This post is a more general meditation on the famous question and continues the “What is to be done” parts of Los Alamos Study Group Bulletin 214.
Generally speaking we might say there are just four things to be done in the public realm right now.
- we must effectively stop those who are killing the planet and destroying civilization (and they are very close to succeeding on both counts, so our actions must be swift and effective if our children are to survive);
- we must at the same time effectively and quickly build polities, institutions, infrastructures, and characters that embrace solidarity and sustainability, and
- we must effectively care for vulnerable people and species.
To do these positive things effectively we must negatively “do” (i.e. not do) one more thing, which will come in the right proportion if we allow it:
- we must simplify.
To the extent we simplify we also will, in the phrase of Chuck McCune, “boycott ecocide.”
What seems complicated and overwhelming from the outside, from an alienated perspective, will not seem so complicated from the inside.
These actions come with abundant built-in rewards. We can’t lose. Everything that the dying empire offers fraudulently, the Great Transition offers authentically, and from the first step.
Our greatest barriers are perhaps twofold.
First, the public realm where we act is nearly nonexistent for all but a very few. It has to be reclaimed. To the extent it exists at all it is largely inaccessible to most people, whose lives are increasingly precarious and exhausting. Debts, for example, shackle many. But there are usually more choices available to us than may appear at first glance, and small freedoms we exercise can grow.
Cynicism is deadly.
Given this general lack of time, the result of real obligations we all have to meet, there has to be leadership and it has to be accountable.
Second (and far more serious, it appears), we who have the most freedom are generally failing to grasp, even theoretically, the gravity of the situation. We are also failing to grasp our own responsibility to set things right, and our unique and largely latent power to do so. The exercise of this responsibility, for all of us who have the freedom and understanding to read these lines, is almost the sole path of maturity in a world so existentially threatened.
Perhaps especially in the educated and politically-active professional classes, denial and hopeful fantasies are the norm. It is toward this group that the distortions and strategic silences of the elite press, and the misdirection and distancing practices that usually dominate academia, are especially aimed. We have to re-educate ourselves, and it has to be done in part bodily, through action, and socially, as well as intellectually.
Denial and distancing are to be expected in any heavily propagandized society organized largely around material possessions and the elaborate system of faith-based beliefs that supports it. Richard Norgaard identifies our dominant religion as “economism,” in a particularly cogent recent essay (“The Church of Economism and Its Discontents”).
In response to this weakening of personal relations and increasing distance from nature, economism glorifies the individual and rationalizes material greed. Economic models focus on the individual, assume utility maximization, treat society as the sum of individuals, and omit society’s influence back on the individual. Care for others and the land may give people utility, but there is no obligation to care. This view runs contrary to all major religious traditions, effectively competing with the teaching they provide. (emphasis added)
Economism, in other words, is anti-religion. This cult pervades our society’s whole mental sphere. In its practical application it is little more than the worship of money. We train our “best and brightest” to be its acolytes, its “excellent sheep.”
I qualified our basic tasks with the adjective “effective.” We all aspire to effectiveness in our political action, but the fact is that effective action is quite rare among liberals and “progressives.” They are losing, and they are taking us down with them.
Too many people want to believe – in almost anything. Technology will save us! Bernie will save us! Hillary will save us! Renewable energy will save us! Just fill in the blank. What this kind of “hopeful” ideation means is that we “hope” we will be able to remain prosperous and secure, keep on shopping, and keep taking climate-destroying vacations halfway around the world. We would be wrong in all of that.
We have a doctor friend in Santa Fe who often says by way of parting benediction, “Avoid optimism!” It is very good advice given his and our environment of pervasive “brightsiding” (see Ehrenreich, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America). In many circles, and not just those of New Age would-be magicians, “negative” thinking is not allowed. Illusions must be maintained!
We are all awash in fallacious “positive” propaganda, about our economy (which is deteriorating, not improving, and this process will continue), about climate policy (baby steps are too slow to matter, and neither the administration nor Congress has proposed even baby steps – the “Clean Power Plan” won’t help the climate), about oil and gas reserves (depleting, not increasing, with new oil increasingly unaffordable), about the U.S. role in the world (principally responsible for the wars underway today, as David Stockman recently explained), about our democracy (almost nonexistent on a national level), and so on.
It is for us, as Chris Hedges writes, “emotionally difficult” to fully grasp just how far the United States has fallen, let alone how pathetically inadequate are the ordinary liberal approaches to the crisis.
A disenfranchised white working class vents its lust for fascism at Trump campaign rallies. Naive liberals, who think they can mount effective resistance within the embrace of the Democratic Party, rally around the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who knows that the military-industrial complex is sacrosanct. Both the working class and the liberals will be sold out. Our rights and opinions do not matter. We have surrendered to our own form of [W]ehrwirtschaft [a policy of armaments and war as national economy]. We do not count within the political process.
…
The longer fantasy is substituted for reality, the faster we sleepwalk toward oblivion. There is no guarantee we will wake up. Magical thinking has gripped societies in the past. Those civilizations believed that fate, history, superior virtues or a divine force guaranteed their eternal triumph. As they collapsed, they constructed repressive dystopias. They imposed censorship and forced the unreal to be accepted as real. Those who did not conform were disappeared linguistically and then literally.
The vast disconnect between the official narrative of reality and reality itself creates an Alice-in-Wonderland experience. Propaganda is so pervasive, and truth is so rarely heard, that people do not trust their own senses. We are currently being assaulted by political campaigning that resembles the constant crusading by fascists and communists in past totalitarian societies. This campaigning, devoid of substance and subservient to the mirage of a free society, is anti-politics.
While Hedges’ fierce generalizations should not be all accepted at face value – there are some exceptions and he is implicitly challenging us to find them, or to create our own beachheads in occupied territory – he is correct in the main. Most of the so-called political activity we see around us in the U.S. will fail or has failed already, because it based on hopeful lies. This creates a political and personal crisis for us because the activity that is apparently required is not at all convenient — or so it may seem.
More of us are waking up now. Have a cup of coffee. We’ve got a job to do. It’s not that bad once you wake up. Dress warmly. Our friends are waiting. Many hands make light work.