Marie-Josephe Devillers & Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram (Eds), Towards the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood.

- Australian publisher Spinifex has just published this superb collection of essays against surrogacy. Fifteen feminists, scientists, LGBT+ activists and other experts in the field have combined to produce a highly informative and persuasive argument against this horrendous exploitation of downtrodden women by childless wealthy couples and singles, including gays. 

- Surrogacy is not an issue frequently in the news, particularly in Australia. It's an unfamiliar moral terrain, so this book will hopefully go a long way to rectifying that intellectual laziness and apathy. 

- Surrogacy is a rapidly growing corporate enterprise around the world, particularly in India, Russia, Ukraine, and in US states like California and New York. The majority of Australian states allow non-commercial surrogacy, but worldwide Big Fertility and Big Pharmacy are successfully persuading childless couples, some gay organisations, and legislators to support the commercialisation of it. 

- It’s becoming normalised, which is horrendous as it’s the modern equivalent of slavery. 

- This extract from biologist and social scientist Dr Renate Klein's essay summarises the issue passionately: 

Whatever way we look at surrogacy, there is only one conclusion: surrogacy in all its forms - for money or love - is a fundamental human rights violation of the birth mother, the egg provider, and the resulting child (if there is one). Surrogacy is a deeply unethical, exploitative and callous way of reducing women to breeders: we are nothing but empty vessels or spare parts providers to produce children as commodities for those with the power to pay. And then to be cast aside - never to see our child again. It is obvious that we have to abolish surrogacy. All of it. And everywhere in the world. 

Jeff Sparrow: Crimes Against Nature

 

- I found this recently published book by Melbourne academic, editor and journalist Jeff Sparrow fascinating, but also frustrating and rather naive. The word 'capitalism' gives it away. 

- You could be forgiven for thinking the book is simply a tirade against commerce, against the rise of the West, against inevitable population growth, against the progression over the last few centuries of science, medicine, trade and globalisation. Nature and its gifts to life and community has been virtually destroyed and Sparrow identifies the overarching reason for this as capitalism, the very alienating and destructive trading of goods and services for profit. He refers to a pre-capitalist world, where artisans mastered every element of their craft and were not simply labour beaten down by low wages and poor working conditions. Animals change nature without conscious decision. Humans change and destroy nature by deliberate exploitation. 

- We have to wait until the final chapter for his ideal economic, social and political system to become clear. It's Central Planning of course. One can only imagine the local, national and international groups of saintly geniuses directing all human enterprise. So the individual chapters, while insightful and persuasive in them themselves, don't add up to a convincing whole. It's a radical naïveté.   

- But nevertheless there is so much interesting and informative detail in Sparrow's thesis. He takes us on a journey from the early foundations of capitalist invention and enterprise, starting with Henry Ford and the rise of the motor car in the US. There were other choices, including electric vehicles and streetcars, but the powerful petrol car lobby won. Ford’s production line destroyed artisan skilled workers and gave origin to the prominence of the consumer. ‘Planned obsolescence’ was widely adopted, as were disposable and non-recyclable plastics. 

- In Australia the arrival of colonists devastated the indigenous lands, grasses, plants and animals. The capitalist economic system with wage workers producing commodities for export and sale radically changed the productive relationship with the land.

- The rapid growth of corporate power and its antagonism to any trend or movement that might inhibit profitable growth was relentless. The PR (Public Relations) industry went into overdrive. Cigarettes needed to be sold to women; the fear of lung cancer had to be destroyed; the concept of industry ‘research’ was manufactured to defend corporate interests; anti-pollution messages blamed individuals, as did the ‘carbon footprint’ concept. 

- Sparrow populates the book with loads of interesting stories of movements and trends that have defined our relationship with nature and the environment over the last half century in particular - conservation movements and their early link to eugenics and racism, and the anti-population growth controversy and its denunciation of immigration from the ‘third world’, for example. 

- In more recent times things have changed. Global warming has become far more alarming, as Australia’s severe bushfires in 2019/20 demonstrated; citizens are organising and their power is increasing. Amazon's ill-treated workers are unionising and fighting back. Corporate malfeasance is less tolerated.

- Sparrow attempts to articulate his alternative to our destructive economic system in the final chapter. 

In the twenty-first century, we remain unable to imagine a coherent alternative to a capitalist system that is, quite literally, killing us...We could instead devote our massive resources and technological capabilities to staunching the wounds already inflicted on the planet. We could begin systematic decarbonisation…Each year the world spends over $1,917 billion on guns, bombs, and other military equipment. The comparable figure on advertising is some $325 billion. Those staggering figures represent a mere fraction of what we could direct immediately to environmental programs on land, sea, and air....[but] we're impeded by the imperatives of capital and insistence on blind, mathematical and destructive growth. 

Peter Watson, The Age of Nothing.

 

- This is a huge book in more ways than one. It was published in 2014 and within its dense 600 pages noted British historian Peter Watson has assembled a vast panoply of insights into many of life's deepest and intriguing questions that the process of secularisation, the end of religious dominance, has thrown up over the last 150 years. In lucid prose and clear exposition, and quoting hundreds of Western civilisation's greatest thinkers, he tells the story of the birth of secularism. 

- The 30 page Introduction alone is a fabulous overview of the book's central concerns. We're introduced to Frederich Nietzsche and his ‘death of god’ pronouncement in 1883. His core insight - and the most dangerous - was that there does not exist any perspective external to or higher than life itself. There cannot exist any privileged viewpoint, any abstraction or force outside the world as we know it; there is nothing beyond reality, beyond life itself, nothing 'above'; there is no transcendence, nothing metaphysical. 

- Since Nietzsche's groundbreaking proclamation humankind has been searching for meaning and ‘community’ in the non-religious world. Breakthrough thinkers like Freud, Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Darwin, as well as highly influential 20th century philosophers, psychologists, writers, poets, artists and composers like Joyce, Sartre, Camus, Eliot, Lawrence, Wolff, Matisse, Mallarme, Wallace Stevens and many contemporary intellectuals have been attempting to define what really gives our lives meaning. Secular theologians who emerged mainly in America in the 1960's and became hugely influential, such as Harvey Cox, Paul Van Buren and Paul Tillich are also interrogated.   

- Watson liberally quotes from many of the writings of all these key voices. In fact quotes  probably take up two thirds of the book, and provide much richness to the exposition overall. 

- Here's an interesting and refreshing paragraph from the conclusion of the book:

Nietzsche called truth a woman; James Joyce foresaw, with pleasure and optimism, a world where hope lay with the female side of men. Andrea Dworkin has emphasised that the world we have now is 'man-made', a term by no means complimentary. Wallace Stevens admonished us to 'embrace an idea like a woman'. Politically, too, this is a highly relevant issue; who can doubt that one of the ways in which Islam is most backward is in its (often disgraceful) treatment of women. 

Evelyn Araluen, Dropbear

 

- This small 100 page collection from poet and academic Evelyn Araluen is simply magnificent. It was announced last week as the winner of the 2022 Stella Prize, a prize that over the last ten years has become one of the most prestigious in Australian publishing. 

- Containing 42 short poetry and essay pieces, it is powerful in every way but far from an easy read. It is dense in meaning, highly literary and political, and totally unsettling and confronting.

- I had to read most of the poems a number of times before I felt I got them. And then I had to read them again.

- Unlike 99% of back cover blurbs this one truthfully describes this book. Well done UQP: