Chaotic Waters
[Adapted from David Watson’s “Catching Fish in Chaotic Waters: An Essay on Empire and Mass Society” — 1994]
What it means to be human is now in flux. And the old political terms, never entirely useful, don’t work. The green world in which we evolved is being shredded by our instruments, our way of life, our very rationality. Neither our technology nor our problem-solving rationality yield adequate responses to this catastrophe. It is a crisis rooted in character and culture, and it runs very deep.
Mass society lurches along from war to war, disaster to disaster, while the slow-acting catastrophe continues silently and incrementally, in natural cycles, in human society, in the psyche. The Captain Ahabs at the control panels try to administer it, but they only direct it to a degree. The Leviathan has its own powerful built-in dynamic.
That tells us something crucial about the tragedy that is history, a tragedy of hubris and unforeseen consequences. Prometheus steals fire, but leaves his dull-witted brother Epimetheus to invent the nuclear reactor. History is filled with prometheans — Sargon, Caesar, Columbus, Ford, Lenin, Einstein; it’s their story. Francis Bacon, perhaps the exemplary promethean, urged the disciples of his new scientific method in the seventeenth century “to unite forces against the nature of things,” bind “the harlot” nature “into service,” “storm and occupy her castles and strongholds … and thus extend the bounds of human empire.” The human empire is Epimetheus, filled with hubris, domesticating chaos, splitting the atom and the gene, all to a utopian, messianic fanfare.
* * * *
We all wonder how to bring about change; we’d like to find a fulcrum [like: socialize the means of production]. But there isn’t any panacea, and “what to do” can fall into an instrumentality reminiscent of Lenin, whose methodology didn’t help him predict the upheavals of 1917, and who, by the time he was done, described his sense of being at the control of a vehicle which did not obey his commands. Furthermore, we are standing at a vague moment not only along the continuum of modern capitalism, but at a crisis akin to the decline of ancient empires.
We have to talk tenuously about how an unprecedented, megatechnic empire and its corresponding constellation of cultures might become a qualitatively different kind of society; how a grid might become an organic weave of diverse, egalitarian, communal societies; and how an atomized, mass human being might become a whole person embedded in a community.
No generation has ever faced such prospects. Even many of the former wards of collapsing empires probably had memories of tribal community and subsistence skills to sustain themselves. In fact, the most auspicious revolutions in history were carried out by people with direct connections to archaic communal societies. We, in contrast, face the greatest crisis of detribalization and social decomposition since the birth of the state five thousand years ago. Trying to make sense of mass society, to practically respond, is, as the Chinese say, like catching fish in chaotic waters.
It goes without saying that we are oppressed by the institutions of industrial capitalism. But we also find that people have been conditioned to be cogs, both functional and dysfunctional. We may have nothing to lose but our chains, but they are our own pathological behavior patterns, and they conform to an enormous social and material terrain — a terrain we tend to reproduce even as we oppose it.
I wish to speak here for something simpler and more subtle than political programs: a mindfulness about where we find ourselves, our context (certainly a green sensibility), and a respect not only for what we know but also for what we do not know and, especially, what we cannot know. This demands some humility.
When the Lakota medicine man Black Elk, sounding exactly like the old Taoists, said, “We should even be as water which is lower than all things, yet stronger than the rocks,” he wasn’t counseling servility. He was telling us something valuable about strength not as force but as endurance, about radiating power rather than possessing or controlling it, about listening to nature instead of fantasizing about mastering it — all evocative of the kind of character change necessary to sustain us. Without certain insights into who and what we are, we’ll never become the seeds of a new society.
In classic tragedy, as in primal societies, the sacred and profane commingle. They do for us, too, even if we don’t admit it. We should be cautiously open to the intuitive and skeptical of the more invisible magical thinking — what we might call “magical rationalism” — pervading secular thought and experience in modern society. Science and technology are for most people a new religion, and their orthodoxies are believed with the same fervor. Questioning their monopoly on reason is considered heresy, when not altogether ignored.
What science claims to know is based on a vast body of unexamined assumptions about the nature of language and the language of nature. It follows that Marxism, that now decayed modernist project which claims to be the science of sciences, must also be scrutinized, as we recognize the compulsions and superstitions of the rationalist, instrumental civilization that it celebrates. Marx said that the “practical construction of an objective world, the manipulation of inorganic nature, is the confirmation of man as a species being.” Such instrumental rationality, as Jacques Ellul has written, seeks “to transform everything into means,” to abolish mystery. But in the process of disenchanting the world it has itself become a belief system, one that never questioned what Lewis Mumford called “the myth of the machine” . . . the belief that megatechnic civilization is not only irresistible but ultimately beneficial.
