Discover an Effective Progress Invoice Example for Animal Science

Progress invoice example for Animal science

[Music] we live in very dark and disturbing times right now we are Witness is to um endless Wars and to rampant militarism everywhere we see um uncontrolled uh growth of corporate capitalism and uh the impoverishment of peoples we see unparalleled State repression and government surveillance of our activities and the violation of our privacy rights we live live right now you must appreciate in an utterly unique historical moment right now we live amidst the world's sixth Extinction crisis in the history of this planet the last five were all caused by natural events this one is human-made the last one was 65 million years ago the current one is happening as we speak we also live in an era of climate change that has been caused by humans this climate change is almost at the Tipping Point the point of irre of irreversibility or what they call runaway climate change and no matter what we do it's it's happening and by the year 2050 the United Nations says we will live on a planet that is unrecognizable so welcome to progress this is the Harvest of thousands of years of so-called civilization and again by civilization I mean the Agricultural Society this radical new mode of production that we started 10,000 years ago as opposed to all of our history millions of years before that when we lived in nomadic small hunting Gathering tribes in some sense alth as I'll describe although progress is a modern concept it really began for most people once we made this transition from hunting Gathering tribes to settled agricultural tribes and we began to domesticate animals and plants or to master nature so progress in our culture has been defined as the replacement of nature by culture as a transition from savagery to civilization as The Growing Power to command nature for our purposes through science technology and capitalist markets progress has been defined to the extent to which we can control and ma uh and exploit animals the environment and premodern peoples progress is the religion of our day it is still believed in politicians universally speak in the language of progress and yet this concept for any critical thinker is so discredited uh it is obvious that it is Laden with problem IC assumptions so we have lived in Dominator cultures for 10,000 years that implicitly then explicitly assumed that we were making steady progress and now and now we we live in a state such that we are in contradiction with the natural world the Earth is telling us that our ideas and our way of lives are false that the way we are living is wrong uh and uh impossible to sustain so the Earth is telling us that our so-called civilization is based upon one gigantic mistake and it will erase it so um this is a difficult time to uh talk about progress to make any kind of argument for Progress at all who in this room believes that the next generation's life will be better than this generation's life who in this room believes as parents always did that their children will live in a better world and have a better life than they did who in this room believes that homes and health care and education will be affordable for their children or the Next Generation who in this room believes that the great animals that we love to see the Lions the Tigers and the elephants will be around for your children or the Next Generation to see even in a zoo who in this room would wish upon their worst enemy that they be born at the end of this Century because in all likelihood by the end of this Century this planet will be a living hell and didn't the dream of the Enlightenment that if we create a rational culture and we had rational human beings we could have peace and Harmony and prosperity for the whole world who believes that the dream of the Enlightenment is still alive didn't the enlightenment die on the slaughter bench of the 21st C of the 20th century didn't the enlightenment die on the slaughter bench of world wars genocide totalitarianism Nazism and concentration camps and now here we are barely out of the starting Gates of the 21st century which virtually began with 911 which led to a so-called attack uh a war on terror which is really a war on democracy and everywhere civil liberties are under attack everywhere we see people fighting over scarce resources everywhere we see the gap between the rich and the poor grow wider and wider everywhere we see we see human desperation grow everywhere we see the environment deterior at the oceans die and the rainforests fall and every time we blink another species has vanished from the face of the earth now uh this has led uh the the death of the Enlightenment uh mythology that reason equals Freedom that reason will bring freedom this Enlightenment mythology this modern mythology has led to postmodern thinking or to postmodern thought and if you've ever wondered what is this postmodern stuff about uh to an important part it is about rejecting uh the ideas of the Enlightenment and of modern thought as completely false as metaphysics so ing to the French thinker uh Jean Francis leotard we live in a postmodern condition this this postmodern condition is defined as a skepticism toward meta narratives and The Meta narrative that's told by Western Civilization that's told by Hegel that's told by Marx that's told by so many thinkers is this that reason equals Freedom that to the extent we can develop rational cultures we will be free and this this is this goes back to Socrates the idea that we only do the wrong when we don't know the right that we're really rational beings and of course n and Freud said that this is uh that this is a myth and that we are animals and that we have a very violent destructive and self-destructive core to our being and so uh we had uh the work of the Frankfurt School in the 1940s uh ooru and horkheimer for instance and they had lived through the death of Marxism they had lived through uh the the the building of concentration camps they had lived through Nazism and Fascism and they saw decades before leotar did that this equation is false they saw that rationality does not necessarily lead to Freedom that it leads to what they called the totally administered Society it leads to outwits to concentration camps to factory farms into Atomic weapons so progress is uh the core myth of modernity as I said and it's a very seductive myth because it legitimates modernity it tells us that this system is bringing something good for everyone and eventually uh all boats will rise uh as the markets do and eventually we we will all be the beneficiaries of progress but if progress is a lie and you can attach it to your own class interest and you can get the rest of the people to believe that you are the vehicle of progress then uh you have control over the people because progress uh has been an alibi or an excuse for greed and for the exploitation of humans animals and the Earth so all of the all of the nightmares all of the disasters perpetuated in the name of progress and the name of civilization invite us to reject these Concepts completely but I suggest this would be a mistake I suggest there's something we can salvage about this concept of progress that's important that indeed we can't do without I believe that uh we need this concept of progress as a moral map and a compass to guide us to a better world for how else can we gauge whether things are getting better obviously things need to get better because uh there they can't get much worse and so in some sense we are going to need a concept of progress that we are making progress in our personal lives in our social lives in our Consciousness Etc but obviously see we're going to have to reconstruct this concept in some very serious ways it's going to have to be a concept that uh will measure progress in the most universal possible way for humans for animals and for the environment we are going to measure progress ing to a new universalism a radical egalitarianism a boundless notion of of the moral community and an Ethics that are more inclusive than anything that we've ever seen now a bit on the on the history uh quickly on the history of the concept of progress as I said really this is a a modern concept it did not begin to get uh developed until the 17th 18th and certainly by the 19th centuries because the Ancients you see uh the uh the Greeks the Romans the stoics uh they all had a very pessimistic view of the world it was a cyclical view of the world that uh things happen but nothing ever changes that it's just the E and Flow In Time the rise and fall of Empires the same pattern that repeats itself over and over what n called The Eternal recurrence many historians equated in the ancient world the passage of time with Decay and Corruption not something getting better and better so the Greco Roman worldview was fatalistic it was deterministic and it was cyclical obviously this does not lead us to a concept that the world is getting better and better for more and more so for the concept of progress to arise uh quite a few things have to happen we need a positive view of change we need a new view of the universe that is not hostile to our ability to alter it for our good we need to Reen we need to renounce the idea of a fixed human nature and we need an optimistic belief that things can get better and better and we need the material forces which can bring this about so once with modernity with the scientific revolutions with the Renaissance and with the Enlightenment and we were able to unchain reason from the shackles of dogma and to develop rationality in a free way we began to prepare the material forces that could bring about progress or the illusion of progress at least these would be three principal forces that have constructed the modern and postmodern world uh since uh at least the 16th 17th centuries and on these forces are science technology and capitalism so as science started to get more and more sophisticated we began to understand the world for instance when Newton grasped the laws of gravity this was a fantastic evance I cannot underestimate how excited the world became that we could understand and and and and Master the laws the secrets of Nature and by the time of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century despite the Luddite reaction we had this Machinery of civil this civilization of Machinery that had all kinds of potential Marx thought for instance that automated Machinery could end human labor and bring human Leisure and free us all from from the burden of Labor and so uh also U of course uh for many not for all not for the radical thinkers capitalism was going to free markets this was part of the general concept of Freedom spreading in society and that all theoretically could prosper by this now something uh interesting uh happened uh um with uh the recoding of the ancient ideologies so to put it very crudely instead of this uh sick sick uh circular idea or cyclical view of History we we we had a a linear view of history that things were always and always going to get better and actually this view of history is uh judeo-christian in Origins notice the judeo-christian view is certainly not cyclical things happen once only once certain key events Christ is born Christ dies uh Christ comes back to save us all Etc it happens once one time only and uh for those who are lucky there's salvation and so really the modernists affirm this this this same basic uh Vision or or metaphor of history for instance Condor the French thinker he developed the theory of 10 stages of progress it was a linear model in 10 stages we would go through 10 stages and we would reach the Pinnacle of progress and freedom for all but uh notice that this secular worldview is really a religious worldview it's a secularization of Christianity maybe you have noticed the the the similarities between Marxism and Christianity that there is this notion history is Meaningful it is moving toward a certain goal purpose or end it will evolve some some coming Clash or apocalyptic struggle and it will lead to some sort some some concept of salvation the classless society now also this modern concept whether it's Marxist or any kind also internalized the worst possible aspects of Western ideology because uh the new religion became humanism the new God became man the forces of Salvation were science technology and markets and uh for instance uh comp August comp the father of modern sociology talked frequently about the Church of reason so uh in other words uh this is a humanist ideology and it defines progress in terms of the old ideologies anthropocentrism and speciesism are not factored uh into this concept that uh humans will progress on the backs of the uh through exploiting the Earth and through exploiting animals and Marxism of course was a thoroughly anthropocentric and speciesist ideology just like Christianity now uh since the 17th century progress has defined AC uh ing to very specific quantitative measures such as our growing technical power over nature the more we can exploit nature for our purposes the more progress we're making in society just think about what that means for a second and where that has led us to this point and how that has led to the very opposite of anything we really call could call progress because right now if we call this progress we are we are uh we are at the precipice of utter disaster and yet we dare to call this civilization and we dare to call this progress still there have been very specific measures to Define progress for instance uh uh in English we call it the gross national product uh how much are we making in society that uh people uh can the general average or the general wage or the general level of uh of of social wealth the problem with these quantitative measures is they cannot represent intangible such as happiness or spiritual satisfaction and there is no direct connection between the quantity of goods and the quality of life and it's a well-known fact that the more advanced the society and its economic and technological structure the more modern the more developed the more diseases the more more divorces the more drug addiction the more suicide the more depression the more alcoholism the more General the and higher the levels of human misery so there seems to be an inverse relationship between the material the development of the material forces that the enlightenment told us would bring us happiness and the actual true state of Happiness of people in society now I said that some of the modern radical thinkers um they believed in all of this but but they they they made a very specific uh condition upon how to measure progress because again in a class Society progress means the greater uh the more extraction of wealth and this wealth was always distributed unequally so Feist like rouso and condos and Mark said no no this is not progress we believe in progress we believe in the domination of nature we believe in the powers of Science and Technology and we believe uh in wealth so long as all of this is equally distributed so long as everyone benefits equally then we have progress so one way to look at uh the the essence or structure of capitalism is to realize that it is what the economists call a zero sum game that means that we cannot All Rise together we cannot all share Collective wealth that some people win only if others lose so as Mark saw on the one side of the production of wealth is the production of poverty capitalists win only because workers lose powerful States win only because less powerful states lose Europe becomes rich only because Africa is impoverished and the cities and palaces of modernity were built on the backs of slave labor now the most obscene Zero Sum game of all that has defined civilization for 10,000 years involves the game of humans over animals the greatest Zero Sum game because the biggest class of of slavery ever has been animals and we have benefited off the blood and backs and body part parts of animals for 10,000 years now and so every human virtually is an oppressor every human has gained something because animals have lost and this economy would fall apart in a second without vivos section factory farming fur farming and uh all of the various ways in which we exploit animals so if we were to ask an animal what does progress mean to you the animal would say progress for humans means regress for us for us humanism is barbarism for us the light of Reason brings darkness and for us science is sadism we recognize that the concept of progress uh is in incredibly problematic uh that uh it has not yet been formulated uh except in a way that uh is based upon uh exploitation and actually undermines uh our own interests but I've said that I think that we need this concept of progress uh as a moral map or Compass to to get us to a better place how are we going to gauge if we've created a better Society a more just Society a more equal Society a society where animals and humans and the Earth are no longer exploited without some concept like progress even the primitivist like John zeren who completely reject civilization and the notion of progress are assuming a notion of progress so uh in other words if we go back to the Pine era to a time of hunting and Gathering tribes we've gone to a better world and that means progress so progress means two things it certainly means things have changed and it means they've changed for the better and so the question becomes what do we mean by better and who defines better always be careful who's using the word progress I suggest uh that this new concept of progress if it's going to be viable uh is uh going to have to be uh holistic we have to grasp the profound unity and interconnectedness of of the human world the animal world and the environment it has to recognize the profound Transformations we have to make in our psyches and in our lifeways it uh calls for revolutionary transformations in all aspects of our lives and it calls for an end of this Zero Sum game we must construct a world where some people do not win because other beings other beings lose must construct a world in which everyone's interest if possible can be harmonized now have you ever heard this idea that history is random that history is flux uh it goes back to you know this ancient worldview there's no pattern or coherence to history at all what I want to suggest is that there is a coherence at least in modern history and that is a way in which we can measure progress and this will be a to for instance the universalization of Rights rights of course started off as a white elite capitalist discourse as Mark well pointed out uh this discourse uh disguised particular interest as general interest the rights of man really were the rights of capitalists so if if if we can trace a notion of progress for instance from uh say uh capitalist to to uh to labor from patriarchal rule to uh equality of the Sexes if we can make our moral Community broader to include not just white people and their rights but uh people of color and their rights and that they are seriously equal in substantive ways with the rest of us and we can broaden this community more to make also equal uh people who are gay transgender gendered transsexual Etc and if we can include and and and broaden our moral Community even more to include the disabled and we can include in this community even more that last great qualitative step that massive boundary that Rubicon that we have to cross so that we recognize that non Human animals belong to our community and we belong to theirs this is the universalization of Rights and I believe in Ecuador now even though there's uh conceptual difficulties with applying this concept they are talking about the rights of nature so do you see our community here our community here is not Italy uh it's certainly not certain privilege or Elite people within Italy it's all people of all kinds within Italy equally it's all of Europe equally it's all of the Western World equally it's all of the Southern world and the undeveloped or undevelop or the developing World equally and that's where humanist stop and this is where we where we need to begin equally including all nonhuman animals because they are sentient beings like we are because we are animals too and because everything we have every moral capacity every capacity to think we got from the animals through an evolutionary continum and of course we are different from animals no they can't build spaceships no they don't do Algebra no they don't write romantic poetry like Shelly godamn it can you swim like a whale can you Fly Like an Eagle can you hear like a bat are you as beautiful as a cat do you smell as good as a cat to single out reason as the Criterion for uh the moral universe and for who gets rights and who doesn't Who belongs in the community and who does it is absolutely absurd and arbitrary now if giraffes were as arrogant and bigoted and ignorant as the human race were unless you had a neck that was 20 feet tall you would not have any rights how would you like to live in an imperialistic giraffe world where they vivisect you they uh they cut you up for food they torch you in any any number of ways just because you don't have a long neck that's how arbitrary our moral code is we have made two mistakes here's one way I will summarize human thinking based on two mistakes we have overestimated our capacity for reason are you really a rational being do you ever get angry have you ever had an addiction you ever broken up with a boyfriend or girlfriend I will never call that again remember we're animals we have an ID we have a violent core we have a sexual core there's not a second of a day we don't think about sex or violence I don't know about you but every day I think about something violent I've got 25 people on my list how about you we're not so rational are we okay we we we try to keep it together but you know we we fall apart sometimes and like when you try to deal with an addiction it's impossible because our will our reason it's you know we we do irrational things and we can't control things with our with our reason like we think we are we're not the C captain of the ship look at this shameful disgraceful species Homo sapiens I think they meant to say homo rapan no intelligent species destroys its own environment we lack the foresight to plan for the future we know why all the great past civilizations have collapsed it's not a secret it's because they exhausted their resources they cleared their Forest they ran out of the the vital uh uh uh resources that they needed to survive they collapsed and look at us we're running out of oil we're addicted to oil yet we keep using it Bill McKibbon the environmentalist just wrote a very important article uh with with some basic mathematical formulas and he said when we use the oil reserves they already have and are planning to use we will reach that Tipping Point and pass it forever we're repeating the mistakes of past civilization s they maybe didn't have an excuse or or had an excuse we don't we are exhausting our resource Supply and we are just waiting for the catastrophe to happen don't tell me about Homo sapiens don't tell me about rational man now I said we made two mistakes uh in history one is overestimating our rationality there's a second one we have underestimated the rationality of animals we've underestimated their emotional complexity in sophistication of their lives and we are so stupid we think because they don't speak in human language they don't have a language or thought process at all and uh now we know uh and I can only say there have been four decades now of literature in a new scientific field called cognitive ethology which is based the study of animal intelligence you may for instance know the writer Mark beckov that's an example of what I'm talking about so we are now at a Crossroads in our history we are at a crossroad the main drama of our time which road will we choose into into the future or into our futures will we choose the road that leads to peace and stability or the one verging toward war and Chaos will we choose the road that leads to social justice or the one that sharpens inequality and poverty will we stay in the same trail of uncontrolled growth and uh rampant capital ISM unsustainable economic systems will we radically reconstruct our economies uh and our institutions which means we will radically reconstruct our systems to be Democratic will we move toward the great unraveling of everything or will we move to the great turning where we finally learn to live in partnership with other forms of life on this Earth the windows of opportunity are closing and closing quickly the actions that Humanity now takes or fails to take will be decisive forever it will determine whether our future and that of biodiversity in the earth is hopeful or Bleak or maybe we could say um whether it's bad or just nightmarish we're living in the aftermath of 10,000 years of war on the planet war on one another and War on the animals and we have reached this point right here right now un personally globally we are all in it together and we are facing the greatest challenge that has ever stared this species in the face so can we radically retool our thinking and our societies uh to avoid a dovetail a spinning into a fatal crash or can we rise from these ashes Phoenix like and reconstitute ourselves as as a as a species that is worthy of the name Homo sapiens there is no guarantee we will survive we are not here put we are not put here by God no God is going to save us all other homo species have disappeared Homo erectus Homo hobis extinct Homo neanderthalensis extinct Homo sapiens on the path of Extinction now the result may be horrible for us to contemplate we may not have the will or the ability to meet this challenge I see no signs that anyone is taking action the corporations are continuing Full Speed Ahead to exploit all remaining oil and gas deposits ironically because the ice caps are melting because of global warming they're now moving into ice caps which previously were impassible to exploit more gas and oil supplies the governments aren't doing anything about it because they're in the pockets of Corporations the NOS like Greenpeace are largely co-opted by corporations that leaves us the people and why aren't we rioting in the streets why aren't there Mass demonstrations every damn day in this planet because everything is at stake now everything is at stake and I can't underestimate that and no I'm not an apocalyptic nut I'm talking about what science is saying to us everything is at stake why aren't we angry why aren we out in the streets why aren't we tearing this down so from the perspective of the animals in the Earth the best thing that could happen is that human beings die off and die off totally and rapidly as possible they would Rejoice because if we can't learn how to live on this planet we don't deserve to live on this planet I'm afraid we've overstayed our welcome and you could take a worm out of an ecosystem you could take a butterfly out of an ecosystem uh you could take uh a beetle out of an ecosystem and that ecosystem would suffer because they are so important to the Earth but if you take Homo sapiens out of the ecosystem it's the only species you can remove except for the cats and dogs and the animals in the zoos that everything else will will start to heal and flourish here is my hope for you my optimism for today there is a genre of book and documentaries and books with pictures let's just call it the call the genre life after humans let's say ing to uh the hypothesis that a virus kills this entire species within 24 hours what will happen all of the domestic animals will suffer and die they'll be trapped as many zoo animals will will suffer and die some will break out and live nuclear power plants will blow up and for temporary time there will be a great toxic environment on this planet that will kill life but in time the rivers will become clean the uh air will become fresh the forest will regrow the Earth will regenerate in 100 years New York City will be gone from water erosion rain erosion and nature will reclaim New York City like everything else and it will all be back to planet Earth so it's increasingly obvious that um the fate of all life is inextricably bound and that uh we hold um this whole planet um in our hands progress can no longer entail a zero sum game where we advance at the expense of the Earth or the animals we must eliminate the false opposition between society and nature between human and non-human animal and we must learn to become good citizens of the bio Community instead of being the B barbarians and Invaders that are bringing the whole house down thank [Music] you