This whole argument rests on a fallacious idea of steady-state ecology. Read about ecological succession, biofilms, the great oxygenation event, eucalyptus (and other fire-adapted) trees, surplus killing in predator species, and the incredible abundance of parasites in the wild. Nature is far more ruthless than we are. It’s been around far longer and will continue long after we’re gone.
I never really get this argument - like, yeah life that isn't humans will 100% persist in some form, but I'm kind of attached to the species and configuration of ecosystems we currently have.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding - we could wipe out species until there's nothing left but that bacteria that eats radiation and still reassure ourselves that 'nature' still exists. But I don't think it's what these folks are talking about when they talk about ecology. Is it fallacious to argue for a society that coexists with the biosphere that supports it?
What I’m saying is: if we do things, we do them for our own reasons. We shape nature to our own advantage. We don’t speak for nature and we don’t have any say in what’s best for nature, only what’s best for us.
Lots of people try to shelter their arguments from criticism by appeals to nature and that’s fallacious. Cooperation evolved by natural selection but it isn’t any more natural than competition. Arguably, competition is the more fundamental force in nature.
So arguing that species of animals or plants have an intrinsic value and are worth preserving for their own sake is wrong? Or does it have to be couched in their value to humans, maintaining the biosphere that feeds us, air filtration, medicine, or aesthetic value or things like that? Does that apply to other people too? Intrinsic worth vs utility?
I don't think I can agree that we can't have any say about what is good for nature. A lot of people devote their whole lives to identifying systems and patterns in the species around us. They can track numbers, identify habitats, tell when something is thriving, declining, and, with some confidence, gone. Often they can identify why. All the fields of scientific study aside, it's pretty easy at least to identify things we do that are bad for other species. If I buy hundreds of gallons of herbicide and douse some land with it, I don't think the outcome to nature is going to be unknowable, and I think it'd be hard to argue it'll be beneficial. Seems like the inverse must be true - we can identify crucial habitats and protect them, identify the characteristics of good habitats and cultivate them on damaged lands to bring them back. This is testable stuff that's already being done in real life. People devote their lives to conserving habitats.
Sorry if I'm getting side tracked because this is something I'm somewhat involved in. Maybe this is a specific point about a nuance of philosophical discussions I don't know enough about, and not an argument that humans can do whatever they want to their surroundings because the consequences are somehow unknowable or unimportant.
My argument is about the way things are, not about the way they ought to be. People as a whole tend to say one thing but do another. I’m arguing for some brutal honesty in the way we look at things. Unfortunately, idealism far too often gets in the way of that. I place a lot of the blame at the feet of Disney and other entertainment giants who make their living anthropomorphizing animals and preying on people’s instincts (to protect children) to make money.
So with all that said, I challenge the people who claim to be acting for the benefit of nature. They’re imposing their own vision of what they believe is natural. Far too often they’re proven wrong.
I think the only way forward is to acknowledge our own existence as part of nature. Like the beavers and the ants and the termites, we remake environments in a manner that’s pleasing to us.
You want to work hard to save endangered species? That’s fine! Just admit that you’re doing it for your own satisfaction. It’s your interest and it makes you happy. We humans pick favourites. That’s the bottom line.
So I sometimes see the argument that humans are part of nature so anything we do is inherently natural when someone's arguing that you should be able to do whatever you want and it's all equivalent as long as it makes you happy. Like clearcutting forests and building walmarts or storing leaking barrels of chemical waste on your land is a human instinct and we're helpless to do otherwise.
I'm not saying that's what you believe, but I think this might be a chance for me to understand this worldview better, and maybe get better at talking to those folks.
To me, the fact that humans are part of nature doesn't seem like a gotcha or an out. I think it's a kind of pointless distinction. We're part of nature, yes, but that doesn't mean that producing Per- and Polyfluorinated Substances is natural, and even if you can slap the label 'natural' on it, that still doesn't mean it's a good idea.
