WFHB

This episode originally aired on January 8, 2019.

In November 2016 today’s guest, Bruce Laurie, published an essay called ‘”Chaotic Freedom” in Civil War Louisiana: The Origins of an Iconic Image.’ This image is of a badly abused enslaved man called variously “A Typical Negro,” “The Scourged Back,” “Gordon the Slave,” or “Poor Peter,” who is turned away showing his badly scarred back to the camera. Laurie reaches forward to compare it to the photograph labelled “Napalm Girl” from the Vietnam War in order to take the measure of its reach and value as abolitionist propaganda. Utilizing new photographic technology, the picture of “Poor Peter” quickly found its way into hands and homes all over the nation. It further gained wide exposure in the pages of Harper’s Weekly in the July 4th, 1863 edition.

The context of that image and the power of that image to affect those citizens living as if on a different planet from that of the Slave South is our subject for this Interchange.

GUEST

Bruce Laurie is an Historian and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst whose most recent work is devoted to abolitionism before the Civil War. This includes the books Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (2005) and Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists (2015).

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Lynchings On Loop (Interchange with Courtney Baker)

MUSIC

“Battle Hymn of the Republic” performed by Odetta

“J’ai fait tout le tour du pays” (I Went Around the Country) by Jimmy Peters recorded by Alan Lomax

“Get Off the Track!” (Hutchinson Family Singers)

“Rockaway” by Jimmy Peters recorded by Alan Lomax

“Battle Hymn of the Republic” performed by Jon Batiste

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

This episode originally aired on January 8, 2019.

In November 2016 today's guest, Bruce Laurie, published an essay called '"Chaotic Freedom” in Civil War Louisiana: The Origins of an Iconic Image.' This image is of a badly abused enslaved man called variously “A Typical Negro,” “The Scourged Back,” “Gordon the Slave,” or “Poor Peter," who is turned away showing his badly scarred back to the camera. Laurie reaches forward to compare it to the photograph labelled “Napalm Girl” from the Vietnam War in order to take the measure of its reach and value as abolitionist propaganda. Utilizing new photographic technology, the picture of “Poor Peter” quickly found its way into hands and homes all over the nation. It further gained wide exposure in the pages of Harper's Weekly in the July 4th, 1863 edition.

The context of that image and the power of that image to affect those citizens living as if on a different planet from that of the Slave South is our subject for this Interchange.

GUEST

Bruce Laurie is an Historian and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst whose most recent work is devoted to abolitionism before the Civil War. This includes the books Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (2005) and Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists (2015).

RELATED

Lynchings On Loop (Interchange with Courtney Baker)

MUSIC

"Battle Hymn of the Republic" performed by Odetta

"J'ai fait tout le tour du pays" (I Went Around the Country) by Jimmy Peters recorded by Alan Lomax

“Get Off the Track!” (Hutchinson Family Singers)

"Rockaway" by Jimmy Peters recorded by Alan Lomax

"Battle Hymn of the Republic" performed by Jon Batiste

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Today’s show is about understanding the need for a new social and political vision in the face of climate catastrophe, ecological collapse, and species extinction. New technologies must spring out of new ways to organize living if we’re not to repeat the same mistakes of humans devoted to the attempt at dominating and subduing all …

Today’s show is about understanding the need for a new social and political vision in the face of climate catastrophe, ecological collapse, and species extinction. New technologies must spring out of new ways to organize living if we’re not to repeat the same mistakes of humans devoted to the attempt at dominating and subduing all of nature.

Imagination is key, but not the sociotechnical imaginary that wants to aerosolize the stratosphere as a way to delay the cascading effects of climate change. That sci-fi dystopia is brought to you by capitalists and fossil fuel industry think tanks.

The window for action on climate change is closing rapidly. As anxieties about global temperatures soar, demands for urgent action grow louder. What can be done? Can this process be reversed? Once temperatures rise, is there any going back?

In her new book, After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration, today’s guest Holly Jean Buck charts a possible course to a livable future. Climate restoration will require not just innovative technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but social and economic transformation. The steps we must take are enormous, and they must be taken soon.

Buck examines industrial-scale seaweed farms, the grinding of rocks to sequester carbon at the bottom of the sea, direct air capture, marine cloud brightening, and even old school low tech fixes like soil carbon sequestration, and reforestation. The truth, to date, is that even if some methods show promise, they are still only imaginary when it comes to the scale of need.

What is most worrying to Buck is the way the current capitalist fossil fuel barons are putting their considerable wealth and influence behind technologies that might fit the technical definition of carbon neutral or even carbon negative (and so serve their propaganda), but with the sole purpose of continuing to pollute for profit in the same old way for as long as possible. Who or what gives them the right to decide on the fate of life on the planet?

Our music today comes from Polish jazz pianist and composer Krzysztof Komeda and we open with title track to his 1966 masterpiece Astigmatic. To be astigmatic is to suffer blurred vision.

GUEST

Holly Buck researches the social dimensions of geoengineering as a faculty fellow with the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment in Washington, DC, as a member of the Steering Committee for the international Climate Engineering Conference in Berlin, and as a doctoral researcher at Cornell University, from which she holds a PhD in development sociology.

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"The desperate race to cool the ocean before it’s too late" by Holly Jean Buck

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Pathways to Planetary Sovereignty – Joel Wainwright on Climate Leviathan (Interchange)

MUSIC by Krzysztof Komeda

"Astigmatic"

"Cul-de-Sac"

"Get Out of Town"

"Don Kichot"

"Por Katastrofie"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Throughout 2019, an unprecedented amount of massive protests, marches, and strikes occurred in various countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, all commonly giving voice to the sharp inequality throughout these societies that has been produced by the increasing austerity of economic policy modeled on neoliberalism. While similar to these examples, Colombia nevertheless offers a …

Throughout 2019, an unprecedented amount of massive protests, marches, and strikes occurred in various countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, all commonly giving voice to the sharp inequality throughout these societies that has been produced by the increasing austerity of economic policy modeled on neoliberalism.

While similar to these examples, Colombia nevertheless offers a unique case, being the country with the highest inequality in terms of land distribution in all of Latin America and having the largest internal population displacement in the world. (Oxfam)

This has largely been an effect of the armed conflict in Colombia that has lasted for over five decades between the Colombian government and the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). On top of claiming over 220,000 lives, the armed conflict has also resulted in the intense militarization of the government and the frequent repression of social groups and organizations fighting for alternative forms of Colombian citizenship.

The U.S. has played a heavy role in aiding the Colombian government in a deadly War on Drugs through financial and policy assistance, most notably with the implementation of Plan Colombia from the early 2000s.

In 2016, the Colombian government and the FARC signed an historic peace agreement which called for a ceasefire and the laying down of arms among other things. But the Colombian government has been slow and largely ineffective in implementing the policies laid out in the peace agreement and in many instances has continued to deepen social, economic, and political inequality for many Colombian citizens.

The Colombian National Strike, which began 21 November 2019, comes in this context, originating as a response to a set of tax reforms proposed by the current Colombian President Iván Duque, and expanding to include a wide range of demands by a vast coalition of Colombian citizens.

In today’s Interchange we’ll offer a particular angle from which to view the National Strike, the Peace Accords, and Plan Colombia: that of the Cocalera, particularly the women who work in the coca fields in places like Putumayo.

GUEST

Margarita Martinez-Osorio, co-author of “Voices from the Coca Fields,” a 2018 report issued by the Colombian social justice and human rights organization Dejusticia. The report focuses on the socioeconomic situations of women coca growers in Putumayo faced with a triple burden of care, community, and productive labor, all while navigating the stigma of criminality given them by the Colombian state due to their association with an illicit crop. Martinez-Osorio is a PhD student in the History department at Indiana University where she is researching the Peasant Movement in Colombia in the 1960s.

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Voices from the Coca Fields: Women building rural communities (Executive Summary)

"The Debts We Owe to Female Coca Growers" by Margarita Martinez-Osorio

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Outrage after Colombia riot police force young woman into unmarked car

For our music today we’ll bookend the program with songs by Henry Threadgill coming on the heels of the Reagan era in the United States, and in between offer Sun Ra & His Myth Science Arkestra from the 1960 release Angels and Demons at Play. From an era of collective hope to one of individual …

For our music today we’ll bookend the program with songs by Henry Threadgill coming on the heels of the Reagan era in the United States, and in between offer Sun Ra & His Myth Science Arkestra from the 1960 release Angels and Demons at Play. From an era of collective hope to one of individual despondency.

From the 1960s to the 90s politicians and economists engaged in the projects that would result in what is now widely recognized as Neoliberalism - a totalizing worldview with theological underpinnings that appears inescapable but that our guest, Adam Kotsko, believes is beginning to lose its mystifying grip on us.

We’ll open with Threadgill’s “The Devil Is On the Loose and Dancin’ with a Monkey” from the 1988 release Rag, Bush and All.

Since the late 1970s, neoliberalism has reshaped public policy and arguably every area of life on the model of market competition, which it presents as the most authentic expression of human freedom. But Adam Kotsko asserts that such a freedom, the freedom to compete, exists solely to generate blame; when we are given a choice, we are always being set up to fail.

