BIOPOLITIX

Biopolitix is a philosophy notebook I use to comment on political events, and work out biopolitical theory.

Biopolitix takes political affairs, old and new, and places them in the context of planetary biology, or what I call bios.

 

Bios is not the same thing as nature or the environment. Nature is a classical construct that is genderized and mythological. Environment is a concept made up by bureaucrats for political and legal reasons, and is definitely mythological.

 

Bios is the subject of biology and ecology, the “living sciences” that strive to account for what is actual—and not for what is literal. (Philosophy focuses on the literal.) The subject of bios might be traced back to Lovelock’s Gaia theory, but it doesn’t need to be, for cognition of bios has always been required to survive. As Leopold noted, hunters and farmers either knew bios or died; and more than that, he spoke of the “land organism” that our lives are biologically and ecologically symbiotic with.  Bios is our own bodies extended into the bodies of all other lives so, yes, what Lovelock means by Gaia. But Gaia is universal and ginormous and is thereby beyond our personal ability to embrace; it can be experienced only by direct contact as the bios we experience as reality. So Leopold’s concept is much more useful to us; the “land organism” is perceived specifically and actually, and we are able to adapt our behavior to harmonize with its conditions. We cannot love and care for something we do not know, and Gaia is something we cannot know.

Biopolitical thinking and actions are necessary because, through industrial thoughts and deeds, our species has undermined the foundations of its own biology and therefore survival. With a biopolitical perspective, we expand the context within which our thoughts and deeds take place, and can accurately understand and judge their effects on our own, and other species, destinies.

Biopolitix dedicates itself to examining and interpreting history, and to judging human ideas and behaviors on this ethical basis:

As participants in the evolutionary continuum, we bring health or harm to bios. We are not as gods, for gods are our inventions. We are human, born of the humus, fragile and short-lived. Our manipulation of bios to suit our short-lived desires brings us health or harm.

Human behavior that manipulates bios and brings health is good.

Human behavior that manipulates bios and brings harm is bad.

We should do good, not bad, things.