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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order. By Thomas Princen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 224p. $22.95.
When you are trying to get someone to embrace new habits of mind and body, like, say, those of ecological sustainability, it sometimes works to appeal to common sense. Thomas Princen employs this stragegy of persuasion—he also invokes enlightened self-interest, but I think he prefers to appeal to common sense—in his bold, tolerant, honest, and powerful short book. To be more specific, he invokes a set of minor or currently rather quiet “segments” (p. 171) inside the mixed bag that is American common sense. Common sense is not, after all, a stable block but a conglomeration of diverse parts, some of which do not fit at all well with the others. And it is the heterogeneity of the common store of wisdom that makes possible Princen's reorganization of it. He highlights some underutilized segments of the “old normal” and harnesses their power to the project of building a society that “takes infinite material growth as impossible,” “embraces limits” (p. 187), and is devoted to “living well by living well within our means” (p. 124).
1 Kurzweil, Ray's claim in The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005)Google Scholar that we are on the verge of intelligent machines that will usher in a “post scarcity” society is perhaps the most confident and thoroughgoing rejection of Princen's common sense recognition of natural limits. Though I am intrigued by Kurzweil's claims about the exponential growth of information technologies and agree with him that “the human” will surely be altered as it enters into relation with newly emerging (techno-natural) bodies, I also agree with Steven Shaviro's criticism that the “ideological function” of Kurzweil's work is “to bring us to utopia without incurring the inconvenience of having to question our current social and economic arrangements. This is why Kurzweil supposes that the onward march of technology will produce the society of plenitude, all by itself—so long as government bureaucrats and religious fundamentalists do not interfere with entrepreneurial innovation” (Shaviro, Steven, “The Singularity is Here,” http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/Singularity.pdfGoogle Scholar).
2 Decontested terms “aim to limit the range of possible contestation around central political concepts” and identifications. (Norval, Aletta J., “The Things We Do with Words—Contemporary Approaches to the Analysis of Ideology,” British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 30, No. 2Apr., 2000, 313–346, p. 316, note 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.)
3 For a good, historical account of the power that plants (tulips, apples, cannibus) have exercised over humans, see: The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World, Random House, 2001Google Scholar.