115 quotes found
"The way forward does not lie in amateur and comically timeless linguistic sociology which takes ‘forms of life’ for granted (and this is what philosophy has been recently), but in the systematic study of forms of life which does not take them for granted at all. It hardly matters whether such an inquiry is called philosophy or sociology."
"(J. L. Austin's) admirers claim that his supreme preoccupation was truth. His work, with its sad conjunction of extraordinary cunning in presentation with very thin content, leaves rather the impression of a man who had little sense of real problems but who liked winning arguments and dominating people in the course of them, and who was well equipped to gratify his taste. He was the supreme dialectical poker player, unsurpassed at making people believe that their bluff had been called when in fact they weren’t bluffing, and at stone-walling any attempt to call his own. It would be hypocritical not to say all this. Hypocrisy might not matter, but it would also be unfair to those students who are still conned into supposing that this kind of philosophizing has much in common with serious intellecual endeavour."
"Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own."
"Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel, and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right."
"Wittgenstein's appeal lies in the fact that he provides a strange kind of vindication of romanticism, of conceptual Gemeinschaft, of custom-based concepts rather than statute-seeking Reform, and that he does so through a very general theory of meaning, rather than from the premisses habitually used for this purpose. Because there is no unique formal notation valid for all speech, each and every culture is vindicated. One never knew that could be done — and so quickly too! It is that above all which endows his philosophy with such a capacity to attract and to repel. His mystique of consensual custom denies that anything can sit in judgment of our concepts, that some may be more rational and others less so. So all of them are in order and have nothing to fear from philosophy, as indeed he insists. This is a fairly mild form of irrationalism, invoking no fierce dark Gods, merely a consensual community. It is the Soft Porn of Irrationalism."
"When knowledge is the slave of social considerations, it defines a special class; when it serves its own ends only, it no longer does so. There is of course a profound logic in this paradox: genuine knowledge is egalitarian in that it allows no privileged source, testers, messengers of Truth. It tolerates no privileged and circumscribed data. The autonomy of knowledge is a leveller."
"It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round."
"[I am a humble adherent of]...Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism."
"Knowledge which ... transcends the bounds, the prejudices and prejudgements of any one society and culture is not an illusion but, on the contrary, a glorious and luminous reality. Just how it was achieved remains subject to debate."
"It is this which explains nationalism: the principle — so strange and eccentric in the age of agrarian cultural diversity and the 'ethnic' division of labour — that homogeneity of culture is the political bond, that mastery of (and, one should add, acceptability in) a given high culture ... is the precondition of political, economic and social citizenship."
"I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs ... on my mouth-organ. My oldest friend, who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmalzy way, 'crying into the mouth organ'. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music."
"Primitive man has lived twice: once in and for himself, and the second time for us, in our reconstruction."
"There is a story about German students who were told by their Professor of Philosophy that they, the students, had a real existence, and who went wild with joy on being given this information. Ethnomethodology also teaches us that our daily lived world and experience are real, and we can and do rejoice in this."
"A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject."
"Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution."
"The idea that some of the members of the smooth, bland variety of second generation of linguistic philosophers undergo ”perplexity”, let alone intellectual cramp, has an element of high comedy."
"Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak."
"The new perspective also manifested itself in other ways: the shift of attention to sociologists such as Max Weber who were primarily concerned, not with overall 'development', but with the one specific development, that of modern society; the tendency to be concerned with those aspects of Marxism relevant to this one transition, and to ignore its Evolutionist aspects; and, recently and most characteristically, the concern with the notion of industrial society, and its antithesis, to the detriment of other classifications, oppositions and alternatives."
"In the twentieth century, the essence of man is not that he is a rational, or a political, or a sinful, or a thinking animal, but that he is an industrial animal. It is not his moral or intellectual or social or aesthetic ... attributes which make man what he is. His essence resides in his capacity to contribute to, and to profit from, industrial society. The emergence of industiral society is the prime concern of sociology."
"The model that can be drawn up, of a plural society in which the multiplicity of forces and institutions prevent any one of their number dominating the rest, and which function on the basis of a broad and non-doctrinaire consensus — this picture does not warm the blood like wine. To appreciate and savour its appeal, one needs a rather sophisticated taste, perhaps."
"Looking at the contemporary world, two things are obvious: democracy is doing rather badly, and democracy is doing very well. New states are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains. Democracy is doing very badly in that democratic institutions have fallen by the wayside in very many of the newly independent 'transitional' societies, and they are precarious elsewhere. Democracy, on the other hand, is doing extremely well in so far as it is almost (though not quite) universally accepted as a valid norm."
"People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing."
"What are the motives of those who wish to endorse all cultures? A part of their motive is, no doubt, a kind of universal benevolence — let a hundred flowers bloom, let all cultures enjoy their own life and their own values. This kind of liberalism on behalf of cultural wholes faces the same difficulty as liberalism on behalf of individuals (but it does not even attempt to face it) — is it to be freedom for the pikes or the minnows? Many traditional cultures are exclusive and intolerant, and oppress subcultures within their own territory. Who exactly is to be granted this protected status?"
