And recognizing ever and anon
The breeze of Nature stirring in his soul.

The breeze of Nature no longer shakes dewdrops from out eyes, at least so readily, but Dennis is more alive than Ducati to that which is alive. What men mean nowadays by ‘art’ it would be hard to say. Even Dennis said that the Etruscans never approached the pure, the sublime, the perfect beauty which Flaxman reached. Today, this makes us laugh: the Greekified illustrator of Pope’s Homer! But the same instinct lies at the back of our idea of ‘art’ still. Art is still to us something which has been well cooked—like a plate of spaghetti. An ear of wheat is not yet ‘art’. Wait, wait till it has been turned into pure, into perfect macaroni.

D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places

Pickton threatened the autonomy of the state by using physical violence without permission, which is why he is being prosecuted by the state rather than by a lawyer working for the women. Considering the Crown symbolism, in fact, the women have very little to do with this trial whatsoever.

The dubious arrangement of state-funded legal representation in the BC Missing Women Commission of Inquiry is a nice illustration of this fact. As noted by The Dominion:

The provincial and federal governments are providing funding for the one lawyer for the Attorney General of BC, three lawyers for the Department of Justice Canada (RCMP), nine lawyers for the commission counsel, two lawyers for the Vancouver Police Department, one lawyer for Rossmo (former VPD), two lawyers for the Criminal Justice Branch (prosecutors), and one lawyer for the Vancouver Police Union—19 legal representatives in total for the justice system representatives.

One lawyer is provided to represent a fraction [ten] of the families of the missing and murdered women represented at the commission; no funding will be made available to the Aboriginal, sex-trade and women’s groups—many of which knew the women intimately.

Weber says, “If the state is to exist, the dominated must obey the authority claimed by the powers that be.” A more equitable distribution of power, one in which regular civilians are permitted to criticize on a level playing field the application of state autonomy, is evidently perceived as a massive threat.

No, the problem I have with Salatin’s views on agriculture have nothing to do with the agriculture itself, but rather on the way he sees libertarianism as the solution to the global deck of cards that is the modern industrial food system. Like a lot of rural types, Salatin’s libertarianism comes from his personal experiences and the accumulated wisdom of his rural heritage. On the personal experience side of the coin, his particular frustrations have arisen from those points where the implementation of his agricultural principles has come up against government regulations that are designed to regulate gigantic corporate feedlots rather than small, decentralized farming communities. His desire to process and sell his own beef, to cite only one example, has been kaiboshed by the regulations regarding the slaughter of food animals. Because his agricultural model works so well, every time he comes up against a regulation that prevents him from implementing it as fully as he would like, he understandably becomes somewhat more soured on the idea of centralized government—the government, it seems to him, is not only complicit in the perpetuation of the military-industrial approach to agriculture, but it is also one of the major forces impeding small farmers’ attempts to put into practice alternatives that are more sustainable, less polluting, less dependent on fossil fuels, more environmentally friendly, and more delicious than the mainstream approach.

To the maximum extent possible, Salatin and his family have opted out of the mainstream approach. From an agricultural perspective, they hardly have any reliance on external inputs like seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, and from a personal perspective, a huge proportion of the food they consume on the farm, not to mention the buildings and machinery, are produced or manufactured right there on their property. This ideal of self-sufficiency is a cornerstone of libertarianism, and it’s no surprise that rural types, who have a firsthand perspective on the production of sustenance from the land, are more inclined to libertarianism. (A person from the city might have a harder time imagining being self-sufficient, if they’ve spent years and years picking up plastic-wrapped chicken breasts from the local Walmart Supercentre.)

When questioned by Pollan about the possibility of this small, local, polyculture-based farming system eventually overtaking the military-industrial approach, he indicates his belief that ”all we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse”—dispensing with the government altogether, I suppose, much like his own family has done to the maximum extent possible. In fact, he believes that the process of mass opt-outs has already begun, as evidenced by things like the increase in the number of farmer’s markets, the rise of metropolitan buying clubs, and the growth in popularity of “artisanal” approaches to production among, say, readers of Mother Earth News. What he seems to forget is that the ideals embodied in the Whole Earth Catalogue in the sixties—a similar attempt at opting out of the  military-industrial mainstream—had as good a chance of ensnaring the mainstream of America then, and look how that turned out. (In fact, read The Omnivore’s Dilemma to see how that turned out.) At least back then, the movement had a convincing veneer of soul—farmers markets are also increasing in popularity here in Vancouver, but it probably has more to do with people opting in to our thriving economy of guilt-free, greenest-city-in-the-world^TM goods than it does with a popular desire for a new form of social and economic organization. Indeed, this is the city where the ex-president of Happy Planet juices—”a company with soul”—went on to become God’s gift to Canada’s most gentrification-happy property developers.