The green sensibility, on the other hand, with its attentiveness to the whole of life, suggests to us that this “objective” world is so because it is alienated. The world is not objective — that is a Cartesian fantasy wedded to the imperial designs of rationalist science. Rather, in a subtle way that it is our responsibility to engage, the world is alive, inspirited. A recognition that the world is alive, now being discussed and debated seriously by scientists, is a metaphor already very familiar to primal and classical societies, is in fact one of their key intuitions.
Many such intuitions are now being “discovered” by science the way the Europeans discovered America. But some people didn’t need lab tests to understand it.
There are “revolutionaries” who warn that these ideas are unreliable, even dangerous. But since when have rationalism or revolutionary reason been any more reliable? How many people were exterminated in the name of dialectical materialism? One-dimensional irrationality and rationality were both responsible for turning the twentieth century into a charnel house.
The green idea, on the other hand, open to the wholeness of human experience during our million or so years here on this planet, suggests that our adventure is not to be found in the manipulation of “inorganic nature,” but rather in an ineffable, numinous relationship with an intelligent, animate world.
“The White people never cared for the land or deer or bear,” says an old holy Wintu woman. “The White people plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything. The tree says, ‘Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me.’ But they chop it down and cut it up. The spirit of the land hates them . . . Everywhere the White man has touched it, it is sore.”
The testimony of native peoples and the idea of union with nature may strike some as sentimental nostalgia; there is a fearful reaction when not only the land claims of native peoples are affirmed (as all good progressives agree they should be), but their vision. That is understandable. We have been shaped by the scientific revolution with its single vision, as Blake called it, and then by multiple waves of permanent industrial revolution that have commodified and mechanized every sphere of life.
In contrast to so-called “pre-scientific” peoples’ intimate relation to being, mass technics has allowed (or rather, forced) us to live in our heads, shutting out the phenomenal world by constructing an artificial one. As radical psychologist Norman O. Brown points out, “Capitalism has made us so stupid and one-sided that objects exist for us only if we can possess them or if they have utility.” Brown’s provocative work condemns the dehumanized nature of modern rational subjectivity, which makes the land sore with its calculus of efficiency, compulsion to dominate nature through work, and mania for money and quantification. In contrast to these compulsions, he argues, a nonmorbid science would be erotic. “Its aim would not be mastery over but union with nature.”
Such talk may not seem very practical, and some are impatient to get to nuts and bolts. Learn patience; we are going to need it. What appears practical and possible defines the parameters of the ruling ideology. In fact, industrial capitalism now presents itself as life’s only option — either we continue technological development (we can argue about who administers it or reaps the profit) or we’ll face collapse and all the horsemen of the apocalypse. Question technicization, mass communications, electrification, medicalization, organization, and you are looked at like the malicious child who lets the barbarians in through the back gate (all those forces capitalism worked so hard to suppress, witches hanging on the compound wall), or you’re treated like a lunatic, speaking a language hardly anyone even faintly comprehends.
In any case, capitalism no longer needs to justify itself with claims to be good or eternal, it appears eternal because it’s the only game in town [this was writtten in 1994, before socialism started making a comeback]. As for the critics, and the people in the path of the bulldozer who find it more and more untenable — los perros ladran y la caravana pasa (“the dogs bark and the caravan passes”). Nuts and bolts rule; the machine trudges on.
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In natural terms, we humans are but one leaf on the enormous world tree of four and a half billion years of Gaian evolution, though a marvelous and unique leaf to be sure. In human terms, the last ten thousand years of human society represent one percent of our time on earth. The other ninety-nine percent was lived in small, stateless, propertyless, egalitarian, visionary societies like the Wintu. Only perhaps two hundredths of a percent has been lived in the experiment of urban industrialism. Civilization could arguably be described as an aberration. A deep critique would gain from looking at the industrial world, as the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) recommend in their famous Basic Call to Consciousness, “through Pleistocene eyes.”
Such a perspective not only encourages a tough-minded humility, it gives us some insight into the origins of the plague we are discussing. It was one of Mumford’s great contributions to recognize the reorientation and reorganization of society thousands of years ago (at the time of the first empires) into a kind of giant social machine, or megamachine — wherein the primal circle became a pyramid, mutualities became hierarchies, elites and the drudgery of the oppressed were institutionalized.
A second great mutation was the rise of the capitalist world system — the first global system of interlocking megamachines. The scientific and the industrial revolutions occurring in production and later in culture and consumption have managed to internalize the empire, wire it into subjectivity, in a way no previous form could. Capitalism, first financed by the mutation resulting in the vast discovery and plunder of Africa and the Americas in particular, has become itself a system of permanent revolution, constantly finding new commons to enclose and new colonies to vampirize. For the first time in history, the instrumental and economic transformation of the world has become the central cultural motif.
This process of conquest, looting, regimentation of labor and leisure, and growing dependency on an energy / capital / production grid continues today, not only in the hinterlands of India, Mexico and the Amazon, where remnants of vernacular cultures persist, but in the soil, seeds, oceans, sky and gene pool. The empire of man over things has been firmly established. We marvel at its miracles and disasters, take for granted its transubstantiation of the life web into resources, of real plenitude into pseudo-wealth. As if watching a televised war, we cannot avert our gaze from the spectacles that its official loudspeakers and apologists call Progress.
In old mythic terms, we have been taught to revere, instead of life, a two-headed Beast: the promise of mastery over mechanical slaves and the bribe of a world awash in artifacts. Understanding both idols requires our skeptical attention. Yet a critical skepticism of megatechnics and industrial pseudo-plenitude is exactly what elicits the most resistance, bringing accusations of indifference to the suffering of the poor or irresponsible luddism, or utter incoherence. This is the myth of the machine in operation, where the denial is strongest, and the fetters most difficult to break.
The empire is a brutal, mechanized pyramid that cannot exist without colonies and sacrifice zones: once established, quantitative value flows from one direction to another. Thus at one end of the spectrum we find an idyllic, manicured park, and at the other the slag heap which paid for it. At one end society chokes on its waste and excess, while at the other, starvation is permanent, institutionalized. The “winners” in the imperial war-of-all-against-all now find themselves in the industrial enclaves, where they can shop at air-conditioned malls. The losers are in places like Bhopal.
In the train stations of India, I’ve been told, where poor people actually live, there are public monitors broadcasting American television programs. Some of the world’s poorest people are vicariously witnessing the transubstantiation of spirit into money, and they are now craving that impossible living death in the high-rise towers, when in fact only the village can save them.
Various reformers and noble souls, be they leftist revolutionaries with political programs or U.N. technocrats with satchels full of blueprints, are determined to deliver the “much” to the have-nots. If you suggest that bringing an industrial existence to the poor is neither ecologically feasible nor culturally desirable you are usually accused of privileged elitism. Yet not only is this viewpoint connected to age-old insights of both primal societies and classical philosophy, it is coming to be taken seriously by radical critics in the so-called underdeveloped world and in indigenous communities. “My people are tired of development,” one activist told a development conference in the mid-1980s, “they just want to live.”
“More commodities and more cash mean less life,” Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva has written. Or as Ivan Illich has noted, the organization of the economy toward a “better” life is undermining the possibility of a good life. People in rich nations and poor are beginning to realize that we must all get off the treadmill, that what we need is not a higher standard of living but a deeper one.
The critique of empire has other crucial applications. It doesn’t just focus on peons working the banana plantation to feed the global supermarket, the image of empire to which we are accustomed; industrialism is structurally and ecologically an empire in other ways. You cannot have petrochemicals without colonies and sacrifice zones — waste pits, oil spills, refinery row, ruined areas and lives. You can’t have mass dependence on a global chemical-industrial grid without unanticipated incidents and accidents. You can’t have the empire of man over things and mastery over a complex of mechanical slaves without feedback and without becoming, like Dr. Frankenstein, the creature of your monsters.
The common attitude toward technology is a weird amalgam of optimism, resignation and denial. While explicitly acknowledging the profound changes in culture and social institutions, in the rare instances when it ponders the shifting social contract mass technics have imposed, the ruling ideology concludes that we must adapt. The gigantic technological structures, the reorganized forms of life and new reorientation in thought, and the very modification of the experience of reality itself are all considered necessary “trade-offs” for the industrial bribe. Contained in the idea that we cannot get the genie back into the bottle, that there is “no going back,” is a dim recognition that technology can indeed undermine human autonomy.
Yet strangely, technology is usually thought to be neutral, or the product of social relations, never a determinant that itself imposes conditions. This is true even among many greens, expressed for example in Brian Tokar’s remark in his book, The Green Alternative: “Technologies are only as good as the society that creates them; the more powerful the technology, the more it can amplify the qualities of the society it was designed to serve.” Missing from this view is the recognition that technology — actually an interlocking system of apparatus, rational techniques and organization — doesn’t merely follow design but changes the world in a systemic, ecological way.
Neither tools nor technology are neutral. They are inevitably powerful constituents of our symbolic world. Technology imposes not only form but content wherever it comes into use. Industrialism is the grand example, shattering the medieval world with its dynamism and synergy, its tendency to irreversibility and pervasiveness. (Here it is important to emphasize that modern industrialism and capitalism emerged in tandem as a unitary phenomenon; industrialization and capital accumulation have always occurred synergistically, both in the period of the early rise of capitalism, and later in the various state formations of industrial capitalism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.) But even one supposedly isolated technological addition can easily come to reshape society, creating qualitatively different conditions, a famous example being how the introduction of snowmobiles rapidly exploded Sami (Lapp) society in the 1960s. In a matter of a few years, the snowmobile undermined ancient modes of life of the reindeer-herding people, altering the behavior of the reindeer, further opening the society to the world market, and creating new dependencies and a class society where there had previously been none . . . proving again that everything is interconnected.
Clearly, technology is more than the sum of its parts. The automobile, for example, is more than a tool; it is a component in a total system of production, energy, distribution, roadways, techniques, laws and other attendant processes that extend throughout the culture and reshape it behind our backs. Thinking in terms of our individual, enlightened use of the single component — be it a car, computer or television — misses the whole picture. We forget that a socialization process is taking place in individuals and their society, that the totality of means, apparatus and organization is having its effect.
“Seen as a way of ordering human activity,” writes Langdon Winner in Autonomous Technology, “the total order of networks is anything but neutral or tool-like. In its centrality to the daily activity and consciousness of … the function-serving human component, the technical order is more properly thought of as a way of life.”
And what is worse, the system, once fully in operation, no longer responds to human guidance. The dream of mastery gives way to desperate attempts to manage the feedback. “The means,” writes Winner, “accomplish results that were neither anticipated nor chosen and accomplish them just as surely as they had been deliberate goals.”
Today’s utilitarians are the crackpot realists (to borrow C. Wright Mills’ rich term) in the research labs, military command centers, corporate board rooms and universities planning out each new stage of a new-improved world, free of war, hunger and disease — or so they promise. Meanwhile they have created an exterminist system with its daily litany of death — Bhopal, Prince William Sound, Minamata, Chernobyl, Love Canal, the burning Amazon, the Gulf War. And let us not forget the invisible, undramatic, slow-acting catastrophe — the “climate death” now discussed by climatologists, the massive pervasive contamination of the food chain, a ton of toxic waste a year per person in the U.S.
The tree says, “Stop. I am sore.” But the technician doesn’t listen. The life web says, “Stop. I am suffering.” But the empire plants more surveyor stakes, isolates the genetic Holy Grail, hooks its children to a keyboard, demands more studies. And the life web suffers, as the immune systems of plants, animals and people, undermined by this pervasive Bhopal, succumb to viral and bacterial predators they once could resist.
* * * *
So, what to do? There is plenty to do. Yet, if transformation is a question of culture and character, then on a certain level we can, in fact we must, relax. In this world, that’s almost a radical step in itself! It will help us to endure. In some contexts that simply means showing concern and affection for the life around us, proof we exist not because we know, as the decaying worldview has it, but because we care. In our daily life, respect for both what we know and for what we cannot know might mean learning patience.
I’m in no way nullifying analysis, critique, social action. I’m proposing to harmonize them to the fullness of life. As for proposing global, universal strategies, let’s be careful not to fall into instrumentalism in our desire to be practical. Mumford believed the necessary planet-wide reorientation of culture would first appear in evidence of inner change, and in a wide variety of gestures of refusal, non-conformity and creative, alternative forms of practice. Like a diverse constellation of radical greens, native traditionals, ecofeminists, anarchists, libertarian socialists and many others drawing from an enormous wealth of traditions and counter-traditions, he understood that below the surface of the empire, ancient forms of human sociation and alternative forms of reason continue to work organically, even if under harsh conditions and in distorted ways. I do think creative response points to a basic frame of mind and practice beyond the tepid proposal to democratize industrialism; we have to find ways to challenge its basic assumptions. A radical vision for today demands a green politics starting from a skepticism toward the entire structure and content of industrial-technological-statist society. It demands a focus on the process of empire, not only the innumerable hydra heads that are its symptoms.
Global industrialism is a dead end, in social and in evolutionary terms. We need to deconstruct industrial and technological dependencies. I am thinking here of a kind of great moratorium on development and scientific-technological expansion that would renew the vernacular domain of doing-for-self by exploring how to create subsistence and culture at home in one’s community.
Key values would be restoration and renewal — of wilderness, the land, community, and the self — all presently contaminated and eroded by the external and internal structures of the megamachine. This means consciously going in a direction far different than either “going back” (which could never occur anyway) or going “forward” into technotopia. It means a third way that will come from asking the kinds of questions suggested above and raising the kinds of issues that might make no sense to business-as-usual.
Our task is to break free from business-as-usual. And isn’t the green idea potentially the exemplar of a “third way”?
