Is That the Mainstream or The Margin?

Posted on December 12, 2006
Filed Under For Argument's Sake |

The famous American philosopher Thomas Kuhn once compared scientific explanations to a building surrounded by scaffolding to support all the people doing running repairs on the basic structure. News is a bit the same. Yes, Iraq is important but we kinda get the point. People are dying in unnacceptable numbers, it is a disaster and American motivation was impelled by the wrong fuel. Got it.

On the other hand the debate about where we are going to grow food, and how crop allocation for the production of ethanol is oing to be managed alongside our modern appetites, is seen as esoteric and part of the margins of our legitimate concerns. It is, wait…. for the serious greens… and not a subject to trouble the average scratchjaw citizen concerned about the environment. My impression however is the average Jo has already gone much further than this and has a socially modified hunger for information on these topics. If the land is used for biofuel, duh, what about us?

To care which alternative fuel source is grown on the plains of America, the flood fields of Europe and the meadows of Ireland and Britain to offset carbon emissions is seen by the news guys though as just so pedantic. Wrong.

Pushing certain subjects from the mainstream to the margin used to be a political device. When we had strong conservative Governments a little right wing extremism was tolerable. When we had left wing Governments it had to be marginalised. And equally the other way round. Explanations and the priorities of news tellers for many decades were like so much scaffolding supporting one side or the other, depending on the day. By the way, right now M. le Pen of France has been pushed into Second Life. Hooray! There’s all kinds of simulations possible for his followers, down and dirty in the virtual. Le Pen is a quirk. Left-right marginalisation has generally come to an end.

One of the joys of a post-ideological society though is we don’t need to do that any longer; one of the mysteries is why we keep picking on ways to keep the habit going.

Land use and how we feed and power our world are becoming central issues of the day and there are those who thing the electrical speed with which we’re headed into ethanol production through certain kinds of biocrops is a recipe for Monsanto…. or do I mean Archer Daniels Midland. Yep, son. There’s a goddarn agri-industrial interest in there and it goes right to the top.

My point is not that the pleadings of a special interest group is wrong, ill-advised or beckoning corruption. Special pleading is part of the everyday flaw lines of democracy. But so too, in theory, is perfect information. Instead of those dominant Iraq headlines we need to be told at what point genetically modified crops become unavoidably part of everyone’s diet because so much land is being given over to producing corn syrup for the ethanol stills.

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