In Salatin’s case, though, it appears that one of the major problems with his kind of libertarianism is that by opting out to such a degree, he apparently ran the risk of losing touch with the realities of the rest of the world. It’s only because he has opted out so vehemently, in other words, that he can take this perspective on the future of agriculture. (“There were plenty of books in the [Salatins's] house,” Pollan writes, “but, aside from the Staunton daily newspaper, which devoted more space to local car crashes than the war in Iraq, little media (and no television) penetrated the Salatin household.”) From the perspective of someone living in the city, such as myself, it’s hard to see Salatin’s viewpoint as anything other than hopelessly utopian—especially as more and more people flock to cities all over the world. By opting out to such a degre, Salatin is privy almost exclusively to the negative aspects of government—the overbearing regulations, the complicity with the industrial economy, the centralization—or, at least, the aspects of government that he is privy to are grossly out of proportion.

I would never try to argue that the government’s regulatory systems are perfect, or even that they’re significantly better than mediocre, but I do see these regulations as one of the few things that are (barely) keeping the industrial system from burgeoning right out of control. The regulations may inhibit some of Salatin’s activities, because of their narrow scope or other flaws, but they also regulate the activities of a lot of massive organizations, much more massive than his, that have the potential to cause a great deal more harm than they’re already causing. Think about what BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and ChevronTexaco want to do in the National Arctic Wildlife Refuge, for instance, but can’t because of government regulations.

This is what leads me to believe that rural-style libertarianism is essentially a selfish political philosophy. It’s a philosophy characterized by willing ignorance. You don’t like what goes on in the cities and the industries, so you just choose to ignore it altogether, to leave it out of the equation when you’re thinking about how to make things better.

What strikes me as particularly bizarre about someone like Salatin disparaging the role of government in inhibiting his freedoms is that the same rhetoric is routinely proffered by people like Charles and David Koch. When he ran for vice-president of the Libertarian Party in 1980, David Koch ran on a platform of intense deregulation, including the outright elimination of regulatory bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and the National Labour Relations Board (not to mention the public school system—the Salatins have opted out of that too). The reasons for this aren’t difficult to figure out—if companies like Koch Industries and Cargill don’t have to worry about environmental, health, labour, or trade regulations, then they can make a lot more money by cutting wages, abrogating decent working conditions, dumping waste into creeks, drilling for oil in Canyonlands National Park, doing away with sanitation measures and safety equipment, firing people indiscriminately, lying to consumers about what’s in their products, and so on. These are all things that companies want to do right now, and by and large the only thing stopping them is government regulations. It’s certainly not scruples and good conscience. As John Ralston Saul observes in The Collapse of Globalism, it has been shown time and again since the beginning of the industrial revolution that “market leaders, if left to themselves, would, on average, act badly,” largely because market leaders tend to prioritize money making over everything else.

This view, at least in relation to the hippie generation, is shared by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in The Rebel Sell:

The hippie counterculture shared many of the individualistic and libertarian ideas that have always made neoliberalism and free-market ideology such a powerful force on the right wing of the American political spectrum.

Aspects of Heath and Potter’s book are compromised by their tendency to overgeneralize and equivocate, but I do think that Salatin’s case serves as an apt illustration of their thesis that people tend to get caught up in utopian ideas about social reformation to such a degree that they overlook, even as temporary measures, shorter-term, practical reforms that can be implemented right away to make things better than they are now. “After the holocaust,” argue Heath and Potter,

the left began to distrust many of the basic building blocks of social organization, such as social norms, . . . laws and bureaucratic forms of organization . . . . As a result, the left has found itself mired in insuperable collective action problems, and unwilling to use some of the basic organizational methods that all human beings must employ in order to overcome these difficulties. The preference for individual consumer activism in response to environmental degredation, rather than state regulation of externalities, provides the most clear-cut example.

Whereas Salatin’s model of agriculture is right on—there’s no question about that—his belief that it’s going to spontaneously catch on and eventually overtake industrial agriculture is hopelessly naive. And the salient point here is that by opting out of mainstream society, he has entitled himself to take this viewpoint. He’s like Heath and Potter’s survivalist living on a compound in Montana with a generator and a shotgun—he may have it figured out for himself, but his political philosophy really only extends to the boundaries of his property. This is the paradox of libertarianism: Salatin’s approach to ecological sustainability in agriculture is spot on, yet he ends up supporting policies—like deregulation—that have the potential to destroy the very thing he’s fighting so hard to protect. A system of smart and effective regulations has the potential to do vastly more good right now than Salatin’s approach does, and if an agricultural utopia comes next, then that’s a bonus.

(Disclaimer: Everything I’ve said about Salatin is based on Pollan’s book, and I recognize that the book may not be a complete characterization of Salatin’s philosophy. Again, I’m not criticizing Salatin’s farming practices, just his political philosophy.)

The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris.

Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape, is a now-elderly English zoologist-turned-anthropologist (and later -turned-surrealist-painter), who apparently became concerned about the rapidly escalating rates of human population growth and decided to do something about it in the form of a zoologist’s take on the human animal. An odd choice of action for someone concerned about population growth, perhaps, but although his reasoning is convoluted, is is extant nonetheless: he believes that it’s our ignorance of our limitations as animals that leads to our substituting sappy humanistic sentiment for good ecological or evolutionary sense. “There is no hope of shrugging off the accumulated genetic legacy of [man's] whole evolutionary past,” he argues, and man “would be a far less worried and more fulfilled animal if only he would face up to this fact.”

“Ladies love my fleshy earlobes.”

Of course, the book is couched at first as more of an expression of the ecstacy of scientific exploration, and it’s not until the end of the book that Morris admits the political nature of his motivation:

Sooner or later we shall go, and make way for something else. If it is to be later rather than sooner, then we must take a long, hard look at ourselves as biological specimens and gain some understanding of our limitations. This is why I have written this book, and why I have deliberately insulted us by referring to use as naked apes, rather than by the more usual name we use for ourselves.

This insult was received largely as he intended; the book received a lot of criticism, enough that dust jackets of subsequent editions hailed the book as a “controversial classic.” Morris posited that our simian heritage is frequently a source of embarassment, and there’s little doubt that in conceiving of the book the way he did, he was aiming to generate some bad publicity for himself (which is to say, good publicity) by hitting Homo sapiens below the belt. Russell H. Tuttle, of the University of Chicago, said of the “unfortunately chosen” title:

Morris states on page 15 that “At this point and without further investigation, it is justifiable to name this species (viz. man) the ‘naked ape.’” One suspects that “further investigation” stopped shortly after it was realized that “the naked ape” would make a catchy title for the book.

Some humanists chomped on this bait as expected. George Gaylord Simpson, in reviewing the book for the New York Times, opined that “the overt intention of treating man as a zoological species or a biological specimen is not only unobjectionable but is also admirable,” yet he ultimately objects to the book because of his conviction that “man is not an ape, not by far.”

Actually man is an ape, and Morris was right in trying to pull some of the wool away from our eyes. Next time you scratch an itch, think about how that reflex helps to keep bugs from crawling on your skin, and realize how clumsy an animal you really are. The problem isn’t that Morris treats humans as apes, it’s that his approach to doing so is predominantly bad biology; large swaths of the book read like nothing more than drawn-out, rambling hypotheses, with little in the way of evidence. If such and such is the case about humans today, he’ll say, then perhaps so and so is the explanation. Hypotheses are fun to think about, but they’re hardly science unless they’re followed by experimental verification. In the cases where he does draw on existing research, his conclusions are mostly audacious and his generalizations are indefensible.

Morris’s goal, as stated, is clear—to elucidate our biological limitations. Yet throughout the book, he tends to vacillate between knocking humans down from their “grandiose ideas and . . . lofty self-conceits” and lifting them up as prototypes of evolutionary success. At times, in exchange for a theological anthropocentric view, Morris substitutes fitness as a measure of a creature’s rank on the Great Chain of Being. This latter tendency is inherent in Morris’s teleological account of evolution—many of his hypotheses are posited as though certain adaptations were devised as solutions to some kind of problem. Thus, he writes things like, “As the battle was to be won by brain rather than brawn, some kind of dramatic evolutionary step had to be taken to greatly increase his brain power.” Or, “The males had to be sure that their females were going to be faithful to them when they left them alone to go hunting. So the females had to develop a pairing tendency.” This isn’t actually how evolution works; see Wikipedia for details.

Unfortunately, this misunderstanding leads him to imply in a lot of cases that certain creatures are more highly evolved than others. Perhaps the clearest manifestation of this mistaken view of evolution, and the aspect of the book that’s most worthy of criticism, is in Morris’s ranking of human cultures in terms of evolutionary fitness. Most of Morris’s hypothesizing is derived from research conducted on whiteys from Western Europe and North America:

Most of the detailed information we have available stems from a number of painstaking studies carried out in recent years in North America and based largely on that culture. Fortunately it is biologically a very large and successful culture and can, without undue fear of distortion, be taken as representative of the modern naked ape.

Note the appeal to biological success: white people are numerous and powerful, and therefore they are the purest manifestation of the naked ape’s evolutionary goals. Nevermind that when the book was written, North Americans constituted just 220 million out of 3.5 billion people on earth. Morris justifies this leap of faith by characterizing other, non-white cultures as backward failures:

The earlier anthropologists rushed off to all kinds of unlikely corners of the world in order to unravel the basic truth about our nature, scattering to remote cultural backwaters so atypical and unsuccessful that they are nearly extinct . . . . The work done by these investigators was, of course, extremely interesting and most valuable in showing us what can happen when a group of naked apes becomes side-tracked into a cultural blind alley . . . . The simple tribal groups that are living today are not primitive, they are stultified.

And later:

Only if a culture becomes too rigid as a result of its slavery to imitative repitition, or too daring and rashly exploratory, will it flounder . . . . We can see plenty of examples of the too rigid and too rash cultures around the world today. The small, backward societies, completely dominated by their heavy burden of taboos and ancient customs, are cases of the former. The same societies, when converted and ‘aided’ by advanced cultures, rapidly become examples of the latter.

I might note that two of the worlds biggest religions, Christianity and Islam, are burdened with taboos and customs, and they constituted about half the people on earth when this book was written. Clearly his regard of the cultural East and economic South is so low that he can write them all off—two or three million people in Africa, a couple billion Asians, about two hundred million Central and South Americans—as being no more typical than the people of Papua New Guinea. This isn’t necessarily an impediment to Morris’s worldview, though, because culturally sophisticated, relatively wealthy white scientists like himself are even purer expressions of evolutionary destiny:

Certain types of belief are more wasteful and sultifying than others and can side-track a community into rigidifying patters of behaviour that hamper its qualitative development . . . . A belief in the validity of the acquisition of knowledge and a scientific understanding of the world we live in, the creation and appreciation of aesthetic phenomena . . . , and the broadening and deepening of our range of experiences in day-to-day living, is rapidly becoming the ‘religion’ of our time.

Not surprisingly, these assumptions—that upper-middle class 1950s America is more or less representative of the entirety of humankind—bleeds over into his discussion of work and leisure.

When the pseudo-hunter is relaxing he goes to all-male ‘clubs’, from which the females are completely excluded. Younger males tend to form into all-male gangs, often ‘predatory’ in nature. Throughout the whole range of these organizations, from learned societies, social clubs, fraternities, trade unions, sports clubs, masonic groups, secret societies, right down to teenage gangs, there is a strong emotional feeling of male ‘togetherness’ . . . . Females frequently resent the departure of their males to ‘join the boys’, reacting to it as though it signified some kind of family disloyalty. But they are wrong to do so. All they are witnessing is the modern expression of the age-old male-grouping hunting tendency of the species.

Indeed, going to all-male clubs is part of our nature, so get over it, woman!

“Excuse me while I express my primitive hunting urges.”

When you conceive of evolution as a process designed to meet certain goals, and your goal is to produce an organism exactly like Desmond Morris, it’s inevitable that your examination of humankind will come out looking like The Naked Ape. Overall, Morris’s goal to turn his pen on Homo sapiens to provide a much-needed account of the species from a zoologist’s perspective was unmet–there’s very little in this book to tempt a practicing zoologist. But his goal to make a name for himself by inflaming passions worldwide, in a style that would later be adopted by people like Anne Coulter, was wildly successful; the book has sold over twelve million copies, and Morris went on to apply his money-making formula to a number of subsequent books, like The Human Zoo and The Naked Woman, that I have no intention of reading.

First, Dr. Pigliucci distinguishes between advocacy and science using ecology as an example (since he spent a considerable amount of time earlier in his career studying invasive species):

If you study the environment, you are an ecologist, but if you are advocating on behalf of particular, you know, types of defense of the environment or managing of the environment then you are an environmentalist or you are interested in policy and things like that, so you’re not doing science anymore . . . . If I publish an article as an ecologist, I’m expected not to do advocacy; in fact, the article would very likely be rejected if I started doing advocacy in a scientific journal, because the editor would correctly point out that what the science of ecology is about is to find out how things are, not to make value judgments or suggestions about value judgments . . . . That doesn’t mean that the same person cannot involve himself or herself in both activities, but it does mean that the two activities are, it seems, distinct . . . . If you want to make your department or your association or your journal mostly about advocacy, then you really ought to be, in fact, decoupled from the science branch.

Julia responds, “I’d like to talk a little bit more about the question of whether the knowledge in anthropology is generalizable or not . . . .” She refers to a comment on the Rationally Speaking blog from a grad student who asks, “what is the purpose of anthropology if not to produce generalizable knowledge? Of what empirical use is anthropology to anyone if it doesn’t produce this kind of knowledge?” Elaborating on this idea, Julia asks, “are the questions that it asks specific questions, like describing this particular society or this particular culture, or . . . are we trying to get at general principles of why things happen the way they do?” And later, in clarification, “what is the use, I mean, should anthroplogy be asking these specific questions, or should anthropology be trying to answer general questions?”

Dr. Pigliucci replies:

Why is it that certain people . . . see ungeneralizable knowledge as [un]worthy of science? I don’t think that’s the case. . . . There’s a lot of knowledge in science that is not actually generalizable . . . [such as] almost anything you get out of evolutionary biology. . . . One of the problems with the study of invasive species is precisely that it seems very hard to find any generalizable conclusions. It seems to be the fact that invasive species behave in a fairly idiosyncratic way. . . . But that doesn’t mean that that research is useless, because, for instance, if it comes to managing a particular species that is invasive in a particular area, . . . well, then you want to know a lot of specific knowledge about that particular system, and it doesn’t really matter whether that knowledge is generalizable or not–you have a problem to solve, and you’re solving it upon scientific grounds, you’re not solving it in a nonscientific manner . . . . It’s pretty clear,

he goes on,

that science is a highly heterogeneous kind of enterprise that addresses a variety of questions at a variety of levels, and these questions may have different degrees of generalizability, and some of the specific questions may be actually more useful, frankly, than general questions. We may come up with some general platitudes about, for instance, again, the behaviour of invasive species, but if they’re not particularly useful in terms of managing the species in the field, then it seems to me that we haven’t gained that much.

This is an interesting exchange, to me, because it implies that even scientific knowledge has some kind of use-value, and that the use-value of the knowledge is more or less the point of creating that knowledge. This is particularly interesting coming from Dr. Pigliucci, who argues for the importance of distinguishing the creation of scientific knowledge from the use of it. (I will note that it’s not a foregone conclusion that all or most scientists would agree that the purpose of creating knowledge is for its use-value; even Dr. Pigliucci seems to suggest that the goal of generalizable knowledge, as opposed to specific knowledge, is to contribute to the development of overarching theories—as is the case in physics, for example. Still, it’s not clear what the point of such a theory would be.) I agree from a practical perspective that what’s published in a scientific journal should be science, as opposed to advocacy, but I don’t think journal articles are the be-all-and-end-all of science as it’s practiced. If a scientist’s job is merely to produce scientific knowledge, but we argue that knowledge is produced for its use-value, then whose responsibility is it to make use of that knowledge?