"In practice, those who espouse this universal cultural tolerance are indeed inevitably selective; what they mean is nice, cosy, traditional cultures, not as they exist, but as they are pictured in the romantic imagination. And above all, they are interested in selective preservation within their own society. Not surprisingly, they dislike scientism, positivism, rationalism in their own society, and rather ignore the fact that these traits also constitute a culture, and one which, from the viewpoint of their initial and rather abstract starting point, has at least as good a claim as the cosiest of closed societies."
"In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires the ethnic boundaries should not be cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state — a contingency already formally excluded by the principle in its general formulation — should not separate the power holders from the rest."
"Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism."
"Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category."
"Obstruction of mobility, where it occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of industrial society."
"This is Disenchantment: the Faustian purchase of cognitive, technological and administrative power, by the surrender of our previous meaningful, humanly suffused, humanly responsive, if often also menacing or capricious world."
"Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep ..."
"This is indeed one of the most important general traits of a modern society: cultural homogeneity, the capacity for context-free communication, the standardization of expression and comprehension."
"I do not recommend any legislative action against hermeneutics. I am a liberal person opposed to all unnecessary state limitation of individual liberties. Hermeneutics between consenting adults should not, in my view, be the object of any statutory restrictions. I know, only too well, what it would entail. Hermeneutic speakeasies would spring up all over the place, smuggled Thick Descriptions would be brought in by the lorry-load from Canada by the Mafia, blood and thick meaning would clot in the gutter as rival gangs of semiotic bootleggers slugged it out in a series of bloody shoot-outs and ambushes. Addicts would be subject to blackmail. Consumption of deep meanings and its attendant psychic consequences would in no way diminsh, but the criminal world would benefit, and the whole fabric of civil society would be put under severe strain. Never!"
"America was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it."
"Whereas Weber was so bewitched by the spell of nationalism that he was never able to theorize it, Gellner has theorized nationalism without detecting the spell."
"The state is the dominant political form in the world today, and nationalism remains a powerful political force. This book will help you understand where it came from and why it endures."
"Gellner was a polymath, whose training had been in philosophy, and the peculiarity of his contribution to anthropology lies in this fact : he theorized at a deep philosophical level with remarkable acuity what was involved in the practice of the discipline. The arguments he made are highly distinctive because they suggest that mainstream anthropological self-understanding is not correct. He is a powerful, indeed almost scandalous figure. Differently put, he was not and is not an accepted insider within anthropology."
"Our ultimate task is to find interpretative procedures that will uncover each bias and discredit its claims to universality. When this is done the eighteenth century can be formally closed and a new era that has been here a long time can be officially recognised. The individual human being, stripped of his humanity, is of no use as a conceptual base from which to make a picture of human society. No human exists except steeped in the culture of his time and place. The falsely abstracted individual has been sadly misleading to Western political thought. But now we can start again at a point where major streams of thought converge, at the other end, at the making of culture. Cultural analysis sees the whole tapestry as a whole, the picture and the weaving process, before attending to the individual threads."
"Twenty years ago we heard many predictions that there would be no Indians left in Brazil by the end of the decade. These gloomy forecasts were wholly wrong. We are now optimists — hopeful that right thinking will prevail and the destruction of tribal peoples and their environments will stop. Tribal peoples will survive against extraordinary odds — but they do need the help of concerned people throughout the world."
"My interaction with the Himalayan tribespeople overturned my pre-conceptions. There was no superior or inferior being. I was just a human being like them [...] I lived with people who had no electricity or cars and yet they lived very fulfilling lives. They had no schools but they were very intelligent people. I became even more thirsty to understand and learn more about the tribes people of the world."
"The tragic destruction of the Gana and Gwi Bushmen reaches into the very roots of humanity and touches not only every human being alive today, but the generations yet to be born. The Gana and Gwi call themselves ’first people of the Kalahari', they might as well say, ’first people of the world'. They have been here longer than any of us. They are the last survivors of the world's first modern humans. It is not up to the Botswana government to wipe them out of history, with nothing more than an arbitrary and cruel presidential directive in favour of just more wealth for the country's elite – and of course the fantastically rich owners of De Beers. We will fight for the Bushmen's right to survive however long it takes. If they lose, then we will make certain that the crimes which brought their end are not expunged, but written large into history. Twenty-first century governments can no longer destroy indigenous tribes with impunity."
"Would people still use the same demeaning language talking about European gypsies or immigrants? It is fundamentally an old, 19th-century throwback to the idea that that these people are somehow like our ancestors, or backward. It conveys that they are somehow not as intelligent as we are; that they haven't progressed as far as we have. It is fundamentally a colonial mentality."
"Every time another tribe becomes extinct and their language dies, another way of life and another way of understanding the world disappears forever. Even if it has been painstakingly studied and recorded, a language without a people to speak it means little. A language can only live if its people live, and if today’s uncontacted tribes are to have a future, we must respect their right to choose their own way of life."
"In the relentless search for advancement and material progress we have perhaps alienated ourselves from our Earth. I feeltingly witnessed this innate appreciation of belonging when the Colombian Indians greeted strangers on a street in Bogatá. Tribal people are the beacons that illuminate the importance of these connections. If we destroy them, we smother these lights, and so make our future far less human. I believe their survival, far from being a fringe concern, is one of the greatest humanitarian concerns of our time."
