A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior Noam Chomsky In Leon A. Jakobovits and Murray S. Miron (eds.), Readings in the Psychology of Language, Prentice-Hall, , pp. Preface. Rereading this review after eight years, I find little of substance that the,. of and to in a is that for on ##AT##-##AT## with The are be I this as it we by have not you which will from (at) or has an can our European was all: also " - 's your We Password requirements: 6 to 30 characters long; ASCII characters only (characters found on a standard US keyboard); must contain at least 4 different symbols;
Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior
W OULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of or the Civil Rights Act of ? Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption or enlightenment for organized political resistance.
An Inconvenient Genetically modified organism persuasive essay helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption — changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much — and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet?
Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide. We so often hear that the world is running out of water.
People are dying from lack of water, genetically modified organism persuasive essay. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans.
Collectively, genetically modified organism persuasive essay, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution. was about 1, pounds. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags shopping, genetically modified organism persuasive essay.
You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes, genetically modified organism persuasive essay. Since municipal waste includes not just residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses, you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it.
Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States. I want to be clear. So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses.
Any option is a better option than a dead planet. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm genetically modified organism persuasive essay. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.
The second problem — and this is another big one — is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself.
By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, genetically modified organism persuasive essay for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it. The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide.
If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, genetically modified organism persuasive essay if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling or unable to question much less destroy the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.
The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned — Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States — who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them.
We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems. This article, along with other landmark Orion essays about transformative action, are collected in a new anthology, Change Everything Now.
Order your copy here. Interesting angle, but I have to disagree with the overall message. Placing blame on industry in my opinion only removes the blame from the individual, and thus makes it less personal, genetically modified organism persuasive essay.
We as individuals are responsible for the industry which seems to be to blame. It creates the products and services that each individual consumes. So only by collectively saying no to these products and services are we able to truly change our destructive path. This analogy can be used just about everywhere and helps bring back the responisiblity to the consumer and genetically modified organism persuasive essay project it onto some foreign concept such as the government or corporations.
Now is the time. We hear the same message, over and over again about all the things that are wrong with the world. No matter that it is true, there is never any alternative other than stop doing what you do now, genetically modified organism persuasive essay.
And then, what? For that, Jensen provides no answer. Neither did Nader. He might have made a real difference had he been able to tell us what his future looked like and how to get there. Nader did not do it and is now relegated to providing a few comments when the media needs someone to disagree.
I doubt that Jensen will get that much. There is an alternative. The vision of that started the Green Party, one of ecological sustainability and an industry the practices sustainable permaculture on a massive scale, a vision of citizens who respond according to their needs, not their wants; a vision of a world at peace and not at war.
Too many Greens are themselves caught in that old paradigm of protest. Remember, we do not remember Martin Luther King for say stop it, but for sharing his dream with all of us. I wonder if Jensen dreams. You would never know. I was going to make the same argument that Joel did, but since he said it so well, I have very little to add. Industry and agriculture are not solely to blame — they cater to the consumers. There are certainly better methods to produce products, for instance in sustainable agriculture vs.
industrialized agriculture. The other comment by Wes needs a response — Wes claims that Jensen offers no solution or alternative. Genetically modified organism persuasive essay is simply not true. This is the point that Wes somehow missed in his reading of the article. I largely agree with Joel, but would place my emphasis on the human rather than the economic. For me, the most persuasive case for living simply is not to reduce the economic demand that fuels industry.
Rather, it is the way that changing my own actions contributes to changing cultural values and norms. When I bring my own tupperware to a restaurant instead of taking a to-go box, I am not just reducing the demand for styrofoam by a minuscule amount.
I am also helping shift our collective cultural norms towards a world where using resources to create a single use to-go box is no longer acceptable. In turn, this might eventually move us towards a world where creating any item for a single use — be it industrial, corporate, military, etc. And it is only once we as a society come to regard single use production as unacceptable that large scale activism has any chance.
Without simultaneous efforts to shift our underlying cultural attitudes, our activism has very little probability of succeeding and may even appear as hypocrisy. No claim here to have thoroughly read everything Jensen has written, but I will side with him that we do need much more activism and much more truth in the face of power, lies and pablum.
Could it be his frustration with those who peacefully go about living their simple, low-impact lives, knowing that behavior can be contageous, is that there is no time to wait for that behavior to catch on in a large scale? We do need revolutionary change and we need it yesterday. Still, I think there is a place in this transition for all — a place for revolutionaries and I count myself one and a place for more diplomatic change agents.
Derrick, I think you have made some very important points about the clever way capitalism obscures political action by promoting smaller acts. Still, genetically modified organism persuasive essay, I think you have not included the importance of spiritual practice and individuals entering processes of political change through the doorway genetically modified organism persuasive essay individual action.
I have seen this in the fair trade system. It is largely focused on consumption and, genetically modified organism persuasive essay, yet, it also helps people understand some of the system dynamics at play in trade. This makes it an easy way to begin the journey which sometimes leads to political action. Real, dramatic, systemic change is necessary if we are to have any chance of preserving the planet in anything close to the condition in which it now exists to say nothing of the condition in which it existed years ago.
The personal may indeed by political—but that is not to say that the political is exhausted by the personal. There is a whole realm of political action genetically modified organism persuasive essay all kinds which is going to be necessary IN ADDITION TO whatever purely personal actions we can take, genetically modified organism persuasive essay.
Major political and economic change is not optional. I agree completely with Derrick Jensen. As he must have expected, he has ruffled some feathers.
The scale of involvement necessary for real solutions is frightening to the timid. Who to trust? Most media are just branches of the corporate world. And making sense of the multitude of ideas most of them half-baked or worse on the internet is a labyrinth that few have time or intelligence to sort out. As for the comments about dreams, Mr. I thank him and the editors of Orion for sharing this dream, genetically modified organism persuasive essay.
Well-written argument, but essentially a luddite one.
Persuasive Speech GMOs- Ashlyn
, time: 6:21DNP: Emerging Areas of Human Health
Password requirements: 6 to 30 characters long; ASCII characters only (characters found on a standard US keyboard); must contain at least 4 different symbols; We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow blogger.com more Oct 16, · @universityofky posted on their Instagram profile: “Like her sticker says, “Find your people.” College is a great place to do just that. Tag “your ”
No comments:
Post a Comment