An anthropologist who also commented on the Rationally Speaking post suggested that in the case of anthropology, at least, advocacy cannot really be separated as cleanly from science as Dr. Pigliucci would like. He suggested that a picture of anthropology that ignores the use-value of the knowledge it creates (i.e., “tak[ing] all of our research data and go[ing] up into the Ivory Tower”) doesn’t accurately reflect the nature of anthroplogy. Thus, although I agree with Dr. Pigliucci about the distinction between science and advocacy in principle, I’m not sure that looking at a field such as anthropology through that lens gives an accurate or complete picture of what’s going on there (it might give a picture of what should be going on there, but that’s not a scientific approach to studying anthropology). Nor does it give an accurate picture of what’s going on in ecology. If we look at science as it’s practiced, I think both ecologists and anthropologists are equally likely to use their knowledge for advocacy purposes as part of their jobs, and in the case of anthropologists, this occurs under the auspices of the American Anthropological Association.

To give a concrete example, here is the goal of some ecological research that was conducted by a friend of mine:

. . . to determine if channel geomorphology controls (a) the sensitivity of small streams to the altered rates of terrestrial inputs that result from riparian management, and (b) the extent to which these changes are conveyed downstream.

Is this science or advocacy? Or both? Maybe it makes more sense to look at certain applications of science as a part of advocacy, rather than an activity done by a discrete group of people to create knowledge that’s used by another discrete group of people. In this case, a problem is identified with our current forest management practices, some research is carried out to determine the specifics, some recommendations are made, some regulators are lobbied, some policies are changed. And in practice, as Dr. Pigliucci acknowledges, several of these steps might be done by the same person. But this doesn’t mean that the articles produced by this project were motivated by value judgments, and I don’t think this is grounds for “decoupling” the scientific part of the forestry department from the advocacy part, even though the forestry department is ostensibly “mostly about advocacy.” (Forestry, according to the Association of University Forestry Schools of Canada, is “the art and science of protecting, conserving and managing forests.”) I’m inclined to think it’s more likely that the invocation of such a distinction in a discussion about anthropology is a result of some kind of bias.

I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met
Who could appreciate Georges Bataille;
Standing at a Swedish festival, discussing Story of the Eye.

Since Of Montreal is a good band, and they seem like a smart group of people, this allusion to Georges Bataille would appear to reflect favourably on the quality of his work, right?

In fact, the opposite is true. Kevin Barnes, Of Montreal’s frontman, may be good at music making, but his taste in literature is evidently bottom of the barrel. Story of the Eye, in fact, is probably one of the worst things ever written that is still referred to as “literature.” It’s hard to believe, upon reading it, that what you’re reading is the same thing that was referred to by Barnes, because why would anyone want anything to do with a person who didn’t recognize right off the bat that Story of the Eye was a piece of garbage?

I will concede that a big part of the problem with Story of the Eye may be the translation, as I could imagine certain turns of phrase, like “she huddled against me with a beating heart and gaped at the huge phantom raging in the night as though dementia itself had hoisted its colors on this lugubrious chateau,” could actually read much better in French, and in English with a stronger translation. Surely reading another of his works would give us a better indication of whether it’s a translation problem or a Bataille problem, right? Reading through The Solar Anus, however, it’s hard to be convinced that he’s not just a bad writer:

The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.

As far as Story of the Eye is concerned, this opinion is shared by a lot of the people at Good Reads (at least the ones on the front page). Anita describes it as “an enormous turd polished to a sheen by specious intellectualism.” According to Nathan, “the best part of this tedious wankstain is that it is short.” Chris, a reviewer with a keen eye for the written word, remarks that “in Story of the Eye the scenes aren’t particularly moving, interesting, or even necessary. Come to think of it, Story of the Eye pretty much sucked.” Patrick described my experience exactly: “This book was unabashedly, humiliatingly retarded. It’s the kind of book that’s so famous and then you read it and wonder if someone is pulling a practical joke on you.” John notes that “This book is just plain bad. No real characterization, plot, description, . . . nothing really.” ”It reads like a dishwasher manual,” says Jaga. According to Blake, “it begins badly and then gets worse. The narrative is too brisk and lacks subtlety; the images are crudely sketched when they ought to be sharply drawn and vice versa and the transitions are blurred. It was just not pleasing.”

Strangely, the average review of Story of the Eye on Good Reads is 3.77 out of 5, which is unexpectedly charitable. This appears to be a result of a surfeit of readers who revel in pornography, as long as they have an excuse to parade it around as a showpiece of intellectualism. Take Beverly, for example: “Bataille’s masterpiece, a genius of eloquent pornographic imagery, so that one’s disgust is coupled with desire. I never read anything so appalling and enthralling at the same time.” Or Mr.: “a mordantly brilliant dip into the post-Nietzschen world modernity . . . . A seminal piece of 20th century literature.” Or Forrest: “It served as mirror to observe my own reaction to the transgressive.”

Of all the reviews I read, positive and negative, Doug’s is my favourite. It consists only of a quote from Nabokov, apparently as an authority on pornography, but also as an authority on good writing:

In pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust. The novel must consist of an alternation of sexual scenes. The passages in between must be reduced to sutures of sense, logical bridges of the simplest design, brief expositions and explanations, which the reader will probably skip but must know they exist in order not to feel cheated . . . . Moreover, the sexual scenes in the book must follow a crescendo line, with new variations, new combinations, new sexes, and a steady increase in the number of participants (in a Sade play they call the gardener in) and therefore the end of the book must be more replete with lewd lore than the first chapters.

Not surprisingly, this describes Story of the Eye quite accurately. Nabokov disliked pornography and considered it somewhat antithetical to literature, because in pornography “every kind of aesthetic enjoyment has to be entirely replaced by simple sexual stimulation.” There is certainly no aesthetic enjoyment to be had from Story of the Eye, as even many of the favourable reviewers admitted (e.g., Melissa, who gave a four-star review, suggested that “if you read for narrative pleasure you should run in the other direction”). Thus it appears most likely that people who think highly of Story of the Eye either aren’t very well read, or their reluctance to admit that they like the story because it’s pornography compels them to gussy up their opinions with intellectualism.

This idea of gussying shallow things up with intellectualism may be familiar to some people in the context of other Continental writers like Derrida, and certain manifestations of academic postmodernism that emerged after these writers–at least, certain writers in the humanities took a lot of criticism for gussying up their weak ideas with fancy words (and between some and much of this criticism was warranted). Andrew Bulhak, a fan of Alan Sokal, created a script using the Dada Engine that generates complete academic papers with titles like “Deconstructing Social realism: The postcapitalist paradigm of narrative and neocapitalist modernist theory,” which are total nonsense but which are designed to sound like typical unintelligible humanities papers. After having read The Solar Anus, I think Bataille’s work would be a good candidate for one of these text generators. It would produce statements like this:

The Epididymis of the Moon
Each of the moon’s phases represents a step in the transition from flaccidity to erection. As the crescent reflects a building of lunar passion, the full moon results from an ejaculation of gibbousness. Each lunar orgasm is constituted from particles of thought, and as the lunar erection thrusts into the dripping shadows, the light of the sun is reflected in a torrent of blood. Thus menstruation is a flushing of the bodily consciousness through the plumbing of fear and loneliness. Within the woman, impregnated by the gibbous moon, the fetal goddess becomes restless. It plucks the legs from a hornet and watches it writhe, electrified by the erotic pain of dismemberment. Like a fly caught in flowing sap, the fetal goddess is drowned, at birth, in a cascade of semen, and her body corrodes into the fluid of moonlight. But because the craters of the moon tolerate only love and hate, they drink the saliva of the bourgeoisie. In the struggle for power, only love caresses the shafts of moonlight penetrating the clouds, making them shudder with thunder and delight. And like rain the shaft of moonlight pours onto the oceanic sea a torrent of waves, and those waves lap against the shore like a tongue, making the rocks wet with pleasure. In the warm cavity of a shadow lurks the anus, and within the anus, the written word trembles sordidly.

Any takers?

I’m not sure exactly what the complaints were that the tuna company received about the draining of traditional canned tuna. Maybe some of the juice splashed onto people’s hands, or maybe it smelled bad; maybe it increased the amount of time it takes to make a sandwich (although increased in comparison to what, one might ask), I don’t know. Maybe some people forgot to drain it and they ended up with watery tuna by accident. I really can’t think of any other possible objections to drainable tuna. I also don’t know if the tuna company—I haven’t taken note of which one it is—produced this product in response to consumer demand, or in response to complaints they received about having to drain tuna, or as a result of extensive research involving focus groups opening and eating different kinds of canned tuna, or because they just needed a gimmick to set them apart from their competitors.

Whatever the case may be, I’m reasonably confident that the underlying motive behind this product, and the reason the tuna marketing team surmised that this product would appear attractive to consumers, is the ease of not having to drain tuna before you eat it. It doesn’t matter if no one found draining classically-canned tuna particularly difficult; if given the choice between having to drain tuna and not having to drain tuna, most people would probably pick the latter because it’s easier. For the marketing team this is a two-pronged tool that recruits both the people who resent traditional tuna because they dislike the process of draining it, and the people who don’t particularly care about whether they’re required to drain it or not—all things being equal, both groups would likely pick the no-drain tuna if given the chance, and that probably covers about everybody.

This concept of ease is often taken to be self-evident as a marker of human progress. The easier our lives are, the more advanced a civilization we belong to. Whether or not they’ve given any thought to the matter, I would be surprised if most people wouldn’t consciously choose to do something easier rather than something harder, because their conscious knowledge about what they want is underlain by this idea of ease. It seems self-evident, but it’s more likely that the preference for ease is a cultural thing that’s been adopted unconsciously by our being bombarded by the idea that we should want things to be easier. Other cultures might recognize more readily the value of things being hard. (Only lip service is paid to this counteridea; it usually appears in the form of an inspirational quote from someone like Siddhartha Gautama, unimaginably far-removed from our everyday lives.)

