Against Lovelock 1 ~ CookingFood.Org

I was recently informed that someone was “terrified” by Lovelock and his vision of Gaia and Gaia's revenge, and so on.

Precisely. This is the problem. Lovelock, like many deep ecologists in a certain rhetorical mode, imagines a future without humans, or disastrous to humans. The reader is put in an impossible–cynical position outside her phenomenological envelopment.

Whatever one thinks of the science of Gaia, the thought–virus that comes with the idea is catching and it doesn't help at all. It's almost the precise opposite of ecological awareness.

Contra some of my young Hegelian acquaintances, it's perfectly all right to run around weeping and screaming when you are think about the end of the world. If that makes me a hysteric, fantastic. Or a narcissist, fantastic.

The attempt to delete this affect only results in sadistic rubbernecking of the other's hysteria. So suddenly a woman who ruins her wedding is admirable against a desperate mother. Ecological awareness is not a mode of mockery.

Like some speculative realism, this doom hippie approach is just modernity by another means. You turn into the David Morse character from 12 Monkeys. Looking on with fascinated horror as you let the security guard release the (phenomenological) virus you have made into the airport.

Now let's talk about the content: next post.