"Governments, corporations and assorted others regularly exploit the idea that tribal peoples are "primitive" in order to remove them from their land or open it up to outsiders, thereby freeing up access to the natural resources on or under their land. Often this is done in the name of "development", justified on the grounds that the so-called "primitive" tribes are backward and out-of-date and need to "catch up" with the rest of us. But what are the consequences? For the tribes, they are almost always catastrophic: cultural and spiritual alienation, poverty, alcoholism, disease and death."
"Where there’s money to be made from Amazonia, whether from cutting it down or taking its riches whilst leaving it standing, Indian tribes end up dead. That was the story a hundred years ago, and it’s the story today. A century of human rights declarations and more and more elaborate schemes to save the forest, haven’t made much difference; they won’t until the Indians, whose land this is, are put at the centre of the debate. They have proved time and time again that they are by far the best custodians of their own land."
"Discourse occurs at the silent level of the artefact and is continuously presenced in the world as such. It is a discourse which is not, and cannot be, articulated in speech."
"When we link things metaphorically we recognise similarity in difference, we think one thing in terms of attributes of another."
"To be human is to think through metaphors."
"Metaphors are thus the very medium and outcome of our analysis."
"A society in whose culture the Ancient Greeks played such an important part was bound to have a view about the Modern Greeks. The inhabitants of that famous land, whose language was still recognizably the same as that of Demosthenes, could not be regarded as just another remote tribe of natives or savages. Western Europe could not escape being concerned with the nature of the relationship between the Ancient and the Modem Greeks. The question has teased, perplexed, and confused generations of Greeks and Europeans and it still stirs passions to an extent difficult for the rational to condone."
"Whether the present inhabitants of Greece are descended from the Ancient Greeks is a profoundly unsatisfactory question. No method of subdividing the question makes much sense. On the one hand, one can attempt to trace the numerous incursions of immigrants to Greece and try to assess the extent to which the ‘blood’ of the Ancients has been diluted by outside races, Romans, barbarians, Franks, Turks, Venetians, Albanians, etc. On the other hand, one can point to the remarkable survival of ideas and customs and, in particular, to the astonishing strength of the linguistic tradition."
"But neither approach seems to lead to the kind of answer which those who ask the question are seeking. What they seem to want to know is—Are the Modern Greeks the same as the Ancient Greeks? Are their racial and national characteristics the same? Do the Modern Greeks behave in the same kind of way as the Ancient Athenians, Spartans, and Corinthians behaved? If one looks among the Modem Greeks will one find the equivalents of Pericles and Sophocles and Plato? By their nature such questions are vague and contain within them a host of assumptions—about human nature, genetics and race, the influence of environment on behaviour, and the reliability of our knowledge of ancient history—all of which are questionable and some of which are simply unfounded."
"During the hundreds of years since the glorious age of Greece, various views have been held about the Modern Greeks. Europeans of the Middle Ages and Renaissance times may have assumed that the Modern Greeks were the descendants of the Ancients hut they were far from regarding this as implying any continuity of character, let alone imposing any obligation. To be Greek was to be a drunkard, a lecher, and, especially, a cheat, It never seems to have occurred to the men who issued the calls to join in the defence of Byzantium, for example, to suggest that they were aiding the descendants of Pericles. Nor as Christians did the Western Europeans (of whatever sect) feel any instinctive sympathy for the schismatic Christians of the Orthodox Church."
"Extreme poverty should not exist, period. The fact that up to 17 percent of the world population lives in extreme poverty today (according to Robert Allen’s data on cost-of-basic-needs poverty) should be understood as an indictment of our economic system.8 It is a sign that severe social dislocation remains institutionalized in the capitalist world economy. Yes, the prevalence of extreme poverty is lower today than it was at the height of the colonial period, but this is not sufficient reason for celebration. The colonial high-water mark was an effect of capitalist policy and should never have existed."
"Capitalism relies on maintaining an artificial scarcity of essential goods and services (like housing, healthcare, transport, etc), through processes of enclosure and commodification. We know that enclosure enables monopolists to raise prices and maximize their profits (consider the rental market, the US healthcare system, or the British rail system). But it also has another effect. When essential goods are privatized and expensive, people need more income than they would otherwise require to access them. To get it they are compelled to increase their labour in capitalist markets, working to produce new things that may not be needed (with increased energy use, resource use, and ecological pressure) simply to access things that clearly are needed, and which are quite often already there."
"The rise of capitalism, rather than delivering improvements in human welfare, was associated with plummeting wages, a reduction in human stature, and a marked upturn in the incidence of famine. Progress did not begin until the 1880s in the European core, and the 20th century in the European periphery, the latter roughly a century later than the standard narrative suggests."
"While the precise number of deaths is sensitive to the assumptions we make about baseline mortality, it is clear that somewhere in the vicinity of 100 million people died prematurely at the height of . This is among the largest policy-induced mortality crises in human history. It is larger than the combined number of deaths that occurred during all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and ’s Ethiopia."
"If the whole population were to consume and emit like Ireland and Switzerland, we would be living on a dead planet right now."