Research has shown that what people think they want is not always what they actually want. Malcolm Gladwell, for example, pointed out in his TED talk on spaghetti sauce that when people are asked what kind of coffee they would like, they almost always indicate a preference for a “dark, rich, hearty roast,” but when given samples of coffee to taste, they generally gravitate toward coffee that’s weak and milky. The idea that we might actually want a life of difficulty, on some less-than-conscious level, is not unprecedented; see, for instance, the criticism of a life of unadulterated ease presented eagerly in the film WALL-E. The disconnect between what people think they want and what they actually want, I think, explains, at least in part, why some people are attracted to certain unpleasant activities, like camping or jumping off a cliff into a cold lake. It’s because on a level deeper than their consciousness, they crave real sensory experiences; they desire to escape, temporarily, from this world governed entirely by ease.

Curiously, within each of these “unpleasant” activities is some measure of variation in the degree to which the activity severs one from his or her easy, everyday life. In camping, some people will take along a giant RV and a couple of motorboats, rendering the overall experience not much different from the experience of being in their backyard (apart from the boats), while others will load up a pack and spend a week huffing up and down mountainsides and sleeping on rocks. And even within this latter group, some people will spend a lot of money on lightweight sleeping pads and Gore-tex boots, while others will carry a box of melons on their head and wear flip-flops made out of old tires. The key is that even when seeking real sensory experience, the countervailing desire to lapse into ease is sometimes overpowering. It’s much more common, I imagine, for people to go car camping than it is for people to do grueling multi-day backpacking trips.

What predisposes a person to one or another of these categories is hard to say, but it could be figured out with some cursory empirical research. Is their something that distinguishes backpackers from RV campers, like socioeconomic class or level of attained education? And what is the significance of camping and backpacking being predominantly the activities of white people? Perhaps other groups of people get their sensory stimulation in other ways, through sex (BDSM?), through food (arugula?), through drink (IPA?), through music (Metal Machine Music?). Perhaps other people succumb to their conscious desire for ease, and then wonder why their lives are so unsatisfying—indeed, these are the people depicted by marketers, people continually haunted by the burden of figuring out how to stack tupperware containers in their cupboard so they don’t avalanche out when the door is opened, or people concerned about the possibility that their child might come into contact with monstrous germs coating their countertops and door handles, or people perplexed by the problem of figuring out by sight whether or not their beer is cold (so they don’t have to touch it, I suppose). Approaching these advertisements as a form of dramaturgy, is there any evidence that the people depicted therein derive any fulfilment from their lives?

-Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

As it turns out, People for Good is a national campaign with the goal of “making the world a better place” by encouraging people to do good deeds for one another. As their manifesto notes, “It may sound ambitious but it’s easier than you’d think. In fact, you could help make the world a better place right now. Just by doing something nice for someone.” Their website implores visitors to “join the movement” and “pledge their support” by installing a Facebook application or by downloading the free People for Good iPhone app, both of which give you a list of suggestions for good deeds that you can do each day – offer to give someone directions, for example, or shovel the snow off someone’s walkway, or send someone a handwritten note instead of an email. It is the claim of People for Good that “when you do something nice for someone, it gives you a natural high that can last for weeks, even months”; and presumably, people doing good deeds for one another will create a cascading effect that will eventually engulf the world in happiness and good cheer.

Whoever wrote the web copy anticipated some scepticism: “Rest assured,” they say, “we’re not asking for money, we just want you to donate a little generosity.” Needless to say, I was not resting assured. This campaign, which involves billboards and subway ads and newspaper ads in major cities across Canada, obviously cost a lot of money to produce, and I was a little suspicious that someone would invest so much money in something without expecting a return. My scepticism was fuelled by the overall superficiality and banality of the campaign. There’s little else on the website or the apps apart from those suggested good deeds, and after reading the examples I gave above you could probably come up with another fifty off the top of your head while playing with a Rubik’s cube. Eleven out of twelve people gave the iPhone app a five-star rating, and at least two of these eleven people work for Thinkingbox, the company that designed the app; presumably the others, who showered the app in effusive praise, are their friends and family members. The one person who offered a two-star rating wrote what everyone else must be thinking: “I love to do nice things for people but I was disappointed by the lack of original and new ideas.” What’s more, an individual who goes by the sobriquet “fartamplifier” pointed out on the People for Good Youtube page that “peopleforgood.ca doesn’t function properly in IE9 (even with compatibility mode turned on) and FF5. It locks up both browsers and the site is displayed incorrectly.” In short, the app is stupid and the website is boring.

My question must be fairly obvious by this point: if these guys had a million bucks to spend on making the world a better place, why did they choose to spend it on something so inane and unsubstantial? People for Good was started by Mark Sherman, founder and executive chairman of a company called Media Experts, and Zak Mroueh, the head of a branding company called, modestly, Zulu Alpha Kilo. In a July 11 press release, Mr. Sherman characterizes the campaign as a feel-good bit of philanthropy:

When something is not right, we tend to rely on someone else-our neighbour, our boss or our government-to fix it. But the truth is, anyone can help change the world. Companies can harness the power of their collective to heal and improve our society. We took stock of what we could do as two business owners.

