the Cornel West campaign will help to advance the project
. . . re: transitioning the left “from Red to Green.”
He’s a leftist coming over.
It’s caught the attention of DSA.
While they’re in a receptive state of mind, we’ll hit ’em with the following. This was posted to the DSA discussion list today:
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
The Longer View
Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973) made the claim that human activity is driven largely by unconscious efforts to deny and transcend mortality. “We build culture and character [for esteem] in order to shield ourselves from the devastating awareness of underlying helplessness and terror of our inevitable death.”
Psychological protection against existential terror. The theme was extended in The Worm at the Core:
This argues for the leftist critique taking a longer view and appreciating a deeper perspective.
* * * *
Emergences:
. Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago
. consciousness (gradually) since maybe 200,000 years ago
. culture (gradually) starting about 100,000 years ago
. agriculture 10,000 years ago
. the “New Ways” (private property, wealth/power elitism, cities, states, empires) 5,000 years ago
The long-standing (aboriginal) Original Ways were characterized by stability, cyclicality, and an intuitive effort to keep in check personal aggrandizement and Power (with a sensibility that they would be toxic forces re: social cohesion). The New Ways are characterized by Development … i.e., development of the social-technological-cultural edifice.
Take-off into the New Ways — which led to what is now being called “the Anthropocene” — was a singular phenomenon among life-forms … very idiosyncratic and not easy to explain.
It might have been a function of two forces, a kind of “carrot and stick” phenomenon.
The “stick” aspect has to do with the initiation of agriculture. The growing of supplemental provisions of favorite foodstuffs, as horticulture, had been practiced by humans for a long time. Even some animals do likewise. But population density pressures led to a situation where humans became dependent upon self-production of food (and other things). Hence the transition to agriculture.
The “carrot” aspect has to do with what agriculture enables: personal wealth accumulation and social capabilities for building physical manifestations of the developing cultural edifice.
With the potential for relatively vast wealth accumulation, aboriginal norms of boundedness and constraint went by the wayside. Individuals fell prey to a lust for the greatly elevated “self-esteem” provided by wealth, social aggrandizement, and power. With the collective wealth of the power elites they were able to build monuments, big social projects (via what Lewis Mumford termed “social megamachines”), cities, empires.
The social megamachines consigned the wealthless masses to zek-life (conscription and toil). There is evidence that the masses resisted to some extent … and yet not as much as might be expected. That could be attributed to a certain psychological “carrot” associated with the construction of the edifice, the physical manifestation of the cocoon of culture: Reflected glory. Collective security. Tangible human dominion and control. Thus were the benefits of civilization. But, as Freud noted, its inevitable domestication, labor, and psychic repression fostered inevitable discontents. And the process of touted “development” eventually led toward the problematic social and ecological trajectories that have culminated in the modern crisis of our civilization.
The directionality is contrary to Marx’s techno-optimistic interpretation of human history. And the roots of the crisis go deeper than just capitalist economic relations. Socializing the means of production might be one aspect of an ultimate solution. It might even be a necessary aspect. But a fully-sufficient programmatic orientation would involve a “new paradigm” transition of worldview, one that addresses the problem of the directionality itself. It would advocate for a gradual deconstruction of the social megamachine.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Machine
and:
