WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - Political theory professor Laura Ephraim is continuing her quest to educate us on how Locke's inattention to excrement is a serious flaw in his theory of property.
Her premise seems to be that everything in the world is best understood by 1) linking it to stool, or 2) using stool (or bowel movements) as a metaphor, simile or analogy.
I'm not joking. Read her cringe-worthy abstract here.
Locke, she complains, presents an idealized view of the abundance of God's natural world because Locke leaves out how everything in nature is actually the result of human or non-human feces. She believes she adds value by rethinking Locke through the perspective of peristalsis. As you may know, peristalsis is the involuntary constriction and relaxation of the muscles of the intestine which push the contents of the intestine out.
She ominously links Locke's inattention to stool to the way he labeled people without property as "noxious" beasts. Drawing on my own history as a Marxist, I think what she means is that Locke's inattention to the ownership of one's excrement makes it easier for Locke to dehumanize the human casualties of our economic system. It is ironic, in her view, that Locke paid so little attention to poo and yet nevertheless describes the victims of capitalism as being like poo. In her The Politics of Waste course, for example, Ephraim explores the how we deal with unwanted noxious people through a special course offered at the Berkshire County Jail which is composed of nine Williams students and nine inmates.
Given her poo tinted glasses, you will probably not be surprised to learn that Ephraim is concerned that neither political scientists or political philosophers have displayed insufficient interest in waste. I think she is on to something. As far as I can tell, discussions of excrement are also absent from the works of Thomas Jefferson, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and even Immanuel Kant. In her upcoming fall course, The Politics of Waste, she informs students that "...we will openly discuss unmentionable topics and get our hands dirty (sometimes literally) examining the politics of waste."
If we take away the high dungeon histrionics and I think Ephraim is basically advocating that we set aside our routine social manners and substitute the word poo for the more widely used phrase "negative externalities." I think those of us with normal levels of emotional IQ will quickly see it is best to base their vocabularies on economics rather than coprology or - even worse - coprophilia.
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