“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, March 6, 2016

OOO and the American Election

Very interesting piece by Lakoff in the Huffington Post today, me having read Lakoff for all kinds of things since forever. He explains that Republican voters often want a father figure. The father is there to lay down the rules. If you don't follow them, you get punished.

There is a simple, mechanical, linear causality happening here.

And this, he explains, is one reason why people don't want to accept global warming, which demands systemic causal explanations that aren't direct and linear. You have to think quite a lot, he argues, to accept this kind of causality.

Otherwise known, thanks Graham Harman, as vicarious causation, when you take it to an extreme, such that things can't touch each other ontologically at all.

You just can't have mechanical causality in OOO. Thank heavens it's not that real, actually. Otherwise we'd all be sunk.

No comments: