Saint Jean de Dieu 29 Nowambre 1948. Au feu

En éffaçant les crimes par l’absolution il n’y a aucune raison que toutes les autres raisons ne soient amnisités, notemment celles des collaborations être états ennemis. A partir de ce jour laissons au créateur son jugerond, qui est autre chose que le nôtre nous les petits riens, a grands pouvoirs pas sa volonté. Nous avons compris les choses par la division humaine. Nous avons compris toutes les saloperies flagrantes. Nous savons que nous ne devons verser aucune goutte de sang pour la révolution mondiale. Mais ce qui se passera en boxe pure ne sera que la volonté diffusé du créateur sur ses âmes vengeresses. Sans compter d’onc ce qu’il produira lui même, nous avons sa force de Dieu par les hommes (29 Dieu par les hommes tel doit tourner) 1949 Dieu par les hommes moyens détournés, par les hommes sur l’attraction. Cela nous prouve que les vrais fautifs n’attendrons pas la punition le pied ferme. Ne vous en faite en rien pour ces cas les diffusions sont lançées depuis des siècles et elles existerons. Chacun a sa naissance a un cycle de vie particulière a remplir. Quoiqu’il fasse il l’a remplira telle que la diffusion l’a préparé. Tout est réglé pour la poussée active, que ce soit en mal ou en bien. Heureux d’onc sont ceux qui sont des masse côtes, ils ne sont que les héritiers de parents ou d’aïeux ayant respectés les principes loyaux du créateur. Pour obéir aux ordres, tout spolié se servant d’armes pour une défense problématique sera appréhendé et brulé vif. Pour ceux ci la chose fait partie de leur cycle démoniaque a purifier par le feu. Si les coutumes anciennes ne nous avaient étés si soigneserond caché, nous aurions suivis cette directive divine qui commande de rendre la mort par la consommation volontaire de la mort, et toujours par le feu pour la purifiquation de l’âme à réformer. Les principes d’éparpilleronds et de pourrisseronds ne sont qu’un départage des âmes reprises a températeure pour former une faune des plus divers, celle que nous connaissons. Dans celle ci, pour bien montrer que le créateur a la main a tout, nous avons les animaux utiles et ceux démoniaques institués pour la punition des humains sur tout ce qui est leur pouvoir vie. Nous en voyons les diffusions multidivionables j’usqu’a l’invisible gente microbienne la plus diffusée et la plus mauvaise a la vie humaine. Du gros quand les choses sont imparfaite les cycles se diffusent en désintégrations j’usqu’a l’invisible. Les réunions de ces invisibles se distribue dans l’air j’usqu’a ce qu’ils soient appés par un foyer qui purifiera, tout en y prenant force vitale. La force vitale récupéré n’est autre que l’atôme azote qui se transforme en fluide magnétique pour retour à l’endroit qui la émis ou appé par les mécaniques florales, fauniques, aquatiques, dont nous. Le fluide magnétique s’aglomère en diffusions fils constement en hauteur, ce qui nous prouve qu’il subit intencement l’attraction solaire. Il forme ainsi des ondes séparées, courtes, moyennes, et longent (ues) la pellicule atmosphérique jusqu’au soleil.

Le désordre du Guide [des égarés] n’est pas un désordre : c’est ordre différent. Maïmonide oblige son lecteur à accepter et pratiquer l’intertextualité. Pour lui tout mot compte, chaque unité discursive doit être interprétée en liaison avec une autre : « Il faut combiner les chapitres les uns avec les autres. En lisant un chapitre, il ne faut pas seulement avoir pour but de comprendre l’ensemble de son sujet, mais aussi de saisir chaque parole qui s’y présente mot après mot, même si elle ne concerne pas le sujet du chapitre. » Cette attention à la lettre prend son sens dans une nouvelle règle herméneutique : « Dire quelque chose hors de sa place, pour expliquer quelque autre chose à sa véritable place » – une formule ambiguë, que certains auteurs ont ensuite érigée en procédé. Un bon exemple d’herméneutique maïmonidienne est ainsi donné par Maître Eckhart dans le second Prologue de l’œuvre des expositions, quand il explique que tout passage cité pour expliquer un autre passage de l’Écriture doit être à son tour expliqué par lui, là où il se trouve. Cette réversion des exégèses va sans doute au-delà de l’intention même de Maïmonide, elle exprime, toutefois, à sa suite, une solidarité intertextuelle à laquelle l’exégèse traditionnelle ne s’oblige pas.

Chaque chose d’ici-bas, que ce soit une substance ou un accident, émet des rayons à l’instar des astres. La grande diversité des choses de ce monde provient tout entière de ce choc de rayons. Toute l’action des étoiles s’effectue par l’intermédiaire des rayons. Il n’est pas jusqu’à la voix humaine qui ne produise des rayons et qui, comme toutes les autres choses réelles, n’agisse par leur intermédiaire dans le monde des quatre éléments.

Et ce quelque chose de tel que rien de plus grand ne peut être pensé est si véritablement qu’il n’est même pas possible de penser qu’il n’est pas. Car on peut penser que quelque chose est, et ce quelque chose être tel qu’il ne peut être pensé n’être pas – et c’est là quelque chose de plus grand que quelque chose que l’on peut penser n’être pas. Donc, si ce qui est tel que rien de plus grand ne peut être pensé peut être pensé n’être pas, cette chose même qui est telle que rien de plus grand ne peut être pensé n’est pas la chose qui est telle que rien de plus grand ne peut être pensé. Mais c’est logiquement inacceptable. Il est donc bien vrai qu’il y a une chose telle que rien de plus grand ne peut être pensé et qu’elle ne peut être pensée n’être pas. Et cela, c’est toi Seigneur notre Dieu ! Donc si tu es si véritablement, Seigneur mon Dieu, que tu ne pourrais pas même être pensé n’être pas. C’est donc toi seul qui, de tout, as l’être au sens le plus vrai et au maximum, car tout ce qui est autre que toi n’est pas si véritablement et, par conséquent, a moins d’être. Pourquoi donc l’insensé a-t-il dit dans son cœur : « Il n’y a pas de Dieu », quand il est si évident pour un esprit raisonnable que, de tout, c’est toi qui as l’être au maximum ? Oui, pourquoi, sinon parce qu’il est sot et insensé ?

Ce qu’il y a de plus beau, c’est qu’en me promenant dans la cour je vois et j’entends des oiseaux : toute une bande de pierrots insolents qui font parfois un tel chahut que je m’étonne de ne pas voir foncer dans le tas un agent de police : « bang ».

Si une femme s’est approchée d’une bête pour être montée par elle, vous devez faire tuer la femme et la bête car ils sont coupables. On peut se demander comment la bête peut bien être coupable, alors qu’elle est dépourvue de raison et qu’elle est totalement incapable d’un point de vue légal. Il faut croire qu’on ordonne de tuer le bétail parce que les êtres contaminés par une action aussi infâme ravivent l’indigne mémoire du fait.

Mulier que accesserit ad omne pecus ascendi ab eo, interficietis mulierem et pecus ; morte moriatur. Rei enim sunt. §. 1. Queritur, quomodo sit reum pecus, cum sit irrationabile, nec ullo modo capax legis est ? Item : Pecora inde credendum est iussa interfici, quia tali flagitio contaminata indignam refricant facti memoriam.

The problem is a more general one, beyond this particular terroir. Why are so many figures on the bien pensant Anglophone left adopting anti-ecological politics that advocate technologies that are as inseparable from their funders as the looms were from the mill owners in the age of the Luddites ? Why are these positions serially platformed by allegedly critical podia, time and again, even as their logics are symmetrical to those underlying efforts to force meatpackers back to COVID-infested processing plants, where all that labor is « saved » ? There’s a through line from Trump to what counts in much of the Global North as the far left.

Clearly the interminable omission reflects an inability to center the voices of the actually existing ecological and anti-systemic movements in the core and periphery alike. Soul Fire Farms, the Savanna Institute, and the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance in the core are rendered invisible, as well as the more discomfiting and openly anti-imperialist La Via Campesina, which expresses solidarity with crucial fortresses for humanity’s struggle for a better future such as Venezuela, Cuba, and the now-fallen Bolivia.

Compare such calculated disappearances with the Minnesota Farmers Union’s recent efforts to breach the rural-urban divide in the other direction :

You’ve no doubt heard about the killing of George Floyd this week by a Minneapolis police officer. This horrific act and ensuing protests and property destruction have been hard to process, not just for those living and working in the Twin Cities Metro, but all Minnesotans and Americans.

There’s a lot to reckon with and soul-searching to do to ensure that, at an absolute minimum, nothing like this ever happens again. We have to do more than say that we condemn it, which we do. This comes on top of a deadly pandemic that has disproportionately harmed people of color, including in agriculture and food sectors.

As always, we are here as a community, ready to listen to whatever is on your minds and hearts. Do not relegate this to simply an urban issue. We can’t go back to the previous « normal » post-COVID—this makes it even clearer why. We call on our public officials to fight back against all injustices they can, and for everyone to reflect on why injustice persists.

Perhaps such soppy sentiments make us agroecologists « appreciate simplicity, » not to say clarity, to borrow a condescending aphorism from a « radical » anatomy in favor of the Bolivian coup. We leave that for others to judge, if in the glare of a bank of bright bulbs shining light therapy right to left upon the pandemic.

The bad takes on COVID wend across the political continuum into the more recognizable left. Superficially more grounded anatomies of the crisis have leapt atop the backs of the dead animals and broken landscapes that did indeed help produce the pandemic. But in a classic riding trick, the acrobatics suddenly switches mounts mid-ride to characteristically Eurocentric hobbyhorses from which to herald imperium-old edicts on how to live, eat, and die.

Should we eat meat, with source livestock an apparent driver in the emergence of deadly pathogens ? Documentarian Astra Taylor, environmental historian Troy Vettese, and political scientist Jan Dutkiewicz—TVD, for brevity’s sake—answer in the negative : « Individually, we must stop eating animal products. Collectively, we must transform the global food system and work toward ending animal agriculture and rewilding much of the world. » With anthropogenic global warming already taking carbon dioxide levels through the roof, meat was already an easy target. It’s a synecdoche for effete gluttony, the emblem of a global class divide, an easy piece of fat—and protein—to trim from wealthier consumption baskets, and a neat way to merge individual ethical consumption and world ecology.

The anti-meat crusade has apparently received an unintended and misused push from recent ecological and epidemiological work on the likely origins of the pandemic. These analyses traced how the interaction across confined animal feeding operations, monoculture doppelgangers, fading forests, and antimicrobial marination has produced a petri dish of new diseases. Out of this combination, one virus after another easily jumps from animal populations to humans.

Pre-pandemic, TVD fellow travelers rejected such political ecology, which in their psychologizing dismissal « often romanticizes what are seen as anti-modern subsistence livelihoods on the margins of global capitalism. » But now, given the obvious realities on the ground, a pandemic strain that hopscotched from bat caves on the other side of the world into the lungs of urban workers they champion, the ecomodernists (again to no reputational damage given their golden tickets) have turned to folding in the analyses they previously characterized in the most scurrilous terms as if they approved all along.

Such systems—these incubators for viruses, huge biological emitters of CO2 and methane, rampant deforesters, and living beings suffering amid the cruelty of enclosed industrial animal camps—merge into a pithy command from TVD : No, don’t eat meat. The team suggests we plow « public-directed investment » into « both plant-based meat alternatives and cellular agriculture, » or, in other words, lab meat, a product that so far exists primarily among venture capitalists, a few labs, and red-washed ad copy lauding it as a socialist wonder food from Keynesian Green New Deal cookshops.

Key questions are greased over, restricting, as sociologist Andy Murray describes, the very discourse lab meat proponents claim they wish to open up. Who is this « we, » for one, and even, what is meat ? Veganism and animal rights, to which one needn’t object as ethoses on their face, are reflexively deployed here to conflate objects and processes. There is no thing, meat, that has uniformly negative ecological, social, or epidemiological consequences. Meat only has in common that it comes from living creatures, and animals, just like people, can only be fundamentally understood in relation to the material environments within which they live, are loved and cared for, or maltreated and abused, and, in the case of most food animals, killed.

The question of « Should we eat meat ?, » therefore, appears very different among different sets of « we » and the different relations « we » have with such animals.

There are millions who might bridle at, or whose lives would be simply upturned and devastated by, enforceable commands that they simply cease meat production and consumption. Tunisian camel herders in the semi-arid steppes of the Jerid who rely on herding for day-to-day survival, or Bedouins in the northern Gaza Strip, have not been consulted about how they feel about an order from the Global North—in this case from Harvard and Johns Hopkins direct—to stop eating meat or engaging in the meat trade. Nor, in the other direction, have these researchers asked if such meat is substantively identical to the confined feedlots they rightly condemn.

[…]

A herd of examples stampedes to the horizon, but the point on that front is clear enough. Advocating intervening in the Global South and blithely demanding adopting capitalist technology in the name of a socialist Half-Earth, as does Vettese, who orders that it « must be from pasture that an eco-austere world will derive the land needed » for tree planting, is a form of « natural geo-engineering, » developed according to specific values, specific devaluations, and pathological externalizations. These are not the no-brainers their advocates presume. Compulsory veganism and lab meat, endorsed by prominent social democrat Green New Dealers, among them UPenn sociology prof Daniel Aldana Cohen, consents to the brute confiscation and erasure of peasant and pastoral particularisms in the name of « universal » ideals : rewilding Earth upon the bones of supposedly atavistic peoples poor and brown.

Even before COVID-19 arrived in the United States, it was apparent that in deploying the virus as a propagandistic parry against China, conservatives and liberals alike would make matters worse by imposing an opportunity cost. By crowding the social space with saber-rattling, the United States would fail to take notes about the outbreak and China’s responses pro and con—so as to make adequate and internationally teamed preparations.

Certainly it’s a bipartisan miscalculation borne more out of structural decay than mere hubris or bad data, but the problem extends across the sweep of respectable politics. These broader cultural pathologies, entwined into the literal pathologies of the pandemic, are on full digital peacock display beyond Chang and his ilk. The near entirety of the chatter sphere manifests a primal incapacity to adapt a holistic social and ecological perspective. Little subtle, flexible, and capacious thought—capable of encapsulating both the technical-policy-public health sphere of prevention and prophylaxis and the social-ecological-civilizational domain of responding to the problem from the bottom up—is on offer. No one is caught dead taking the lead of the world’s most affected dispossessed, who might know something about such thinking.

One instead traces a long arc of incompetence, reductionism, social triage, capitalist Mad Hatter logic, technicist tomfoolery, and rank opportunism. From the privatized right to the public left, influencers political and academic have been studiously incapable of responding to the crisis. Against all notions of political ecology, the pandemic is a « Chinese virus » on the right wing or an « act of God » on the left, removing off the board any notion of refounding our agrarian practices or the other modes of social reproduction that together drove the emergence of COVID-19.

In 2011, science journalist Laurie Garrett wrote on the « alarming regularity » of accidents in biosafety labs around the world. The accidents are as much a matter of numbers as any one lab’s poor safety record. A 2013 Princeton University study showed an increasing global population exposed to the risk of accidents from biosafety laboratories pursuing studies of some of the world’s most dangerous diseases.

The study, conducted by health geographer Thomas Van Boeckel and colleagues, showed the population living within the commuting field of BSL-4 labs increased by a factor of four from 1990 to 2012. The fields summed together encapsulate nearly 2 percent of the world’s population. Any escape infection could potentially seed an outbreak able to hop upon the global travel network to infect the rest of the world in short order. Since 9/11, thousands of new BSL-3 and -4 labs have been built for studying pathogens. The team noted a particular surge in Asia, describing, among others, new labs in Taiwan, Singapore, Pune, Bhopal, and, listed in the appendix, Wuhan.

The lab bubble appears to have arisen out of a combination of legitimate concerns about emergent infectious diseases, the return of « respectable » biowarfare research, the ideological demands of the War on Terror, and the next iteration in Keynesian military economy. The sum effect includes producing the very threat of outbreak the labs were ostensibly set up to stop. Expanding such labs in number and geographic extent bends rare events like viral escape toward inevitability. The labs represent a political logistics folding in calculated dangers that science propaganda spins away as so much conspiracy theory.

In 2004 alone, four separate SARS escapes were reported _out of the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing. In 2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology used a « less virulent » SARS strain to test lab disinfectants. Are we going to pretend such things don’t happen ?

You can find a dossier that an anonymous group of self-identified researchers put together in favor of the lab accident theory here. I find some of its inferences and criticism on target and others unconvincing.

[…]

So, what is the Solomonic choice here ? All the contending parties—the United States and Chinese governments, the EcoHealth Alliance, scientists, and conspiracy theorists alike—can piss off. Because they told us all to do so ourselves and are attempting to dump responsibility on each other, letting the whole gang escape. Allowing such hubris to continue to run amok would be an act of self-destruction beyond the COVID pandemic and what climate change already has in store for us.

[…]

Philosopher Alain Badiou writes of liberal parliamentarianism’s neo-Kantian opposition of truth and opinion. In the spectacle of debate, we are allowed to struggle over opinion, the core of the extreme center’s politics, but truth is never up for grabs, we’re told. It’s instead locked away in journals and think tanks that the state and philanthrocapitalists own. And the plebs—left coughing on their couches, not from ritual fire but a virus, their pains and sorrows untrue because these are carefully left undocumented—are never allowed access to the official story as a matter of first principle.

Consciously or not, by devious intent or the best of intentions, in accepting what appear diametrically opposed premises that in actuality are scattered together around the dictates of capital and the imperial states that serve it, the various factions of power—money, political class, the latest in colonial medicine—all back some version of expropriation or empire building that regularly spring deadly diseases. By this season, Midvinter 2019, that Great Game finished off a drag race of protopandemic SARS across lab and field alike.

One strain of the many still circulating got out. I’m betting this round that pandemic SARS emerged along the increasingly industrialized wild animal commodity chain from hinterlands and border towns as far south and west as Yunnan. On the last leg of its domestic tour, the virus made its way to Wuhan by truck or plane and then the world.