"(MMT) is getting a lot of attention these days, thanks in large part to the excellent work of and Nathan Tankus, two of the movement’s most effective communicators. Over the past few weeks a number of people inspired by their work have asked me whether there is scope for thinking about from a MMT perspective. My answer: definitely. In fact, the two belong together."
"Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place."
"We are sleepwalking into a mass extinction event – the sixth in our planet's history, and the first to be caused by human economic activity. The rate of extinction is now 1,000 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution."
"A few years ago, virtually no one was talking about this . . . everyone just assumed that the web of life would always be intact. Now the situation is so severe that the United Nations has set up a special task force to monitor it: the (IPBES). In 2019, it published its first – a groundbreaking assessment of the planet's living species, drawing on 15,000 studies from around the world and representing the consensus of hundreds of scientists. It found an accelerating rate of global , unprecedented in human history."
"It was only with the rise of capitalism over the past few hundred years, and the breathtaking acceleration of industrialization from the 1950s, that on a planetary scale things began to tip out of balance."
"Capitalism rose on the back of organized violence, mass impoverishment, and the systematic destruction of self-sufficient subsistence economies. It did not put an end to serfdom; rather, it put an end to the progressive revolution that had ended serfdom. Indeed, by securing virtually total control over the means of production, and rendering peasants and workers dependent on them for survival, capitalists took the principles of serfdom to new extremes. People did not welcome this new system with open arms; on the contrary, they rebelled against it. The period 1500 to the 1800s, right into the Industrial Revolution, was among the bloodiest, most tumultuous times in world history."
"The same process of enclosure and forced played out over and over again during the period of European colonization – not just under the British but under the Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch as well ... In all these cases scarcity was created, purposefully, for the sake of capitalist expansion."
"It's no wonder that we react so nonchalantly to the ever-mounting statistics about the crisis of mass extinction. We have a habit of taking this information with surprising calm. We don't weep. We don't get worked up. Why? Because we see humans as fundamentally separate from the rest of the living community. Those species are out there, in the environment. They aren't in here; they aren't part of us. It is not surprising that we behave this way. After all, this is the core principle of capitalism: that the world is not really alive, and it is certainly not our kin, but rather just stuff to be extracted and discarded – and that includes most of the human beings living here too. From its very first principles, capitalism has set itself at war against life itself."
"Of course, we also have to think about the role of population going forward. The more the , the more difficult this challenge will be. As we approach this question, it's crucial - as always - that we focus on underlying structural drivers. Many women around the world do not have control over their bodies and the number of children they have. Even in liberal nations women come under heavy social pressure to reproduce, often to the point where those who choose to have fewer or no children are interrogated and stigmatised. Poverty exacerbates these problems considerably. And of course capitalism itself creates pressures for population growth: more people means more labour, cheaper labour, and more consumers. These pressures filter into our culture, and even into national policy: countries like France and Japan are offering incentives to get women to have more children, to keep their economies growing."
"In the absence of more consumers, capital finds ways to get existing consumers to consume more. Indeed, the dominant story for the past few hundred years: the growth rate of material use has always significantly outstripped the growth rate of the population."
"is not about reducing GDP. It is about reducing the material and energy consumption throughout the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the publics goods that people need to thrive. It is the first step toward a more ecological civilisation. Of course, doing this may mean that GDP grows more slowly, or stops growing, or even declines. And if so, that's okay, because GDP isn't what matters. Under normal circumstances, this might cause a recession. But a recession is what happens when a growth-dependent economy stops growing. It's a disaster. Degrowth is completely different. It is about shifting to a different kind of economy altogether – an economy that doesn't need growth in the first place. An economy that's organised around human flourishing and ecological stability, rather than around the constant accumulation of capital."
"Some critics have claimed that degrowth is nothing more than a new version of austerity. But in fact exactly the opposite is true. Austerity calls for scarcity in order to generate more growth. Degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary. If we are to avert climate breakdown, the environmentalism of the twenty-first century must articulate a new demand: a demand for radical abundance."
"From this perspective, I cannot help but feel that degrowth is, ultimately, a process of decolonisation. Capitalist growth has always been organised around an expansionary territorial logic. As capital pulls ever-increasing swathes of nature into circuits of accumulation, it colonises lands, forests, seas, even the atmosphere itself. For 500 years, capitalist growth has been a process of enclosure and dispossession. Degrowth represents a reversal of this process. It represents release. It represents an opportunity for healing, recovery and repair."
"When I set out to write this book, I worried about using degrowth as a central frame. It is only a first step, after all. But as I think about the journey we've been on, I wonder if it is also more than that. Degrowth provides a way for us to approach this challenge. It stands for de-colonisation, of both lands and peoples and even our minds. It stands for the de-enclosure of commons, the decommodification of public goods, and the de-intensification of work and life. It stands for the de-thingification of humans and nature, and the de-escalation of ecological crisis. Degrowth begins as a process of taking less. But in the end it opens up whole vistas of possibility. It moves us from scarcity to abundance, from extraction to regeneration, from dominion to reciprocity, and from loneliness and separation to connection with a world that's fizzing with life."
