necessary background, without which society could not exist. Most of these activities seem to share two characteristics. They have a strong emphasis on self-initiative; and they are activities in which the ends and products are transparent to the people doing it.

This necessarily raises a question. If this system is beginning to dissolve, and if, in many ways, we want it to dissolve, then how can we create an alternative milieu in which individuals who have been fragmented and atomized can be socialized? Where they can experience something like society, and internalize the values of society?

Bruno Latour

I've been reading a lot of Bruno Latour, the French sociologist and philosopher of science. His book, We Have Never Been Modern contains what may be the best review of another awesome book, Leviathan and the Air Pump, by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. Latour reconceptualizes their work as showing the invention of separate spaces for scientific versus political discourse, not just the clash between the two realms. Latour goes on to propose a three-category conceptual framework for everything: natural, social, and textural.

In the Prince and the Wolf, Latour out-argues a professional philosopher by refusing to believe in the necessity of a single viewpoint. Instead, he argues in favor of 'Occasionalism' which finds its philosophy in each new moment.

Do We All Have an Equal Chance for Health?

Unnatural Causes, a PBS documentary, asks the pointed question "Is Inequality Making Us Sick" and answers strongly affirmative. According to information presented in the video series, poverty is correlated with disease, more so than any other socioeconomic variable. This correlation is more than the obvious fact that (in the US at least) you have to have money to see a doctor. The series argues convincingly that there may be a causative factor in poverty that predisposes people to illness, weakened immune systems, increased heart disease, and cancer: increased stress. While our society often thinks of 9-5 businessmen as stressed out, the cortisol levels of the on-call janitors, cooks, and welfare recipients tests out as significantly higher.

Cortisol has been shown by numerous scientific studies to lead to disease. However, the ability to manage and control our circumstances may be the actual barometer of cortisol levels in humans. If that is true, then it will take more than just increased wealth and decreased stress to bring healthier outcomes to the majority of Americans. They will have to have a feeling of control over their lives, too. Furthermore, correlation does not prove causation: poverty need not necessarily be stressful, so poverty need not necessarily lead to poor health. However, the sociologists interviewed in the series may not be concerned with such nit-picking as long as the overwhelming correlation holds.

Inequality and Wealth

The unlinking of Top 1% income from all those below them is simultaneous of another trend which is hard to measure, and often overlooked: increasingly, health and human hapiness have stopped tracking GDP and wealth. Correlation, or causation? Would greater equality lead to higher standard of living? Why? In the 1960's President Kennedy stated that a "rising tide would lift all boats," which was generally true, but something changed in the early 1980's.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/14/income-inequality-is-at-a_n_259516.html

Sustaining Lives through Organic Farming

Association for India's Development, Columbus, along with the EARTH Center and Students for Food Sovereignty welcomes AID Fellow and organic farming expert, Ms. Revathi.

Revathi has worked with more than 32,000 farmers in the organic movement in Tamil Nadu and her work has been recognized by the governments of India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. She has hands-on knowledge in the importance of rejuvenating the soil using a holistic approach towards soil restoration, seed selection techniques, methods to create organic pest repellent and herbicides. She described the use of Sesbania ("dhaincha") to reclaim soils made saline by the tsunami as well as conventional agriculture.

More info.

The Canary in the Coal Mine

Our lab's colony of moths is dying...horrible mutations where we all work...there are so many possible sources its impossible to test for. Maybe our society is doomed, everything wrong with it, the chortling moans of ever-increasing numbers of mentally retarded, the true voice of our generation. Nothing is right.

We've only managed to show that we can satisfy artificially manufactured desires, replacing traditional sustainable natural solutions with inferior glitzy saccharine placebos. TV for sunsets, Chain restaurant fast food for raw local slow produce. Our values are wrong: slow and quiet and uneducated are not bad...perhaps even scientific progress, the ratchet that keeps us one step ahead of crowding-induced pestilence and destitution, is misguided: Progress destroys as much knowledge as it creates. Even as we fill up the libraries of the world with new facts, the old ways of knowing become increasingly remote, fragmentary, incoherent. Just as all the movies on VHS are now lost to those of us with only DVD players, the myths and legends that made us more than animals cannot be seen in the blue flickering light of the TV screen.

I question everything, now. Astigmatism, near sightedness, orthodontic braces, "vestigial organs"...we are changing our biology and the end will not be cataclysmic but gradual decline; lowered fertility, increased birth defects, centralized stagnant control. Our schools are factories and our factories and offices and living-places are nothing but slave labor camps that strip us, divide us, leave us homeless.

It is easy to imagine the past as primitive and dirty: the myth of linear evolution (rather than cyclic). It is easy to imagine that we can "help" the oppressed and the poor in the third world. But I look around me and see that the worst are full of passionate 24-7 intensity , believing if not in Heaven than in some consumerist ultimate utopia where entitlement and legitimacy are measured in cars and real estate. Meanwhile the best lack all conviction, while away their hours "looking for answers" in books or in masochistic exercise, walk with slumped shoulders and twisted mouths, wanting to believe in something but to honest to give up that final allegiance to our sadistic broken society. Who are our heroes now?

Stressed? The constant fight or flight response to this horrible mess: to run away (to the hills?) or stand our ground even as the gastric juices of this horrible Leviathan swirl around us? If intelligence is the ability to adapt, isn't the only smart choice to pop antidepressants and social anxiety pills until we make ourselves fit, like Charlie Chaplin, into the gears and cogs of "productive society"? If the only things I can do that are of value to society (i.e. will earn me money) also dehumanize me, is the cost vs benefit worth it? Are commitment and loyalty and honesty good if they serve a sick end? Is it smart to volunteer to be the canary in the gold mine?