Conclusion and Reflections 2004

       I finished the last chapter over 7 years ago in the summer of 1997. I had had a heart attack in Feb.1997 and was bed ridden for over a month and then resumed work on this with the desire to finish it soon. I had decided even before my heart attack that I was going to use this book as an experiment. I wanted to see if my thesis about power and knowledge as a form of social practice, which I had been studying and writing about since 1991, could be accepted by my professors, or rather not just accepted but understood. I had doubts that my particular way of seeing things was appropriate in the academic setting. When I began my thesis I had decided consciously that I would do my best to express the core of my thinking between the years 92-97, and if I put myself entirely into the effort and got a negative result, I did not belong in the university system. I did that, both in the Empire of the Intellect and in the various essays about Great Books, history and religion I wrote during these years. I also wrote a series of studies critical of and about Traditionalism between 1991 and 1999. These were all part of my Thesis. My way of thinking was independent of the university. I made these studies because I had to. My life required it. It was not just an academic exercise.
         I realized that my particular mode and way of approaching writing and knowledge, while scholarly, was not terribly sympathetic to the university structure.  I was questioning power after all. Certainly I was not the first to ever question this in the university. But my thesis committee met, with three professors, Lee Makela, Don Ramos and Jim Borchert asking me questions for a few hours. I was still sick, and weak form my heart attack. I could tell by their questions that they had not grasped much of what my book was about. They all said it was "original". Makela said that the whole last section on science, Hiroshima and atomic weapons, an area he has also studied, was "really fine". But the whole concept of knowledge/power went right over their heads. One of the professors said it was inappropriate to make the university itself, as well as my own experience in it, a subject of my study. Actually that is one of the things that is exciting about the book. It is in many ways a running commentary on my years in the university and a questioning of the value of this kind of education. There were various inane questions, such as one professor asking me if this paper was about showing off how much I knew, and another claiming the thesis was too monumental and another saying it has all be said before. One of them said it was too personal and another said it was not personal enough. One said it was too difficult and another that it was too dense. None of what was said showed any insight into what I wrote and why. None of the critical comments taught me anything useful. But over all I could see that my professors had not read it carefully and that in some respects it was beyond them.  By this time, I wanted to merely get through he exercise, aware that though they were giving me my degree, that I had failed the system in an essential way, and more importantly, the system had failed me. I thanked them for their efforts. I genuinely liked these men, after all. It was not their fault. It was a problem in the system in which they were forced to teach. I wrote a book outside the “canons” and rules of the university. I crossed disciplinary boundaries. I was writing both autobiography and history and was verging over into art, social science and ecology. Some of their criticism were valid, some were not. I could see they sensed the book had some merit. But no matter, the main thing was to get on with the academic game. They passed me and gave me my Master's degree. Handshakes all around. Warm Wishes for a good future. But I knew the game was over.
      In the end what had I done? I had used the university as a means of asking questions about the world  I lived in. I even questioned the university itself. I had of serious doubts about the university system and its purposes and outcomes.  I had too many doubt about its duplicitous relations to the business concept of hierarchy. I could not see myself spending the rest of my life in the university. I would only seek the university now if it was necessary for employment. My heart attack was very serious and I suspected I might not have much longer to live. I was longing for the natural world.  I had questioned what I needed to question. I was free of traditionalism and religion. I was free of systems of knowledge and power. My thesis pointed me toward my old loves of poetry and painting, and even before I finished my thesis I was back to painting and studying nature.  The following quote from page 30 above shows that I was thinking ahead of human rights and beginning to imagine what I would later call nature’s rights.  

Science need not be gotten rid of, but it certainly ought to be subsumed under human rights as defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and thereby  brought into accord with truly democratic and environmental laws in order to protect unprotected beings. Men and women are not separate from what they know and think. Changing the world begins with changing how one thinks of it and how one knows it.

 My concern was to try to tell the truth about my experiences, and I always thought of reading or study as a peculiar kind of experience.  My outlook and way of going about inquiry was much more that of a poet or artist that an academic. My experience in the university showed me, for instance, that history is often deformed by a notion of “balance”. Some scholar decides he is going to study a given subject and rather than place himself in the shoes of those who he studies, he creates an artificial notion of ‘balance” whereby all the differing accounts of an event are given artificially equal weight. This results in a false “objectivity”. The opinion of slave owners cannot be assessed in quite the same way as the opinions of slaves, for instance.
        In any case, my thesis was born first of my desire to question the great books and great religions. Certainly I was initially motivated in this by the desire to question some of the basic idea of the Traditionalists. I had accepted their philosophy for a few years and then had rejected it. I needed to reassess the idea of their being a “transcendent unity” of religions. But that was only the initial question. Soon I went far beyond traditionalism and saw the I need to question Christianity and other religions I had studied and lived in. I needed to reassess why I had gone so wrong as to give those years of my life to religion. BU then this led to the need to reassess some of the basic ideas behind the belief in western cultural supremacy: the roman empire, big business, science and their roles in oppression. This led me to question deeply some of the motives and ideological justifications for atrocities committed in western culture since 1492. 
     The logical conclusion to this book is not so much as to draw morals about how society should be structured in lieu of the failure of religion, capitalism and communism to uphold human rights. The logical result of this thesis was to began to seek the basis of human rights in nature. I began to apply the ideas of social history to the study of animals and nature. I began doing that right after my heart attack and continued doing it up until the present. The logical conclusion to my thesis was to abandon the university, at least for now, and to seek further into nature. I returned to nature, to painting, and poetry. I became very interested in a notion of citizen science, as it were. By that I mean a science that seeks evidence not in order to bolster some powerful corporation or state so it can make more money or gain power, but rather a science that seeks to inquire into nature as part of a concern with fairness and notions of justice. My concern with animals rights and nature's rights grew out of my love of nature, as well as my study of such authors as Thoreau, Chomsky and Neruda. I corresponded briefly with Chomsky while I was doing my Master's thesis. I also met him and Howard Zinn. I argued with Chomsky somewhat about science. But after some years of thinking about his replies to me I think he was right. Science is very important. But what Chomsky means by science and what corporate think tanks and Walls Street or Soviet commissars think of as science are to different things. For Chomsky, "science is tentative, exploratory, questioning, largely learned by doing." whereas "Big science" done by pharmaceutical companies or the Russian government is biased toward particular results involving profit or power.  One needs to distinguish between science done to serve states and corporations and science done to find out what is real and true. Chomsky was right to bring into question those  aspects of "Post-Modernism" and the hatred ot rational inquiry that it has sometimes propounded.  Chomksy writes that

The critique of "science" and "rationality" has many merits, which I haven't discussed. But as far as I can see, where valid and useful the critique is largely devoted to the perversion of the values of rational inquiry as they are "wrongly used" in a particular institutional setting.

        In other words, science is not to blame for all the horrible things done in its name. Chomsky claims that science ought to be pursued, partially by those who oppose powerful and unjust institutions, precisely because we need truth to oppose corrupt power.  Chomsky criticizes those on the left who have given up science as follows:

It strikes me as remarkable that their left counterparts today should seek to deprive oppressed people not only of the joys of understanding and insight, but also of tools of emancipation, informing us that the "project of the Enlightenment" is dead, that we must abandon the "illusions" of science and rationality a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use.

Chomsky is right here. To abandon science is to abandon one of the best tools we have to serve justice, human rights and nature's rights. It is true that I see Chomsky as limited in some ways, as we all are. He is not a guru, though sometimes he tries to be. His understanding of nature and animals is very limited. But he is right about the importance of science to the critique of systems of oppression and power.  I realize that this is a change from what is written in my thesis. But I have changed since 1997, when I finished it. I am not endorsing the sort of science that is done to harm others or to support rapacious human centeredness and corporate rule. i simply have come to accept the importance of direct study and observation, reasoning and testing against reality. Our world is the only world there is and I seek to understand and to love it.

       After I finished my Thesis in 1997 my spouse and I traveled to various National Parks and I began to study birds and flowers, landscapes and natural histories of animals. The conclusion to this book was that I abandoned university system, at least for the time being and made nature into my university. . But I retained much of what some of my professors had taught me. I retained a respect for social history, especially that taught to me by Jim Borchert, who was probably my favorite professor. I spent the next  years studying the natural world. In a way, the conclusion to the Empire of the Intellect is my next book. The next book is called Nature’s Rights.  Nature’s Rights compiles paintings, poems in essays in a celebratory exploration of animal rights and environmental philosophy. It begins where The Empire of the Intellect and Its Victims ends. Nature’s Rights continues the journey into "Heroes Wetland" and the individual stories and social histories of birds and animals.  Indeed, writing a social history of nature seems to me to be one of the most wonderful use of history that I can imagine. So the conclusion to my Master's thesis was that I continued my critique of knowledge systems as forms of power and ideology. But I moved this critique into the ways humans treat nature and animals. I began to study evolution and natural history more seriously and I moved more and more toward a socially responsible vision of science and nature as a locus of rights and fairness.

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