"Today, some 4.3 billion people – more than 60 per cent of the – live in debilitating poverty, struggling to survive on less than the equivalent of $5 per day. Half do not have access to enough food. And these numbers have been growing steadily over the past few decades. Meanwhile, the wealth of the very richest is piling up to levels unprecedented in human history. As I write this, it has just been announced that the eight richest men in the world have as much wealth between them as the poorest half of the world's population combined."
"The plunder of Latin America left in its wake. In India, 30 million died of . Average living standards in India and China, which had been on a par with Britain before the colonial period, collapsed."
"From his base on , the island shared today by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, he forced the local inhabitants – the – to bring him a certain quantity of gold every three months. Those who failed to do so would have their hands chopped off or were hunted down and killed. Men were forced to spend their lives in mines, stripping the mountains in search of gold. Up to a third of workers died every six months. Within two years of the Spanish invasion, some 125,000 people had been killed - half the island's population. Most of the remaining inhabitants of Hispaniola were forced into slave labour on plantations. A few decades later, only a few hundred Arawaks remained alive."
"Economists often speculate that the failed to develop because of a lack of capital. But there was no such lack. The wealth that might have provided the capital for development (precious metals in Latin America and surplus labour in Africa) was effectively stolen by Europe and harnessed to the service of Europe's own development. The global South could theoretically have developed as Europe did were it not for the plunder of its resources and labour, and were it not for the fact that it was forced by Europe to supply raw materials while importing manufactured goods. Whether or not they would or should have done so is another matter, of course - after all, much of European-style development required violence towards other lands and other peoples. But the point remains: it is impossible to examine the economic growth of the West without looking at the base on which it drew."
"When the CIA made clear that they would back a coup, General - who was upset with President Sukarno for supporting policies that undermined the military's power - offered to lead it. In 1965, with the aid of weapons and intelligence from the United States, Suharto between 500,000 and 1 million of Sukarno's supporters in one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century. By 1967, Sukarno's base had been either eliminated or intimidated into submission, and Suharto took control of the country. His military regime - which ruled until 1998 - was open to Western corporate interests."
"As it turns out, making rich people richer doesn't make the rest of us richer. Nor does it stimulate economic growth, which is the sole justification of . In fact, quite the opposite is true: since the onset of neoliberalism, the rich countries of the have seen growth rates fall from an average of 3.5 per cent during the 1960s and 1970s down to an average of 2 per cent during the 1980s and 1990s. As the numbers show, neoliberalism has failed as a tool for - but it has worked brilliantly as a tool for restoring power to the wealthy elite."
"If we dig behind the rhetoric, it becomes clear that Western support for right-wing coups had little to do with Cold War ideology, and certainly nothing to do with promoting democracy (quite the opposite!); the goal, rather, was to defend Western economic interests. The veil of the Cold War has obscured this blunt fact from view."
"People commonly think of neoliberalism as an ideology that promotes totally free markets, where the state retreats from the scene and abandons all interventionist policies. But if we step back a bit, it becomes clear that the extention of neoliberalism has entailed powerful new forms of . The creation of a global 'free market' required not only violent coups and dictatorships backed by Western governments, but also the invention of a totalizing global bureaucracy – the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and bilateral s – with reams of new laws, backed up by the of the United States. In other words, an unprecedented expansion of state power was necessary to force countries around the world to liberalize their markets against their will. As the has known ever since the in 1842, when British gunboats invaded China in order to knock down China's , free trade has never actually been about freedom. On the contrary, as we have seen, free trade has a tendency to gradually undermine national sovereignty and ."
"To get a sense of how extreme is: if we all were to live like the average citizen of the average high-income country, we would require the ecological capacity equivalent of 3.4 earths."
"Scientists tell us that up to 140,000 species of plants and animals are disappearing each year due to our of the Earth's ecosystems. This rate of extinction is 100 to 1,000 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution - so fast that scientists have classed this as the event in the planet's history, with the last one having occurred some 66 million years ago."
"was intended to be a war-time measure, which is why it is so single-minded – almost even violent. It tallies up all money-based activity, but it doesn't care whether that activity is useful or destructive."
"While global real GDP has nearly tripled since 1980, the number of people living in poverty, below $5 per day, has increased by more than 1.1 billion. Why is this? Because past a certain point, GDP growth begins to produce more negative outcomes than positive ones – more than wealth."
"In light of this, perhaps we should regard countries like Costa Rica not as underdeveloped, but rather as appropriately developed. We should look at societies where people live long and happy lives at low levels of income and consumption not as backwaters that need to be developed according to Western models, but as exemplars of efficient living – and begin to call on rich countries to cut their excess consumption."
"Rather than submitting to plans handed down by central governments in distant capitals, people are using to make decisions about their resources and environments, seeking regeneration and harmony with their surrounding ecology. In the Middle East, communities in the mountains of northern Iraq and in in Syria are experimenting with similar ideas."
"The Reagan and Thatcher administrations eventually came to power on platforms that promised to enhance individual freedoms by liberating capitalism from the 'shackles' of the state – reducing taxes on the rich, cutting state spending, privatizing utilities, deregulating financial markets, and curbing the power of unions. After Reagan and Thatcher, these policies were carried forward by putatively progressive administrations such as Clinton's in the USA and Blair's in Britain, thus sealing the new economic consensus across party lines."
