Pliable Privilege, pt. 03

I continue against my better judgment listening in fits and starts to Jordan Peterson on YouTube. No doubt he’s prolific, influential, interesting, infuriating, and by all accounts, earnest. I often come away frustrated, recognizing how I’ve been fed an extended line of BS in some sort of confidence game run by an overconfident intellectual bully. Because he’s the host inviting others onto his own platform, at least of late, everyone is very polite and disagreement — if it occurs — is quite tame, which allows Peterson to elide corrections smoothly. (Live conversation runs that way: piling on top of what was already said displaces and obscures ideas because memory is limited and the most recent utterance typically assumes primacy.) I avoid some topics on Peterson’s webcasts because they’re simply too far outside his expertise to be worthwhile, which he openly admits then stomps right in anyway. For example, Peterson has a series with the caption “Climategate” (putting the conclusion before the discussion, or is that biasing his audience?). Episode 329 (which I do not embed) is titled “The Models Are OK, the Predictions Are Wrong.” His guest is Dr. Judith Curry. I should have avoided this one, too. In the course of the 1.5-hour episode, Peterson repeatedly offers a characterization of some aspect of the climate emergency, to which Dr. Curry responds “I wouldn’t describe it quite that way.” Better characterizations may follow, but that’s neither the tone nor the takeaway.

One of Peterson’s contentions is that, if indeed humans inhabit and treat the surface of the planet problematically, the best way to address the problem is to raise out of poverty those billions of people still struggling to survive. Then they, too, will be ontologically secure and positioned to start caring more about the environment. Sure, just like all those secure, multimillionaire CEOs care while running corporations that extract resources and pollute. (Incidentally, someone in a recent DarkHorse Podcast Q&A asked if Peterson’s hypothetical solution makes any sense. Disappointingly, and perhaps because DarkHorse hosts are chummy with Peterson, they said it depends on how the solution is implemented, which I take to mean that the stars must align and everyone start rowing in unison. Yeah, right.) Peterson follows up his climate solution with the indignant question “Who are we to deny those struggling to raise themselves out of poverty their chance?” Which brings me round to the title of this multipart blog.

Survival is by no means an idle notion but poses a struggle everywhere, even in the affluent West. Just ask the burgeoning homeless population or those laboring frantically to keep mortgages or rent paid so they don’t also become homeless (unhoused is the new euphemism, fooling exactly no one). Even a casual look history reveals that competition among peoples and nations to survive and prosper has wildly uneven and shifting results. Some “succeed” earlier than others or not at all and winners may in time lose their preeminence. Never has there been an all-men-are-brothers approach to competition, though temporary alliances may form. Someone (us, not them) or something (profit, not unspoilt nature) is inevitably privileged. In this context, Peterson’s “Who are we to …?” question is a non sequitur, though it may pull on heartstrings because of quite recent embrace of the idea of equity. A glib answer might be that “we are we, not them,” so of course “we” get available spoils before anyone else. Doesn’t the leader of a pack of wolves eat first? Isn’t that dynamic repeated throughout nature? Aren’t humans embedded in nature just like all other species? Don’t we privilege human life above, say, food animals we farm for sustenance? (We eat them, they rarely eat us until we die and microbes — but nothing else — consume us. Or we give ourselves up to flames, denying even the microbes. We’re selfish that way.) It’s also why the rare individual who gives away all his or her money to charity and winds up penniless is regarded as mental. For nearly all of us, it’s always me (or my progeny) first. Another way to put this that Peterson should understand is that hierarchies exist in nature. Hierarchy and privilege are impossible to disentangle, and attempts to redistribute equitably borne out of ideology tend to devolve into tyranny.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I heard another webcast where the interviewer (Nate Hagens I believe) asked his guest what do you value (i.e., privilege) above all other things? (The word all invites an unbalanced reply.) The extended answer rather took me aback. The guest values life in all its profundity yet declined to privilege human life. In the context of the webcast, which was about the climate emergency and anticipated human die-off and/or extinction, that answer sorta made sense. Should humans survive, even if we eventually sacrifice everything else (our current operational strategy)? Or do we leave the Earth to hardier competitors such as cockroaches and rats? Most people (humans) would unhesitatingly choose us over them as, well, um, always. It’s a strange hypothetical to ponder. Taken to its extreme, if one doesn’t privilege one life form over another, then what’s the problem with criminals, scavengers, and parasites winning the battle for survival? Or more colorfully, why not give zombies and vampires their bite at the apple? They may be undead but their basic strategy for propagation is undoubtedly a winning one.

Pliable Privilege, pt. 02

Continuing from pt. 01, the notion of privilege took an unexpected turn for me recently when the prospect inevitability of demographic collapse came back onto my radar. I scoffed at the demographer’s crystal ball earlier not because I disagree with the assessments or numbers but because, like so many aspects of the collapse of industrial civilization, demographic collapse lies squarely beyond anyone’s control. My questions in reply are basically Yeah? And? So? Do a search on demographic collapse and it will reveal a significant number of reports, with reporters themselves (including the worst contemporary media whore and glory hound who shall forever remain unnamed at this site) freaking out and losing their collective minds, on the hows, whys, wheres, and whens population will crash. The most immediate worrisome aspect is anticipated inversion of the youngest being the most numerous, the usual state of affairs, to the oldest being the most numerous and flatly unsupportable by the young. This has been the basic warning about Social Security for decades already: too few paying in, too many granted benefits. See also this documentary film being prepared for imminent release. I suspect supporting annotations will appear in time.

Probably not fair to call capitalism and its support structures a Ponzi scheme (latecomers to the scheme supporting earlier entrants), but the desire to perpetuate historical demographic distributions (as opposed to what? yielding to the drift of history?) is clearly part of the perpetual growth mentality. Traditionally, prior to the 20th century in the West, when the vast majority of people participated in agrarian and/or subsistence economies instead of the money economy, children were desirable not least because they provided free labor until they were grown, were positioned to take over family farms and businesses, and cared for oldsters when that time came. Intergenerational continuity and stability were maintained and it was generally accepted that each generation would supplant the previous through the seasons of life. The money economy destroyed most of that. Many young adult children now exercise their options (privilege) and break away as soon as possible (as I did) in search of economic opportunity in cities and form their own families (or don’t, as I didn’t). Estrangement and abandonment may not be complete, but families being spread across the continent certainly limits extended family cohesion to holidays and occasional visits. Oldsters (in the affluent West anyway) are now typically shuttled off to (euphemism alert) retirement homes to be warehoused prior to dying. Easier to pay someone to perform that service than to do it oneself, apparently. So if older people are currently privileged over the young (in some ways at least), that condition is being reversed because, dammit, children are in short supply yet needed desperately to keep growth on track.

Demographers point to a number of factors that have conspired to create the crisis (one of many interlocking crises some intellectuals have begun calling the polycrisis). The two main factors are declining fertility and reproductive choice. My suspicion is that the toxic environment, one result of centuries of industrial activity with plastics and drugs now found in human bodies where they don’t belong, accounts for many fertility issues. Add to that poor food quality (i.e., malnutrition, not just poor diets) and it’s easy to understand why healthy pregnancies might be more difficult in the 21st century than before. I’m not qualified to support that assessment, so take it for what it’s worth. Reproductive choice, another recently acquired female privilege (in historical terms), is a function of several things: financial independence, educational attainment, and availability of birth control. Accordingly, more women are choosing either to defer having children while they establish careers or choose not to have children at all. (Men make those choices, too.) Delays unexpectedly leave lots of women unable to have children for failure to find a suitable mate or having spent their best reproductive years doing other things. As I understand it, these correlations are borne out in some harrowing statistics. As the polycrisis deepens, a philosophical choice not to bring children into the world (just to suffer and die young) is also a motivation to remain childless.

Wrong Things Getting Done Anyway

The difference between right and wrong is obvious to almost everyone by the end of kindergarten. Temptations persist and everyone does things great and small known to be wrong when enticements and advantages outweigh punishments. C’mon, you know you do it. I do, too. Only at the conclusion of a law degree or the start of a political career (funny how those two often coincide) do things get particularly fuzzy. One might add military service to those exceptions except that servicemen are trained not to think, simply do (i.e., follow orders without question). Anyone with functioning ethics and morality also recognizes that in legitimate cases of things getting unavoidably fuzzy in a hypercomplex world, the dividing line often can’t be established clearly. Thus, venturing into the wide, gray, middle area is really a signal that one has probably already gone too far. And yet, demonstrating that human society has not really progressed ethically despite considerable gains in technical prowess, egregiously wrong things are getting done anyway.

