Gear 3: “ It is in the blood….”
The concept of Genes or Blood or whatever stands above that awkward distinctions humans must draw between their individuality and their material collectivity. I am at once an individual with a set of passions and feelings, and yet as I have a body I am also a thing. As I am the former I experience myself to b free, while as Aim the later I am aware that materiality usually involves a price, a degree of determinisms,. The Game therefore becomes then how t call this apparent paradox. That is how to decide exactly how much of me is free and when and why, and ho much is not. This game has occupied philosophy and religions for the best part of 2000 years without result. Each generation finds its own formula, it own way of expressing what it is to be bound in material, spiritual or even social worlds, while all the while feeling free.
Left to itself this debate might have only a marginal effect on the majority of lifes. It would be one of those debates, like the existence of God or the use of government. It matters on the biggest of levels and yet does not really mater on the day o day And yet there is clearly a second ascept to this debate, one that makes the entire affair rather sinister and problematic. It is one thing to engage in a high minded debate about the status if freedom or the nature of individuality, but it is clearly rather a different thing to look for how that debate has an effect on the day to day. Reasoning the other way around, the matter o the bold or the effects of Genes and gender, have a totally different import. The concept kicks in as a way of describing or expressing either a feeling of helplessness or power. In the former case the matter so the bold is of course always about capturing within a net of necessity a socially highly compel situation. One I then disgruntled (for numerous sliding reasons and complex facts), and looks to the cause foot that disgruntle in the stuff of the world; Racialism, sexisms or prejudices shoot out from such fears, feelings and worries. I the latter case the being true to a blood line is of course seen in a positive light. If one acts as a true born Britain or ‘ I a man’ , one act a way that not only expresses ones own freedom, but also sweeps other up along in that freedom. That is by acting according a fixed standard, one is free in oneself and carries the notion, the power, and pattern of freedom forward.
The blood, hat is the rubric f biological necessity over pinning social actions, translates into popular thought two of the great philosophical definition of freedom. The first definition comes down to what is conventional called negative freedom. One talks of blood or biological difference when one own persona freedom to ac on the ay to day has been constrained, and one is looking for a reason for that that. Ones freedom to live n the ay to day is then under threat, and one invokes then name of blood to reserve certain rights or certain goods for oneself or ones community. The blood is then the badge people need to war to qualify for a certain rights and freedoms. On the other hand, the Blood also encapsulates the essences of Spinoza’s conception of freedom. To be free is not to make a choice, but rather to be able to act according to ones own nature. On is then free when one can directly express ones own nature and ones own power. one is free then as a one acts as ‘an Englishmen’ or an ‘American’ or a women. One is fee as to acts under to gaze of apparent necessity.
It is very easily to be hard on both these form of freedom, one both these conceptions of the Blood, and it is of course true that many lunacies and cruelties are carries out in their name. And yet, there is not no reason for this of thinking. To make an argument about the bold is always to attempt to resolve something than otherwise cannot be simply resolved Than is it is a flight into certainty. It might then be a cack handed one, and yet to most people, for most of the time better have an idiot solution than no resolution. And better still have a short hand to express of whole series of very different thoughts and feelings and apparent injustices then have merely the injustice and so the problem glaring down on one.
Here the important fact is that any and every appeal to the Blood offers to understand and articulate an apparently necessarily and very harsh economical or social reality, and so do it a way that is not threatening to the individual or the society. We live after all in a world of spectacular poverty, and within a system that appears only partially able to do anything about that poverty. It is getting better but only slowly and rather unevenly. That is more there appears an inherent dynamic in this improvement. If one area of the wolf d becomes more wealthy the fear in another already wealthy areas is that it will loose its power, its prestige or even all its money. This I the fear the west has of China or India. There is the a worry in the west that it needs to keep its economic supremacy intact. This fear, and the accompanying guilt that goes with it has then of course been traditionally expressed in terms of a justification by the blood. There was either something ’wrong’ about that other lot, something that forced them to be poor; Or else whether there is 'something right' about us, our tribe, something that meant we had a right to be wealthy,; a right based on a history or a special place in the world, and so quite unassailable by rhyme or reason or even justice.
Blood was then a code to express or codify inequity. Every inequity could be gathered under its gaze, an given a sense. One of then meaning of globalization (and the epidemics it beds) is that this old manner of expressing difference has of course become rather problematic, at least on the level of national conventional politics (most of the time). However this has not meant even of this level that the old anxiety has gone away. The real problem with actually sorting out the issue of global warming is that as well as being true it also codifies in science of suspicion the third world countries always had about the west. That is he suspicion that the west would always find a pretext not to share their technologies with the rest of the world. A suspicion that is not groundless. The west put simply does not really want to have to share, and it is true that it expresses that jealous in the Global warming debate (as well as in many other places). It will therefore be the great challenge then for the next decade to actually have to move beyond this jealousy (and the matters of the Blood it codifies), and to attempt to resolve the problem as if we were genuinely fair an just. This is very likely a tall order, even though the position of humanity on the planet actually depends upon it.
