Exploring the Depths of Human-Nature Relationships with Jules Delisle

Do you ever feel like ecological thinking is being misunderstood, or worse, misrepresented? Join me and the insightful Jules Delisle, from the member school for the humanities, as we dismantle these misconceptions and explore the nuanced interplay between humanity and our environment. We tackle the thorny issues of quantifiability versus validity in statistics, deconstruct the myth that ecological consciousness is a regression to primitivism, and celebrate the unrecognized intelligence and adaptability of hunter-gatherer societies. Our conversation takes you through the importance of dynamic ecosystems, the fragility of our technologically driven world, and the vital role of biodiversity in the future of human adaptability.

As we navigate the complexities of environmental and cultural identity, we challenge you to consider the profound implications of land claims and societal priorities. We delve into the insights of indigenous perspectives, especially in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and emphasize the importance of precise language and dynamic cultural recognition in these sensitive discussions. This episode promises a compelling narrative that spotlights the intersection of environmentalism, cultural identity, and human development, pushing you to question how these issues impact the well-being of our most valuable asset – our children.

We conclude this powerful exploration by reimagining the structure of our relationships with both technology and each other. Discover the potency of traditional kinship structures, the need for a nuanced approach in legal and philosophical debates, and the global responsibility that accompanies our collective struggle towards a sustainable future. Whether it's reflecting on the ethics of statehood and conflict or the role of reading in understanding our diverse world, this journey with Jules redefines the essence of progress and urges us to invest in the resilience and development of the younger generation. Prepare to be inspired, enlightened, and ready to contribute to the pivotal change our world so desperately needs.

Jules Delisle is an organizer of the Mimbre's School, researcher, human ecologist, and nurse.  

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

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Challenges and Misunderstandings of Ecological Thinking

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello , and the overdramatic music means we are at VarmVlog . For those of you who are listening on the podcast , you don't hear the same overdramatic music and so you don't get the joke . I apologize . Today we're here with Jules , organizer of the member school for the humanities . Members is a valley out in New Mexico . It does not mean members , as in groups of people , although it's a fun pun to make about the school .

C. Derick Varn 1:19

Today we're responding to some of the criticisms of Jules and I's last discussion . We're going to try to go into what Jules thinks . Ecological thinking actually is why people respond . So just to relate to it . We'll probably upset some more orthodox Marxist . Just going to warn people about that .

C. Derick Varn 1:49

I'm increasingly of the attitude that I don't care about that . I used to , but I'm increasingly just like , yeah , it's not worth trying to pique you guys anyway . So one of the first things that I noticed when we were talking about this last time and this was a theme of some of the comments most of the comments were positive . So we know that we're not . We don't think our audience was hostile , but the two themes that came up one people calling you a primitivist and two people accusing both you and I of not understanding how numbers and representation works , about things like IQ and whatever , and I find this really funny because I work with educational statistics actually as part of my living . It's not the only thing I do , but it's definitely part of my job , and you work with high end science .

C. Derick Varn 2:57

So let's go into these accusations a little bit , because I think part of the problem you and I talked about this privately is that people don't know what ecological thinking is and they also don't really know what modeling is our numbers , relationships to modeling and because of that , they will take certain critiques made . Admittedly , yes , we could have gone into much more detail about what we were talking about when we were talking about any number of quantifiable matrix , but there is a general assumption , I think , that one , quantifiability equals both generalizability and validity in statistical terms , which you know , and if you don't know what those two things are specifically for statistics , you already don't know what we're talking about . And two , that anybody who says anything about limits is automatically saying that we have to go back to being hunter-gatherers .

Jules Delisle 4:02

As if that is still an option on the table right , which is an interesting thing to really consider about all of this the options that people have for how they choose to live or not choose to live , and this fear that we could backslide into this primitive state of being hunter-gatherers . It actually takes an extraordinary amount of skill physical , embodied skill to be able to move over a landscape and identify all of the different kinds of foods and to process them and use them successfully . So there's something really insulting just about the idea that we would backslide out of this period of sophistication into a hunter-gatherer state , as if we would just devolve . That's kind of a weird way of thinking , as if there aren't living hunter-gatherers that are contemporaries who have actively maintained their life ways in the face of colonization , even with intrusions of all of these different kinds of ecological modules that I think people get really stuck on as the only ways of eating or the only ways of living . That's kind of an interesting thing about this the idea of living with a deep knowledge of nature and living not in opposition to it but moving along with it or figuring out ways to adapt to it . But that's somehow primitive . It's what humanity is defined by when you actually look at our evolution and how we've moved across landscapes , how we've adapted to huge ecological ships in Africa and then , as humans , moved out of Africa and interacted with different plants and animals and developed technologies that were both social and ecological in order to carry themselves all across the planet . So I have a lot of respect for all of the people that led to this moment that we exist , and I am in some ways contemptuous of how we have phrased success in terms of society and civilization in direct opposition to biodiversity , stability , resilience and these are qualities that , especially as things change radically , are really valuable . It's interesting to know how humans have survived across radical changes .

Jules Delisle 6:29

I understand that a lot of the urge to maintain the way that things are or to reform the way that things are comes from an inability to imagine any other alternative , and I assume that that's also because people are pretty sad and things aren't going really well and we have this simultaneous propaganda of things are always getting better , like the pinker arrow go up , stonks go up kind of timeline , versus what we see , which is that people are really struggling and systems really seem like they're off their axis . The things are not moving forward as one would hope this is . It's an interesting moment to talk about what we used to have . You know what humanity is . You know what nourishes us and makes us healthy , because we have evidence that we've been healthy at different times and in all manner of situations . But it's kind of hard to think about where we're going from here and what we'll eat and how we'll organize ourselves and what we'll lose , and I think that everyone everyone is kind of coming from a defensive position when it comes to what we'll need to change about how we eat and live . Nobody really wants to give up the little that they have and I understand that , like even the most rational Marxist and the people who do statistics that are trying to show these positive secular trends .

Dynamic Modeling and Human Interaction

Jules Delisle 8:02

I'm really interested in modeling that isn't looking at fixed or static times . I'm interested in more dynamic and more complicated ways that humans interact with ecosystems and interact with each other and what the cost of that really is , what the cost of changing strategies would be , because there is inertia to the way that we organize ourselves . There's inertia to a lot of these ideas that we have around progress and success and health and ecological thinking . It's adaptive and it changes with the environments that you're in . So there isn't like this singular narrative of salvation that can come from looking at an ecological system and trying to see what you can learn about flows and stability and to make decisions from that . That's really what I'm interested in . I want to be able to make decisions that I know will have sustainable and metabolically resilient like paths forward .

Jules Delisle 9:11

I'm sick of the idea that if we just keep throwing things into a sinkhole , that eventually it will fill up and then this sunk cost theory to the way that we eat and live is interesting to me , but this comes from a technological and scientific understanding . In my case , I work with people . I look at bones as study bodies and it's the spread between what people purport to be like the good of our current trajectory forward against what we clearly have had in the past and people do have now that's the other thing like they're healthy and resilient people on the planet , even in spite of industrial capitalist modernity . But they definitely operate very differently and that is like what can you learn from people that intentionally organize themselves differently in different kinds of ecosystems ? I don't think that that's .

Jules Delisle 10:07

I find it weird that that becomes immediately equated with the idea of primitivism , because these are , in a large part , are contemporaries , so that's kind of like the biggest thing and heavily influenced by technology to the extent that it is making and doing . So I think that there is in all of this also a conversation about exactly what people think technology is and whether or not they think that we have transcended the idea of technology as a part of our bodies and that we're full like cyborg now . The idea that we are like completely amended and augmented consciousnesses and are capable somehow of collectivity on another level because of our technological advancements that doesn't exist in other networks or other ways of thinking . That's the thing that I think is really interesting . It's like , are our networks actually more complex because they have more nodes , or are they significantly more homogenous and fragile as a result ? And so that's kind of that's where I'm really at is .

Jules Delisle 11:16

I'm not necessarily interested in discussing how modernity is definitively justified , that like how this , the cost of all of this advancement and the settlement and industrialization , is like just taken for granted . I think it's interesting that anarcho-primitivist is the way that people respond to that . I don't understand why , saying things are bad and that other people in different times had better lives like observably better lives . That can't be masked by statistics . I don't know why that is so controversial . I find it really interesting actually .

C. Derick Varn 12:04

Yeah , there's a lot that I think about in regards to like we talk about the teleological assumptions of rationality and how that looks like , even for people who are critics of capitalist modernity in quotation marks , whatever the fuck that actually is and I think one trend people might be noticing on the show , as I constantly say under my breath whatever the fuck that actually is to get people to start thinking about the way they've used these concepts to stand , and so they haven't really defined them . That said , I even think about , normally , one of my bet-noirs in this realm , which is Steven Pinker , to me like or example of the kind of thinking in the liberal form not so much in Marxist form , but that we're talking about here . And yet I remember even Pinker in his 2021 book on rationality , which is , by and large , a very , very silly book , but he does concede , for example , that hunter-gatherers had intelligence . That , say , iq testing in the 1960s , which put the average hunter-gatherer tribesmen at like a 60 IQ or something , could not pick up , didn't try to pick up , because the way it was measuring pattern recognition was so based off the assumptions of European languages and our assumptions about mathematics that it missed that hunter-gatherers can sex an animal from their tracks pretty accurately , which is something that a lot of modern specialists can't do , that they have incredibly long memories for things that we don't even think about having a memory for because it's not articulable easily in conventional words and I don't know why that just didn't undermine Pinker's entire Better Angels argument right there . He tries to salvage it later on .

C. Derick Varn 14:36

Basically , in a liberal , humanism makes us smarter because basically we can kill each other and us . We have to be smarter .

Exploring Historical Data and Human Impact

C. Derick Varn 14:44

That's actually the keynote of his argument and that's not even getting into , say , someone like Nicholas Nassam-Talib's critique of him for missing stochastic patterns and whatnot in his data , that he just ignores that and removes the numbers to a level where it paints a pretty clear , consistent , linear development , although at times , for example and I remember thinking about this when I was talking to someone about , say , what was the economic growth rate of medieval Europe , and someone will say it was less than 1% , but then I'm like , okay , but what are we measuring there ? We can't be measuring GDP . There's no GDP specific for the 12th to 15th century . That doesn't mean anything .

C. Derick Varn 15:44

Are we measuring , like , bone density data ? Well , that's going to come back where some of the there's some really there's periods of pretty significant decline in life expectancy in the 13th or 14th century . Are we talking about trying to just adjust for data that we have from like since this is in the 14th century and taxation records , and then compare it to modern GDP ? I mean like that's . It's like comparing . It's not even comparing like apples to conquats which is my , because at least those are both fruits . It's like comparing apples to plutonium .

Jules Delisle 16:28

We're really gonna have to learn Arabic super fast if we wanna fill out the other side of that census data from Europe where they're draining people , you know like . So that's the thing is like there is a lot of data that we can look at , especially from the European period , and it's all interesting in what it could potentially indicate , especially in terms of like reproductive trends , like the roles of children , the placement of children , the distribution of population that results from their value . I'm very interested in how children are centered or valued and how they're distributed in different kinds of economic systems , and like the impact that that has ecologically , because it's important to remember that humans aren't just apex predators . We have , like you know , we're predators to a third of all vertebrate species on the planet . I think that the amount of animals that were used for testing I was like over a hundred million last year or something like that . There's extraordinary use of animals , not just for food . So our predatory behavior has to be put into a much larger framework . We're not just talking about what we eat . We're also talking about how we interact with other you know , other elements of the environment and how we use things for parts , and children are part of that dynamic in the way that they are involved in labor . Sometimes they are the ones that are responsible for providing a significant amount of food in the diet or otherwise like tasked with extraordinary amounts of domestic labor , so , like kids , are productive in that way . But there's also this huge potential and , like the way to featurety that comes with moving out a whole section of your population . This is an advantage to other people . It could be a disadvantage to you later on .

Jules Delisle 18:19

It's just like these kinds of tracks that people are on the idea of , even like Hobbs and Rousseau . These are statistical washings , right Like Hobbs idea that , like all indigenous , life is like a state of nature and should therefore be nasty and brutish and short . The idea that nature is nasty , brutish and short and full of competition and toothy and fangy and so against the idea of like culture is somehow being safer and kinder . Like a lot of this data that we see just kind of lays bare how humans were not valued , how children weren't valued , and so we can look at the same numbers but we're not necessarily seeing the same thing in them , because we're like , if you're looking just at rates of violence or if you're looking at population growth as a necessarily good thing . You're not and you're not comparing that to other metrics of health , especially like social determinants of health .

Jules Delisle 19:26

If you're stressed out and living in squalor and all of the water and your sanitation systems are connected , obviously you're gonna have a different life outcome , even if you're living in the same area than people that have different surroundings . So there is , embedded within this washed data , a huge variability in how people's life outcomes actually work out , and that's the thing that I find kind of frustrating . I'm more interested in the spread and the real variability than I am in giving kind of like smoothed , washed presentation of data that gives a clear narrative , especially when the narrative is like just so , not the way the world . They can just look outside and see that that's not how it is . So we're definitely living in different worlds and I think that that's

Interactions With Environments and Perspectives

Jules Delisle 20:23

a part of it . We're not able to reconcile how our individual lifeways are fundamentally different because of our positions , like regionally , and as a result of our present ability to tap into either selling ourselves and our skills in different kinds of contexts or figuring out how to kind of like go around those systems and need or want less .

Jules Delisle 20:51

That's the other thing , the pro consumption side of things , the idea that , if we keep eating things and wanting more , that luxury is something that we are all fundamentally entitled to and that , like , were it not for the billionaires courting the luxury , the world could be covered in luxury . That kind of idea is just like it's trying to fight against the idea that you will have to be uncomfortable or there will be things that you are without , that sometimes you can grow up in a period of extraordinary bounty and then the situation can change , and that for the second half of your life you can live in poverty or with lack or want . These are things that people find it hard to deal with , even though we see it playing out in the politics of the world that we live in and even in the way that we like conduct our lives in relatively safe , stable , economic and social like positions in North America . So I definitely think that the desire for everything to be peaceful and ecological and balanced , the idea of being able to kill an animal with respect , to have reciprocity I could see how that is a fairytale to people who live in this very disjointed world in which , like , the only way out is to like crawl through this like technological ladder to salvation , Like I get it , but there are a lot of people , like I get it , but there are people living now , our contemporaries , that have completely different ways of interacting with the environment , and there's something to be learned from that , because they also have a right to be on earth and to live the way that they have come to understand is beneficial for their bodies and for their families , and so , like , there's a fundamental issue of like the land and health and food , and there's a difference between seeing the products of the land as something that you are dependent on and have to contribute to , and the idea that , because you have managed the land , that you own it , that it is worth fighting and dying for , that it can't be left and come back to . So that's another part of this that's really difficult . It's like , how do you have ecological thinking if you don't have land ? If you grow up in a very impoverished ecology that's intentionally constructed and just has way too many Bradford pairs , it's hard to imagine , especially because , like , maybe you don't like the way that grass feels , or you've been to another country and we're horrified by the insects or other things like that . There's all manner of ways that by being sedentary for , like most people , even if they move for work , or still , pretty interestingly , locked into certain kind of like language areas or regions where their work experience is particularly viable .

Jules Delisle 24:05

So I think that there's just like a lack of familiarity and a fear to think differently or to realize that other people have succeeded , even when these forms of life were actively like criminalized or fought against , and that was for a reason . It's because they saw benefit to it . That's another thing about , like the pinker thinking . It's the idea that there is one reason , there is one rationalization and that the numbers are what show us . That that's , I think that that's . The other issue is that , by saying that there are some forms of measurement that will never really approach , like the real experience , like we're looking for real measures , we're looking for the proof , the ultimate truth , as can be approximated in the least amount of data so that it is a singular point of agreement . But a lot of this is quality of life and that's an experiential thing that we just have to have respect for . Like you can't just like argue people into changing their way of life with statistics . If that could work , it would have worked . There's so many people have been doing so much statistics .

Understanding Cultural Differences in Healthcare

C. Derick Varn 25:21

One thing that I think about when I approach these kinds of problems is there's a couple of things I was thinking about times where I stayed with Bedouins out and the white desert , which is near the Sahara , not something that most , even middle-class white people get to do . Being an educational mercenary does come with privileges and I will totally admit they are privileges but you start realizing that there are ways to cobble together a pretty stable and healthy life that you don't understand , like okay , so we're bathing in sand , but I'm actually pretty clean . And then I am like well , I don't have sunscreen , but I'm wearing all these clothes and they actually work . Like I'm not all of a sudden , these things that seem exotic or cultural affectations you realize no , there's reasons for them most of the time actually Like , and these things get expounded .

C. Derick Varn 26:36

Now , where there's a problem a lot of the time is when these kinds of I'll use the term micro-political economy it's just to make people happy hit up against a different one . So , for example , I think about , like indigenous women making talyutas in Southern Mexico and they're beginning to have problems with the traditional baking practices because modern housing traps the smoke and it causes cancer . But what's happening ? There is one life way that is effectively somewhat adaptive for a situation is running into another one that's not adaptive for the same situation . And when I noticed that , I even started looking at our houses here in the United States and going like , well , these assume a whole lot of things . It assumes that certain kinds of infrastructure is always gonna work . These things are actually not super inhabitable , particularly if they're relatively new . If certain things start to fall apart For example , you live in the great white North , I live in the cold part , in the cold desert what happens if modern heating doesn't work ?

Jules Delisle 28:00

You have to go in , you have to use your petroleum engine to drive into town and to find somewhere else that somebody else has either going on , or a generator so you don't freeze to death at night .

C. Derick Varn 28:10

Right , and also your water . Your water pipes are closed like your . The infrastructure is built on a whole lot of assumptions that are nodes of complexity and I get all Joseph Tainery about this stuff , I'll admit that . But nodes of complexity actually do increase fragility points , even if they're centralized , like there's just more stuff to break and you can have cascade fractures . To me , when I think about that and I think about a place like Cuba all right , cuba has great medicine . They have well-trained doctors . They're not always able to even get needles Like . The embargo is pretty fucking nasty . Why do they have better healthcare than us ? And it is because they've had to right , they've had to do preventative medicine because that was the only option for them . But they've actually cobbled together in a very isolated and relatively poor for the region , definitely shut off island country , a way to have a health system that is , in terms of outcomes , better than the US's .

Jules Delisle 29:22

Well , it's patient-oriented care and that's the thing . Like , the model that we have for the most part is that people come in , they're triaged Based on the initial appearance . You're kind of given a label of exactly how like emergent . Your problem is how immediate it is and it is very easy along the line for information to get lost Because you're reporting off and reporting off and reporting off . It is supposed to be objective and professional . You're supposed to give , you know , unconditional , positive regard to all of your patients and there are trainings for this sort of thing . But like this is actually the research work that I've been doing .

Jules Delisle 30:07

People think that they are very culturally competent . They all rate themselves like nurses , especially like there's a study in Saskatchewan nurses rated themselves as being very culturally competent . They're very respectful and knowledgeable about other people's cultures . But they don't really like you know , they self-reported this , but they don't have any of the skills and they don't know how to demonstrate like the behavior of cultural competency , which is recognizing the difference between where you are and another person is and then figuring out a way to bridge that gap and in the way that meets their needs the most . So like , if there is a language issue , finding someone that can communicate with them effectively , not just like speaking across each other in two different languages and being like I'm still gonna give you care . In Cuba there's an idea of enhanced health experiences , like so that everybody knows the social context that the person is in , what they may or may not be getting that they need . There's a different role for family members and communities and discharge planning , and I think that most healthcare workers in especially places like Canada , like they hate that we're just putting band-aids on things and we're not solving systemic problems . But that's kind of the whole deal is that , like people's health and people's diets are not separate . People's stress levels and their social interactions are directly linked , so , like all of these things play into each other In an inextricable way and in communities that have their traditional food practices , in facilities that are specifically designed to bring people together , people's health outcomes are being met in a different way and that doesn't have to be filtered through the concept of Western development or progress , like it doesn't have to have box houses . We don't have to settle and fill in swamps that will eventually sink in and everybody's basements will flood . You know , like there are different ways to incorporate what people have learned works on a larger social scale , in part by actually like listening to those people that have actively maintained traditions of effective human environmental interactions and effective human interactions like kinship , and then also like how to treat others . Interacting with your environment teaches you how to treat with others , like how to treat others , how to interact with others and also to have respect for like things that are different than you .

Jules Delisle 32:45

It's interesting how we talk about learning from animals through myths as such . Like all the story started off with , like the ASOP's fable or like you know the legend where there's the anthropomorphized animal or whatever . We put that into the past of our learning . But there's still a significant amount to be learned from our ecosystems , and not just things that are like us , not just animals or vertebrates , but like the whole concept behind like microbiology is that we can learn more about the world by looking at tiny things very closely and paying attention . And that's another problem with some of the framing of ecological thinking . They think that it is all trees and it is all fungus , but the reality is it's viruses , it's microbes . Like ecological thinking takes into account the nested ecologies that exist in any given setting . So , like you know , I'm on a grassland , but I'm an ecosystem and I have things in me that I can't name that are doing all sorts of cool things , so like that's .

Jules Delisle 33:53

That isn't that is supported by the most advanced science . The fact that we've had to throw so much imaging technology that has such a profound ecological cost in order to see these things . It shows that there's a huge gap in how people are able to process the relationship between themselves and nature , like where the line of nature is , how dangerous it is , what they're willing to risk , and that's something that I find like reading anthropology fails , because reading about other people's lives like and even like pictures and the way that museums and collections and galleries portray other ways of life , it makes it so distant . There's like there's a way in which interacting with other people and having an embodied experience of what it means to live and survive . People always say that you have to be there , and I think that that's like there are a lot of people that have very limited embodied experiences , trying to figure out how anything could be different and like it's .

Jules Delisle 35:12

There's so much that's possible in terms of technological innovation , but we have to be willing to adapt , and I think that patterned behavior is comfort , like that's comfort behavior , and that there's a in being fixated on maintaining so much of what we know is dysfunctional . There's just a that comes , I think , from an entirely anxiety-based , like individual , level of dissatisfaction , because there's there's the arguments are very clear for what would be better . I don't know how to like , I don't know how to convince people when what is on the table is more of that emotional inability to pivot , to transition to a different way of valuing yourself or even like putting yourself in different kinds of settings . I think that this kind of comes back to patient oriented care and healthcare . There is a level of control that people want to be able to exert over their surroundings , and in a healthcare setting , that's when people have the least amount of control .

Jules Delisle 36:20

For the most part , they don't necessarily know what's going on in their bodies . Orders are coming from out of the room , things are not being explained to you very well . The only thing that really makes that kind of feeling better is if you assume that there's somebody kind of at the top of all of it who's got a better idea of it than you and that ultimately it'll be okay , and I think that , like on a civilizational level , we're just not . We're not confronting how much of that dynamic exists , and even in how we confront economics , even in how we discuss politics . And I don't even feel the need to trash talk Marx anymore . He's super bombastic and compelling to read , but like he's in despair too .

Jules Delisle 37:08

So I don't know , I don't . Yeah , I don't see a lot of hope in it . That's the more interesting thing , I think , is that people thinking that transcending nature , that becoming purely technological , that no longer having to be subjected to constraints or limits , that that that's what we should be pointed towards as people . And this is like I've told you about this , my goonther . And there's Prometheanism and the bomb like line of thinking . I've been reading him a lot lately and I've also just been dealing with ideas of technologies created to avoid massacres . The things that we do to try to prevent violence are often so easily outside of our control . I've been thinking about that a lot . So that's the other thing . We don't have to . We don't have to necessarily think about Liberation through technology like Deus ex machina , entirely in positive terms . I think we can recognize all of these , like these interesting narratives that we have for technology gone awry and things gone completely off the rails , that there's there's less of a willingness to talk about that . In Marxism , the Prometheanism is very like optimistic it is , it's driving .

Jules Delisle 38:41

And then I know other engineers . I know engineers that they recognize this too that if you just get fixated on generating value for investors which many engineers are put in positions where they need to do but you become kind of this amazing puppeteer of all of these supply systems and you get to understand how things are actually made and what it actually takes to get all of these different things assembled and compiled into an effective way , that's an impressive amount of human coordination and we should be impressed that so much of our technological advancement is able to coordinate that . But not without recognizing the extraordinary human cost and the ways in which people along those circuits of capital or compromise . The idea that making the system more consolidated under a single guiding force doesn't take into consideration the fact that it's impacting all of these different ecologies in different ways right Like the pull to the core doesn't necessarily recognize all of the variable conditions and the periphery that make that engineering possible . It doesn't necessarily foresee its own limits as effectively as it could .

C. Derick Varn 39:54

Yeah , I think that's . There's a lot to disentangle when we talk about ecological thinking or even like human development , even in our own quarters , for example . I'm loosely associated with member school . You are very associated with member school as an organizer , one of the primordial organizers , the original gangster organizers . But I always think about the Hobbesian vision of humanity and what it thinks states are and states of nature are and what they exist for . And I actually mean the other primary organizer of member school , often getting the fights where I actually accuse Hobbes of being the first liberal and he gets really mad . And I'm talking about Colin Drum because I'm like , well , you know he comes to anti-liberal conclusions the way we understand it . But all his assumptions , his notions of human equity , his notions of progress , his notions of what people were like , his assumptions that sub-renity because sub-renity seems conceptually simple actually radically simplifies power dynamics , etc . There's no evidence for any of that .

Jules Delisle 41:47

It was very relevant in his context as a thing like writing about Anglo's as if they're reflective of the rest of the world is just like a mistake we can't make . But he does explain power extraordinarily well in his context .

C. Derick Varn 42:03

Yeah , a context of a civil war right Like , and I think that's what we .

Failure to Coordinate Philosophical and Environmental

C. Derick Varn 42:07

The problem with , even a problem with a lot of the critiques of the Enlightenment , is , like I find Hobbes very interesting because he actually has some pretty , some pretty progressive I put it in quotation marks for people who are listening and not watching assumptions about , like male , female equity , the way peoples actually are , the fundamental equality between peoples which he actually does weirdly hold to , and yet the entire mythology , effectively , that he has to build up to secularized justification of trying to establish a stable government , atroists in the context of a very long series of civil wars , unastricts , which cannot be forgotten , like this man had survived , I think he's he starts writing in the 60s and he'd survived the English Civil War , which we should really think of as a series of civil wars , both religious and economic .

Jules Delisle 43:21

And the ecological impacts of that . That's . The other thing is like war in England was like , very directed at destroying crops and peasantry and like and destroying people's ability to be fortified , and like there's a lot , there's actually a lot to analyze about English and that's different in different periods , but no , like the , the ecological cost of war has people really rashing things out and thinking things in a different way . And there's also something like when you're in a war , there's something about it that feels inescapable . So , and like having you know , most of my life has the United States has been at war or there's been some massive conflict . I had intense anxiety about it as a child , but now , like there it is a state of war , it feels perpetual and people are just like , oh , people are viruses , people are awful , like I don't know like it's . There is an acceptance and all of that and so like when I read , when I read the nasty British and short like it , there are ways in which that could have been all that he had seen or like that to him . I like he's , like it could be . It had to be worse than even this , which is like traumatized people trying to explain what they've never seen or understood . You know you're gonna , you're gonna have some problems with that . It's similar with Rousseau the idea that there was , like this perfect time where you could be alone and nobody would bother you and you know you didn't have to maintain all of these borders and the anxiety that comes . Like they're . They're dreaming up different ways in which the way that things are now are only the result of a certain number of conditions that could be easily corrected . They want minimal revision while still being able to maintain the things about their lives that they like .

Jules Delisle 45:08

I think that that's it . There's there's a failure to coordinate the ways in which the things that we like philosophically or civilizationally , like our values and our concepts , freedom , reason , all those things that people say freedom isn't free . But then there is a lack of understanding about exactly what the ecological costs are of like the behavior set that we associate with freedom , like the end , just just like the horrific loss of life , emissions , destroyed agricultural capacity , like there's no one way to quantify it that's really successful , but consolidation of power in times of war is something that we have . I think we do have to think about quite a lot because , like all the new Green New Deal rhetoric was oriented around this idea of a dress transition like right , like a war , a wartime reorganization of the economy , like what we saw with World War two , where things change so rapidly , our production capacity changed so rapidly , our labor or labor relationships change so rapidly . People do act very differently during war and then that's , I think , something to consider to the extent to which , like on a civilizational level , you know , conservatives and reactionaries are saying that we are at war . On a civilizational level , they're willing to fight or die . They have their tradwives , the picture of the homestead and the fertility and the reproductive capacity that comes with that .

Jules Delisle 46:54

Like all of the , the wojak memes of , like the dudes coming home to the conservatives , like this is a very interesting internet phenomenon . But like people , people do think about , like what the good life would be now and people don't see it in jobs in the cities . Like the mad men era is over for a lot of people , even though there are a few people . So that you do get these like where do we go from here ? It's either , you know , back to the homesteads , you know . Oh , I just want to farm with a handful of people in a large pile of ammunition .

Jules Delisle 47:28

Like this is a leftist fantasy and a conservative fantasy at this point . Right , the idea that we can retreat from all of these like relationships and responsibilities and somehow renew , just like a one on one environmental relationship , right , like this isn't going to take a community , I can subsistence farm for just me , you know , out in the middle of nowhere . That's an interesting fantasy . And the people that push back against it on the left , especially Marxist , like they're right to , because there isn't , there isn't space for everybody to go to and to act like that , and even if there were , nobody has the skill set . But that because we are in a time of war and because our production and the movement of people and economic products has has become so extraordinarily accelerated by all of these like global military conflicts that are playing out every everything is in flux . You know farmers were having meetings about the war in Ukraine and making decisions about that in Saskatchewan .

Jules Delisle 48:32

So like everybody feels like they have a stake in all of this but nobody knows exactly how to reorganize their life . They only have like a small part to play in a much larger network that feels completely out of control . The idea that one single power could grab that and fix it and redirect . It is a lot that that's a lot more appealing than the idea of the masses consolidating into something that actually is coherent , and so I think that that's that's really the Hobbes .

Jules Delisle 49:02

Rousse's idea is like the Hobbes doesn't have faith in the masses but believes that power could be consolidated and directed , that there is this point at which you can grab and say no and like the more Rousseau track is the idea that , like collective consciousness and vibes and other things , could you know , could maintain a world in peace . And then you know this comes through with Graeber . This is kind of the idea that we can just choose to relate differently . Every choice to relate differently has to have this like ecological and material foundation as well . So it's not . It's not like people can just choose to do things differently . They still have to live . We have to couple things that have been philosophically and , you know , economically and behaviorally decoupled .

C. Derick Varn 49:52

Yeah , you mentioned a person that I used to respect and now think has done massive damage to leftist , and that's in scare quotes , to , because I don't know what that means anymore . Thinking , because you know , even from my my priority Marxist , super Marxist perspective , the way in which you can choose to be different actually does require you to understand the quote material conditions , and I'm putting that in big quotes because I think that actually for Marxist has been way not to think about this . You just say material conditions and not clarify what you actually mean by what is the material and what is the conditions . And they'll say you know , a lot of people say , like economics , like , but what does economics consist of ? Like , well , not super structural things , like , oh , that is , like relations that justify social reproduction .

C. Derick Varn 51:01

You know that even Marx thinks is the foundation of what economics is , but yet you still think about economics in the same way . You think about it the same way that any bourgeois scientists does . So I'm just in . Anyway , I'm gonna have to put everything in scare quotes as I'm talking today , but the just put every , every noun that I say audience and scare quotes and the the the problem that you immediately see is like well , you're going to have to make trade offs to just to operate within your environment that you don't understand . You will never understand all the things you're affecting in your environment . Now I don't think that that means you humans can't do planning , because obviously we fucking have . For all of our existence like since there's been , probably since we figured out rocks and proto language we've been planning .

Jules Delisle 51:55

We've been in the ecosystems before we were cracking rocks . That that's the thing . Like . I'm really enjoying my human origins class because of this , because like what ? What is like ? They keep trying to figure out . Like , what is it that makes us human ? Is it the fire ? Is it the rocks ? Is it the killing every other species there's ?

Jules Delisle 52:14

The right by conquest narrative is like so heavy in biological anthropology and it really doesn't have to be , because that's not what the evidence actually suggests . But it is really funny like that . What makes us us is that we figure out how to carry our water in a container long distance , like we modify our environment and we take it with us . Then maybe we start taking other things with us from one place where there's none of those things to another . We did it with stones , like . So like stone tools are a good example of the ways in which humans are , like using the elements of their environment in order to provision themselves better . We carried water before we cracked rocks . We made so chimps make spears , and what's really interesting about that is that it's the females that drive like the spear , hunting , and then juvenile males watch them and use it as like this idea that , like women drive technological innovation is like not shocking to me whatsoever , and in part because , like , the actual gestational requirements of growing another human are really substantial .

Jules Delisle 53:19

So like you're you know a gestating parents going to be the one that needs the clerk package the most , so like maybe you get really angry and you stab something . That that makes way more sense , is like the origin of hunting in our species than anything else that I've ever heard . But I'm like , so like this idea that like yeah , we modify our environment , we we get caloric packages from our environment using tools , using elements of our environment . Like how far back does this go ? And like there's really like we can't say , because we know that the stones are the best and that stones are definitely not like the original technology .

C. Derick Varn 53:57

People , and start with rocks , yeah , the assumption that we started with rocks has always confused me , even when I was an undergrad , because I was like , wait , but that like we have rocks , like clearly we got rocks . Okay , maybe they weren't making steel , because that requires a certain amount of heat , but like I'm going to assume that a lot of the shit was wood or bone , like you know how many .

Jules Delisle 54:22

Like plant fibers and animal fibers . You can do all sorts of cool , weird stuff with shells , but like there's , like there's some . We know that the vast majority of technology is that people have engaged in haven't been preserved , because we've also covered the surface of the earth heavily disturbed at the entire time . The existence of humans undermines our own archaeological record because of how we like interplay , like how we earth move , and so that's that's the biggest thing . It's not that ecosystems , that ecological thinking requires you to have a hands off approach , that you're not supposed to touch the pristine environment . That's not it at all . Like you have to get your hands dirty , and this is this is my pitch . I think that all the finance guys and like all of the economists who've been crunching all of these numbers and trying to prove , I just want them to redirect all of their cognitive energy towards biology , because there's legitimately interesting modeling to be done there . There are , you know , generational thresholds of energy transfer . That would be like you know the surely they would be interested in actually like observing these things . I like I've been talking about the metabolic theory of ecology and optimal foraging theory a lot with people lately , because they're models right like these . These are statistical models , like I'm doing the exact thing . People are saying that I'm incapable of these concepts that you know humans and other animals have relationships that can be met met metabolically as an ecosystem , and that we could figure out ways to look at energy flow specifically as a parallel to observational behavior about human environmental interactions in ecosystems . Like those would be really beneficial for people because they'd actually be able to see how , how disturbed our ecosystems are in North America , like how , how things are declining . I think that that's the other thing . You can read numbers about population , like how you're not timing out for ungulates in North America , or you can read about birds dying in mass or pollinators dying in mass , but like if you never see those things anyway and an urban setting , it's hard to imagine what less of them looks like or feels like .

Jules Delisle 56:46

Having ecological thinking means actively interfering with environments to sustain them , to make them better , to make them more productive for you . Toronto is built on a meadow that was , like man , made by indigenous people to create an environment where deer would want to come , so it'd be really easy to get deer .

Exploring Indigenous Perspectives on Environmental Relationships

Jules Delisle 57:06

It's interesting how these things get lost , like we've always modified landscapes and made habitat for wild animals , even that we provisioned . So that's the other thing is the idea that , like , in order to have a relationship with animals , they have to be the domesticated animals , that like we've We've replaced the biomass of the planet with these animals that we prey on the maybe we could have different relationships with other kinds of animals in different circumstances if we had the kind of ecological modeling and planning that did allow us to invest in management , like actually like directing ecosystems and putting energy into areas that are more productive or more beneficial . Like the incentive isn't there because of all of all of the other problems that we talk about with , like organization and profit motive and those sorts of things .

Jules Delisle 57:57

But if people really like wanted to focus on the necessary interventions , like the relationship interventions that we need to make in order to create a viable future , like the most immediate choke point is our relationship with the environment , how we provision ourselves and how we organize ourselves around that .

Jules Delisle 58:21

Those are the things that wartime mobilizations have seen . People change rapidly , like lifeways can change rapidly , rations can change rapidly , but the idea is that we always talk about what you're going to lose under those circumstances . Right , like the men went away that you know people were making strange butter sandwiches to survive . The emphasis is on what we lose and I think that , like , what's interesting about indigenous perspectives which is something that the Marxist actually like , kind of like they physically like , like they move away from is what we will do . So , like the ideas of family , ideas of kinship , inclusion , nourishment , these sorts of things , indigenous communities that face genocide and maintained themselves and their health and their resilience across that they have , they have a lot of right to point towards ways of thinking what you'll gain and there's a way in which , like , if you , if you don't have , like a successful military coup under your belt , that that somehow becomes irrelevant or wishful thinking or not a necessary component of what will bring about a revolutionary movement because like I don't know .

Jules Delisle 59:36

my understanding is that when you cannot actually make the moves to liberate yourself , when you can't actually move to radically change things , what you can focus on is survival and your own well being in that position as you move towards that .

Jules Delisle 59:56

And so I'm not just thinking about like me and my family , I'm not just thinking about like breakfast programs in my community .

Jules Delisle 1:00:02

Ecological thinking for me is like it's like how we feed everybody , like how do we deal with the ecosystems that we're already embedded in and how do we get out of way to work with them and relate to them so that we can continue on .

Jules Delisle 1:00:20

I don't like the lack of planning when it comes to those sorts of things and the extent to which individual choice and preference , the ability to access a market and to take a product off a shelf , how that is like why people think that's the fundamental , necessary interaction , the ability to transact for that object of your choice , when we're already kind of limited by the way that things are changing now . So like how much of that is like just nostalgia to the 90s , like to that period of like when you get to open up and have all of that choice , like you can get your surge in your you know airheads and you can be a nerd with your friends . I think that there's a little bit of like developmental . There's a developmental inability to let go of the idea that things will also continue to get better . We were also promised , like a lot of technological advancement by Star Trek .

C. Derick Varn 1:01:21

Well , a lot of people's idea of socialism actually probably comes as much from Star Trek and people not noticing the inability of Star Trek to be able to like , maintain its metaphors or its vision of the future at all , which you know . You could do the Marxist Viennese here thing and say , well , you can't imagine it until it happens . But then I'm like , well then , what's the point of your politics , because you can't imagine any of this until it happens that you still try to spell it out . I- .

Jules Delisle 1:01:52

It can only happen in the future . That's the thing that gets me , that people like the failure to look into history and to see all of these successful strategies that people have already had , like acknowledging it as successful because it resulted in survival . That's what gets me . I'm sorry for interrupting .

C. Derick Varn 1:02:11

No , I was thinking about the other day . I was going back and rereading that climate Leviathan book and then climate Malin and then climate X , and I remember a lot of the contempt at climate X . But I think one of the funny things about the climate X models that those two authors were talking about is that they were actually based on things we've seen people do and where the other two strategies are absolutely not based on anything we have any historical record for people doing , which is a peacefully created universal world government .

Jules Delisle 1:02:49

Sounds fake .

C. Derick Varn 1:02:50

Yeah , it's just like I'm always like , well , let's talk about what a government actually is for one thing , like in its relationship to violence as inherent , but two , you know , you're gonna get people to just agree to that because of necessity , but they're also going to see their self-interest , like the structures of states necessarily create . See where some interest patterns . Good luck , right . And so , whereas climate , the climate X modeling is like well , we can look at what different groups , indigenous groups and I think we should , we could . I don't wanna get into my uncomfortableness about indigeneity as a concept actually , because I'm sort of like I don't know that anyone's indigenous anywhere , but there's definitely people who've survived in certain areas for long periods of time . Maybe we should listen to them .

Jules Delisle 1:03:52

But had consistent places of settlement that were actively interfered with by , specifically , the British .

Jules Delisle 1:03:59

But like also the other European nations that practice the colonial , like the European colonial expansion that .

Jules Delisle 1:04:10

So indigeneity as a concept there are people like . This is why First Nations , like people , actually prefer to be discussed by the name of their community Right , like your people and your territory and your relationship are something that are demonstrable like it's not just oral traditions , it's not just the British , it's definitely not the British legal tradition that gives people any right to discuss like their ancestry or their like their deep connection with the land , but like the way that people

Indigenous Identity, Environmentalism, and Societal Priorities

Jules Delisle 1:04:41

talk about it here . They often say from time immemorial , because like putting a date on it doesn't matter . They like were likely the very first people that habitually settled these places and had like long continuity in doing it but also huge amount of interactions with other peoples and like inclusive kinship systems . So that's the thing Kinship systems on Turtle Island are largely adoptive and inclusive and it's not like by being adopted you are not , like you don't lose your family connection to your other community you just have a bigger network of people that care about you .

Jules Delisle 1:05:17

You have multiple kinships and that means you have , like , multiple rights and duties . None of this is to say that your relationship with the land or with territory is one of like defending and murder . Often moving across the land is part of your relationship and your responsibility to it not occupying it for too long , not taking too much from it . So that's the issue . Like the concept of people are from this land , being made equivalent with indigeneity . That in many ways supports a lot of the inappropriate behaviors that we're seeing in Europe and the Middle East . Like this supports a lot of the worst kind of nationalist tendencies , but should not be conflated with the way that communities like indigenous communities in North America , talk about themselves or relate themselves to the land when they say that the bones and the bodies of their ancestors are a part of the land . That is like an inextricable metabolic fact . It's not comparable to the idea of blood and soil where , like you , fight and bleed and work and toil and earn the land that way . That's dropping those two concepts into a single pot fails to recognize the ways in which , like over exploiting the land , staying too long , failing to be good stewards is part of the dynamic interplay with an ecosystem . You don't have to assume that people are all environmentalist , egalitarian , friendly people either because they're part of communities that have , like these , larger traditions of ecological thinking either . So it's not like there aren't periods of people bubbling up and disturbing ecosystems , even across , like North American , south American , like archeological history . It's just like it's . There are so many ways to interact with the environment . I think that there's something really telling about North American thinking that indigenous people are , for them , spiritual environmentalists who are fixed in a period of the past and are projecting the past into the present moment without a sense of futurity . Because , like , indigenous people are also , like , heavily invested in futurity , like very , very involved in their families , in accessing medical care , like that's another thing , like working in Saskatchewan , working in Canada . Indigenous people are always seeking out ways to interact and support each other , even across , like familial or community lines , in a way that is worth noting , it's worth observing and it's also worth supporting , without the need to convert it into the theory of German identity .

Jules Delisle 1:08:09

You don't need to take it through Marx , you don't have to take effective ecological interactions and translate them or put them through the filter of what we have Like everybody , box houses are all over the planet Like nobody . They're going to be here . They're not going to just decompose overnight . They'll take a long time to break down . We can live in the ruins of them as we figure out better ways to habitat . We don't have to stay in this like decomposing carcass , constantly trying to maintain it . We could also just like kind of let it fall to the side , use it while we can and then figure out other ways to arrange ourselves .

Jules Delisle 1:08:50

And that is actually like that is the human legacy . That is our history across an extraordinary amount of time . If there is any universal in our history that we can point to , it's adaptability Right , and people that don't adapt leave huge caches of stuff into caying houses , and people that do adapt pick up and they move on and they are continuous , and so what you might leave behind might be kind of like monumental . It might be frightening , because it's actually quite a lot , and having to watch it , watch it fall apart , is hard . But there are ways to live within it . There always have been , and there are people now that are effectively figuring out how to survive on the fringes of capital and on the fringes of these like circuits of power . Their survival is a lesson . It's .

Jules Delisle 1:09:45

I don't think it has to be the single or orienting like organizational fixation , so that's the other thing it's like in suggesting that , hey , maybe we need to look at this more . People think like this couldn't possibly be the totalizing solution to all of our problems . I think maybe we need to stop thinking that there is a single solution , that there is a monarchist or a revolutionary moment or a machine like some kind of day sex machina that can save us , like the idea that we could engineer ourselves over our problems . What if we have like a ton of different problems and all of these problems are feeding into each other ? And if we actually like slow down and look closely and if we are to use numbers , use them to measure the resilience and the health of people as our guiding metric for how we organize moving forward , like if that's our baseline , especially kids , but you know how , like I wanna center kids and their development and wellbeing , like that's the arena of investment that I'm much more interested in talking about than technological advancement , and I don't think that that's primitive .

Jules Delisle 1:10:48

That is an investment in humans as extraordinary agents of change , as not stupid , nasty , pretty short earth-disturbing viruses but , like you know , recognizing our capacity for amazing things , even in the face of these gargantuan colonial waves of extraction , Like people always survive and always figure out ways . And I want to continue orienting to that , instead of saying that we have to have these conditions in place that may never be met in order for the moment of salvation to occur . I'm just like that's an old story and I'm kind of over it .

C. Derick Varn 1:11:29

You know , something that I used to think was liberal nonsense about 10 years ago , that I've actually really changed my position on , directly relates to this . We always talk about material conditions in the Marxist center and we always talk about , like , oh , the superstructure . But I've really started to realize that the metaphorical assumptions in our models for communication have strong implications that we are not always completely aware of and that this in and of itself is a kind of technology and one cannot remove it from the matrix of quote material conditions just because it is a speech act or a word or a mental conception . And so there's a lot of these questions that lead people to despair the revolutionary moment , the sovereign , the universal sovereign , the state of nature , returning to the state of nature , even even viewing that as a positive thing that induce despair . Because they are stupid questions . Like the reason why they induce despair is because in them already has contained a kind of framework for making sure your questions aren't answerable by pretending that it's one question , like by pretending that there's only one question to be answered and that will solve everything downstream .

C. Derick Varn 1:13:11

That seems to me , and I know people who are gonna hear this and they're gonna say oh , varn , you're going back to being a conservative . I'm like no , but also it doesn't really matter . If I'm right , that seems to me to be a question that is not only unanswerable , it will lead you to a place of inaction , just total , complete inaction . But the way people respond to that Tinnitus , it's like , oh well , you're just telling us all the B liberals are . Oh , you're just telling us we have to accept the status quo . And I'm like no , I'm not . I'm actually saying , okay , how we deal with the soil which really rode , all right , how we deal with our food systems , how we raise children , how we prioritize . And in one sense , for example , in North American society , we have a fundamental contradiction double scare quotes for that but in that we prioritize youth as a consumer , but we do not structure our society for the wellbeing of youth at all , and we know that by our teen suicide rate Like .

Jules Delisle 1:14:20

The kids are not okay .

C. Derick Varn 1:14:21

They're just not Like and I know the kids get mad at me like when I say this . But I'm like , I'm not blaming you , we are all responsible for your wellbeing . Like we have failed , like no one likes to hear that because it says something about them , but the way most people frame that is it's a moral choice by the young . And I'm like no , we have totally set up a society that alien age children at the point developmentally . That's one of the few things we know about people that you really don't need to do that . It has real consequences when you do that to young people and we have done that to treat them as a consumer block for the most part . I mean there might be other reasons to the structure of work , et cetera . I should be very careful in unicausal reasons , but it seems the overriding one is maintaining a system of consumption .

Jules Delisle 1:15:25

And how many kids do we like ? The opioid crisis changes the way that new generations of people are kind of like brought into the world and what the expectations are for their life outcomes . I don't think anybody nobody predicted that like such a significant number of my high school graduating class would overdose . There's a way in which not taking care of the psychosocial health and the emotional and physical health of children , it has a weight on the people who live beyond them and it also it means that there are options and that there are potential features that have been closed out . And I think that squandering children the idea that like to be a North American child is to require so much contribution from so many places in the world , like so much energy flows to the children of North America in terms of what they consume and it just like it ends there when they aren't well maintained , when they aren't cared for , so like that is a squandering that is extraordinary , like it is horrifying .

C. Derick Varn 1:16:38

Their lives are squandering other people's lives in labor .

Jules Delisle 1:16:41

it's squandering other people's environment and the planet , yeah , and so , like I take it very seriously , not just like on the level of it being like a sad loss that , like any child , is not cared for in a way that actually allows them to be successful , because , like , fitness is an inclusive force , right Like our children succeeding and thriving , it should be the very definition of our success .

Jules Delisle 1:17:10

But this is why Lancy is actually wrong about our society being in the intocracy . Because children really are pawns in an arena of like comparative parenting and memetic desire and that sort of thing . They're not looked at as keystone species in an ecosystem and that's like kids are keystone species and in an ecosystem , humans are keystone

Investing in Children and Kinship

Jules Delisle 1:17:36

species . We need to reorganize our investment in them as an investment in the ability to actually respond to climate change , because their knowledge , their skills , their resilience are gonna be what actually like carries , especially like our generation , through the transitional period over the next 50 years , like it's . That's not like boomer dependence , that's like the shift needs to be from what's gonna happen if civilization collapses to civilization has to change and children and their environmental interactions have to be a priority . I don't feel like that should be as hard of a pitch as it is , but like I'm willing to continually provide citations on it .

C. Derick Varn 1:18:20

People are more willing to accept the witness of the world than they are willing to actually do something , to realize that you're just going to have to change a little bit .

C. Derick Varn 1:18:28

I mean , like in that , you know , and again I hate the fact that , like the people that I think are actually best on this are generally viewed as conservatives .

C. Derick Varn 1:18:37

But I'm just gonna you know , outside of we talk about indigenous stuff , but like I think about Nicholas and Sam Tlaib and he's talked about like resilient societies and building resilient people , and I'm like that does have to be part of what we do right now . I think that's a good thing . I think you know my way of talking about it , as always , like you want to give people a choice and how they do that as best as you can , because agency , collective agency , in so much that that's a thing seems to be how you get people to do these kinds of things without , not without polarization and not without antagonism and not without conflict because that view of the world is childish but maybe without war . I mean one of the things I always talk about when I like , when you think about the social versus the state it is not that the social sphere is de-alienated and we all get along and community is magic , because it's not Like community is there's sublimated violence all the time , right ?

Jules Delisle 1:19:52

People are a lot of work . So that's the thing . It's like Marx failed to account for how much people just like don't want to be annoyed . But like kids are annoying , right , like your fellow man is annoying . Like arguing with the people in your family about when you're going to eat is annoying . But these things are also . They're the sites for meaning making and they are the opportunities for change . Like every moment of those kinds of interactions , it doesn't actually demand that the outcomes are always the same . Those are opportunities to pop off and to do things differently .

Jules Delisle 1:20:30

Intergenerational knowledge transfer like actually like having old people with children is good for their neurological health and helps you know , it helps push back against degenerative neurological diseases . For older people to be around children . It's also extremely valuable for children to have elders explain how their body works , tell them how to try and do things that they haven't done before . Then there it's not just cultural transmission in that way , there's also like embodied skill and knowledge . One of the things that we were reading about in like Flintnapping and actually like making the original , like Old Owan , ashulian or Mysterion Hand Xs , it could take like 20 years . This is the idea that , like , to gain a full skill set . It takes like a lifetime . So that's really the issue is like apprenticeship should be something that we think about in terms of people's development and we've kind of lost . We've lost the ways in which we can train each other and train people , and I think that looking at health as an embodied period of investment that makes people like looking at children's development as a period where we are truly investing in all in the outcomes not only of their health and well-being , but like their ability to actually perform essential tasks in the world Like this gets . This doesn't get considered effectively . When we talk about growth Right , and especially when we talk about the kinds of jobs that are necessary in order to like provision these kids , we have an economic analysis of it when we're lacking a kinship analysis of it Like this , more investment needs to happen in children in their own communities , in their families , and like this is an issue of how do we bring people back in after they have basically been conditioned into what I think is like an answer .

Jules Delisle 1:22:31

What I think is like an anti-natalist , like a very anti-natalist way of thinking . People who have had bad childhoods or who have had difficult childhoods . They think that it would be impossible for anybody to be a good parent , for a child to be raised in a way that would be fair and okay , how they wouldn't be messed up , the idea of a world that isn't messed up or failed or fallen . This gives a lot of power to people that actually like , value children even less because it's the idea that they are undesirable , that there's so much work , that they're so awful . It's honestly really common in our age cohort , like , I think , most millennials . Even parents that I know like have really negative things to say about the relationship dynamics that they have with their kids , and the biggest part of it is like there's no mediator , it's just like them in the screens .

Jules Delisle 1:23:32

And so that's what I'm interested in , like where are the Marxists coming from in this ? What is their relationship to fertility ? What are their families like and what are they imagining families as a unit ? Like how would they be approached using the frameworks that we've had in previous revolutions and previous governments ? What programs do they see as potentially valuable carrying into the future ? Because , like , all of them depend on an industrial production and a household that and a system of ownership that doesn't necessarily seem viable moving into the future ? It doesn't seem possible now for many people . So that's the other thing . I don't know if that's like a unit of analysis that many people have even considered Like . What does the household look like moving forward ? Like people are polyamorous and collectively paying rent and collectively child rearing , even with no genetic relationship to children , because it's so impossible to figure out ways to live , and that's actively like . It's actively challenged by state agencies . But people are still having to live differently now . They're already adapting and changing how they operate .

C. Derick Varn 1:24:58

Kinship stuff . I think here is Keynes brings us back to a lot of thinking , and this is largely absent from most Marxist work . I will give Ingalls some credit he does try to deal with it . And I guess I'll give Babel some credit he also tries to deal with it . Marx does not try to deal with it and that makes sense to me , since he largely lived off the labor of others , and people can get mad at me for saying that , but it's a fact . So this is something that I think we really do have to think about , and I think about this with damaged families too .

C. Derick Varn 1:25:42

At risk of being too personal , I know I come from a pretty complicated family background and that's code . But when you live with other families that don't work that way and are you see them in a context that's different , and for me it was both working as a teacher and having to help other people's families and seeing that , yeah , a lot of this is really messed up , but it's not all messed up . And then you live in other cultures and I have a dual response to people when I say look , american life or North American life , because Canadians , we're separated by a border more than a culture . Let's be frank .

Jules Delisle 1:26:31

No , to play more like on Earth .

C. Derick Varn 1:26:35

And I also say this because people really can't tell us apart either when we're abroad that life is really lonely and it is kind of unique , uniquely lonely . And that said , I don't think people are like sapphire worth machines that are fundamentally different everywhere . The reasons why things are the way they are isn't anything essential to being a North American . It's why how we've structured our lives and how it disincentivizes certain kinds of cooperation , when you experience places where that is not as true , it is easy to romanticize them , and you shouldn't . I want to put that big , bright letters . Don't , don't romanticize the other . That's also treating them as an object , for one thing , but you do realize that like , oh , this does not actually have to be this way , so it isn't . Like , like the Marxist question , do we have the bourgeois nuclear family expanded to the working class and the Ford is compromised , blah , blah , blah , blah , blah . Or do we have family abolition ? And my response is increasing like I don't know what you mean , because there's a bunch of different ways to organize kinship and there's plenty of historical evidence for it . And fuck , there's plenty of evidence in our own neighborhoods , if we actually look for it , that people already changed that , like they're already altering it .

C. Derick Varn 1:28:11

I'm running this frustration a lot because I am kind of a ad hoc Christopher last scholar and he's really hung up on on , like you know , maintaining the , the , the 19th century nuclear and I'm gonna say sick , because the 19th century family wasn't really nuclear anyway Family without looking at what it required , how it was maintained , who had access to it , etc .

C. Derick Varn 1:28:42

The promise of expanding it in the forties period was largely done by taking the need for servants to maintain that lifestyle and outsourcing it to machines , this and thus , if you need service to maintain the lifestyle , necessarily most people are shut out of it . So how are most people living if they're still having kids , which they obviously are ? And that's what you do . And when you , when you shift that approach and and I've been really trying to get people to look at this and look at social reproduction you start realizing we're too hung up on particular visions of this . We're too hung up on like , like a very early 20th century , late 19th century notion of industrial production , ownership and family , which which , like the , like the introduction of agriculture , actually , if you look at the fucking bone data , wasn't even good for most people . Anyway , we know that , like we got data for that . People want the data .

Jules Delisle 1:29:41

we have it and undermines the idea of the extent to which it's a choice . So , like the , the extent to which people are compelled , or the , there's like a gravitational pull to enough of the people in your collaborative network deciding that they want to interface with other people even , even if they don't necessarily know the consequences so that's the thing like I was on a labor and delivery unit very recently and babies are being born , like people are still having children .

Jules Delisle 1:30:13

So the extent to which many Marxists have like pushed back against , like the concept of futurity or how so many people in our cohort have , the world , I think , seems smaller to them because they have blocked people and kind of made themselves , they back themselves into a quarter in some way and they are failing to engage with this like new way of people . I interact with children all the time and they're they're already here , they're already a part of our future .

Jules Delisle 1:30:48

They are not coming to the same conclusions that you know , even we did growing up , because the information that they have access to is radically different . But I think that when , especially when , I talk to my kids , I ask them like what they're what they're most interested in , like what matters to them the most is it . And I get weird with them because , like , is it sensory experiences and they care about their friends , they care about their family , they care about being with groups of people . They want to be with groups of people doing stuff . So that's kind of my thing . Like you know , my 11 year old and my nine year old . They know how to talk about making and doing . They know how to like orient social technology in their interest .

Jules Delisle 1:31:32

There's a like why is social technology primitive ? Like rhetoric is sophisticated , manipulation is like complex . We're watching genocidal rhetoric play out on the ground right now and like this is instrumentalized . It's absolutely a tool . So the like I like gadgets , I like hydraulics , I like mechanisms as well , but like the social technology is real and we have to think about the kind of making and doing that we're willing to do , how annoying we're willing to be with other people , how much conflict we're willing to have and how that's supposed to be mediated , because right now we have conflict and we don't loop back to it . People just like turn their backs and and don't discuss things further . Or you know , or we go to , you know , wholesale war .

Technology and Conflict Language Addressed

Jules Delisle 1:32:27

We have to address the fact that , like , people do need to deal with their conflict , but there are social technologies for dealing with conflict that , like the social technologies that we're seeing displayed , are the , the imperial , like rhetoric , the , the strategies for dehumanization , for the suffering , for , you know , euphemizing , mass displacement , final settlements , sounds a lot like you know the things like that they're like we're seeing social technologies operating . There's like this there's a huge wave of fear over decapitated babies , for which there is no evidence for , and that's not to say that horrible things do not happen and more but the . When you see patterns of hysterical behavior coming out in terms of , like other people , how they're destroying more , you have to think back to , like , the rhetoric of the crusades . You have to think about how these are patterns of dehumanization . They have an origin , they have a history .

Jules Delisle 1:33:30

Language isn't just this fluffy , floaty thing that exists in the ether that we can like summon at any moment . You're trained in it . It has weight and that's why , like , how we label things and how we measure them is one question , and how we talk about them and use that in rhetorical discussion is a completely different one . But just to assume that because a technology is fundamentally linguistic , that it is less sophisticated , that's a fail . That's a failure of imagination for sure , but it is , I don't think it's also kind of dangerous .

C. Derick Varn 1:34:04

It's extremely dangerous . I have lamented lately the way in which I think radicals gotta have to put everything in quotations . The group of people who self-identify themselves as radicals have not taken responsibility for the consequences of their frameworks and also have not been successfully able to push back on horribly dehumanizing language towards all kinds of people . I mean . The obvious one we're both obliquely referring to is Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the apartheid being maintained there , and that being clearly looks to be shifting into an ethnic cleansing of Gaza , unless something really dramatically changes the way in which people talk about . However , one of the first responses to this was to frame Columbus Day in terms of the Hamas attacks in a way that actually accepted and naturalized the assumption that , quote , land-back actually means a national struggle and that the national struggle somehow also requires things like ethnic cleansing . And that's the way it was being talked about by people who thought they were helping Palestinians , which blew my fucking mind .

Jules Delisle 1:35:51

This is the problem with indigeneity across concepts , and this is also like land-back as like it is . Indigenous organizing , especially in so-called Canada , is largely driven by aunties right and their relationship with elders and traditional systems of guidance and governance , and so a lot of the protests like there's what you do is dictated by a community of people that contribute to the action in some ways , and there are still . There are totally people that don't want to be peaceful and to use the rhetoric of reconciliation and they're very angry and they have every right to be , and a lot of people are influenced by Marx and other , like Indigenous activists are influenced by Marx and other revolutionaries and have ideas about how , like indigeneity in , like the context of Turtle Island , can be consolidated with Marx , and I think that there's a lot of frustration because they're not necessarily talking to each other . Land-back means very different things to these different communities , like the idea of land-back as being you know , not that we own the land , but that the land owns us , that we are obligated to it by our dependents on it , and so , like land-back is returning to a relationship of reciprocity . For some people it is the actual like give back our land that was stolen , so some of it's recognizing the treaties and saying according to your own internal legal logic , honor what you said you'd do . That's like one line of land-back . There's the idea of returning to relationships of responsibility and reciprocity . That's another land-back . And then there is also the land-back that aligns itself with what people pointed to with Palestine and Hamas the idea of , like an occupied people who have had their land pushed back and stolen , that have experienced brutal police violence , who have experienced militarily you know , the first time the Gatling gun was ever used in Canada , it was used against like Metis elders at the Battle of Batoche . So the legacy of development in Canada involves like this violent assault against relatively peaceful peoples . So they're seeing the continuity there and collapsing a very complicated set of like legal relationships and legal maneuvers on the attempts of people within systems that presently exist to gain access to their rights and resources .

Indigenous Land, Kinship, and Legal Claims

Jules Delisle 1:38:23

At the same time that we're dealing with like something that is actually much larger as a result of British colonial strategies in particular In this case , like the relationship that's very similar between Canada and Palestine is , you know , the Anglo element of it all . Like those things , they get collapsed way too easily . Like we need to have dynamic conversations about people and metabolic relationships with ecosystems . Like we have to be able to talk about how people contribute to environments and environments talk how they contribute to them , without it becoming an issue of determinism , legal claim and right . Like we have to recognize there is a relationship here , it is working .

Jules Delisle 1:39:06

That's different than the rhetoric of nationalism in which , like , we're defining borders and the genes that define ethnicity and we're showing the points at which people are actually different . These are very different perspectives from which to like approach land back and that's kind of the issue is . Like if you think your genetics and the land are somehow inextricably linked because of an ancient legal claim that is not mappable onto Indigenous conceptions of territory and kinship and land , and so that's to assume that just because we have an issue of land and an issue of kinship on one side and an issue of land and an issue of kinship on the other , that they're collapsible . That's not an acceptable way to recognize the different conditions .

C. Derick Varn 1:39:57

Absolutely . I talk a lot about Glenn Cotard's work , which I think was really eye-opening for me , about understanding the debates within I'm not even going to use the Indigenous community because it's not helpful here specifically within , like First Peoples in Canada , and also within the various DNA nations . And I'm going to use DNA nations because we're talking about plural DNA groups . There's a broad cultural subset but there are different groups within it .

C. Derick Varn 1:40:24

Cotard himself , leong said , believed to the yellow knives and there's a strong debate within this community that most people who use it for whatever they use it for , including whatever notions white people have about decolonization and whatever that is is flattened out .

C. Derick Varn 1:40:47

Because one of the things Cotard argues is we should not necessarily even be accepting the treaty agreements because that would involve accepting the legitimacy of certain legal claims in the first place that we should not accept , because then we're going to have to deal with the fact that there's multiple nations that we have to deal with , because part of these historical DNA nations is in the United States and part of it is probably even historically claimed in Mexico .

C. Derick Varn 1:41:17

So there isn't that is not something we can flatten in discussing this as if Indigenous people are an object similar with Palestinians , similar with even Gazans as a subset of Palestinians , like we should be very careful about speaking in broad , generalized terms and , I think , in general and I'm not saying this as a call for people to suppress speech I'm saying this as a call for people to think about who their audience is and to actually use the technology of speech pretty a lot more precision than we do we should probably frame this in what is agreed upon . For example , what happened on October 7th is in the context of an apartheid , after several attempts to handle this non-violently were attempted and people got killed , particularly in 2019 . That is something we can all most Palestinians that I've talked to agree on . The rest of it is actually contentious within even the community . When we flatten the community out like that , when talking about them , we are actually making a decision ourselves as who we see as representative of that community and turning it into an object .

Jules Delisle 1:42:44

Without recognizing their dynamic life ways . That's the thing . The issue of Palestinian land , the Palestinian way of life , involves a direct relationship with the Mediterranean . Giving land without access to the sea disrupts Palestinian life ways . It's not just land , it's a way of doing stuff that requires an environment to move through . Because the land is different and because the life ways are different , we can't collapse the legal dynamic into the same thing . More importantly , we're talking about populations of people in an area of the planet that literally every human has a claim to because of the movement of humans across the surface of the planet . That is one of the richest fossil caches . It's full of artifacts from every wave of human expansion .

C. Derick Varn 1:43:38

It's been occupied continuously in an extraordinary way 4,000 years of various kinds of occupations , 7,000 to 8,000 years of civilized culture . It is in many ways a cradle of agricultural humanity .

Jules Delisle 1:44:00

There are stone tools from around 2 million years ago that can't be homo sapiens because homo sapiens weren't even around then . That's part of the whole speciation claim . It has been a site of movement , of human acquisition of resources and survival for an extraordinary amount of time .

Talking About Indigeneity, Palestine, and Colonialism

Jules Delisle 1:44:22

This is what makes it difficult to talk about in terms of indigeneity , in a place where groups of people moved across in waves . It's also just recognizing that what people are attempting to do when they're advocating for Palestine is to try to draw international attention towards their rights , seeing images of the children that have been killed in Palestine . This isn't an issue of their legal rights . It's an issue of their humanity and their position to Israel in terms of Israel's goals as a nation . That's the thing that's the most frustrating to talk about . I don't know why we're talking about ancient rights and claims . There are real people with real metabolic relationships . This is what actually needs to be talked about more the actual flows of power , as opposed to the idea that there are greater violences that can be bestowed on people historically that entitle them to also participate in these large-scale systems of warfare , these large-scale systems of displacement .

Jules Delisle 1:45:42

I think that we need to talk about the idea of becoming part of the United States military complex and part of the special relationship between British imperial expansion , the US and its involvement in those areas . Putting it into the language of British law , this is actually an objection that the Maori have . Specifically , there's a really good documentary Tuho , a History of Resistance that even in attempting to do two versions of the treaty one in English and one in Maori the meanings of words were twisted intentionally on the part of the British in order to put themselves in this position where they could eventually creep on the land . The idea that British colonialism and anti-Semitic violence , which is extraordinary could somehow be absolved through this land transfer by saying that Jews are actually so different that they cannot live with Christians in society and that they need their own land in order to be a real people , and that the British are giving this land in order for that to occur . The whole thing's sus and bad .

C. Derick Varn 1:47:00

Even when you look at the population of Israel last time I checked it's about 61% non-Ashkenazi . That includes Sephardic Jews of non-European descent . That includes Masrahi Jews . That includes Ethiopian Jews .

C. Derick Varn 1:47:21

It includes also Palestinians with Israeli citizenship , which there's not many Israeli Arabs , et cetera . I put all those categories together . The way we talk about this is actually really important , because why did that happen ? One of the things is what the British did actually caused tensions in the region , which actually caused massive resettlements of Arab Jewish communities into one area , into Israel itself . It actually didn't just happen . It wasn't like the second largest Jewish population in the world , which the first one was in Poland and the second one was in Egypt just decided one day that they didn't like their 2000 year history of coexisting with Egyptian Muslims and Christians overnight . There was a very specific unraveling by the British of the Ottoman Empire that created the context for that to happen .

C. Derick Varn 1:48:22

My way of challenging the way we talk about this I think makes a lot of people uncomfortable , because my first thing is you have to end the apartheid too .

C. Derick Varn 1:48:32

You have to deal with the fact that this was set up under Bismarckian notions of national identity and funneled through a British settler conception of law .

C. Derick Varn 1:48:44

That is the origins of the way Zionism understood itself , even in its labor Zionist , you know , anti-religious mode in the 19th and early 20th century .

C. Derick Varn 1:48:56

That you have to somehow undo all that without also pretending that you can just magically wave a wand and make everything that's happened since 1930 go away . Honestly , with the exception of a very understandably angry subset of the Palestinian population , palestinians completely know that , more than we do , and I say that not just from popular opinion polls . I know that anecdote is not data to use , although I don't know what fucking is data . If I really want to be completely honest , a lot of people seem totally willing to accept ethnography and what , as ethnography is not just structured anecdote but whatever . But talking to Palestinians , which I had a lot of occasion to do when I lived in Egypt , it was very clear to me that both that we were using a situation in a very you know , in a way that actually justified structures that themselves have been created are the auspices of international law , and by international law we pretty much mean British imperial law as administered by the UN .

Jules Delisle 1:50:33

To be slightly fairer , we shouldn't confuse the consequences of British genocide with the peoples who have experienced it in terms of their conceptions and their strategies . What is shared across the pan-Indigenous context in Palestine is the idea that the laws are fundamentally racist , that the history of the law is racist and that reforming the laws as a process does not itself extract the relationships the law helped to buttress . So , what's kind of interesting , the Constitution for the state of Alabama is used in constitutional law courses , like across the planet . It is a sprawling and horrific document . Very recently they actually just took out a lot of racist language . They actually went through and like it has so many amendments that they actually had to go through like clause by clause to make sure that it didn't have the clearly anti-black rhetoric in it . And it's funny , like the way that the constitutional lawyers were talking about it . It's like . You know this is a gargantuan task . It's taken us quite some time . You know we're not done . There's still quite a lot that needs to be corrected . You know that does like changing the language , does not itself fundamentally change the inappropriate flow of materials and relationships and opportunities , and I think that there is a legitimate rejection within these communities to think that appealing through law , through reform , that that is the ethical way to handle the fact that you are experiencing an ethnic cleansing . There is somehow like a dignified way to engage with the law that fails to recognize any equality or any potential for like mutual recognition . I think about that a lot , actually like so it . By rejecting the law , you reject your ability to engage in a in a humane way . Now you are an animal and anything can be done to you .

Jules Delisle 1:53:00

This is , this is the , the genocidal project as it exists , with colonial expansion , like starting really early on with like the Assyrian Empire , but it is . It is it's amazing the extent to which we we fall back on arguments about law , about arguments about right and what isn't , what isn't addressed in this is like what , what could be done in terms of meeting the Palestinians , metabolically , economically , socially , like how can people who have experienced this much , this much violence , reorganize and move forward with people that haven't acknowledged their humanity in the past ? And we have these are questions to be like how are Ukrainians and Russians going to interact with each other , moving forward after the like , indisputable ethnic cleansing that's been done by Russians ? This is a very similar question that we have here , like that we , we can say these are the steps , like we need to acknowledge their legitimacy as people . We need to respond in a humanitarian way . How , how ?

Jules Delisle 1:54:10

I don't , I don't , we , we cannot dictate how people who experience genocide will feel about others afterwards and if they will come to this like moment of recognition , reciprocity , generosity , like the idea like so never again means something very different for different Jews , and that that's something that we have to tease out .

Jules Delisle 1:54:28

There isn't this universal subject that comes from these horrifying experiences or from moving through them either .

Jules Delisle 1:54:35

So I'm I don't know , like I don't know what it will take actually to heal people in this way . I certainly don't think that grouping people struggles together outside of the design , giving solidarity , showing that you have empathy or concern or compassion , like these are all good things , but when your compassion reduces the complexity of a person's situation and also dictates what steps they could take in your mind to ethically come out of it and come to the other side and resolve this , it's not for us to say , it's not for us to dictate in from our comfort what people like who are experiencing genocide should do , and that it's the telling people what the right play is side of this . That gets really confusing for me . I like in seeking to understand things . I don't feel like I've ever gotten to a position where I could tell people what to do about responding to like a strategic ethnic cleansing , but it seems like people have a lot of advice for how . What is the most appropriate way for Palestinians to move forward .

C. Derick Varn 1:55:48

Um , I may have a lot of historical analogies that are often fallacious . You know , comparing it to Haiti , for example , won't really help you , because the black population of Haiti was a majority population . Um , comparing it to indigenous struggles in the in the United States and the various groups also won't won't help you , because the population ratios are actually wildly skewed in another direction , and we have to be honest about that . How this comes to be . You know , to tie this back around to where we started , though , um , and something that I think about about life ways right , and about what this means , and about why has it been , honestly , that , if not genocide , ethnic cleansing is involved in every national consolidation project on earth ? I really can't think of one that doesn't include it .

C. Derick Varn 1:56:50

So a part of that too , like how maps delineate the borders and erase the people or place them yeah , exactly , I mean it's and how these consolidated identities that were never consolidated and even how Marxist , historically contributed to that because of their attempt to answer these questions in a way that actually reified things that they were critiquing . So who actually sorted Eastern Europe ? It was not even the Nazis , it was the Soviets , the the way that you approached this . I think when we think about this terms and in any situation , we have to be honest about where we are . We have to be honest about what our primary concern is . My primary concern when it comes to Palestinians is that the apartheid be ended in that and that people have a way to integrate . And I have in the back of my question , in my head , the question that that haunts me about this and I'll just state it outright .

C. Derick Varn 1:58:02

I wasn't expecting to talk about a real policy in the day , actually tend to avoid this topic , but it needs to be talked about the current and relationship . All this because it is very much related . Is that , on one hand , how do you live with a people who you view as coming from outside correctly , who are also , in some larger , ancient way ? You're of the same broadly speaking holotype group as you ? It came from , at one point a similar culture to yours , yet has been by a third party given the right to your land . What makes it a little different than the settler colonial editions of the Americas is that this was created by Jewish force off of European context and it is a European colonial project . But for people who , quote , didn't have a homeland , the problem to me seems like well , why couldn't Europe actually accept ? And they go . Well , how would the Jews ever trust us again ? All right , now I will say the third and fourth largest use of communities now are in Europe , so we just look at that .

Statehood, Conflict, and Trust in Israel

C. Derick Varn 1:59:36

But I say the same thing in regards to the Palestinians is like well , on one hand , I realize that either the two state solution or God forbid , which would actually been the optimal solution , a one state solution that did not try to play one population against the other and completely disrupt their life ways , nonetheless that , the reason why the Israeli state is such a problem , for liberals in particular , is it actually ?

C. Derick Varn 2:00:15

It shows a fundamental problem in the enlightenment way of thinking that is both particular and universal at the same time , and all of its claims and in a way , that there's always going to be groups who are excluded from .

C. Derick Varn 2:00:28

There's always going to be groups who are going to be cleansed from , like , if that's your framework , that's what's going to happen , and it happened in Europe too , and it wasn't just towards Jews or Romani , I mean , it was even towards , like , different kinds of Christians , different forms of a language . It wasn't like France was automatically going to be a unified French culture , and the reason why we always use France and Britain as our examples for this , even Marxist is because , for reasons of history and geography , they consolidated intonations first . The question that I have to say , though , is how do you deal with the people who don't want to belong , and how do you deal with people who have been nearly wiped out but also say , well , you kind of have to live together . All right , people do overcome this all the time . I mean , historically , it's something that the healing between two groups who that previously tried to completely wipe each other out , is , I'm not going to say , a common thing in history , but it is a thing which has to happen , because both groups have to survive , like .

Jules Delisle 2:01:36

More than survive . There are measures of health that come from collaboration and cooperation and from solving problems Like . Catharsis is real and it has a weight , and I think that the problem specifically with Israel is that their national rhetoric leans into the idea that other places are so hostile to Jews that Israel is the only safe place for Jews to be a country that is given weapons by anti-seminic countries that also say that this is not a safe place for you , so you have to go here .

Jules Delisle 2:02:15

That surround them by enemies and then also leverage that fear and anxiety against those other forces . You know the relationship between the US and Iran and Israel as a launching pad for those kinds of conflicts . Like the whole dynamic , it just it fails to see all of the ways in which diasporic Jews have lived everywhere and thrived and embedded themselves and said I don't want to leave , and so that's . The other thing is like homeland means something very different for other people . Sometimes it actually means the land , sometimes it means the places and especially it means that when all of your family has been killed and the memories that you have of them in that place are the only thing that really anchor you do it . But there's also something to be said for the idea that , like all of these places that we've lived have had tons of human conflict on them and life keeps happening . People's , like children , keep getting born and they need to be provisioned Like . We need to take care of them and plan for the future . And at a certain point there is a way that people kind of like reorient around what needs to be done to grow , to move forward . You can only maintain conflict for so long . It might pop back up again , but there's a duration that things can really last before they start to break down .

Jules Delisle 2:03:51

I see , even in the history of Jewish pogroms and in what is happening with Palestinians now , all of these instances in which people assert their humanity and assert it not in alignment with a specific religion or a specific land , but with their humanity the fact that we all have to live here .

Jules Delisle 2:04:12

We all have to live on this planet . So if we take the idea of destroying others and by others I don't just mean other humans , but other species off the table in terms of us asserting our national boundaries and our kind of limits of our technologies , everything , all of the cause , like how do we live with each other ? How do we manage energy in a way that feels equitable ? How do we give people the space that we need to reduce conflict ? How do we allow for conflict in structured ways that allow people to blow off steam before things culminate in conflict ? Like these are social technologies that require an extraordinary amount of cognitive energy to invest in , and so when we start making like how do we do this ? Like it is an investment . It will take a lot of energy , a lot of people will have to focus on answering these kinds of questions and then easier or comfortable either .

C. Derick Varn 2:05:15

I mean , that needs to be clearly stated Like it's not like the . The reason why I end up with the question of like , how did you trust Europeans again Then ? How did ? How did Palestinians trust Israelis ? If your answer and I say this to other leftists is just roll history back to some pre-imperial state , you're not serious . You're just not serious Like there is no way to do that . So then you , then the question must be how do we end this apartheid now ? How do you start allowing these people to live ? Because in the question and I say this because , in the case of Palestine , the question very much right now is are we going to do that ? Are we going to allow an ethnic cleansing to happen when the world is watching ?

Jules Delisle 2:06:14

And say about our ability to stop this from ever happening again . Right Like so . That's the thing . It's like never again , and it keeps happening .

C. Derick Varn 2:06:23

Never again has meant much to me . I mean , it seems to me that the answer that that say , from being Gurian forward , the answer for a lot of the Israeli leadership and I'm not going to say all Israelis , because I know that's not true , but the Israeli leadership has been never

Exploring Ecological Thinking and Multiple Perspectives

C. Derick Varn 2:06:43

again . Us , yeah , that's what it's meant , and by us I'm not even sure it means all Jews .

Jules Delisle 2:06:55

Like there's a lot of ethnic tension , even within Jews , and a lot of color there's also just like that's the thing it's like there's not . There is no monolithic Judaism and Zionism is clearly not representative of global Judaism .

C. Derick Varn 2:07:11

And you're neither ethnically nor religiously homogenous at all , I mean , and in the case of Judaism , like with Islam , actually it's somewhat similar , other , like you know , other than the weird odd man out of the Abrahamic traditions , christianity because of all the frankly Neoplatonism in it .

Jules Delisle 2:07:35

But eating people .

C. Derick Varn 2:07:38

That's the thing , people in Antioch and they kind of ruined their reputation with everybody else . So yeah , but well , also also when your main religious right is literally eating , not just eating people , eating the person , that is God .

Jules Delisle 2:08:00

I can put people off .

C. Derick Varn 2:08:05

And then you imagine everybody else is secretly actually eating your babies . It's like it's , it's . It tends not to go . So I mean , yeah , there's these why people don't trust you . But but it also is . It's that the , the way in which Europe , you know , post Roman Europe handled ethnicity and universality and Christian dump eventually , like leads to the . You know , it's my thesis that whiteness , as we understand it , comes out of the incoherence of of both the dual claims to a particular ethnicity and to Christian Dom .

Jules Delisle 2:08:43

And as Christian dump shrank , well , we got to have something right , yeah , this is initiating people into that element of whiteness , like the colonial expansion side of things , that , like you become white by basically becoming the military force that's so anxious that others are penetrating you and polluting you that you have to push them out . The idea even of the Eucharist , like you're eating God so that he purifies all the sin out of your body . You have to take in the white thing to , to get all the dirty out , like all of those weird , like those weird concepts in the medieval period that helped , like influence , with the formation of whiteness later on . It's they're all anxieties . It's all anxieties about maintaining control and power and there's nothing more powerful than eating people . It gives you a superhuman quality , right , like the idea that you gain their strength , you gain their power . It's eating God's especially powerful . Then , more importantly , even than that , like kind of abstracted inability to reconcile with each other , is like ideas of value and power .

Jules Delisle 2:09:53

There are Ashkenazi like , especially like the legacy of German philosophical contribution from Ashkenazi Jews . It can't be understated . Like , obviously , like everybody is still reading Frankfurt School , everyone is still reading Marx , like it's still Kant , it's all we talk about Hegel's Prussian right . So , like all of this , like it's not that , it's not that we haven't seen the way that Jewish thinking was influenced in this , like turbo nationalist , like hyper imperial German project . It's just it's interesting to see that come into conflict with , like Orthodox Jews and their concept of Zionism and their idea of when it would be appropriate to turn to the Levant . Like all of these dynamic ways of approaching , like what actually is the unit , it is the ritual , it's the people , it's you know , there are only some people that are really anxious about maintaining purity , and I think that that's something that we can look at more .

Jules Delisle 2:11:04

Like how these purity narratives , how these , how these influence our idea of ecological thinking . Because , like , why do we think nature is dirty and filthy and nasty and brutish and short ? Why do we , why do we equate people with a state of nature when we do these acts of violence against them and these genocidal ways ? So I think that those are ideas that we need to confront and that they're in Marx , you know , they're there in this presentation even of what are considered like radical thinkers at the time , people who did experience prejudice . There are brain worms they have that they can't get out of . We can , we can identify those and we can try to think around them , right Like this is . This is the thing also . I don't think I can necessarily purge people of their love for Marx . It might not be necessary . I also don't know to what extent like any of his writing about ecology can be carried into the future . The ecological extraction dynamics are escalated to a point which , like nothing nothing he writes about metabolism is relevant to the flows of the world .

C. Derick Varn 2:12:12

All two paragraphs of it .

Jules Delisle 2:12:14

Yeah , so that's the thing it's like you know , john Bellamy , foster and Cytoh , I understand what they like about Marx , what they're trying to reclaim . They just there isn't a degrowth communism in Marx . In fact , there's the exact opposite . There's the ideal of industrial progression . The metabolic limits are a restraint on the revolutionary potential . Like that's the focus on that . It's not . Let's restore these relationships and figure out like safer and more stable dynamics .

Jules Delisle 2:12:44

There is like he goes into Louis Henry Morgan's work and he does like acknowledge indigenous people through the like lens of Louis Henry Morgan , acknowledging indigenous people . They both , you know , clearly came with racist ideas , but like that's the thing is like Marx does have some ideas that people could interact with environments differently and be healthy , but that's not enough for him . It's like there , that's that isn't what shapes his way to discussions of like interest or like how we can consolidate all of these like financial instruments in order to like actually analyze society . There's still . There's kinship is missing , domestic labor is missing .

Jules Delisle 2:13:29

There's like just all of these dynamics that are missing and instead of trying to like insert them into him or take one or two sentences and like leverage that , and I think that we can just like we can see him , he's a pillar over here and we can kind of like let's like start to think ecologically and organizationally outside of these texts and I'm personally starting from the bones and from the histories that people have strategies that have worked , sometimes for thousands of years of uninterrupted occupation and environment Like that's valuable information for me . I might not be able to replicate those behaviors or those life ways , it might not be appropriate for me to ever consider that , but I can still learn from it , I can still make decisions based on that , and that's that's . Ecological thinking is about exploring differences and options and not about falling into a single kind of thinking with the environment . There's not one ecological thinking , just like there isn't one way of approaching any of these concepts .

C. Derick Varn 2:14:31

No , but I think of the things you've said today , that's going to be the thing that upsets people the most is that there is not one rubric . I talk about this in terms of ethics , right Like I'm a virtue ethicist . The reason why I'm a virtue ethicist is not because virtue ethicists necessarily more coherent , it's not . It's that any attempt I've seen to reduce human treatment to a singular rubric or question has been a disaster , and virtue ethics at least says from its get go that you can't do that Like doesn't actually give you a whole lot else to work with , actually , if I'm completely honest , and there is this way in which pluralism really does upset people , and it sets modern people , whatever that means . But people from developed weird cultures you know Western , relatively , which , relatively white , although you know less in both those scenarios , educated in whatever I forgot the other one but it affects them in particular , because there is a way in which reduction brings clarity . You have to ask yourself , though , if the reductive clarity is real , like if you're only seeing one element of a complex system and you're only adjudicating something by that element . Are you actually understanding the entirety of the system ? And this goes from even things like okay , you know , the greatest debate amongst even Marxists the tendency of the rate of profits to fall .

C. Derick Varn 2:16:27

All right , how we calculate profits Is not an easy question to answer . Actually , it really isn't . What . What we are using for that is also not an easy question to answer . Oh good , just go GDP . Well , you can have a perfectly stable fucking society that has zero GDP . Go .