"The growing economic power of the richest percentiles translated directly into increased political power, as they gained new influence over elections. In the USA, the collapse of as a result of neoliberal reforms has meant that corporations are able to outcompete labour in campaign financing. Their position was further strengthened in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled in that corporations have a constitutional right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political advertising as an exercise of 'free speech'."
"In their "wide portfolio" of potential actions, the various paths proposed by the IPCC all rely on unproven carbon capture technologies, to enable production and economic growth to continue. Ecological economists point out that the IPCC ignores a much simpler and more obvious alternative: that we find ways to slow or reverse economic growth in the overconsuming countries. "The principle of reducing energy and resource use represents a safer and more ecologically coherent approach to climate mitigation," conclude Jason Hickel and his coauthors. But, thus far, most policy proposals have studiously ignored this option."
"The place of origin of the is unknown, but both and ', today neatly separated by the Sahara, found their earliest ancestors in the , while a Potamochoerine, ', survived in into the ."
"This useful book surveys endangered species (and subspecies), stating where each lives and why it is endangered. ... The non-Australian conservationist will find much of interest here. The devastation wreaked by introduced species has been astounding: so many formerly widespread species have been swept off their entire mainland ranges by competition from the introductions, survivng only if their ranges happened to include offshore islands which were not reached by rabbits, hares, foxes, feral cats, introduced rats and mice, goats, donkeys, horses, camels, buffaloes, sparrows, starlings, blackbirds."
"The first of the 'complete theories' of evolution developed in modern times was the of (1969; translation of work published in 1922). While badly hampered by an ignorance of genetics, slow to reach the Russia of the early twentieth century, Berg's consideration of the Darwinian model led him to the conclusion that it was incompatible, at least as the major mechanism, with what he knew of the pattern of living organisms and their evolution."
"As new methods of investigation become available to us, levels of analysis can be conducted: nuances undreamed of by , , , even . Science had advanced, but human behavior has not. People still hunt gorillas for food or trophies, and still cut down their forests; but now those same advances in science also enable forests to be cut down more efficiently, gorillas to be hunted more efficiently, human populations to increase ever faster and press in on the remaining habitat, so that our second-closest relative is threatened with disappearing for ever. More and more, the work of taxonomists and other biologists must be put into the service of conservation."
"Taxonomy has a well-defined role, which is much more than simply stamp-collecting and pigeon-holing. are the units of classification, and ; as such they must be defined as objectively as possible. The biological species concept, still widely used in biology, though predominantly by non-taxonomists and all too often misunderstood, is a process-based concept, which offers no criterion for the classification of beyond and hypothesis. The phylogenetic species concept—a pattern-based concept—is as nearly objective as we are likely to get. Amount of difference is not a criterion for recognizing species. It is not possible to insist on at the specific level, but it is mandatory for the higher categories (, , etc.). The rank we assign to a given supraspecific category should be determined by its time depth."
"This article reviews changes in , especially those pertaining to the meaning of the term species, since its inception two and a half centuries ago. Despite continuing discoveries and the involvement of competent practitioners, the adoption of the polytypic species concept, especially underpinned by the biological species concept, ensured that primate taxonomy was in a sorry state by the middle of the twentieth century. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a gradual rethinking of the nature of species took place, and many different species concepts were proposed. The phylogenetic species concept has been widely adopted over the past ∼20 years, sustained by a gradual realization that species are evolutionary lineages. This review provides examples of how the old way of thinking about species hampered our understanding of primate biodiversity and of how the phylogenetic species concept (or the diagnosability criterion under the general lineage concept) has clarified matters, opening them up for discussion. The adoption of this evolutionary view of species has implications for conservation, particularly because it increases recognition of biodiversity."
"There has been a lot of discussion about ‘the species question’ over the past 20–30 years, and several surveys have converged on the essence of what we mean by species: they are evolutionary lineages ... Species thus have a real existence. This settles the ontological status of the species concept, but it does not necessarily solve the question of how to recognise them; the most logical way of defining species operationally is by the so-called Phylogenetic Species Concept: ‘A species is the smallest population or aggregation of populations which has fixed heritable differences from other such populations or aggregations’ ..."
"While studying under the supervision of , he had the good fortune to meet , , and , all of them famous researchers in the field of Anthropology and Primatology. Equally important to Colin, as he recalled in Groves (2008), was his meeting with − then at ."
"The Esbat differed from the Sabbat by being primarily for business...very often the Esbat was for sheer enjoyment only."
"I want to say in the beginning that I do not come before you to criticize or find fault especially, but you know that a great deal of harm has been done us as a race by those who have told us of our strong points, of our wonderful advancement, and have neglected to tell us at the same time of our weak points, of our lack of taking hold of the opportunities about us. Praise a child always and he soon gets to the point where he thinks it impossible for him to make mistakes. If we wish to help each other let us not only praise ourselves, but also criticize."