We’ve been joined on Interchange by several scholars to discuss neoliberalism. With Phil Mirowski we tracked its origins and theorists and its dissemination via think tanks; with Melinda Cooper we discovered Nobel Laureates creating policy positions undermining the revolutions of the 1960s by disparaging and defunding any social relation outside of the heteronormative patriarchal family; Wendy Brown showed us the depoliticizing nature of “marketing selves”; Ilana Gershon then showed how ineffectual (and exhausting) the “marketed” self actually is; and Will Davies even showed us how happiness is just another behavioral bludgeon deepening our sense of failure - well Why Aren’t You Happy when you have all this freedom and opportunity?

In this way neoliberalism demonizes the single, solitary, human agent. You only have yourself to blame; indeed you have been made blameworthy.

Today Adam Kotsko tracks this totalizing worldview through the lens of political theology and demonstrates its parallels to Christianity, specifically how it deals with the problem of evil and the concept of free will. As Kotsko tells it, “God has given us free will so that we will freely choose not to use it.” To use free will, though surely the highest form of human agency, is to rebel against the perfect working order of God’s creation. And so too, the great and all-knowing Market renders freedom of choice our greatest power (and duty) while pre-ordaining that choice will lead to failure - ours, not the Market’s and not God’s. It's in this way we are always already Fallen.

GUEST

Adam Kotsko is a theologian, religious scholar, culture critic, and translator, working in the field of political theology. He served as an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Shimer College in Chicago, which was absorbed into North Central College in 2017. He's the author of several books, among them, Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television, The Prince of This World, and Neoliberalism's Demons.

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Links to 5 Interchange programs on Neoliberalism

In the Name of the Family (Interchange wit...

On April 22nd 1970, Democratic Senator Garland Nelson, originator of the idea of Earth Day, proclaimed: Winning the environmental war is a whole lot tougher challenge by far than winning any other war in the history of Man. It will take $20 to $25 billion more a year in Federal money than we are spending …

On April 22nd 1970, Democratic Senator Garland Nelson, originator of the idea of Earth Day, proclaimed:

Winning the environmental war is a whole lot tougher challenge by far than winning any other war in the history of Man. It will take $20 to $25 billion more a year in Federal money than we are spending or asking for now.

Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty. The objective is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all other human beings and all other living creatures.

Our goal is a new American ethic that sets new standards for progress, emphasizing human dignity and well being rather than an endless parade of technology that produces more gadgets, more waste, more pollution.

Are we able to meet the challenge? Yes. We have the technology and the resources.

Are we willing? That is the unanswered question.

It appears that question has been answered in the negative - and we did indeed emphasize an endless parade of technology that produced more gadgets, more waste, and more pollution.

And so no new American ethic that emphasizes human dignity and especially no ethic that emphasizes dignity for the “all other living creatures” in Nelson’s statement.

Today there’s a single fire in Australia burning an area larger than Manhattan. Multiple fires burning since November have killed an estimated 500 billion animals - koalas, notable to us for their image of vulnerability, have lost 80% of their habitat so far. And there is more death and destruction to come as the fires rage on due to record droughts and continuing record temperatures there. We are witnesses to the consequences of not winning Nelson’s environmental war.

And from fire to flood: In 2018, Hurricane Florence swept through North Carolina, killing at least 3.4 million farmed animals and an unknown number of wild animals. What we generally heard reported though was the toxic consequences the flooding of their waste pools would create to the humans there.

Humans are simply a catastrophe considered from the perspective of the non-human. We breed and kill at least 100 billion animals per year for food and at least 115 million per year for research. Fishing kills 1-3 trillion animals per year. Deforestation destroys animal habitats and on and on it goes.

Philosopher and ethicist Jeff Sebo want to shift the emphasis: what can be done for the animals as human-caused climate collapse continues?

GUEST

Jeff Sebo is Clinical Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, and Philosophy at New York University. He works primarily in moral, social, and political philosophy with an emphasis on ethics. His current work focuses on the ethics of food, animals, and the environment; and the ethics of activism, advocacy, and philanthropy.

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Unequal Suffering: Eduardo Brondizio On Biodiversity and Species Extinction (Interchange)

MUSIC

David Rothenberg is a composer and jazz musician whose books and recordings reflect a longtime interest in understanding other species such as whales, birds, and insects by making music with them.

“Flame” (Grenseland)

“The Year of Insect Thinking” (Bug Music)

“No More Room on the Ark” (3Corners of the World)

“Nature Boy” (Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast)

“Good News Gorillas” (Tablatun)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Studio Engineer: Dan Withered

Executive Producer: Kade Young