Jules Delisle 2:16:49

I did that . It just doesn't . It doesn't have life and death in all of the flows , and that's like I always talk about metabolism , and and it's because there it , like you know , living things require energy in order to function . Nothing , nothing is , just like you know , magically poofed into an environment , fully formed and able to articulate and make its decisions , without that kind of investment either . So , um , like , I my my beef with economics and I need to delve into this further and articulate it more completely . But Metabolic realities , ecological processes , how they're priced and what it actually costs to extract them and , in many cases , to disrupt them so that they are no longer accessible after a certain period of acquisition , like all of these things , they're . There's a metabolic transfer that is radically undervalued within the monetary system and maybe very intentionally not , you know , accounted for in many cases , that it's something that we need to consolidate , it's something that we actually need to discuss and it's the reality is not that there's not enough money in the world to make all of the grain flow to all .

Jules Delisle 2:18:11

The places that needed . It's that we have other sets of constraints . There are other real measures and other real constraints that need to be At the forefront of our planning and , like , gdp , just doesn't take enough factors into play . It doesn't . It doesn't recognize that growth in the finance sector is Related to a loss of biodiversity , potential and resilience in other sectors . So it's it's a it , but it's not a direct transfer . I think that's

Economics, Power and Revolutionary Projects

Jules Delisle 2:18:42

the thing . There isn't a measure through which you are going to be able to take metabolism , fix Economics and then correct economics so that everything that we do is suddenly sustainable and better , and just that . That's the other things .

Jules Delisle 2:18:55

Like economics is A way of talking about power . There are people with power that are acting it out Irrationally on the surface of the planet . They've priced the cost of our lives and of ecosystems and are moving forward , knowing that there will be lots of like . The issue isn't that , by being rational and by appropriately like , bringing into consolidation the concept of Profit and the concept or the concept of value and metabolism , like that . That's not , that's not going to be the thing that fixes us , but we can , by looking at metabolism and looking at what it takes to build healthy people See the difference between what economics is actually communicating and demonstrating and what people need or what the Ecosystems that we manage will require in order for specific outcomes that we're looking for .

Jules Delisle 2:19:45

So like and I don't think we can take a single concept or like Search the history of the words and be able to put a few of them together and all of a sudden Like solve the puzzle for everyone and how we should organize the thought project style of writing that exists now . Where people do they , they'll . They basically come with these like a priori assumptions and just like go with me because I can prove all of it inside the piece . That's actually actively what I'm fighting against is like we need expanding data sets and much more Observation and consideration in forming our relationships , not because real measures are what determines our course of action , but because it can only help clarify what the paths could be . That's the thing . There's many paths . Diversity of tactics might actually be the best possible strategy , and Then , if that's so , how can we coordinate disparate systems of organization , disparate systems of kinship and people with different histories of violence ?

C. Derick Varn 2:20:53

Along , like it , like how can we ?

Jules Delisle 2:20:54

organize along the goal of children and their health and well-being as a central point and focus that's . That's easier , I think , to pitch then many other revolutionary subjects or projects , but it's also it's . It's not as it's not as thrilling as what you can do as an armchair revolutionary , you know sending Twitter troops out to Do the good work . So , yeah , it's . It's eyes on children . Marks needs more eyes on children . Like Marxist need to pay attention to futurity . That this is . This is what's missing in all of it .

C. Derick Varn 2:21:31

Yeah , I Always tell people that this is insufficient , utterly insufficient . But if you're going to use Marx , I would look our marks and Ingalls I'd look as much and and admit that it was flawed and based on really sketchy 19th century anthropology and then I had racist assumptions , but that that still , ingalls did come to some pretty progressive conclusions and Ingalls is writing on the origins of the family and also realizing its limits with what we know now , and not just what we know about the past but what we know about people who actually still exist . I mean , like , like you said , it's not like hunter-gatherers are completely gone , there's a fuck a lot less of them , admittedly . But like and I guess my last point we should ask ourselves you know we asked this question about agriculture , but let's talk about industrial modernity .

C. Derick Varn 2:22:28

If it was so great , why did they have to structure the laws in South Africa and what became Rhodesia to force people out of Collected pastoral lifestyles in South Africa into agricultural and industrial ones ? They couldn't . They didn't get people doing that . They didn't get people doing that by forcing them . They had to literally completely change inheritance structures and whatnot to to make it so that people had to stay in this relationship .

Jules Delisle 2:23:07

Sedentary settlement being imposed on you . I think that's far more common than the idea that people choose to take on those subsistence factors . There's significant evidence for that .

Jules Delisle 2:23:21

Where hunter-gatherers exist and the reason that there are less like the idea that there are less hunter-gatherers now than there were before is a scathing indictment of colonial agricultural Expansion and not of hunter-gatherer life ways . We have to stop talking about the presence or absence of humans as being a result of white colonial expansion . Being superior and , like we , I don't think we mean to talk about it when we're like well , everybody's industrious industrialist . Now the state is here , it's not going away this , it just denies all of the ways that people have continued to resist . And then , if You're not interested in them as people because they don't have a military power to overthrow your state , you're missing the point , like their existence in opposition to the militarized power of the state is often one of the most interesting drivers of their organizational styles and there's a lot to learn from that .

C. Derick Varn 2:24:22

And on that note , jules , where could people find you and your work ?

Jules Delisle 2:24:27

so I'm at member of school and Presently teaching a class on human origins . We also have a class on Pina Cores that Collins teaching , which is phenomenal . I love reading about the Phoenicians and it actually it gives a lot of historical background to these , like Mediterranean racism and kind of like the , the interimperial conflicts that exist between , like Rome and Persia and the Phoenicians and how Hebrews and Canaanites Plane to that . So we've had a really fun time in that class and Jared is leading modern revolutions and so like I've been reading an extraordinary amount of Marx again like so also you know , taking care of Patience in hospital . Being a primitivist , he uses some of the most advanced pharmaceutical and medical devices on the planet . As I talked to you here on my Member , school is a great place and if you're interested in talking about all of these things , flushing them out , because the thing is like I don't feel like I have a really strong conclusion .

Jules Delisle 2:25:26

I feel like I have a lot more problems than I did even a couple weeks ago , but I'm happy to talk with any of you about any of your problems and conflicts , and you can find us on Patreon . You can find Colin Drum on Twitter . He's always stirring up trouble there .

C. Derick Varn 2:25:42

Yeah , he becomes the main character of the internet .

Jules Delisle 2:25:44

A remarkable A lot of the time just because he gets angry at us in the discord . So good , but like , yeah , it's . If you like conflict on the internet , then you'll probably like Good faith , intellectual discourse and the ability to disagree with another person without having to , you know , block them forever . Members , is great for that . So if you , if you want to come and argue with us , come argue . It's wonderful , we have a great time .

C. Derick Varn 2:26:09

Yeah , I am currently in your origins class and I am in Jared's Marxism class , although I'm missing a couple of things for writing a paper . I apologize , but the the Level of discourse has been actually Really helpful , and particularly on things that people think are settled , that when you actually are keeping up with with what is unfortunately often Extremely pay-walled and elite conversations that you that shouldn't be hidden from you you realize how you know , even if you're educated on the topic , which I am , I was like I didn't know that About this debate having shifted in the last 15 years , um , and this is a good place to discover that , as opposed to only talking about concepts from the 19th century .

Jules Delisle 2:27:07

Marxist about theorists from the 1970s , when it's like we've done other things guys .

C. Derick Varn 2:27:14

Like , obviously all of you went to undergrad and then read blogs from people who went to undergrad and just got stuck , but whatever .

Jules Delisle 2:27:21

Well , that's the thing we find a lot of new material I'm I am constantly looking for things that contradict what I've already learned .

Jules Delisle 2:27:29

So like that , like I have a very adversarial approach just to my own research and my own studies , but Everybody is coming from so many different backgrounds and also pulls materials from so many different places . Like if you've argued about Something over and over again and you bring it to the discord and members , you'll have a new argument . That's what that's . I can guarantee that it'll be a novel approach to something that you've already argued about . Or at least you'll find allies , better enemies , any of that stuff . It's all good .

C. Derick Varn 2:27:57

Yeah , most of your enemies are bad , just gonna put .

Jules Delisle 2:28:03

My human origins class has been really Satisfying for me , because it's been me like , ruthlessly criticizing all of the people that I previously had to Be so generous to and talk about how much I love their books . So , like it's , it's interesting because we're talking about how , in an evolution , we're talking coming from the science perspective , but this is something that heavily influences the humanities In ways that they're not even aware of . So it's it's fun to be able to actually like Bring this out and actually have these kind of conflicts in a healthy way where we get to the bottom of it , instead of all of the Restrained social veneer that comes with everything . Like it's just not , it's not a good , it's not a good setting for people to actually think about things deeply . We may not be right , but we absolutely think about things deeply and I think that I actually am right , like very often . So come find out .

C. Derick Varn 2:28:53

Alright , and I would tell people to check it out . I'm also , I guess I . I discovered that I had a title now , which was funny . Our chief didn't drum , has decided that I am a scholar , so I guess I should .

Jules Delisle 2:29:18

Refuse to acknowledge that Colin has any authority over me whatsoever . He asserts it and I , like I've Sovereignty , asserts itself . And you can I just go like it's been very good sharpening teeth . Yeah , I'm not entirely sure why you're a scholar , but that's it's . It's a good role to have . That's the thing . Like . You can come in and you can watch the classes . You don't have to keep up with the reading . If you have stuff that like happens in your life , that's okay . It's best if you're able to do all the reading and say with everything , like especially if you're particularly focused on the scholarship that we're working on . But the whole point is that you can learn at your own pace . You're an adult learner .

Jules Delisle 2:30:05

You don't need us to do cop stuff and to , like you know , grade you with a red pen , but we can give you things to think about and things to argue with and opportunities to bring more material to our tables and make them better and more bountiful , like that's the collaborative quality of everything , and you , you really bring a lot to the table that way . But that's the thing is , like we , there's so many different ways to be a scholar and I and I just got Colin to agree to doing poetry and novels . So even though they said , you know people were worried he had made it illegal , His anti-reading set .

C. Derick Varn 2:30:44

By the way , people interpreting his his stuff about book worship as anti-reading was really hilarious . Cuz , like no , he's just saying you shouldn't just trust a book because it's a fucking book . That's all he's saying . Like and duh , you definitely shouldn't trust the book just because it's a book .

The Power and Importance of Reading

Jules Delisle 2:30:59

The reason that member school exists is because Colin and I have been Competitively reading against each other for years . It's like we nobody like we read . We actually read the books . Like I think that that's like the biggest thing . Sometimes we hate , like sometimes it makes us angry sometimes reading isn't like this , like joyful endeavor or something .

Jules Delisle 2:31:20

I think that that's reading for pleasure . I Haven't heard that name in you . I'm reading for spite , I'm reading because I'm trying to solve history . There are different reasons to read and like . If you Don't read for pleasure , if you read for power , then this is the spot , because I'm I'm trying to figure out everything and I do feel like I appreciate that Colin Talks about . It is arming oneself because I feel safer in the world . Having read all of the books that I have , I like I know how to respond to different things . I know how to think about things and I know how to not think about things .

C. Derick Varn 2:31:57

And I will say this is a last little endorsement of member school and I also has to out my loose affiliation with it . We do talk about things they don't normally get talked about . So , for example , I've made a whole lot of hay about comparing Abrahamic understandings of categories to Darmic understandings of categories , where I'm comfortable speaking actually , and then also saying like we need to look at , like people who understand , say , dinae , our Sue , our Mexica , our Mayan , our Inkin understandings of categories where we have , you know either , strong oral traditions , are written elements . We can't do it for groups that unfortunately we just don't have that for , but Because I'm discovering that these things actually do matter . They are kinds of technologies and some of this stuff , like there are like as much as I would like to blame every problem in Western culture on Christianity this is my own particularly Protestantism I'm just gonna let my own bigotry be known . I Don't actually think I can .

C. Derick Varn 2:33:08

Some of this stuff goes back to like the way Even Islamic people use categories from Aristotle and Pythagoras . I mean like and you might well , that's real weird and idealist . I'm like no , but it actually had material effect on the way we structured all kinds of things , including the classification of animals so like it is not an anti-materialist take , and so I want people to think about that when they approach this material . And on that note , thank you so much , julie . You give me a lot of your time and you don't normally come on podcasts cuz you know You're the only podcast .

Jules Delisle 2:33:44

I ever come on because the internet is a terrible place , but I'm . I want to engage other people in these conversations and , in a time when people seem extremely hopeless about opportunities for the future , there have always been people who survived like if liberation isn't what you can like , point yourself to point yourself towards survival and think about it differently .

C. Derick Varn 2:34:07

Yeah , I would Second that , that note .