The whopper of which nearly everyone is guilty (thus, guilty pleasure) is … the Whopper. C’mon, you know you eat it do it. I know I do. Of course, the irresistible and ubiquitous fast food burger is really only one example of a wide array of foodstuffs known to be unhealthy, cause obesity, and pose long-term health problems. Doesn’t help that, just like Big Tobacco, the food industry knowingly refines their products (processed foods, anyway) to be hyperstimuli impossible to ignore or resist unless one is iron willed or develops an eating disorder. Another hyperstimulus most can’t escape is the smartphone (or a host of other electronic gadgets). C’mon, you know you crave the digital pacifier. I don’t, having managed to avoid that particular trap. For me, electronics are always only tools. However, railing against them with respect to how they distort cognition (as I have) convinces exactly no one, so that argument goes on the deferral pile.

Another giant example not in terms of participation but in terms of effect is the capitalist urge to gather to oneself as much filthy lucre as possible only to sit heartlessly on top of that nasty dragon’s hoard while others suffer in plain sight all around. C’mon, you know you would do it if you could. I know I would — at least up to a point. Periods of gross inequality come and go over the course of history. I won’t make direct comparisons between today and any one of several prior Gilded Ages in the U.S., but it’s no secret that the existence today of several hundy billionaires and an increasing number of mere multibillionaires represents a gross misallocation of financial resources: funneling the productivity of the masses (and fiat dollars whiffed into existence with keystrokes) into the hands of a few. Fake philanthropy to launder reputations fail to convince me that such folks are anything other than miserly Scrooges fixated on maintaining and growing their absurd wealth, influence, and bogus social status at the cost of their very souls. Seriously, who besides sycophants and climbers would want to even be in the same room as one of those people (names withheld)? Maybe better not to answer that question.

Impulse Control

I’ve quoted Caitlin Johnstone numerous times, usually her clever aphorisms. Her takes on geopolitics also ring fundamentally true to me, but then, I find it simple and obvious to be against empire, needless war, and wanton destruction just as she is. That’s not the position of most warmongers important decision makers driving cultural and political narratives, who are reflexively imperial, excited by war, self-aggrandizing, and reckless in their pursuits no matter who suffers (it’s rarely them). Anyway, I had not checked her blog for a while, which for me is too much like staring at the sun. Indeed, that same reason is why I stopped reading TomDispatch and have mostly backed away from Bracing Views. Geopolitics is just too ugly, too incoherent, too raving insane to be believed. However, these paragraphs (from here) caught my attention:

Humanity’s major problems arise from the impulse to control. Ecocide arises from the impulse to control nature. Empire arises from the impulse to control civilizations. Oligarchy arises from the impulse to control political outcomes. Ego arises from the impulse to control life.

A healthy humanity would be free of the impulse to manipulate and exert control: over life, over people, over nature. But it would be so different from the humanity we know now that falling into that way of functioning would be a kind of death. And it would feel like a death.

Sometimes it seems like people want the world to end, want humanity to go extinct. I’d suggest that this may be a confused expression of an intuited truth: that there’s something good on the other side of ending all this. But it’s the end of our dysfunction, not of our species.

I initially misread the first sentence as “Humanity’s major problems arise from lack of impulse control.” Self-restraint (also self-abnegation?) is the quality I find most lacking in everyone, especially our species-level consumption, whether for nourishment, enrichment, or meaningless status. Writ large, we just can’t seem to stop our gluttony, or put another way, suffer the inability to recognize when enough is enough. Johnstone’s remarks that giving up control feels like death echo others who have described the leaders of industrial civilization, politicians and corporate CEOs alike, as members of a global death cult driving everyone ineluctably toward early extinction. While safety, security, and profit are ostensible near-term goals, mechanisms developed to achieve those goals involve no small amount of death dealing. And because civilizational dynamics (observed many times over by those who study such things) demonstrate ebb and flow over time (centuries and millennia) — e.g., the inevitable collapse of industrial civilization and knowing destruction of the planet (specifically, the biosphere habitable by humans and other species) — the willingness to pursue and perpetuate a destructive way of life is maniacal and insane. Whereas Johnstone believes giving up (illusory) control passes as eventual release from earthly torments or at least an opportunity to create something smarter, wiser, and perhaps more restrained than the outright energy binge we’ve been on for the past two centuries, my expectation is that self-annihilation will be total and complete. No one gets out alive; there is nothing beyond.

All Grown Up

Happy to report that humans have finally outgrown their adolescent fixation, obsession, and infatuation surrounding technology and gadgetry, especially those that blow up things (and people), part of a maladaptive desire to watch the world burn (like a disturbed 14-year-old playing with fire to test the boundaries of control while hoping for the boundary to be breached). We are now in the process of correcting priorities and fixing the damage done. We’re also free from the psychological prison in which we trapped ourselves through status seeking and insistence on rigid ego consciousness by recognizing instead that, as artifacts of a hypersocial species, human cognition is fundamentally distributed among us as each of us is for all intents and purposes a storyteller retelling, reinforcing, and embellishing stories told elsewhere — even though it’s not quite accurate to call it mass mind or collective consciousness — and that indeed all men are brothers (an admitted anachronism, since that phrase encompasses women/sisters, too). More broadly, humans also now understand that we are only one species among many (a relative late-comer in evolutionary time, as it happens) that coexist in a dynamic balance with each other and with the larger entity some call Mother Earth or Gaia. Accordingly, we have determined that our relationship can no longer be that of abuser (us) and abused (everything not us) if the dynamism built into that system is not to take us out (read: trigger human extinction, like most species suffered throughout evolutionary time). If these pronouncements sound too rosy, well, get a clue, fool!

Let me draw your attention to the long YouTube video embedded below. These folks have gotten the clues, though my commentary follows anyway, because SWOTI.

After processing all the hand-waving and calls to immediate action (with inevitable nods to fundraising), I was struck by two things in particular. First, XR’s co-founder Roger Hallan gets pretty much everything right despite an off-putting combination of alarm, desperation, exasperation, and blame. He argues that to achieve the global awakening needed to alter humanity’s course toward (self-)extinction, we actually need charismatic speakers and heightened emotionalism. Scientific dispassion and neutered measured political discourse (such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or as Al Gore attempted for decades before going Hollywood already fifteen years ago now) have simply failed to accomplish anything. (On inspection, what history has actually delivered is not characterized by the lofty rhetoric of statesmen and boosters of Enlightenment philosophy but rather resembles a sociologist’s nightmare of dysfunctional social organization, where anything that could possible go wrong pretty much has.) That abysmal failure is dawning on people under the age of 30 or so quite strongly, whose futures have been not so much imperiled as actively robbed. (HOW DARE YOU!? You slimy, venal, incompetent cretins above the age of 30 or so!) So it’s not for nothing that Roger Hallan insists that the XR movement ought to be powered and led by young people, with old people stepping aside, relinquishing positions of power and influence they’ve already squandered.

Second, Chris Hedges, easily the most erudite and prepared speaker/contributor, describes his first-hand experience reporting on rebellion in Europe leading to (1) the collapse of governments and (2) disintegration of societies. He seems to believe that the first is worthwhile, necessary, and/or inevitable even though the immediate result is the second. Civil wars, purges, and genocides are not uncommon throughout history in the often extended periods preceding and following social collapse. The rapidity of governmental collapse once the spark of citizen rebellion becomes inflamed is, in his experience, evidence that driving irresponsible leaders from power is still possible. Hedges’ catchphrase is “I fight fascists because they’re fascists,” which as an act of conscience allows him to sleep at night. A corollary is that fighting may not necessarily be effective, at least on the short term, or be undertaken without significant sacrifice but needs to be done anyway to imbue life with purpose and meaning, as opposed to anomie. Although Hedges may entertain the possibility that social disintegration and collapse will be far, far more serious and widespread once the armed-to-the-teeth American empire cracks up fully (already under way to many observers) than with the Balkan countries, conscientious resistance and rebellion is still recommended.

Much as my attitudes are aligned with XR, Hallan, and Hedges, I’m less well convinced that we should all go down swinging. That industrial civilization is going down and all of us with it no matter what we do is to me an inescapable conclusion. I’ve blogged about this quite a bit. Does ethical behavior demand fighting to the bitter end? Or can we fiddle while Rome burns, so to speak? There’s a lot of middle ground between those extremes, including nihilistic mischief (euphemism alert) and a bottomless well of anticipated suffering to alleviate somehow. More than altering the inevitable, I’m more inclined to focus on forestalling eleventh-hour evil and finding some grace in how we ultimately, collectively meet species death.

Let’s Be Evil, pt. 04

On the heels of a series of snowstorms, ice storms, and deep freezes (mid-Feb. 2021) that have inundated North America and knocked out power to millions of households and businesses, I couldn’t help but to notice inane remarks and single-pane comics to the effect “wish we had some global warming now!” Definitely, things are looking distinctly apocalyptic as folks struggle with deprivation, hardship, and existential threats. However, the common mistake here is to substitute one thing for another, failing to distinguish weather from climate.

National attention is focused on Texas, expected to be declared a disaster zone by Pres. Biden once he visits (a flyover, one suspects) to survey and assess the damage. It’s impossible to say that current events are without precedent. Texas has been in the cross-hairs for decades, suffering repeated droughts, floods, fires, and hurricanes that used to be prefixed by 50-year or 100-year. One or another is now occurring practically every year, which is exactly what climate chaos delivers. And in case the deep freeze and busted water pipes all over Texas appear to have been unpredictable, this very thing happened in Arizona in 2011. Might have been a shot across the bow for Texas to learn from and prepare, but its self-reliant, gun-totin’, freedom-lovin’ (fuck, yeah!), secessionist character is instead demonstrated by having its own electrical grid covering most of the state, separated from other North American power grids, ostensibly to skirt federal regulations. Whether that makes Texas’ grid more or less vulnerable to catastrophic failure is an open question, but events of the past week tested it sorely. It failed badly. People literally froze to death as a result. Some reports indicate Texas was mere moments away from an even greater failure that would have meant months to rebuild and reestablish electrical service. A substantial diaspora would have ensued, essentially meaning more climate refugees.

So where’s the evil in this? Well, let me tell you. Knowledge that we humans are on track to extirpate ourselves via ongoing industrial activity has been reported and ignored for generations. Guy McPherson’s essay “Extinction Foretold, Extinction Ignored” has this to say at the outset:

The warnings I will mention in this short essay were hardly the first ones about climate catastrophe likely to result from burning fossil fuels. A little time with your favorite online search engine will take you to George Perkins Marsh sounding the alarm in 1847, Svente Arrhenius’s relevant journal article in 1896, Richard Nixon’s knowledge in 1969, and young versions of Al Gore, Carl Sagan, and James Hansen testifying before the United States Congress in the 1980s. There is more, of course, all ignored for a few dollars in a few pockets. [links in original]

My personal acquaintance with this large body of knowledge began accumulating in 2007 or so. Others with decision-making capacity have known for much, much longer. Yet short-term motivations shoved aside responsible planning and preparation that is precisely the warrant of governments at all levels, especially, say, the U.S. Department of Energy. Sure, climate change is reported as controversy, or worse, as conspiracy, but in my experience, only a few individuals are willing to speak the obvious truth. They are often branded kooks. Institutions dither, distract, and even issue gag orders to, oh, I dunno, prop up real estate values in south Florida soon to be underwater. I’ve suggested repeatedly that U.S. leaders and institutions should be acting to manage contraction and alleviate suffering best as possible, knowing that civilization will fail anyway. To pretend otherwise and guarantee — no — drive us toward worst-case scenarios is just plain evil. Of course, the megalomania of a few tech billionaires who mistakenly believe they can engineer around society’s biggest problems is just as bad.

Writ small (there’s a phrase no one uses denoting narrowing scope), meaning at a scale less than anthropogenic climate change (a/k/a unwitting geoengineering), American society has struggled to prioritize guns vs. butter for over a century. The profiteering military-industrial complex has clearly won that debate, leaving infrastructure projects, such as bridge and road systems and public utilities, woefully underfunded and extremely vulnerable to market forces. Refusal to recognize public health as a right or public good demanding a national health system (like other developed countries have) qualifies as well. As inflated Pentagon budgets reveal, the U.S. never lacks money to oppress, fight, and kill those outside the U.S. Inside the U.S., however, cities and states fall into ruin, and American society is allowed to slowly unwind for lack of support. Should we withdraw militarily from the world stage and focus on domestic needs, such as homelessness and joblessness? Undoubtedly. Would that leave us open to attack or invasion (other than the demographic invasion of immigrants seeking refuge in the U.S.)? Highly doubtful. Other countries have their own domestic issues to manage and would probably appreciate a cessation of interference and intervention from the U.S. One might accuse me of substituting one thing for another, as I accused others at top, but the guns-vs.-butter debate is well established. Should be obvious that it’s preferable to prioritize caring for our own society rather than devoting so much of our limited time and resources to destroying others.

Pathological Anxiety and the Counter-Enlightenment

I’ve been holding in mind for five months now the article at this link (an informal interview with neuroscientist and psychologist Oliver J. Robinson), waiting for conditions when I could return to forms of media consumption I prefer, namely, reading books, magazines, and long-form journalism. When I try to read something substantive these days, I find myself going over the same paragraph repeatedly, waiting in vain for it to register. Regrettably, the calm, composure, and concentration needed for deep reading has been effectively blocked since March 2020 as we wait (also in vain) for the pandemic to burn itself out. (I could argue that the soul-destroying prospect of industrial collapse and near-term human extinction is having the same effect for much longer.) So my attention and media habits have been resignedly diverted to crap news gathering, mostly via video, and cheap entertainments, mostly streaming TV (like everyone else, though others may complain less). The lack of nourishment is noticeable. Considering we’re only weeks away from the U.S. presidential election, stress levels are ratcheting up further, and civil authorities prepare for “election riots” (is that new term?), which I can only assume means piling violence upon violence under the pretense of keeping-the-peace or law-and-order or some other word string rendered meaningless now that the police are widely acknowledged to be a significant contributors to the very problems they are meant to address. These unresolved issues (pandemic, police violence, civil unrest) give rise to pathological anxiety, which explains (according to Robinson, disclaimers notwithstanding) why it’s so hard to read.

To say we live in unprecedented times is both obvious and banal. Unique stresses of modernity have led multiple times to widespread madness and conflict, as well as attempts to recapture things lost in previous shifts from other styles of social organization. Let me not mince words regarding what’s now happening: we’re in an era of repudiation of the Enlightenment, or a renewed Counter-Enlightenment. I’ve stated this before, and I’m not the only one making this diagnosis (just learned it’s a rather old idea — I’m always late to the party). For instance, Martin Jay’s essay “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment” appears to have been floating around in various forms since 2011. Correlation of this renewal of Counter-Enlightenment fervor with literacy seems clear. Despite basic literacy as a skill being widely improved worldwide over the past two centuries, especially in the developing world, deep literacy is eroding:

Beyond self-inflicted attention deficits, people who cannot deep read – or who do not use and hence lose the deep-reading skills they learned – typically suffer from an attenuated capability to comprehend and use abstract reasoning. In other words, if you can’t, or don’t, slow down sufficiently to focus quality attention – what Wolf calls “cognitive patience” – on a complex problem, you cannot effectively think about it.

Considering deep literacy is absolutely critical to clear thinking (or critical thought, if you prefer, not to be confused with the The Frankfurt School’s critical theory discussed in Jay’s essay), its erosion threatens fundamental institutions (e.g., liberal democracy and the scientific method) that constitute the West’s primary cultural inheritance from the Enlightenment. The reach of destruction wrought by reversing course via the Counter-Enlightenment cannot be overstated. Yet many among us, completely unable to construct coherent ideas, are rallying behind abandonment of Enlightenment traditions. They’re ideologues who actively want to return to the Dark Ages (while keeping modern tech, natch). As with many aspects of unavoidable cultural, social, environmental, and civilizational collapse, I have difficulty knowing quite what to hope for. So I won’t condemn retrograde thinking wholly. In fact, I feel empathy toward calls to return to simpler times, such as with German Romanticism or American Transcendentalism, both examples of cultural and aesthetic movements leading away from the Enlightenment.

Long before these ideas coalesced for me, I had noted (see here, here, and here) how literacy is under siege and a transition back toward a predominantly oral culture is underway. The Counter-Enlightenment is either a cause or an effect, I can’t assess which. At the risk of being a Cassandra, let me suggest that, if these times aren’t completely different from dark episodes of the past, we are now crossing the threshold of a new period of immense difficulty that makes pathological anxiety blocking the ability to read and think a minor concern. Indeed, that has been my basic assessment since crafting the About Brutus blurb way back in 2006. Indicators keep piling up. So far, I have a half dozen points of entry to process and digest by other cultural commentators exploring this theme, though they typically don’t adopt wide enough historical or cultural perspectives. Like the last time I failed to synthesize my ideas into a multipart blog series, I don’t have a snazzy title, and this time, I don’t even have planned installment titles. But I will do my best to roll out in greater detail over several blog posts some of the ways the Counter-Enlightenment is manifesting anew.