"Plain talk will not hurt us. It will lead each woman to study her own condition, that of her own family and so that of her neighbor’s family. If I can do anything to hasten this study, I shall feel repaid for any effort I may put forth. In consenting to come before you women to day I am influenced by this thought more than anything else: We need, as a race, a good, strong public sentiment in favor of a sounder, healthier body, and a cleaner and highertoned morality. There is no use arguing; we do not think enough of these two conditions; we are too indifferent; too ready to say: ‘O, well, I keep well, my girls and boys behave themselves, and I have nothing to do with the rest of the race!’"
"No nation or race has ever come up by entirely overlooking its members who are less fortunate, less ambitious, less sound in body and hence in soul, and we cannot do it. We must not do it. There are too many of us down. The condition of our race, brought about by slavery, the ignorance, poverty, intemperance, ought to make us women know that in half a century we cannot afford to lose sight of the large majority of the race who have not, as yet, thrown off the badge of the evils which I have just mentioned."
"You are not, I know, surprised to hear me say that the women, young and older, among us, who most need to take caution in the matter of health and character, are the last to take any personal hold. It is no longer a compliment to a girl or woman to be of a frail and delicate mold. It is no longer an indication of refinement in woman to possess a weak and fastidious stomach. It was the great French Emperor who declared that the greatest need of France was mothers. And to day all who are willing to study facts with reference to our growth and strength in this country declare also that the most serious drawback to the race is its lack of a careful, moral and healthy motherhood. You have already noticed that I speak of health, then morals; morals, then health; my sisters, these two things go hand in hand, they are interdependent. They must go thus. They must be studied together at this time. They must be corrected at the same time."
"To be a stronger race physically we have got to be a more moral one. We do not want to lose our tempers when we discuss these conditions either. Now that, as women, we may be able to make a move in the direction of improving the race, we have got to take certain facts regarding our health and morals. They are not all from the standpoint of the Southern white man, either, nor are they all from the Northern white man with a Southern soul. You know that we often feel that every white man and woman south of the Mason and Dixon line is a real devil. It is pretty bad down here, I will admit, but there are many very fine and noble Southern white people, women as well as men. It is a Southern man, an Alabama man, at that, who, in part at least, makes it possible for us to be here together to day to study our own shortcomings and to try to find a way out of them. I say it is not Southern whites alone who have felt that we should make a move upward, who feel that we are weak in these directions; nor is it the white man alone at all, but our own medical men, our own educators, who also feel and know that there is too great a laxity amongst us."
"It is not an easy thing to secure accurate data with reference to the race in these particulars, for, in making up the statistics, especially in Southern localities, the health boards have entirely ignored us; of course many places in the South have had health boards only recently. However, we have evidence sufficient on each of these subjects to condemn us, to make us feel that something must be done; that some step, and that quick, must be made to stay the awful death rate and the alarmingly increasing illegitimate birth rate among our women and girls. This may not apply to a single woman under the sound of my voice, but it does apply to the race, and so far it comes home to you and to me. We cannot separate ourselves from our people, no matter how much we try; for one, I have no desire to do so."
"I do not mean to tell you, or leave the impression, that all of the disease and immorality in the race are confined to what we are pleased to call our poorer classes or second class folks. There is too much in our higher classes, especially in the case of too many men who as fathers of the girls and boys who, in their turn, will be fathers and mothers of other girls and boys. And does hereditary influence count for nothing? Study your own family as far back as your great grandparents and you will agree with me when I say hereditary influence is a mighty power in the formation of character, physical, as well as moral."
"I give you now these facts for five of our large Southern cities: these relate especially to the death rate of colored people in excess of white people: Rate per thousand in city No. 1, colored 36, white 19; city No. 2, colored 36, white 22; city No. 3, colored 37, white 22; city No. 4, colored 32, white 18; city No. 5, colored 35, white 17. This gives us a decrease in race by death rate in these five cities, in excess of the white people, who already so far outnumber us, respectively 100, of a fraction, 68 and over, 77 and over, and 106 per cent. In one of the large Western cities, and this is not Chicago, either, the death rate of colored people is more than twice that of the white people. Pneumonia and consumption are our most deadly foes. They are not standing still, but are on the increase in every city I have mentioned. In one Northern city alone, in one year, out of ten thousand, there was an excess of deaths, caused by pneumonia and consumption, of 135 percent of colored people over whites; colored dying, 225, and whites, 126."
"The death rate of our children is something to make us tremble. As long as it is so high we cannot hope for much. Numbers count for a great deal is this country. For five years, in one of our largest Southern cities alone, the excess in death rate among colored children under 5 years of age was 163 per cent, while that of the whites was only 32 per cent and a fraction over. In another large Southern city the death rate per cent in excess for colored children over whites is 883.4 per cent. The diseases which are undermining the life of our babies and robbing the race of its future men and women are, cholera infantum, convulsions and still born. There is an excess in this last disease, still born, of colored infants over white of 149 per cent per thousand. What a terrible tribute to our womanhood and to our motherhood this is. In another Southern city, not a thousand miles from here, over half the colored children die before they are 12 months old."
