23rd February 2021 | Race | Moon
Deconstructing the idea of ‘race’; The Moon has rights
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
There’s a good piece in Scientific American by the anthropologist Wade Davis on anthropology’s neglected role in helping society to come to new understandings of framings such as ‘race’. In particular he picks out the pioneering contribution of the anthropologist Franz Boas in this. Boas is a new name to me, but Davis argues that “As a scholar, Boas ranks with Einstein, Darwin and Freud as one of the four intellectual pillars of modernity.”
It’s a long article, and it takes a little while to get going. But a couple of extracts about the intellectual world created by Boas and other anthropologists catch the tone:
If you find it normal, for example, that an Irish boy would have an Asian girlfriend, or that a Jewish friend might find solace in the Buddhist dharma, or that a person born into a male body could self-identify as a woman, then you are a child of anthropology… Franz Boas was the first scholar to explore in a truly open and neutral manner how human social perceptions are formed, and how members of distinct societies become conditioned to see and interpret the world.
The consequence of this was a radical critique of the idea of cultural progress. Perhaps this was informed partly by his own personal history, as a German Jew in exile in America:
[T]he other peoples of the world were not failed attempts to be them, failed attempts to be modern. Every culture was a unique expression of the human imagination and heart. Each was a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? … Race truly is a fiction. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all descendants of common ancestors,
Of course, this did not necessarily go down well at the time. Boas and his students, who included names such as Margaret Mead, Elsie Clews Parsons, Edward Sapir, and others, were dismissed from their jobs, denied promotion and harassed by the FBI. But Boas’ ideas cut through, eventually:
His core idea, distilled in the notion of cultural relativism, was a radical departure, as unique in its way as was Einstein’s theory of relativity in the discipline of physics. Everything Boas proposed ran against orthodoxy. It was a shattering of the European mind, the sociological equivalent of the splitting of the atom…. “It is possible,” wrote Thomas Gossett in his 1963 book Race: The History of an Idea in America, that “Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history."
#2: Rights for the moon
(Image: Gregory H. Rivera, CC BY-SA 3.0. Via Wikimedia Commons)
Australia’s Earth Laws Alliance [AELA] has issued, for discussion, a short declaration of the ‘Rights of the Moon’.
Skipping the preambles, here is the declaration section in full:
“1. The Moon – which consists of but is not limited to: its surface and subsurface landscapes including mountains and craters, rocks and boulders, regolith, dust, mantle, core, minerals, gases, water, ice, boundary exosphere, surrounding lunar orbits, cislunar space – is a sovereign natural entity in its own right and, in accordance with established international space law, no nation, entity, or individual of Earth may assert ownership or territorial sovereignty of the Moon.
2. The Moon possesses fundamental rights, which arise from its existence in the universe, including:
(a) the right to exist, persist and continue its vital cycles unaltered, unharmed and unpolluted by human beings;
(b) the right to maintain ecological integrity;
(c) the right to be defined as a self-sustaining, intelligent, cohesive, intact lunar ecosystem, beyond current human comprehension;
(d) the right to independently maintain its own life-sustaining relationship with the Earth’s environments and living creatures; and
(e) the right to remain a forever peaceful celestial entity, unmarred by human conflict or warfare.”
It’s probably worth putting this into a little context. The AELA starts from a position that puts the idea of ‘Earth Jurisprudence’ at the centre of its work—this in turn is a critique of our legal systems, which are human centred:
Earth Jurisprudence stresses human interconnectedness and dependence with the natural world. Recognition of human interconnectedness with nature is a prerequisite for ecological sustainability and should be recognised as the foundation of our legal system.
And in facr, there’s a whole existing international treaty about the Moon, which gives it some protection—Britain’s Greenwich Musuem has a page explaining it.
But President Trump, caring little for such things, issued an executive order last year which said that as far as America was concerned, the Moon was open for business, specifically for mining.
This Thursday the science fiction writer and futurist Karl Schroeder is hosting a panel on the issue at the Commons in Space conference, which is being held virtually. The conference starts tomorrow and runs to Friday.
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