Doubt

The meteorologists predicted today's weather yesterday, with reasonable accuracy, and with a respectable degree of probability.

But predictions of longer and more devastating fire seasons may be a) incorrect (the further ahead the future, the more determinants there are in play, and the less assurance that predictions will be accurate; prediction becomes statistical -- rather than the accuracy of predicting a cool change around 4.00pm). Similarly the larger the scale, the more abstract the forces: not the causality of a weather system approaching from the SE at 5..00pm but combinations of dipole, el Ninõ, ocean surface temperatures . . . Counting in anthropogenic forces including carbon and greenhouse gases, water extraction etc no longer clearly causal, opening the field for doubt.

In a previous note I worked with truth's antonyms as lies, fictions and fantasies, using the distinction that lies and fictions are not believed but truths and fantasies are. Now we need to address doubt. and to distinguish it from systematic (Cartesian) doubt

Systematic doubt, historically the basis for the Western critical tradition, has been a tool for critical theory versus scientism and common sense. But today it is embraced in the new tactics of populist neo-nationalism (with which neo-liberalism clothes itself in the era of its triumph, which is also the era of the crisis of US hegemony. Every nation positions itself urgently to make the most of the rise of China (and beyond that of India, and somewhere down the line of Turkey) as well as in relation to its reluctant and often rebellious citizenry (and of course against its traditional foes, indigenous and migrant). Preliminary distinctions:

DOUBT 1 is a fortified, strategic position that refuses truth by characterising it as merely one belief among many in the 'marketplace of ideas' - ie a pro-position that all truths are equal.

DOUBT 2 is a critical move in the process of argument, a transitional stage, a recognition of the fundamentally antagonistic relation between truths. Any truth asserts itself as the only one.This is also the case with highly specific truths (it will rain at 4.00pm tomorrow; it is raining now), where the particular stands over against the universal. Doubt 2, critical doubt, asserts the irreducible difference between truths.

Anthropos in the Anthropocene

Talk recorded yesterday for A Clockwork Green: Ecomedia in the Anthropocene Nearly Carbon Neutral Symposium, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and the University of California, Santa Barbara June 2018

Conference details and videos will be hosted are at The Environmental Humanities Center at UCSB

This video runs 24 minutes. It contains bird calls and rural machinery sounds.

For Val Plumwood

God had already loaded the dice in Eden, first by giving Adam dominion over the beasts, and then by demonstrating his own dominion through the interdiction against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It was not only that God established Adam as regent over the animals, or that he placed Eve in the subordinate role, but that Adam had the power to name the animals, while she was the one who could speak to them. The fall from primal paradise was already assured by the design of paradise itself.