Alex Alex's Intellectual Biography

The following Rationale I presented to my advisor as part of the graduation requirements for NYU's School of Individualized Study

Alex Alex Receives an Award from Gallatin Recognizing Academic Excellence

Concentration: Critical Systems Studies

Human civilization has entered a new era of Climate Collapse. For the past two decades, year after year, Western nations(specifically the USA) have watched as hurricanes, floods, droughts, fires, disease and famine increased in frequency and intensity. Rather than confronting the behaviors and economic structures that have created these conditions, we have doubled down on over-consuming and polluting, and disengaged from multilateral efforts to address the impact we have on the planet. The UN Environment Programme, due to current efforts not doing enough to stay below the 1.5°C limit in warming of average temperatures, recently released a report stating “incremental change is no longer an option: broad-based economy-wide transformations are required to avoid closing the window of opportunity to limit global warming to well below 2°C, preferably 1.5°C ” (UNEP, p. XVI).

My studies at Gallatin deconstruct why “developed” countries have driven our planet to the brink of collapse, and how a handful of privileged economic, social, political elite have trapped, persuaded, or disoriented the majority of the global population to allow the abuse of the planet for personal gain. I pursued this study through distinct domestic and international lenses, drawing on the disciplines of politics, law, history, economics, and language.

The first set of classes focus on the state of democracy in the USA and the dynamics that have kept it suppressed; the second set trace how these domestic abuses of citizens have translated to the abuse of politically weaker nations. These classes speak to the multiple impending, interrelated catastrophes threatening the current level of human civilization: severe malnutrition, ecosystem collapse, disease outbreak, resurgence of authoritarianism/nationalism, and numerous mental health crises gripping nations, from the USA and Brazil to China and Japan. 

The USA, as the world's most powerful country since the early 1900s (when its military aid turned the tide in both WW1 and WW2), inherited the mantle of Western Civilization. It has been the single most influential director of western development, and in turn of global development, in the modern era. Before we can fully understand how the USA operates on the global stage, we must critically examine the claims this country makes to democracy. 

William G. Howell in Relic claims that the source of political decline in the USA is the Constitution itself (Howell, 2016); despite its famous proclamation of the equality of all men, the very compromise that formed the union was slavery. This nation would not have been founded, nor launched a revolution against the Crown, had it not “compromised” to allow slavers to chain, mutilate, torture, and generally abuse black people.

Can you found a nation based on slavery and then claim the title of democracy?

The perverse hell Black People were forced to endure, through repeated and concerted efforts to crystallize slavery in legislation, is antithetical to democracy. Without this compromise, Southern States would have never joined the union.

In fact, less than a century later, they waged the Civil War(1861-65) to secede because the federal government dared to infringe on state “rights” to keep people in chains: James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time gives voice to the stories of enslaved and silenced peoples, their bodies raped by violent slavers and overseers; families separated when sold like cattle at auctions; countless unnamed people murdered, their bodies left to rot as warnings to those who sought freedom through flight or rebellion. He links those grave injustices to the current subjugation of Black People (Baldwin, 1993). 

Beyond the inherent hypocrisy of a slave-owning democracy, the framers and signers of the Constitution were 39 landed, elite, white men –men who drafted laws extending suffrage to only their class of people (Howell, 2016). The 1828 presidential election was the first in which non-property-holding white males could vote in the vast majority of states; women were not granted suffrage until 1920(19th Amendment). Fifty years of wealthy white men making most of the political decisions were followed by another ninety of men alone electing political leaders and passing laws. 

Though Black People were “emancipated” in 1863, and the 15th Amendment gave black men the right to vote in 1870, the slate of vote suppressing legislation meant that many black people in the South could not reliably exercise that right until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Looking at this truncated version of political speech and rights challenges Americans to question when democracy was realized in this country, if it has been at all.

By denying women’s suffrage, less than fifty percent of people by necessity have decided the political direction of this country, directed by the tracks set down by wealthy white founders. The true percentage is even smaller accounting for the exclusion and persecution of Natives and Black People. 

I looked to Ancient Greek texts to understand how the facade of American Democracy persists. Intellectual domination by men, a tradition alive and well in the “birthplace of democracy”, has allowed academia to paint Athens as a democracy, even though only land-owning males could vote. Plato, respected for his pursuit of metaphysical truth, writes the following of women:

“do you know of anything practiced by human beings in which the male sex isn’t superior to the female in all these ways (Pl. Resp. 455d.), clarifying that the things “in which the female sex is believed to excel . . . is most ridiculous of all for it to be inferior” (Pl. Resp. 455d.).

He unequivocally states that the elevation in status of women in the theoretically ideal state does not change that by nature, men are superior to women in all things that matter. To try to demystify or explain the human experience while intentionally excluding the female narrative and lived experience opposes Plato’s goal to arrive at the true forms; it is this exact dynamic that the powerful use to weaponize academia and delegitimize all worldviews but their own.

With a history documenting the USA’s democratic experiment’s tendency towards an oligarchic rule of duopoly, why have US citizens not caught on as well? Freire, through his critique of education in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, suggests that the intentional defunding of education while passing budgets of $773,000,000,000 (USAspending.gov) for an ever expanding military –and subsidies for the same corporations that fund political campaigns– has conspired to keep Americans just educated enough to reliably generate profits for the elites, but ignorant enough that they can't fully articulate the frustrations they feel with their political systems themselves.

Fifty-two percent of American adults have a literacy level lower than a 3, as measured by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). They struggle with longer, denser, often digital, texts. They have limited ability to make meaning across multiple texts by using inferences and identifying rhetorical structures.

With the amount of information one needs to consume to understand how the US government and its actors operate, you present them with an impossible task. The two party political system that has existed in some form since the nation's earliest days oversimplifies the national discourse of a nation of 350 million into out-versus-in-group conflict (Howell 2016). A duopolist political system where the leaders run in the same circles, benefit from the same policies, and are funded by the same corporations (corporations give to politicians regardless of party, they primarily seek access to political power) has robbed Americans of all but the performative aspects of democracy. 

The amputation of citizens' capacity for political discourse and action has had horrific consequences on the fabric of American life, and the safety of the world. Kimbrell’s Fatal Harvest notes that food waste in the USA exceeds 100,000,000,000 lbs annually, 40% of the food supply (Kimbrell, 2002). The Economic Research Service for the USDA calculated 33.8 million Americans suffered food insecurity in 2021, yet somehow two-thirds of Americans are obese or overweight (USDA ERS - Obesity).

How do these statistics make any sense? US politicians, lobbied by food corporations like Nestle and Tyson, have allowed industries to create foods designed to be incredibly addicting, filled with chemicals that not only blow up American waistlines, but also threaten their health. Kimbrell shares that despite excessive caloric intake, over 90% of Americans suffer from some vitamin deficiency, most more than one (Kimbrell, 2002). 

The decay of American health goes beyond individual bodies: Marcuse, in Cities Without Capitalism, investigates how auto companies have redesigned American cities and suburbs to accommodate their product at the expense of citizens' health and taxes (Marcuse, 2021). The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with the US DoT, released a study estimating that over forty-thousand Americans died in auto-related accidents in 2021; the number is on the rise.

Street parking dominates cities, occupying space that could be better used to consolidate waste collection, de-pave roads to prevent floods by allowing water to percolate, or grow food in cities to combat malnutrition and food insecurity (which will only increase due to the imminent collapse of industrial agriculture). All of this, combined with capitalism's urging to consume to forget about the horrific realities we live in, means Americans are eating themselves to death, and condemning the rest of the world to die slowly with us.

The USA’s death spiral cannot have happened without its inheriting the colonial legacy of the West, or without liberal theorists’ efforts to bring the peoples and lands of the rest of the world under the power of capital. We export to them our trash; their suffering, stolen homes, and lack of food subsidizes the inordinate amount that we consume and waste. Roy deconstructs the West’s push for industrialization as the sole path towards modernization and economic independence in Poverty Capital, and industrialization’s relation to the control of resources and people through labor dynamics and overwhelming capital might (Roy, 2010). 

Decades, and sometimes centuries, of colonialism fractured various native populations’ civic capacity –leaving hundreds of regions in political turmoil as different factions fought to fill the power vacuum left by colonial powers. The West, led by the USA and its arsenal of international economic institutions like the World Bank, pounced on that instability to fund actors friendly to western commercial interests (Roy, 2010), or pass legislation enshrining the rights of foreign capital at the expense of the people and earth.

The West, having completed much of the process of industrialization by the early 1900s, sought to expand the reach of its markets in the rest of the world. The Green Revolution(1950s-60s) ushered in the age of industrial agriculture, destroying modes of sustenance that millions of native peoples worldwide had used: growing their own crops but also maintaining forests and plains to forage for nuts, fruits, medicines, game and wood. 

By the 1970’s, the USA flooded poor nations with subsidized wheat and corn exports, amounting to 30% and 50% of global exports, respectively (Roy, 2010). Many farmers were forced off their lands, as they could not compete with the subsidized grains. Using the Lockean labor theory of property, Western Nations pressured national governments to allow corporations to appropriate land because native populations had not practiced European agriculture, and thus had not claimed the land for themselves. Millions were displaced to the slums in city outskirts (Roy, 2010), to create the surplus of labor needed to operate factories –but also keep wages as low as possible, as every worker is infinitely replaceable. 

Liberal capitalists claim that “free” markets are the most efficient ways to organize resources, but theoretical economic paradigms divorced from political realities and the Earth’s health as prior to large-scale human civilization construct too narrow a definition of  “efficient”. Modes of food production that require intensive input of petro-chemicals (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc) and the subsequent waste of hundreds of billions pounds of food raise the question of the utility of efficiency as defined by output per input. Claims of liberal efficiency in agriculture are challenged by the loss of biodiversity and billions of tons of topsoil, irresponsible water use, and reduced monoculture harvest due to climate change or fungus/pest infestations (Kimbrell, 2002). National and global paradigms are the creation of elites (often white, often male) seeking to redesign the world. They have unilaterally imposed their vision of the world without the consent of their own nationals, much less the global population. 

We must now reckon with these legacies, and decide whether we are content to face the end of the modern era with the same gluttonous apathy, or if we will radically reform global relations in a bid to save our species and honestly confront the legacies that have produced our world.  The oppressive role the USA has come to play on the international stage, and in many of its own citizens' lives, stems from the reluctance to honestly examine its founding and institutions to preserve a myth of a patriotic and democratic revolution. These texts and my classes at Gallatin do not seek to simply identify and explain the roots of various existential crises; they engage each other in discussion of how we manage our communities, nations, and species through them, and what forms of social organization we ought to aspire to. James Baldwin proposes love to achieve racial justice; how do we harness love (respect for life beyond our own, admiration for beings that never have and never will exist again) to globally confront the crimes that have produced us and the world we live in? The planet and mass civil unrest share a clear message; the Colloquium offers a space to discuss the limited power of reformist actions, but also the pitfalls of narrow minded and rushed radical revolution.

Works Cited

Adult Literacy in the United States. nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp. Accessed 

28 Oct. 2022.

“Early Estimates of Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities and Fatality Rate by Sub-Categories in 

2021.” NHTSA -DOT, May 2022, crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/ Public/ViewPublication/813298. Accessed 26 Oct. 2022.

United Nations Environment Programme (2022). Emissions Gap Report 2022: The Closing 

Window — Climate crisis calls for rapid transformation of societies. Nairobi. https://www.unep.org/emissions-gap-report-2022

USAspending.gov. www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=2022. Accessed 28 

Oct. 2022.

USDA ERS - Key Statistics and Graphics. 

www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-u-s/key-statistics-graphics. Accessed 28 Oct. 2022.

USDA ERS - Obesity. www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-choices-health/obesity. Accessed 28 Oct. 

2022.

Premodern and Early Modern 

Plato. Republic (380 B.C.E). Translated by G.M.A Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing 

Company, Inc, 1992. [HIS]

Plato. Timaeus & Critias (360 B.C.E). UK: Penguin Random House, 2008. [HIS]

Aristotle. Politics (350 B.C.E). Translated by C.D.C Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing 

Company, Inc, 1998. [HIS]

Akka Mahadevi. Songs for Siva: Vacanas of Akka Mahadevi (1130). Translated by Vinaya 

Chaitanya. Harper Perennial, 2017. [CPC]

鴨長明, Kamo no Chōmei. Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World (1212). Translated by Yasuhiko 

Moriguchi and David Jenkins. Stone Bridge Press, 1996. [CPC]

兼好, Yoshida Kenko. 徒然草: Tsurezuregusa, Essays In Idleness (1330). Translated by Donald 

Keene. Columbia University Press, 1998. [CPC]

Juana Ines de la Cruz. El Divino Narciso (1689). Red Ediciones, S.L, 2016. [CPC]

Humanities 

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time (1963). New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Friedman, Thomas. The World Is Flat. New York: Picador, 2007. [HIS]

Putnam, Robert D. . Bowling Alone. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020. [HIS]

Schwartz, Timothy T. Travesty in Haiti. 2008. [CPC]

Social and Natural Sciences 

Hall, Peter A. Varieties of Capitalism. Oxford University Press, 2001. 

Kimbrell, Andrew. Fatal Harvest. Foundation for Deep Ecology, 2002. 

Rawls, John. Justice as Fairness, A Restatement. Harvard University Press, 2001. 

Roy, Ananya. Poverty Capital. Routledge, 2010. [CPC]

Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action. Harvard University Press, 1971. 

Concentration

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of The Earth. Grove Press, 2005. [CPC]

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. 

Greer, Jed & Bruno, Kenny. Greenwash: The Reality Behind Corporate Environmentalism. 

Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1997. 

Howell, William G. Relic. Basic Books, 2016. 

Marcuse, Peter. Cities Without Capitalism. Routledge, 2021.