We have a capability for reason and an ability to predict outcomes based on past evidence, which reaches way further out than those of other species. Environmentalists have gotten it wrong plenty of times before, but arguing that their efforts are equivalent to drilling for oil in a coral reef because they're both human behaviors seems disingenuous to me.
Most of the time, what ecologists want is for society to stop changing the habitats that are already there. You say "they’re imposing their own vision of what they believe is natural" but I find it really hard to believe you think there's no way to know if keeping a native forest is more 'natural' than building a shopping mall.
On top of that, most of what we're doing as a species is incredibly new and we're changing so much at once, everywhere. We're completely erasing some habitats, rerouting rivers, introducing entirely new materials/chemicals, changing the weather - when beavers change their habitats, it's still a fairly small local change, and the rest of the biosphere has had thousands of years to adapt and even use it, there are lots of other species ready to move into that changed environment. Maybe someday all the remaining species will be adapted to living in the margins around humanity. But we're going to lose a ton of species (and likely a lot of humans to starvation) on the way there.
So I guess I have two questions: Do you believe other species (anything, plant, animals, insect etc) have any intrinsic value? Do other humans have intrinsic value?
If humans have intrinsic value and nonhumans don't, what's the difference?
I’m not trying to justify anyone’s behaviour. My critique is aimed at those who claim they’re acting on behalf of nature. Who appointed them to be the guardians of nature? Who is holding them accountable for it?
It’s the hubris that bothers me.
No: I don’t believe species have intrinsic value. Species are an invented concept: a set of categories we apply arbitrarily to suit ourselves. What we call species appear and disappear all the time.
In the great oxygenation event Cyanobacteria poisoned the entire planet with oxygen, wiping out untold swathes of obligate anaerobic life. That’s a pretty big change! We have yet to match that.
This is Murray Bookchin's posthumous work that clearly defines his post-anarchist and post-Marxist period where he develops social ecology and libertarian municipalism. It holds up I think, but I agree with Ian McKay who said Bookchin's critiques of anarchism falls so flat that Bookchin's earlier writings during his anarchist period could be used to rebut his later post-anarchist period.
And the vegan movement, it is driven by the stance that we are not master of animals and their oppression is unjust and a huge driver of ecological destruction. While not many may conscious identify as vegan anarchists it is in the spirit.
I might be misunderstanding something, but I think the modern internet is a lot closer to being anarchist than the early internet, unless you're going back to the 1980s.
Today, anyone who can come up with the equivalent of a couple of cups of coffee a month can have their own domain name, email, and a web presence without being a master technologist.
The first domain name I acquired on behalf of a client in the 1990s required that I engage the services of the local ISP, pay US$200 annually to some outfit called Network Solutions, and make application by postal mail. The application had to include proof that we met the very rigidly enforced criteria for our TLD of choice.
Then we still had to have the relevant contract with the ISP for server space and email services, because we weren't actually permitted to run our own servers without a separate, very expensive contract.
Building the website meant hand coding HTML, something beyond the reach of most.
The client was paying the equivalent of a decent used car every year, not counting that portion of my time allocated to the endeavour.
When the .ca domain first became available, it was available only to the federal government and companies doing extensive cross-country business. If the organization was not national in scope, it had to be content with one of the provincial subdomains, or maybe even on a municipal sub-subdomain, like .saskatoon.sk.ca
I am talking about the governance of the whole thing. The IETF is a volunteer organization. Most of the protocols that fuel the whole thing are coming from its RFC, they are not enforced, purely voluntarily. We owe them principles like the net neutrality. I am saying "early internet" because I don't know if it is still like this but it very well may be. Are we lucky that these people believed in self-organization or was it doomed to happen this way, internet being too big of a project to be steered in a different fashion? We will probably never know.
You are talking about accessibility, which is an important aspect as well, but I would argue an orthogonal one: Google search is extremely accessible, it is far from being anarchist.
I see what you're getting at, and I mostly agree. Yes, the whole thing is still resting on the goodwill and good behaviour of the participants.
But I don't know that access is orthogonal to what you call governance in anarchistic systems. I think that balance of or limits to power requires ready access to all.
Ok, yes I agree, ease of access is important. I just mean that lowering the material barrier of entry is not enough to make a project anarchist in nature.
I dislike giving such examples because my interlocutor would argue that sure, these are shining examples of horizontalist success stories, but they're not a country. Countries have criminals and need to defend themselves... [insert typical statist justification here].
There is some merit in their counter-argument: mine is not an anti-statist argument but an anti-capitalist one. If they can at least agree that we don't need capitalism for production, I will agree that these examples do not prove that we can do without statism.
These examples also prove something that I find hugely interesting IMHO: there is a upper bound to the type of projects that can be handled by hierarchical structures. Some projects are too big and complex for a state or company and can only be done in an anarchist way. Microsoft once conceded that they could not compete with the number of coders on the linux kernel.
We don't exactly have criminals but we have bad actors. We find ways to manage them. From spam filtering to defederation. We are mostly law abiding people so we can't get much harsher than that. (Though conservatives seem to think "cancelling" is a fascist thing to do so I guess they would surely accept that such a punishment should be enough for an orderly society? /s)
Army-wise, that's a dangerous argument because it easily slides into defending other authoritarians but guerrilla warfare is considered about 10x more troops-effective than regular armies. It is far less hierarchical, hinges on local support, focuses on defense. Not 100% anarchist, but not a giant leap of imagination to get it there.
You make sense. Personally, open-source has played a huge role in shaping my worldview. Pointing it out, however, does not seem to convince everyone. Recall that the guy who came up with the term, Eric Raymond, is a right-"libertarian". On the other hand, Moxie Marlinspike is one our guys.
Don't care about the people (I heard weird things about Moxie too), care about the ideas and the organizations they spawn. One of the strengths of open source (that may very well come from a libertarian mindset) is that you don't need to agree with its (technically) anarcho-communist nature to participate in it. Just like you don't need to be an enthusiastic capitalist to engage in a wage job at a private company or to rent a place to live, despite both these things being very capitalist in nature.
Open-source and internet are two things that most people use daily. Android, libreoffice, vlc, firefox (or even chrome) are known by most people. Explaining that they come from a volunteer work (some developers were paid by their employers to participate but their employers' participation is voluntary) has been the start of several interesting discussion on my side.
International research is also an interesting one: who is the boss of international research? Who decides the priority in e.g. machine learning research? COVID also gave a recent down-to-earth example (assuming you are not talking with conspiracy theorists) of how medical research organizes globally pretty well without the need for a hierarchy.
We are presuming that we care about people though, aren't we? The conversation started when you said that you give open-source as an example of anarchist free organization. This implies that you are giving it as an example to a person to convince them of the viability of anarchism, no?
You do not need to convince me of the viability of anarchism through examples like open-source or medicine. I am on this sublemmy because I already agree. We are discussing how to transmit our message to outsiders.
Moxie is... an interesting character (ever seen an anarchist become a CEO?) but he agrees (or at least agreed) with the ideas of anarchism. Actual anarchism, not "anarcho"-capitalism.
Ah sorry, I meant to not care about the person who authored/put forward some ideas, like Raymond or Marlinspike. Of course we care about convincing people!
I think I worded myself poorly. I was not giving Marlinespike and Raymond as examples to make a point about how open-source development is structured, but rather that it does not necessarily push you towards a particular political viewpoint (in contrast to you suggesting that it can be used to convince people of anarchism).
In truth, the only thing I can say about how OS influences people is that it tends to lead away from authoritarianism (and even that comes with caveats and exceptions, like Lemmy's very own Dessalines).
Yes, participating in it does not necessarily align one consciously with anarchist ideals, just like participating in a private company does not necessarily make someone an enthusiastic capitalist, but the fact that so many people contribute or use open source allows us to use it as a practical example of the type of collaboration that we think should become the norm in an ideal society.
The Conquest of Bread — Peter Kropotkin (1892): the ideas hold up, but the examples are quite dated.
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution — Peter Kropotkin (1891): was very influential over modern sociology, but of course newer research on this subject exists.
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