PARÁMETROS DE EVALUACIÒN
4. ANÁLISIS E INTERPRETACIÓN DE DATOS, PRIMERA VARIABLE INDEPENDIENTE “LAS LEYENDAS DEL ENTORNO”
At their heart, our orthodox histories usually depict a delineated relation between the ‘now’ that we confront in the contemporary present and the ‘then’ that we consign to the past. The events, conditions and contexts that characterise the narrative of these various accounts consistently register our collective evolution as a species, along with the iconic nature of our progress. In similar fashion, the various worlds that constitute the ground of our human associations have been elevated to universal prominence and value through international charters, conventions and protocols designed to protect those worlds from untrammelled despoliation and degradation156
. Indeed, the very idea that we must sustain the environments that we occupy, and which yield the means of our developmental evolution, now stands as an embedded testament to our knowledge about what it takes to ensure the continuity of a living world.
Yet, despite the patent advances in our collective, environmental and humanitarian endeavours these same histories that register our progress just as surely fail to account for the ways in which the past drawn into the present. Consider the current enslavement of child labour consigned to sweatshops, fields and factories157
, and add to it the pervasive bigotry and moral rectitude that drives invasions, incursions and spiritually sanctioned murder on a mass scale158. Step back and away from the present and the transformations that
draw us forward in time challenge the more orthodox construction of ‘then’ and ‘now’. Indeed, our sovereignty over reason looks decidedly less secure
156 Brundtland Commission 1987 (World Commission on Environment and Development
(1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, New York); Earth Summit 1992 (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development); Kyoto Protocol 2001; Stockholm (United Nations Conference on the Human Environment I, 1972)
157 See: Foundation of International Research on Working Children (IREWOC) (2005),
‘Studying Child Labour: Policy Implications of Child Centred Research’ [email protected];
www.irewoc.nl; The World Bank (2001), ‘Issues in Child Labour in Africa’, Africa Region
Human Development Working Paper Series; ‘Child Labour in the Coffee Sector of Guatemala’, The IREWOC Research Project on the worst Forms of Child Labour in Latin America, Luisa Quiroz 2008,International Labour Organization, ‘Child Labour in Africa’ (2005) Child Labor. Paper 10. http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/child/10; ‘Report on the Rapid Assessment Study on Child Labour in selected coffee and tea plantations in Ethiopia’, Ethiopian Employer’s Federation and International Labour Organization (2005)
158 Applicable here are those Christian, Judaic and Islamic genocides that rest on
fundamentalist doctrines that demand the extermination of any and all theosophies and theologies that run counter to their specific provenance.
when we re-enter the past with these paradoxical registers of the present in tow. More importantly, perhaps, the prospect of sustaining our ways of living, as well as the broader environments that support life itself, starts to shrink.
In establishing the critical importance of history in relation to the various constructions of a post-millennial present, three overarching features of progress and development warrant some consideration, particularly as they impact upon the ways in which we navigate a way forward in addressing the challenges that come with that development.
Firstly, the dispatch of epochs to the past aligns with the notion of transcendence and completion, where what once was, no longer is. Displaced by the motif of progress, the past is, by definition, something that is done and over. Indeed, once temporally situated, the collective letting go of what was enables a mad embrace of what is and what might be. In the process, whatever value (or lessons) might be drawn from the thinking and acting of the past is relinquished, sometimes at detriment.
Secondly, by extension and imbued with just as much importance, are the various ways in which the past is read. That is to say, the partialities of that reading, in and of themselves, disable the building of a coherent relation, not only to the past, but just as importantly, to the ways in which it might inform the present. For example, the fragmentary nature of our various knowledge streams itself arises from processes that disassemble coherence. In the playing out of this dissembling, the complex of material conditions that are usually cast as ecosystems more often than not find themselves displaced by a ‘developmental’ imperative. Here, a range of signifiers is brought to bear to add weight and legitimacy to the notion of development generally, as well as its specific orientations - economic, technological, scientific and so on. In that process those previous things of value that might have been drawn into the present remain either idle or lost. Within the confines of this space, notions of value find themselves trapped as the ‘psychic additions’ of Whitehead’s construction in that they serve only to underwrite social and cultural norms. The counterpoint to this lies in a fuller reading of history, one which may
carry the potential to reinstate experiential knowledge, along with the more integral variants of scholarship, science and spirituality that pertain to the care and management of the social-material realm.
Finally, the issue of what is valued, particularly as it steers the gaze, reveals not only the differential manifestations of human endeavour, but also their limits. In so far as this work engages with community sustainability, the what that pertains to value is refracted through the prism of progress, which so often distorts the character, and therefore the value of the ground beneath our feet. This interplay finds its most explicit effect in the recalibration of the elements – earth, water, air and sunlight. Transformed by the totality of the planetary biosphere they become a sustenance base of resources that constitutes the necessary and sufficient conditions for all life to flourish. It is here, at this extended temporal juncture between sustenance and progress, that flourishing is imbued with new meaning. Driven not only by what is valued, but how the process of that valuing plays out, these elements-turned- resources enter their final transformation to become commodities. In the process, value is recalibrated, giving effect to new relationships between species and environments. Here, the increasingly dissonant flow of change and transformation is turned back on itself through the degradation of land (soil), waterways (seas and rivers) and air. The only element thus far ‘untouched’ now brought to such radiant intensity that it cooks the heavens, earth and sea.
In documenting the vanishing worlds of our evanescent past, a critical re- reading of history attests to a central feature of development that never vanishes: the form of our progress may change, but the escalating intensity with which it does so is merely an extension of processes that are inherited. That is to say, a critical re-engagement with history exposes the resonant nature of that past as it inheres in the present. The value of this revelation lies, perhaps, in its lesson, which not only implies that we should revisit the past with the present in tow, but more importantly, draw from it those salient insights and knowledge that have been (largely) consigned to the status of done, finished, over.
Clearly, then, the resonance of the past carries a challenge to re-couple and reset what is ‘lost’ or ‘gone’ with what is, along with the process of its becoming. Far from constituting a bid to turn back the clock, this is a process of reclamation, one that asserts the value of re-forming scattered temporal narratives into a more coherent articulation of the ways in which the human species might reconsider its relational position to those elements and resources that it will always require.
David Gross159 presents some of the deeper, though perhaps less obvious
forces at work that order our often-times dissonant relationship with the past. Indeed, the ways and means by which publics dispatch the past does itself change through time. Characterised by temporal markers that shift, by turns, from regret and loss over what is passing, to relief and then excitement about what might become, are the attitudes, values, artefacts and overarching institutions that express the character of our collective relationship to the various epochs that we traverse.
Navigating this relationship Gross turns initially to the pre- and early modern period and focuses on the place of external objects and social values. As he observes, this was a period which operated within a ‘present’ where ‘objects slipped into the past at a glacially slow pace…once created and introduced, they endured for decades or generations’160. To discard was not an automatic
option; rather, repair and restoration were normative, as was collective familiarity with things that endured – from the material realm of environments and objects, to ways of living. He continues:
Formally, there were numerous institutions, rites and rituals designed to keep the central meanings and beliefs of the habitus alive and active…there were countless traditions and folkways which, when taken altogether, had the effect of reinforcing the dominant system of values over the span of centuries. Hence, in pre-modern times there was no strong sense that things were slipping away, because…the pace of evanescence was so protracted that for all practical purposes it was imperceptible. As a result, all the things that mattered seemed not to be vanishing, but rather to be readily available as part of the vary fabric of social life.161
159 Gross, D. (2002) ‘Vanishing Worlds: On Dealing with what is Passing Away’, Telos, 124
(Summer): 55-70
160 ibid., p. 55 161 ibid., p.56
Subsequently, he moves into the modern period, a place where certainties and dependabilities evaporate. Here the reach and speed of social change installed impermanence and disruption as new and characteristic markers of development. This period, from the 16th
to 17th
centuries, saw the unleashing ‘of political, economic and technological forces’ that destabilised the long established. Values attributed to things that had endured fell away and a new willingness to let them go once they had served their purpose took hold:
Along with the diminished perdurance of social objects there also emerged a fascination – even a bedazzlement – with the ‘new’ in whatever form it might appear. Thanks to the advances of an increasingly efficient capitalist system, a plethora of freshly manufactured objects (produced literally by the billions as commodities) now began to inundate even the most hidden nooks and crannies of modern life. In comparison to these attractive new objects, the still enduring old ones seemed to be embarrassingly out of date.162
(As a point of interest, Gross notes that ‘the very term “out-of-date” makes its appearance at this time’ and would have had no meaning before the modern period.)
Thus, with the fading of physical objects from the milieu of the early modern period, there was a similar dissipation in social relations; where once physical objects had held a mediating influence between people and their environments, so too the social connections that had been anchored in those relations. With ‘the disappearance of things as mediators between people, many of the old ties linking the individual to the larger community likewise lost their raisons d’être’.163
This exploration extends profitably beyond modernity, yet the remit here is not to discount certain of the notable developments of the period, particularly in medical science, engineering, agrarian reforms and so on. Neither is it to avoid some reckoning with the adversities that also characterised communal and social life. Rather, it is to situate change processes in their time so that the features as well as the content of that change can be grasped, particularly as it reverberates well into the post-millennial context. The re-search here is, then, directed to a fuller and more critical understanding of the ways and means by
162 ibid., p. 57
which we discard, or retain and intensify, the forces that order not only social life, but just as importantly, the material conditions that support it.
Articulating a ‘present field of possibilities’ with regard to the ways in which we might apprehend the past, Gross avoids the resurrection of romanticism and longing that sometimes accompanies regret at what is passing. Instead he detours around the halt of progress as an icon of that romanticism and resituates the field of possibilities with regard to what is passing by transporting it into the present:
Today one may be too quick in declaring worthless all that is not immediately useful, for what might seem irrelevant or valueless in a narrowly pragmatic sense may be highly relevant and valuable in a broader one. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, those who keep in mind what is departing may have more resources available to them, and therefore be better positioned to live critically and creatively in the present, than those who dismiss or simply forget what is slipping away in order to remain more fully in tune with the present fast-paced age.164
What emerges from Gross’s coverage is the need for a critical re-meeting with notions of ‘the past’ – one that carries with it an imperative to undertake some equivalent re-thinking with regard to the critical forces that drive both social and environmental degradation. To locate the genesis and flow of that process this chapter turns to an epoch that carries one of its starkest registers – the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In focusing on the case of England and Scotland three features of that transition are prominent, particularly because of their resonance within the present.
The Rise of Institutions
In the first instance, the transformation of feudalism in England was mediated not only by the rise of money and markets, but just as importantly, by monarchies, parliaments and the (Christian) church. As critical social institutions all three worked within a tension that ultimately destabilised the precise conditions under which feudalism could continue. While two of these specific institutions no longer occupy the foreground of economic development (monarchies and church), the place and role of institutions generally was critical to both the emergence and the continuity of capitalism,
164 ibid., p. 70
just as it was (and is) in the dislocation and (re)distribution of human and other species populations.
Combined and Uneven Development
Secondly, combined and uneven development emerged as the central motif of capitalism during the period and extends well beyond it. That is, the dispatch of feudal relations in England occurred over a period of some centuries; by contrast Scotland was transported through the process in less than a century. Indeed, the transition here was fast-tracked to the degree that the potential inhibitors to Scottish development were removed apace, to the degree that it became a prototype for development that was applied throughout Europe and Japan165 during the nineteenth century. Here, the manner in which the
‘developed’ economies steer or influence their less developed cohorts becomes critical, and similarly endures over time.
Social-Environmental Dislocation: The colonization of worlds old and new Finally, the cumulative effects of both the orientation and rapidity of this transformation led to social and environmental changes that extended well into the two centuries that followed. For those who had been liberated from their lands during the enclosures and clearances, poverty became an inevitable driver of rapidly increasing crime rates. With the prisons of the eighteenth century breaching capacity, and no police force yet in place, the parlous state of civil order fell into such decline that a solution had to be found. Unintended though it was in its first iteration, transportation became the means by which pre-existing relations of power, along with rights in land, drove the establishment of new colonies.
While much is made of the various and progressive reforms that also characterised this period, the enduring presence of a less than progressive legacy summons its history. In turning to these overarching issues, the following review locates the genesis of some of the more critical issues that have been carried forward into the contemporary present.
165 Davidson, N., (2004) ‘The Scottish Path to Capitalist Agriculture 2: The Capitalist Offensive