Blog 42: Time for some Philosophy

Okay, now, I like caring about stuff. Caring about stuff has to be the second funnest activity there is - (next to not caring about stuff, of course), but there are some things that some people care about that I just completely refuse to sympathise with.

All this boils down to a single philosophical conviction that I carry: Nothing, I repeat, absolutely nothing, has as much worth as a single human life. The reason I carry this conviction seems simple to me, even if perhaps it may not to others... Human life, it seems, is the only value that is able to assert its own value, unlike the value attached to animals, nations, beautiful environments, political ideologies, etc. which always need to have someone external to it to embed it with what they view it is its worth. Often they will attempt to suggest that this worth is somehow innate, despite the fact that recognition of this innate worth is sporadic, if not rare, throughout the human community, whereas recognition of human worth is near-universal.

The distinction I wish to make here is between the Cartesian 'I Think Therefore I Am' principle, which enables people to realise that they are worthy of protection from arbitrary oppression; and the entirely imagined worth which human beings attach to almost everything else in their immediate environment. Human beings are imagination-engines, as well as their production of carbon dioxide and waste carbohydrate, they produce in equal measures imagined values - to give one tragic example, throughout history millions of people within the civilised world have starved to death rather than to admit to themselves that the economic system that has deprived them of food is entirely a product of the collective imagination of their society. As the Poor starved to death, the Rich dined in luxury behind their gates, rather than seize what they need to survive, the Poor content themselves with their impending deaths while respecting the imagined economy that sustained them for a while but which, ultimately, betrayed them.

Now, I'm not saying imagined values are bad. Imagined values are what keeps a society together - as I suggested earlier, without imagined values, the human race would resort to murdering each other for scraps of food. But, I think a line has to be drawn. Drawn along the point in which these imagined values actually start to cause more net harm than they cause net good.

Where, exactly, this point lies is a matter of debate, and, indeed, it should be debated, passionately and often, throughout the world. For instance, perhaps the imagined value that we place of property rights condemns certain people to poverty, surely then, it is harmful and should be ignored? But on the other hand, the Rich are wealth creators, they are able to invest their significant surplus into projects that will return more wealth - at the end of the day, Wealth is an imaginary thing, often people take it too seriously and assume that it is a Real thing, and that if someone has it, then someone else doesn't have it!, but this is not so, it is imaginary, and within the rules of the economic make-believe game, it is possible for more than one person to possess the same unit of Wealth, whilst still owning all of the Wealth, (it doesn't have to make sense, remember, its all imaginary!) - so perhaps the Rich are doing a service by creating more wealth, which will eventually trickle down.

However, there are times when people obviously lose the plot. Recently I was watching Channel 4, specifically, a program entitled 'Hugh's Chicken Run', in which celebrity longnameman, I mean chef, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall experimented with managing an extensive chicken farm. Hugh was often moved to tears as the chickens he cared for were brutally exploited for their sole useful commodity, tasteh tasteh meatz - alongside this experiment, he convinced a community from 'the rough side of Axminster' to run their own free range chicken coop, these people insisted from the start that they were poor (I'm not giving these 'poor' the capital-P treatment, because no-one in the First World is truly 'Poor'), and couldn't afford fancy chicken, yet he pulled on their heartstrings and after the end of their Chickenxperiment, they had been converted into the fancy-chicken camp.

Hugh lauded this as a victory... but is it? In reality what has happened is that a millionaire TV personality has tricked a community into doubling their chicken budget, and thus reducing the amount of money they could spend on more self-beneficial things. I can't help but think that what he has done is produce a net harm to these human beings, who, after-all, unlike their chickens, can declare their own worth, and don't have to have it imaginarily imposed on top of them.

What Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall has done here, is view his own imagined values as being more important than the innate value that human beings are able to assert for themselves. In my opinion, this is fundamentally wrong, and now better than the dictator who views the 'survival of the nation' as being more important than the well-being of the individual citizens.

Now, I'm not saying that 'ethical' chicken is somehow evil - I'm a believer in choice, so if someone decides that they want to indulge their imagination by helping Mr Chicken live a happier live before being culled, then fine. But by forcing people to buy free range - which is Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall's ultimate goal, as, ideally, he wants intensive farming banned - you have crossed the line of individual choice into social manipulation.

Some may say that I am exaggerating the extent of this particular case, but honestly, it is worth considering what life was like before intensive meat (particularly poultry) farming was around. In the 1950s, in this country alone, hundreds of thousands of people died due to conditions that were due to a protein-deficient diet, seeing chicken is this nation's most popular meat, the advent of extensive chicken farming should probably be included in the top five reasons why the nation's life expectancy has nearly doubled over the past century! Honestly, is the welfare of a few birds, (of whom the debate still rages as to whether they even feel discomfort on the level us humans understand), really worth trading for this mammoth achievement?

Indeed, to digress, I believe the whole process of agriculturalism is travelling in the wrong direction within Western civilisation. For the past decade, there has been a kind of nostalgic mass hysteria striking the population, which has caused people to embrace the 'organic' food movement, or rather, the disindustrialised food movement. Its really convenient to live inside a beourgeois bubble, in which one views one's surroundings as being remarkable affluent, and as being able to afford luxury as a matter of course - but the world doesn't need more expensive, less productive agriculture! The global population is still growing, and, since last year, the majority of it lives within cities.

I'm an advocate of what is called Urban Agraculture. As opposed to Rural Agriculture, which has been the norm throughout all human civilisation, and, of course, suited perfectly, for as long as the human race was mostly rural... But now, that isn't the case - and to respond by ultra-ruralising Western agriculture seems fucking insane, (no doubt inspired by the hatred for one's common man fuelled by modern living, and the decision to rather embrace abstract imagined principles rather than human life). Today, there are still people in the world who are starving, but Western agricultural science is concentrating on REDUCING the efficiency of the agricultural process. If this doesn't piss you right the fuck off, then I will probably hate you. The fact that Dr Norman Borlaug isn't the most famous person in the world perhaps one of the greatest injustice's I've ever heard. Anyways, one of the best projects associated with the Urban Agriculture Movement is the Vertical Farm Project, a project that is by its own admission about as inorganic as you can get! The VFP plans to, once it gets its funding, build skyscrapers within the centre of the world's most built-up conurbations, and produce foodstuff with unflinching efficiency, and deliver it no more than a few dozen kilometres out from the production point. The food produced will, ideally, be strongly genetically modified, but its enclosed, closely controlled environment will reduce the need for almost all chemical additives. Truly, this is the future, rather than anything else proposed to reduce global agricultural efficiency and condemn the world to starvation after the ice caps melt and almost every outdoor agricultural facility in the world is royally fucked up.