"We are very often inclined to treat this subject lightly by saying that we are a great reducing race, but I have no patience with this indifference, for it is simply impossible for any race to balance any such loss at this. And now, more than this, women, wee are not so productive as we used to be. I do not know why, I wish I did. I would count no sacrifice too great to bring about a change in this respect. My grandmother had thirteen sons and daughters, every one of whom lived to rear large families. My mother had ten, most of whom have lived long enough, but they have no children. In the whole ten of us, all grown, there are only two children, and they are the children of the youngest girl, who is now 27 years of age, and there has never been more than these, and what is worse, there never will be. Study this race question, this phase of it, and you will find what I say to be true."
"We have got to change this state of things. Our educated women will not or do not become mothers and our less intelligent mothers let their little ones die, and thus our numbers are each year growing less and less. In every city in the country where you observe it you find that we are losing by death more than we are gaining by birth. Immorality, as well as poverty and ignorance, bears its share of the blame for this low state of vitality. It makes us susceptible to all forms of disease and death. We must have a cleaner ‘social morality.’ A man who has given thought to the moral life of the race claims that over 25 per cent of the colored children born in one city alone are admittedly illegitimate. In a certain locality, in a certain State, another man states that there were during one year 300 marriage licenses taken out by white men. According to the population 1,200 licenses should have been bought by colored men. How many do you suppose were in reality taken out? Twelve hundred should have been secured and only 3 per cent were taken out. Twelve hundred colored men and women, for whom there is no excuse, living immoral lives, handing down to their offspring disease and crime, and only three living in such a way as to advance the race. No spectacle can be more appalling."
"In a certain Northern city only 2 per cent of the people are colored, yet we furnish 16 per cent of male prisoners and 34 per cent [of] female criminals. In another Northern or Northwestern city we make up 1 1/3 per cent of the whole city, and yet 10 per cent of the arrests fall on us. Immorality is directly responsible for these crimes, and hence punishment. Immorality is also directly responsible for physical inability to resist crime."
"Go North or South, East or West, and the numbers of the dens of abandoned women, of profligate men is too large. These are the breeders of disease and the millstone of the race. You say there are causes for all these, causes for which we are not responsible. I admit this much, but there are also causes for which we are responsible. And the fact that there are causes ought to make us hopeful, because we have it in our power to remove these causes. It will take time, however, and it will take wise and consecrated women to effect a change along these lines. Not only are poverty, ignorance and intemperance the cause of all this misery, but downright negligence, too, plays a large part in these matters. Colored men drive, cut wood, unload ships, etc., all day in the pouring rain, at night they throw themselves onto a bed and sleep without removing their wet clothes. Our women are little or no better. What is a better feeder for pneumonia and all forms of tuberculosis? The men clean streets, sweep and dust great buildings, with no effort to keep the throat clear of dust and dirt."
"The majority of cases of consumption are not inherent, but are contracted through lack of thought and interest in one’s own self. How many of our women during their pregnancy make nothing of lifting from one bench to another heavy tubs of clothes, drawing buckets of water, lift great sticks of wood, run up and down stairs, and a dozen other similar things entirely against them. They do not know the laws of health, and they will not learn them. No, I do not say do not work during the months of unborn motherhood; work, even hard work, is good for one, but the manner in which labor is performed is what I criticize. As women can we not do something to correct our condition physically and morally? I think we can"
"The average colored person dislikes water, and he won’t keep himself clean. He bathes, if at all, once a week Saturday night and changes his clothes in the same indifferent way. He seldom uses a tooth brush. He often even neglects to comb his hair, except on Sunday. There is no excuse for this. Bathe at least twice a week, and change the clothes as often, and be sure to clean the teeth at least once a day, and do not forget to comb the hair each day."
"We eat too little or too poor food. We are ready to buy showy clothing, but we stint our stomachs too often. They call us great eaters. Let us eat more and better food. There is very little vitality in grits and gravy. Get fresh women, but to their offspring. Keep regular hours. Do not stay in church till 12 and 1 o’clock at night. Go to bed at 10, especially if you labor through the day. When you get up in the mornings air the bedding, open up things for a while and let the sunshine in. When the little child comes do not have an ignorant granny, secure a good physician in addition to at least a clean nurse. Apply your lessons of bathing, feeding, sleeping to these little ones, remembering, of course, their age. Teach the boys as well as the girls respect for the marriage tie and home."
"Be companions for your sons and daughters if you would stop the tide of immorality. A young girl has no business out to a party or church or picnic without some older member of her family or woman friend. Teach the boys to come home at night. Teach them the sin of ruining some man’s daughter. These lessons can be taught around the fireside at night, from the pulpit, in the school room, in mothers’ meetings; and there should be a mothers’ meeting in every community. They can be instilled in many ways. Help secure a minister and teacher who will take an interest in the physical and moral improvement of our families, and together with what we women can do and our ministers and teachers, we shall be able to make some progress in the coming ten or fifteen years which will prove to our enemies that our condition physically and morally is nothing inherent or peculiar to race, but rather the outcome of circumstances over which we can and will become masters. In this way and only in this way will [we] satisfy the men and women, both North and South, who still have faith in us. Let us teach our boys and girls some useful occupations, let us insist upon an intelligent and moral ministry, let us employ teachers only who are above reproach, and above all let those of us who have had an opportunity, who have educational advantages, modify our cause lines stoop down now and then and lift up others."