homelessness and civilisation

"Homelessness inspires not only the intellectual
realization that the machinery of the system has
failed somehow to produce the basic shelter everyone
needs, but even more the social realization that
the system has come up against some limits it
cannot exceed, has created a world it can no longer
control."
- Peter Marcuse (1988). "Neutralizing Homelessness", in Socialist Review, 18:69-96.

I am buzzing at the thrill of new ideas lately. Or at least, 'newish' to me. I’d never, until the last year or so for example, fully investigated Quinn’s ‘New Tribalism’; John Zerzan’s somewhat unrealistically radical critiques of symbolism and civilisation, and the anti-Malthus thesis of the ‘food race’. These ideas had, despite seven years of university study, remained completely outside my awareness. That is, until I was first introduced to the strange little book known as "Ishmael". It was brought to my attention a few years back, through the gift of an invitation by a friend. It was a simple call: to read a book that someone else recognised might speak to my own nameless sense of there being something kind of ‘wrong’ with the world (but not knowing exactly how this 'wrongness' might be understood or recovered from).


There truly are, as Michel Foucault wrote:

"More ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas...not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas...that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think."*

on admitting to intellectual infidelity

I'm a sociology grad student. It's highly improper to court the come-ons of sociobiology. And to some extent I completely understand all the proverbial hackle-raising. If taken to certain places, the theory does risk Social Darwinism. Some [mostly male] proponents have even attempted to justify fixed gender roles on supposed biological, evolutionary bases (to the point of, at one extreme, claiming that a certain violent, predatory behaviour is 'hard-wired' in men). But even I sometimes grow weary of the naysaying coming so often from the very bosoms - sociology and feminism - in which I nestle myself these days.


To be perfectly honest, I loathe the whole nature vs. nurture 'debate'. Mostly because it's yet another one of those typical binaries or dualisms that Western intellectual discourse still can't kick the habit of getting into. We have to be the most black-and-white, down-the-line, everything has only two sides kind of culture in the whole sweep of human history. And yet we keep thinking this is a reliable measure for understanding the world. Sigh. Enlightenment anachronisms die hard. Very hard.