What is more the Blood argument is very likely to make the entire debate that bit more problematic and complex. The old rubric that nations should hold on to their own or defend their kith and kind, is rather likely a world where water becomes scarce to rings true. How else can one decide who it going to have the rights to a limited resource save through birth and blood? Part then of the problem of living in a world of vanishing or poisoning resources is to avoid a slip into the rather unpleasant rubric that would very easily comprehend this scary world. Or perhaps better it would allow humanity to translate one series of problems inequities and fear into another. By making the argument about blood it all becomes about violence and so resolvable.
This last fact gets surely to the essence of this gear. At its heart it has two deep reserves. One the one hand, the Appeal to blood to family is one of those ‘lazy’ thoughts which are always at hand. So that whatever happens, whatever crazy thing anyone does not can look to their past or their family or the genetics to understand or contain that craziness. Blood will out, and that is enough the argument goes. The appeal to blood is then the supreme buttress of a status quo. That is, it what ultimately allows one to say that everything other hand the world of standard convention is somehow wrong or problematic or a matter of (partial) toleration and nothing more. It is the great strength of the language of the right that it is always available o understand a problem. The language might then be problematic and fundamentally unable to adequately express what it attempts to grasp (or to do so in very inelegant formulas, but this is on no consequence. These formals have a power becomes they are universally applicable, They allow then an individual to locate themselves within a complex world. They convey a handful of prejudices and fixed concepts that they allow. They create then a world which s wonderfully navigate, and easy to handle and do so however complex that actually truth really is (or however much it is not really out there).
On the other hand the concept of the blood is peculiarly useful for the darkest of reasons. T is revealing future of humanity that every problem is always translated into personal issue. There is a personal or global problem, and one gets an ache or a pain or mistakes a wide scale debate for a person set of choices (is not altogether daffy, the problem of what should one do in he face of something does always mater. In a sense this inevitable All problems o be understood have to be translated into our own world, That I they need to be come also about us or else we cannot act to ‘solve’ them), The problem then is what to do f the problem is absolutely irresolvable or else so problematic that it cannot be simply grasped or related to.
At which point the issue of Blood comes to the fore. Here are very few problem that humanity cannot absorb into war and violence. A problem about actually ensuring everyone has enough water or oil or food, becomes then not a social problem or problem of planning but a problem on control and domination. It becomes caught up in a series wars or even the great war of all against all. The issue of Blood then becomes the rallying call which defines this move this translation from one form of worry into another, If the issue is not about understanding or planning but only control and dominance with blood as the reasons for that control. One must always protect ones own nearest and dearest or ones people. ; one owes a clear loyalty to them whoever they are. The struggle for resources is necessarily a struggle which pitches group against group, and makes the badges and blood they were the arbitrator over who has a light to what.
Blood is hen the sink solution. If a problem is too difficult to be really solved (and there are many such problem sin the world), then the rubric of blood can fall on the debate like a blade. It will cut off the need to understand the problem in any meaningful sense. Indeed a ‘good’ war will prevent any time for such understanding. It its place it puts conflict were everyone knows their positions and their actions. The ‘joy’ of such a war is that it has traditionally of course actually solved many a problem //the act of ‘ding something else’ that is on not engaging in mass exploitation is enough to change the rules which formed the back bone to the conflict in the first place. That is the back up setting of our nations, the war footing retorts their relations one with the other and also with the environment, and so allows new possibilities in. War by itself might only be organized murder, and yet the fact of being at war might (very unintentionally) change very many things.
However of cause in very recent times there has been a variation on this rubric, one that bring the entire augment about blood full circle. The war of terror opened up the problem of knowing who ones enemy was, more critically it very deliberately confused who was the enemy (an the American right of course took the bate). That is the war on terror was always waged as a war of the blood on the most conventional and most objectionable of senses. The problem was then that it free flowed into all the other uses of the term ( it set religions –acts as a Christian or an Islam or an American) against a war about resources (the Arab-Israel conflict is a lot about the control of water) with a series of debates about globalization (Al Queda was understood as a global terrorist concern). That I it risked rather too readily opening out on a genuine blood war, a war to truly terrify us all.
The Problem of Blood is a problem we all need worry about. It is not good enough to simply assume the problem will go away, as it will not. It will go nowhere. Rather every generation we will need to fight its latest brood of thoughts and its latest manifestations. That will need to strip out their power and meaning, and so prevent that otherwise frighteningly easy slip into a blood war of words or worse.
