61
Lewis and Clark set out to map Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, a financial transaction Jefferson enacted to re-shape a continent’s carrying capacity as a flood of immigrants determined to make America home. It was the first and only noteworthy
population policy exhibited by lawmakers in US history, with the exception of ultraconservative Congressional rejections of China’s population policy and that of the
United Nations Population Fund’s stance on abortion worldwide. By 1850, when
Karl Marx was firmly elucidating a shooting gallery of “contradictions” in capitalism, humanity numbered approximately 1.2 billion.
16
Presently, with 10, 11, 12, 13 billion humans projected by the end of the twentyfirst century, as in no other social and scientific research arena of critical public
importance are there such vague and often meaningless calculations. This is because
the so-called ecological horizon fractions are assessed according to different metrics, and expressed as matters of policy recommendation where bias is intense. For
example, what data sets would one utilize to determine that human carrying capacity had been exceeded as a function of the time when surrounding species extinctions began to accelerate? There are too many unanswerable gaps in this kind of
imagined correlation to even venture an educated guess. To reiterate: At what point
(precisely) did humans begin destroying their surroundings?
One could take any number of measures of human catalytics to formulate a sustainability quotient—such as the year in which assembly-line slaughter of animals
began to shape public perception of animals as mere units of production. But the
number of such correlations that form the basis for grasping the entirety of human
ecological paradox is far beyond calculation. No amount of data is sufficient to
reasonably establish the causes and consequences of such a paradox. Instead, the
mind stumbles around it, while in its very physiological throes. If, as a baseline
consequence, the Anthropocene is determined to be the ultimate result, we are still
unable to verify the vast array of causes, breached boundaries, the multitudes of
trespass, degrees of sullying, the nature and kind of biochemical catastrophe, the
sheer multiplicities of extinctions and population diminutions across every taxon.
7.3 The Separation of Concept and Calculation
While Aristotle acknowledged the basic forerunners of all paradox, his four fundamental causes—material, formal, efficient, and final
17
, the causal relations that
ignite any theory, hypothesis, synthesis, or intuition, are too many to associate in a
16 https://www.jstor.org/journal/philpublaffa, “The Fundamental Contradiction of Capitalist
Production,” Gary Young, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Winter, 1976), pp. 196–234,
Published by: Wiley, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2264873.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents, Accessed January 23, 2019.
17 See Metaphysics, Book 5, section 1013a, translated by Hugh Tredennick, Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1933, 1989.hosted at perseus.tufts.
edu., Accessed September 11, 2018.
7.3 The Separation of Concept and Calculation
Lewis and Clark set out to map Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, a financial transaction Jefferson enacted to re-shape a continent’s carrying capacity as a flood of immigrants determined to make America home. It was the first and only noteworthy
population policy exhibited by lawmakers in US history, with the exception of ultraconservative Congressional rejections of China’s population policy and that of the
United Nations Population Fund’s stance on abortion worldwide. By 1850, when
Karl Marx was firmly elucidating a shooting gallery of “contradictions” in capitalism, humanity numbered approximately 1.2 billion.
16
Presently, with 10, 11, 12, 13 billion humans projected by the end of the twentyfirst century, as in no other social and scientific research arena of critical public
importance are there such vague and often meaningless calculations. This is because
the so-called ecological horizon fractions are assessed according to different metrics, and expressed as matters of policy recommendation where bias is intense. For
example, what data sets would one utilize to determine that human carrying capacity had been exceeded as a function of the time when surrounding species extinctions began to accelerate? There are too many unanswerable gaps in this kind of
imagined correlation to even venture an educated guess. To reiterate: At what point
(precisely) did humans begin destroying their surroundings?
One could take any number of measures of human catalytics to formulate a sustainability quotient—such as the year in which assembly-line slaughter of animals
began to shape public perception of animals as mere units of production. But the
number of such correlations that form the basis for grasping the entirety of human
ecological paradox is far beyond calculation. No amount of data is sufficient to
reasonably establish the causes and consequences of such a paradox. Instead, the
mind stumbles around it, while in its very physiological throes. If, as a baseline
consequence, the Anthropocene is determined to be the ultimate result, we are still
unable to verify the vast array of causes, breached boundaries, the multitudes of
trespass, degrees of sullying, the nature and kind of biochemical catastrophe, the
sheer multiplicities of extinctions and population diminutions across every taxon.
7.3 The Separation of Concept and Calculation
While Aristotle acknowledged the basic forerunners of all paradox, his four fundamental causes—material, formal, efficient, and final
17
, the causal relations that
ignite any theory, hypothesis, synthesis, or intuition, are too many to associate in a
16 https://www.jstor.org/journal/philpublaffa, “The Fundamental Contradiction of Capitalist
Production,” Gary Young, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Winter, 1976), pp. 196–234,
Published by: Wiley, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2264873.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents, Accessed January 23, 2019.
17 See Metaphysics, Book 5, section 1013a, translated by Hugh Tredennick, Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1933, 1989.hosted at perseus.tufts.
edu., Accessed September 11, 2018.
7.3 The Separation of Concept and Calculation