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Close Encounter
Bumped into David Duchovny, almost literally, this morning when I ran across the road and between two trailers that were blocking the road by St Mark’s Church. Almost ran into some guy, dodged, looked up and it was the X-Man himself. Lounging around. I guess they must be filming Trust the Man, apparently it’s shooting right now as a romantic comedy about a couple in New York, or something equally tedious. Sounds riveting. It’s weird seeing someone in the flesh where you’ve only ever seen them as pixels before. There’s a definite visceral sensation of the mind’s image derived from a 2-dimensional projection morphing or being mapped onto a memory derived from a 3-d dimensional stereoscopic vision process. There should be a word for this sensation that’s different from conventional recognition.
He is a lot more wrinkly than on the screen, but definitely sickeningly good looking. And a lot taller than I’d expected. On screen he looks kind of short.
Bush Back
With King Bush confirmed for a second reign, I expect that the impending assault on Fallujah, long delayed and postponed, will now get a green light. It was patently obvious that he wanted to delay the spectacle of several hundred US troops and several thousand Iraqis being slaughtered until after the elections. But there isn’t much time left before January, when the Iraqi elections are apparently scheduled to occur…
Easily Alienable Rights
I’ve been thinking a lot about “liberal democracy” lately, especially when I read a long article lauding the achievements of “The Enlightenment”.
I take a more cynical view of the Enlightment ideology vs practice. I think a lot of the “progress” in defining “universal” human rights (which turned out to be a lot less universal in practice) during the Enlightenment was motivated by the economic substructure. The increasingly voracious appetitite for permanent enslaved labour led to an encroaching industrialisation of the denial of human rights for specified segments of humanity under the control of the European powers.
Slavery, which began the millenium in both Europe and the Middle East as a social state more akin to indentured labour, acquired within Europe and European colonial possessions an increasingly permanent aspect. The progressive intensification of slavery and the definition of slaves and their offspring as permanently property with no prospect of manumission did not exist to the same degree within the Middle East.
As the “Enlightenment” progressed, the public discourse of human rights was increasingly a bipolar dialogue between the ideology of absolute slavery and absolute “freedom”. Within pre-modern societies it’s easy to elide over the presence of absence of human rights because everyone is basically in the same boat and rights, such as they are, are guaranteed by social compact. But if your society becomes increasingly stratified and slavery codified, then stark differences between social classes are produced and reproduced by the culture, mainly through a process of relational construction.
Basically, people (subconsciously) looked at the increasingly miserable state of the slaves and said “Why of course all of *us* have inalienable rights!”. It was a defensive reaction, a pre-emptive declaration against the possibility of indenture!
We’re probably lucky that the industrial revolution came along and provided ready sources of non-human-derived energy. I think it’s no coincidence that the first major European Power to abolish slavery was the British Empire, which was also the first and most rapidly industrialising pseudo-modern economy. The Empire didn’t *need* so many slaves any more, and of course aggressively curtailing the use of slaves by other nations (as the Royal Navy did for a couple of generations) decreased competiting nations’ productivity and sources of energy capital.
We’re lucky that fossil fuels came along to completely replace the demand for human labour capital. I wonder what will happen in a couple of centuries when we run out?
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