Disappearing Act (redux)

The previous version of this blog post was about flora and fauna dying off and/or being driven to endangerment and extinction by direct and indirect effects of human activity, and on the flip side, collective human inactivity to stop or forestall the worst effects. Indeed, removal and rollback of environmental restrictions and regulations hasten the ongoing ecocide. This version is about three more things disappearing right before our eyes like some sort of macabre magic act: American jobs, American businesses, and civil society.

Job losses stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic and government-mandated shut-downs and quarantines have been reported ad nauseum, as have mounting deaths. No need to cite the numbers. To call this disappearance of people from the streets and workplaces sickening is a redundancy. Despite an immediate Federal response (by the Fed) to prop up the stock market (a literal entity) but not main street (a figurative entity), businesses both large and small are now performing this same disappearing act. Again, no need to cite the numbers, which are worsening continuously. It’s impossible to predict what will be left after this destructive phase runs its course. I don’t expect it to be creative destruction (also the name of the defunct group blog where I got my start blogging). In the meantime, however, plenty of price gougers, vultures, scammers, and opportunists seek to exploit new capitalist dynamics. As the unemployed and disenfranchised are further reduced to penury, many have taken to the streets to demand change. While the inciting incident was yet another unarmed black man killed by police in the course of his arrest, the wider context of unrest in the streets is the utterly preposterous level of wealth and income inequality. Two short-lived sovereign zones in Seattle and Portland (declared and undeclared, respectively) attest to a lack of confidence in state authority and fraying rule of law. Federal law enforcement officers disappearing protesters from the street speaks volumes regarding how the citizenry is regarded by politicians. The looming wave of evictions, foreclosures, and bankruptcies also promise to overwhelm civil society and prove the illegitimacy of our current government.

The connection between one set of disappearing acts and the next should be obvious, as we humans rely upon the natural world for our very survival. The modern industrial world, especially in those societies organized around capitalism, has been at war with nature (ecocide), extracting far more than necessary for a balanced, respectable life. Instead, wanton accumulation and self-aggrandizement (read: ballin’) are commonplace, at least for those who can. In the process, we’ve made ourselves vulnerable to even modest perturbations of this hypercomplex style of social organization. Well, surprise! The war on nature is no longer taking place over there, socially distanced, out of sight and out of mind; the war has come home. Nature struck back, blindly demanding a return to equilibrium. The disappearing act turns out to be part of a much larger balancing act. However, processes we humans initiated make impossible any such return except perhaps over evolutionary time. For the foreseeable future, the only paved path is toward unfathomable loss.

Mad World Preamble

Regular readers of this blog understand that for a decade plus, my thinking has been darkened and clouded by impending disaster regarding multiple, interlocking dilemmas: epistemological crisis, social disintegration, periodic financial crashes impoverishing tens of millions of people at a time, ecological collapse and mass extinction stemming from climate change, and at least two bits of irrational mischief (an obvious euphemism) before we all take a dirt nap and the human species goes extinct alongside most others. The first bit of mischief is the doomsday sort, meaning that, in keeping with dystopian, fictional narratives being reliable predictions of actuality, recognition that our time is severely limited will enable some psychopath with his or her finger on the button to rationalize “We’re all nearly spent, so fuck it. Let’s first convert some large portion of the Middle East into a sheet of glass.” Once mutually assured destruction (MAD) is loosed, the second bit will be to convert the entire globe into a lifeless sphere. No doubt this is a worst case scenario, but the necessary dominoes are lined up and ready to topple, and 2020 has already handed us several severe perturbations to make the endgame more likely with each passing disastrous month. It hasn’t quite happened yet and outcomes may take years or decades to fully manifest. Still, eternal optimists offer hope in defiance of reason that we can still rescue ourselves from self-defeat; I’m not so sanguine.

My conclusion (drawn more than once) that the world has again fallen into madness is the central point here. Whereas previous instances were major disruptions leading to political regime change, world wars, genocides, etc., each eventually concluded and what life remained went on. This iteration could well be different. My warning is not perpetual fearmongering that politicians practice. Electoral politics keep raising specters of insecurity to be solved by each incoming administration but then never manage to be resolved. Indeed, that’s the condition of our industrial, technocratic civilization: processes and problems have grown too massive, intractable, and instititionalized to be managed even in sane and stable times. Rather, my warning is about understanding death stalking us best as possible. I also offer no solutions.

Over the years, I’ve written several multipart series of posts that address my conclusion directly and many more one-offs that nibble at the margins. The main ones are The Frailty of Reason, Dissolving Reality, and Pre-Extinction Follies, all (IMO) worth a read. As I contemplate our situation in mid-2020, I had in mind to write another multipart series but have found myself unable to gather disparate thoughts under one cohesive theme or title. So I’ve decided to break with my own habits and instead offer this preview of drafts already begun — at least insofar as I can map them now.

• Unitary Consciousness. My rumination on the misapplication of the scientific method’s divide-and-conquer strategy for understanding reality and the mind.
• Making Sense and Sensemaking. An exploration of fascinating yet frustrating attempts to draw conclusions about the world we inhabit.
• Align Your Ideology! A survey of historical instances of madness overtaking us at the level of whole nations or societies.

Much as I would prefer to tie these together under one title, nothing coalesced in my thinking to allow for tight integration. Nor do I have an order or schedule in mind. I’ll chip away at it, more for my own purposes than to achieve influence or notoriety. All the same, posts will be published here for whatever value you may garner.

Mutually Assured Destruction

/rant on

MAD is a term I haven’t thought about for a good long while. No illusions here regarding that particularly nasty genie having been stuffed back into its lamp. Nope, it lingers out there in some weird liminal space, routinely displaced by more pressing concerns. However, MAD came back into my thoughts because of saber-rattling by U.S. leadership suggesting resumed above-ground nuclear testing might be just the ticket to remind our putative enemies around the world what complete assholes we are. Leave it to Americans to be the very last — in the midst of a global pandemic (that’s redundant, right?) — to recognize that geopolitical squabbles (alert: reckless minimization of severity using that word squabble) pale in comparison to other looming threats. Strike that: we never learn; we lack the reflective capacity. Still, we ought to reorient in favor of mutual aid and assistance instead of our MAD, insane death pact.

The authoritative body that normally springs to mind when MAD is invoked is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Ironically, it appears to be an independent, nonprofit 501(c)(3) entity, a media organization, not an actual collection of atomic scientists. (I’ll continue to italicize Bulletin as though it’s a publication like the New York Times even though it’s arguably something else.) I’ve blogged repeatedly about its iconic Doomsday Clock. In an otherwise astute post against sloppy appeals to authority using the increasingly meaningless term expert, Alan Jacobs takes to task the Bulletin for straying out of its lane to consider threats that are political in nature rather than scientific. Reminded me of when Pope Francis in his encyclical deigned to acknowledge climate change, recognizing that Mother Earth is our “common home” and maybe we shouldn’t be raping her. (OK, that coarse bit at the end is mine.) What? He’s not a climatologist! How dare he opine on something outside his official capacity? Go back to saving souls!

At the same time we desperately need expertise to accomplish things like building bridges that don’t fall down (yet still do) or performing an appendectomy without killing the patient, it’s inevitable that people form opinions about myriad subjects without the benefit of complete authority or expertise, if such a thing even exists. As students, citizens, and voters, we’re enjoined to inform ourselves, discuss, and learn rather than forfeit all opinion-making to, oh I dunno, the chattering classes. That’s intellectual sovereignty, unless one is unfortunate enough to live in a totalitarian regime practicing thought control. Oh, wait … So it’s a sly form of credentialing to fence off or police opinion expressed from inexpert quarters as some sort of thought crime. Regarding MAD, maybe the era has passed when actual atomic scientists assessed our threat level. Now it’s a Science and Security Board made up of people few have ever heard of, and the scope of their concern, like the Pope’s, is wide enough to include all existential threats, not just the one assigned to them by pointy-headed categorists. Are politicians better qualified on such matters? Puhleeze! (OK, maybe Al Gore, but he appears to be busy monetizing climate change.)

As a self-described armchair social critic, I, too, recognized more than a decade ago the existential threat (extinction level, too) of climate change and have blogged about it continuously. Am I properly credentialed to see and state the, um, obvious? Maybe not. That’s why I don’t argue the science and peer-reviewed studies. But the dynamics, outlines, and essentials of climate change are eminently understandable by laypersons. That was true as well for Michael Ruppert, who was impeached by documentarians for lacking supposed credentialed expertise yet still having the temerity to state the obvious and sound the alarm. Indeed, considering our failure to act meaningfully to ameliorate even the worst case scenario, we’ve now got a second instance of mutually assured destruction, a suicide pact, and this one doesn’t rely on game-theoretical inevitability. It’s already happening all around us as we live and breathe … and die.

/rant off