despair in the air
https://moviolaproductions.com/productions/firebird
Findhorn has usually been known as a pretty optimistic place. Now we hear:
“preparing for its 60th anniversary under a cloud of growing uncertainty … the community struggles to navigate one crisis after another. Over the past three years, the whole world has suffered from existential threats, affecting economic, social and emotional security, and The Findhorn community is no different. This feature documentary explores the sequence of pivotal moments which has inflicted significant and detrimental blows, impacting individuals and the community as a whole.”
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I don’t think I remember a period where there was quite so much “despair in the air.” It manifests in many ways. Immediate social, economic, and ecological issues are flash points, but I think there’s really an underlying (or over-arching) phenomenon creating a kind of free-floating agita … and that’s that the human race is now starting to get a sense of the true (and awesome) extent of the overshoot situation we’ve gotten ourselves into. Kind of: “staring into the abyss.”
Year by year and decade by decade, strands of the old techno-optimism wither one-by-one. The internet didn’t save us. With the roll-out of EVs and solar arrays and windfarms comes the realization that they will not make all so much of a dent.
Governments flounder. We watch COP after COP come and go. The problematic trajectories are hardly affected. And it starts to dawn that The Long Emergency is going to be very, very long.
It’s not surprising that intimations of what we’re facing might be disconcerting … disorienting.
It explains why so many were made so uncomfortable by Planet of the Humans. It explains the knee-jerk reaction one gets from the Left (“neo-Malthusianism”) upon suggesting that population reduction might be advisable.
David Watson: “No generation has ever confronted such prospects. We face the greatest crisis of social decomposition and devolution since the birth of the state five thousand years ago.”
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[Below adapted from David Watson’s “Catching Fish in Chaotic Waters: An Essay on Empire and Mass Society” — 1994]
It’s more than a question of socialism or barbarism, as Rosa Luxemburg stated it over a century ago. Humanity has been enmeshed in a deepening barbarism since before her time, a barbarism of which much of the experience of socialism turned out to be just another variety. I am talking rather of a plague of much greater dimensions. 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, by our way of life. 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 to 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. Marxists say the key is to 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. So we have to talk tenuously about how an unprecedented, megatechnic empire and its corresponding constellation of cultures might become a qualitatively different kind of social order; 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 confronted 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 social decomposition and devolution 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 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 much 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.
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 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. 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 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 non-morbid 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, 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. 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 Lewis 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 enterprises 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 venture capitalists’ conference, “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 consequences. 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 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 — actually an interlocking system of apparatus, rational techniques and organization — doesn’t merely follow design but changes the world in a systemic, ecological way that can undermine human autonomy. It 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.
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 or computer — 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.”
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.
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In regard to social transformation: 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 seem to 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”?
