Is defending the first and refusing the second a pure moment of rear-view mirrorism hidden by moral arguments and their market driven correlatives?
I am just having a few thoughts on sustainability and cloning regarding their promotion and use, playing (a bit) the devil’s advocate.
What is sustainability? The ability to sustain or the will to sustain? Conservation and preservation against change, or adaptation for the future generation? Instinctively it seems to be about the preservation , and further the conservation of any form of existence. But what if these forms of existence are to evolve, change, and mute? Can conservation not be resistance to change?
This is where indeed, cloning gets into the story. Cloning is about bringing change to the so-called ‘natural’ evolution of existence. And as much as for the AI research which proposes to upgrade humans with different interactions/communication frameworks, the only way to promote cloning is through the moral therapeutic argument.
Reality is that the rejection of cloning or AI is generally not driven by the fear of an unpredictable misuse of scientific research (the creation of an army of clones- which I guess would be the worst thing on Earth since I don’t know, let me think… the atomic bomb?), but the necessity for a bunch of moralists (from the religious zealots having to deal with God, to the flipped out politicians having to deal with their electorate, to the CEOs having to deal with the capricious trends and curves of the stock market) to show they still have the decency to decide on the so-called natural evolution of biological and moral forms of existence according to the inevitable argument of progress.
By the way, Weapons of Mass Destruction happen not to be part of the evolutionary/moral/sustainable debate, of course. More seriously though, the ideas of sustainability and human cloning in particular raise a discussion about what we call the universal (Earth-wise) definition of human nature and ecological concerns at large.
What is interesting, apart from the moral resistance to change which always proves to be indecent (remember that the Earth is flat, 2+2=5 and that women did not have the right to vote before 1945 in most European countries… because, not only, but partially, they had no soul), is the constant invention of fantastic forward looking arguments which indeed work and sell perfectly the resistance to change!
If we look closer enough at design practice for instance: sustainability is about recycling or using sustainable materials, and more extensively about designing for society (read Papanek if you feel lost).
Let me just remind you that “good design for society” also used to be about the right amount of ornament (Ruskin, Morris), then against ornament (Loos), then about function (let’s pick the Frankfurt kitchen), then about nothing and everything (this is when the ‘post’ comes in), then about branding and stardom (Wally Olins and Terence Conran), and finally about sustainability and ‘new austerity’ (Viewpoint, December 2006).
It seems to me that sustainability in design, and in general, is nothing but a flat discourse which goes hand and hand with the uniforming and mapping of society; and more cynically, with the selling of an increasing number of “useless” stuffs into super cool “useless” shops- unless shopping, as I believe, is part of the necessary catharsis a consumer society can offer.
Jesus! Two things here:
> We can probably be pleased that the green brands are working well enough to push big industries into making revolutionary efforts (and profits) when facing a far from naive citizen-consumer who nowadays votes with his credit card.
> We can also think about my boyfriend’s grandma (you’ll take the example as a sample please) who is a green militant activist in Tasmania. If so, and if she is not just appealing to you for her cool distinctive way of life, but for the strong beliefs she has in her actions, then I would say: keep on producing and shopping if this is what human activity is about, or follow her and stop baffling.
See also www.copymagazine.org, now on sale at the BOOKSHOP, Shoreditch, London
