These transformations have obvious and significant implications for the ways in which we conceptualize human rights and social justice. Social scientists have an important role in this reconceptualization. A large part of this role is to better understand the nature of the order that I have briefly described here, as part of its nature is to conceal its nature. An equally crucial element of this role will hinge upon our effectiveness at communicating our insights and recommendations to the broader public and decision-makers.
The nature of this order he speaks of should raise concern in everyone, as it is has become in a sense a new nature, as elusive as that nature that led John Muir to the heights of an ancient redwood in the middle of a thunderstorm where he could come face to face with God in the raw. The storm he came face to face with likely concealed its nature to him, giving him an elusive flirt that could only reveal itself at his death, for the real nature of his being had been abandoned with his wife and children who waited patiently for him at home. They were shut out for that which expressed its pure sublimity. As William Cronon suggests in his paper The Trouble with Wilderness, could that same connection with something bigger not be found in our backyards? Must we fly and view these things from the safety of glass?
Indeed these things need to be reconceputalized.
I think of a story told about the creation of a particular river I grew up near, and the all-encompassing immensity of water it holds enroute to the ocean. That river, which I knew as a kid as the place to get the best perch as they too were carried down from Lake Huron, enroute to my stomach, is also a troubled river, as it also carries the weight of heavy metals and a very unbio-diverse array of chemicals from the appropriately named Chemical Valley in Sarnia. This story, though it may not be appropriately be shared here, would have likely resonated with German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who died under suspicious circumstances whilst being pursued by Nazis. In his wonderful essay Philosophy of History, Benjamin meditates on a work of art by Paul Klees, Angelus Novus:
Benjamin writes of the ordering of history through this Being with its wings, and states:
His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
This storm we call progress has been piling things high on rivers in a relatively short span of history that is meant to be transcendental. Perhaps the basis of hope is found in the reordering of a type of thought that dictates historical progression is the only way to move forward. Perhaps becoming trapped in thisprogression of thought allows us to be either co-opted into it or lost to all in despair. I like to think there is hope, a way of thinking that asks us to reconsider the nature of imperialism and mass-consumption, and that indeed those things of beauty are also in our backyard... like the chickadees that nest in our backyard. They too can order our thoughts in ways that don't turn entire worlds upside-down and shake them up end over end as the storm of progress... simplicity.