Mr. Mroueh has a similar outlook:

Small good deeds – even as basic as genuinely saying “thank you” to someone who helped you, smiling at a stranger or helping out a co-worker – make a big difference in creating social capital, the glue that holds us together as a community.

He acknowledges that the campaign is intrusive, but the intrusion is justified, he argues, because it intrudes “with a different kind of message.” But is the message really as different as he claims?

In answering this question, it’s helpful to look at another similarly unusual project that was carried out by Mr. Mroueh’s company, Zulu Alpha Kilo. In October 2008, a team of “interdisciplinary thinkers” from Zulu Alpha Kilo built a white box in the middle of Dundas Square in Toronto and offered to give passers-by creative solutions to any questions they might have, like “how can we raise $20,000 to help teach students to invest?” or “how can we put an end to road rage?” or “how can I dress up my wheelchair to look like a rollercoaster?” They called it “thinking inside the box.” After twenty minutes of deliberation on each question the team would present their solutions and then move on to the next question, and they repeated this process for nine hours while the video billboards around the square broadcast the proceedings. The similarities between this project and the People for Good project are quite plain: both have no apparent product that’s being marketed, both involve unusual ways of interacting with the public, both involve a considerable investment, and both offer a vague proclamation about how the project is doing good (in the case of the Think project, it was giving people a “new appreciation for creativity”).

The product being sold in both of these cases is obscured by the digressive rhetoric surrounding it. What we’re seeing here is advertising trying to become indistinguishable from its medium. We’re aware of how product placement incorporated advertising directly into the content of TV shows, but taking that idea to its logical conclusion would involve making the TV shows themselves into advertisements; if the TV show itself is an advertisement, people might not notice that that’s the case, and they might be less averse to the intrusion of the ad into their life. I’m obviously not privy to the conversations that happen in the boardroom of Zulu Alpha Kilo and other advertising agencies, but I imagine there’s some awareness that people generally dislike and / or ignore billboards and TV ads, so the future profitability of the ad business has to involve drawing a façade over the face of the ad to make it less identifiable as such.

The copy on Mr. Sherman’s Media Experts website reflects this strategy using different words. “The business of media,” it states, “is about engagement, not just exposures; it’s about getting into consumers heads and hearts, not just about counting them.” They quote the ancient Greek writer Aesop as saying “appearances often are deceiving,” and they cite this as thinking that “resonates with [their] own.” This is the kind of thinking, apparently, that underlies Media Experts’ presentations about “digital solutions 2.0,” with titles like “Data Driven Digital Marketing,” “Mobile Marketing Revealed,” and “Social Media’s Impact on your Company’s Brand.” There was no billboard in Dundas square that said “hire Zak Mroueh,” but by putting that box into the square and allegedly getting it into newspapers across the country – into the content of the papers, not the ads – Mr. Mroueh loaded his sleeve with a big ace for next time he’s in a sales meeting with a company who’s looking to refresh its brand strategy. If he can do this for his own company, what can he do for you?

Blurring the lines between advertising and non-advertising is a valuable tool because it can make advertising seem so benevolent. The People for Good campaign is ostensibly philanthropic, if you don’t look too closely – it really does appear to be about nothing more than spreading good cheer and making people connect with one another, and indeed, there’s nothing on the ads themselves, the website, or the Facebook or iPhone apps that would suggest otherwise. And there’s no evidence incriminating enough to make Mr. Mroueh concede, if asked, that yes, this actually was a form of marketing for his and Mr. Sherman’s companies. It’s all circumstantial. People complain about advertising being misleading, but this is advertising that’s misleading in it’s very form; it makes it difficult for people to tell if they’re reading the news or being targeted by advertisers, if they’re talking to their friends or being targeted by advertisers, if they’re looking at art or looking at marketing, and this is undermines the whole concept of an informed consumer. Advertising that intrudes on our friendships and our public spaces without announcing itself as advertising is intrusive to a degree that makes old-fashioned TV ads and billboards seem totally innocuous by comparison. This is especially concerning in light of the growing scope of corporate control over politics and government. In the United States last year, for instance, Google and Verizon got together to draft a policy proposal regarding net neutrality, and they left it full of loopholes that would very clearly give them control of content provided through mobile devices – the most rapidly growing sector of data traffic. And the FCC engaged them in talks! Control over web content in the hands of behemoth corporations, coupled with advertising that you can’t tell is advertising (made by people who are  ”in the business of changing attitudes and behaviour”), is a prospect that motivates me to move to the backwoods of the Yukon to live in a cabin.

Joke about tinfoil hats if you want, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think about how our current trends might manifest a few years into the future – in fact, I think it’s necessary. I’m a university-educated adult with a strong background in thinking critically, but even I was naïve enough to expect a product being sold in black and white when I got to the People for Good website, and I was frustrated how my research into the project wasn’t turning up any obvious culprits. People less cynical than myself probably wouldn’t think to try and identify a product in this campaign. As long as advertising like this is so banal that it doesn’t make people think twice, then mission accomplished.

Updated July 24.

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia