HERE COMES THE FLOOD
There is a Persian proverb that says that when we get to the Gates of Heaven, God will ask the one question: ‘What did you do with the land that I gave you?’ In The Night of the Iguana, Tennessee Williams describes the way that human beings have treated the world as ‘man's inhumanity to God’. That expression captures the ambiguities of ‘progress’ and the advance of human civilisation. In conquering natural necessity by means of science, industry, technique and organisation, we have become prisoners of a new social necessity, robbing the world of value in the process. Denaturalisation and dehumanisation proceed hand in hand.
So what have we done with the land given to us? It's a good question. It's a question that invites us to give thanks for the gifts of life and the Earth, and to take responsibility for our actions and their consequences. Whatever our economic 'science' tells us, there are no 'externalities' on our Earthly home.
There is a German pop/folk song from the late 1960s or early 1970s which gives us the Creation story in reverse, showing how human action is unravelling the original goodness of the world. It tells a sorry tale of how human beings have misused their power and knowledge to exploit the Earth.
The story of the Creation rewritten as The Destruction of the Earth in seven days.
“On the first of the last seven days, he looked at the world and he said:
‘Give me back the flowers and the trees, because you’re not fit to enjoy their beauty’.
He saw his work scorned; He heard no prayer – and no-one called out to him –
The next day began!
And on the second of the last seven days he looked at the world and said:
‘Give me all my animals back, because you only like them as the playthings of your moods.’
And on the third of the last seven days he looked at the world and he said:
‘Why do you need the stars and the moon? You only want to spoil them: and that I won’t allow to happen’.
He saw his work spurned: He heard no prayer, and no one called out to him.
The next day began!
On the fourth of the last seven days he looked at the world and he said:
‘Given me back happiness and love, because you do not deserve them, these the best of all my gifts.’
And on the fifth of the last seven days he took the light from the world. And the sun which he had created in the beginning disappeared from the firmament – the world was no in darkness – and yet it was not too late.
But still, no prayer!
Only cursing and shouting – and so the day went by.
And on the sixth of the last seven days, he made the hard decision;
He burnt up the earth, his world, and also mankind, who never listened to him.
And then on the last of all days – the earth was desert and empty.”
THEN – THEN – HE WEPT!
Genesis 9 is the story of God’s Covenant with humankind after The Flood, containing the promise never again will God destroy the earth for reasons of human failure to respect the Creation. This Covenant with all life on earth applies for all time throughout all the generations. Any flood that afflicts the Earth in the future will be one that human beings have visited upon themselves for failing to respect the goodness of the Creation. That possibility for destruction comes with the granting and claiming of moral responsibility. Can human beings live up to the goodness of the Creation by finding and expressing the goodness of their natures within?
Countless scientific reports over the years give us every reason to expect both fire and flood in the near future, grace of humankind and its energy-thirsty, exploitative economic system. An increasing number of catastrophic droughts and floods in recent years reveal the shape of things to come.
Nearly a decade ago (2005), environmentalist Mark Lynas published the book ‘High Tide: News from a Warming World’. The book issued a warning about the catastrophe facing the planet as a result of our dependency on fossil fuels. Act now to save the planet was the message. “If there's one message above all that I want people to take from these pages," Lynas writes, "it's this: that all the impacts described here are just the first whispers of the hurricane of future climate change which is now bearing down on us." That was 2005.
It’s not just the canary in the coalmine that has fallen off its perch. We are witnessing a mass extinction of species, many before they have even been named and recorded. This with less than a one degree temperature increase. The world’s governments are committed to policies keeping us the 'safe' side of the critical threshold of a 2 degree temperature increase. A 4 degree increase seems more likely. Raise the temperature of the Earth by six degrees Celsius - the upper range of predictions for the projected rise in temperature - and the result is the release of an enormous amount of methane held in the oceans and a runaway greenhouse effect. This "methane burp" was what, apparently, caused the end-Permian mass extinction of 251 million years ago, in which 95% of the world's species were wiped out. Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian titled his review of Lynas’ book ‘Act now to save the planet’. That was on 26 March 2005.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/mar/26/scienceandnature.politics
In High Tide, Lynas presents the accounts of those people around the world who have already been dealing with the reality of climate change. The ‘anecdotal’ evidence, however, is firmly grounded in the work of climatologists, meteorologists, atmospheric physicists, oceanographers and other scientific experts. Far from receiving the recognition and thanks they deserve, the work of these people has been subject to denial and vilification in the past few years, their motives impugned, their work denigrated. In an age where knowledge and technology has been perverted in the service of money and political power, climate science has retained the 'blue skies' element we now stand in desperate need of. And I can throw in the clear ‘blue seas’ of the oceanographers and marine biologists too.
Marx Lynas portrays a grim picture of the future in his book.
‘Computer model projections of climate change over the next century indicate that the speed and scale of warming could quickly become catastrophic. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has outlined a range of scenarios, which predict a temperature rise of between 1.4 and 5.8°C.4 Whilst the lower end of the spectrum is still more than double what we have already experienced during the twentieth century, the higher end of nearly six degrees would take the Earth into uncharted and very dangerous territory indeed.
Many of the resulting impacts are predictable, such as the eventual melting of the ice caps, accompanied by an accelerating rate of sea level rise. According to the IPCC, hurricanes will probably get stronger, and the intensity of floods and droughts will increase too. Tropical diseases will spread towards the poles, and billions of people will begin to lose their water supplies. Ecosystems will unravel as plants and animals struggle to adapt to rising temperatures and to migrate fast enough to stay within their natural climatic zones. Agriculture will suffer, and food supplies will be endangered. The impacts will be disproportionately felt by the poor and vulnerable in semi-arid and tropical countries, many of whom are already living on the barest margins of survival. Conflicts over scarce resources become ever more likely, as do large movements of environmental refugees, when millions will be made homeless by extreme weather and seawater flooding of low-lying areas.’
Mark Lynas, High Tide 2005 256/7
The ever mounting evidence makes it as clear as any factual evidence ever could that the crisis in the climate system is the most urgent and most pressing problem of our times. The increasing number of floods we have seen around the world are a manifestation of a big problem in the climate system as a whole. They are, however, a dramatic symbol of the times of turbulence to come. In thrall to our technological abilities, we have enlarged means to the status of ends. We won’t be the first civilisation to have fallen as a result of hubris, but we may well be the last.
Dealing with the crisis requires collective mobilisation and action without precedent in peacetime. Climate change is a global problem that requires a global solution. That is why the crisis is a challenge addressed to humanity as a whole, not just to the minority of expropriators, emitters and polluters. Because we are being challenged to constitute ourselves as one humanity living in peace and harmony on the one world. The challenge of dealing with climate change and global warming involves institutional, economic and technical measures for sure, but physical and political aspects of climate change are not my main concern in this piece, they are the backdrop. The environmental crisis is not some physical, impersonal thing, it affects lives, it affects the value and meaning of life. It has names, it has faces.
‘My journey around a warming world was the experience of a lifetime. I now have friends in five continents, from Alaska to Peru, and from China to Tuvalu. I shared drinks and talked long into the night with people whom I would never have dreamed of meeting before. And moreover, I can now put names and faces on the vague concerns I held before my departure. My abstract 'droughts', 'floods' and 'glaciers' are now people and places, each with their own personality, their own vivid beauty and wonder, and their own myriad reasons for existence.
No longer do any of the places I visited seem remote. And I hope your experience of sharing them with me has illustrated just a little of why it's so vitally important - for all of our sakes - that we act now together to tackle the biggest crisis that humankind has ever faced.’
Lynas 2005: 297
In this piece, the physical crisis which confronts us is the context of a much deeper crisis, a psychic crisis. The flood that concerns me is the psychic flood. This is to explore the climate crisis as an existential crisis, a crisis in the way we see ourselves and our world. ‘Building solutions together’ is a slogan I tend to use when addressing the challenge of climate change. But these solutions can only be enduring if they call back the soul, recover the body from the expropriators and bring us back to our senses. This is the task I will now attempt to adumbrate.
The poem/song by which I have titled this piece brings us face to face with the harrowing consequences of our failure to appreciate, value and respect the great gift of the Earth, the various species, the biodiversity, the ecosystems, and, beyond the physical, the capacities for empathy, sympathy and love. It is as if the human species, in developing its technical ability to manipulate nature, had turned into a race of sociopaths. Rather than appreciate the Earth, the dominant sections of the human species has been obsessed with taking possession of it, depriving other people and species of their legitimate claims and organising to defend their gains against all other would-be possessors. Such has been the story of politics since the rise of civilisation. Even our democratic, legal systems of politics has been a nice, reasonable way by which political opponents sit down and debate and negotiate the terms of possession. And approaching the problem this way exposes us to the frightful truth that, having lived by the sword, civilisation will die by it. And not in the sense of being brought down by another well-organised, well-armed band of possessors. I mean in a much more profound sense than this, the way that the readiness to take possession by force robs us and the world of the soul. The possessive approach to the world dispossesses us internally as well as externally. In expropriating and enclosing the outer world, the possessors have hollowed out the inner life. We lose not only our relation to place, to the land, but our ability to relate to others. And we lose that social and ecological sensibility that causes us to value people and place, the very bases of our existence. Outside of the roles and functions by which ‘the system’ operates, our ability to connect, feel, relate becomes desensitised. The result is an emptiness at the core of the world, the big gaping hole that consumption and other addictions and distractions that pour into, but can never fill. There is a loss of autonomy and authenticity as we are all induced to succumb to the common lie – that this is a world of ‘progress’ and its largesse will be distributed to one and all. We have been swindled out of the good world we were given in return for the promise of a world that will never come.
In describing religion as ‘the soul of soulless conditions’, Marx pointed to a truth about the world much deeper than the character of religion. Marx thought religion was an illusion, but he was more concerned with transforming the conditions which generated and required an illusion. In his own way, he was calling back the soul. The soul of the world has been hollowed out, something which not only devalues the outer life in nature but diminishes the life within. This is certainly the case for the possessing classes, who care nothing at all that it profits a man nothing to exchange his soul for the whole world. These people happily trade their souls for any part of the world. The problem is that the systems they set up draw all people into the web of exploitation and despoliation. The dispossession which characterises the social relations which arrange the material life of human beings on Earth comes also to characterise the inner life.
Terry Eagleton shows the extent to which dispossession in history has gone.
‘What may persuade us that certain human bodies lack all claim on our compassion is culture. Regarding some of our fellow humans as inhuman requires a fair degree of cultural sophistication. It means having literally to disregard the testimony of our senses. This, at any rate, should give pause to those for whom 'culture' is instinctively an affirmative term. There is another sense in which culture can interpose itself between human bodies, known as technology. Technology is an extension of our bodies which can blunt their capacity to feel for one another. It is simple to destroy others at long range, but not when you have to listen to the screams. Military technology creates death but destroys the experience of it. It is easier to launch a missile attack which will wipe out thousands than run a single sentry through the guts. The painless death for which the victims have always hankered is now also prized by the perpetrators. Technology makes our bodies far more flexible and capacious, but in some ways much less responsive. It reorganizes our senses for swiftness and multiplicity rather than depth, persistence or intensity. Marx considered that by turning even our senses into commodities, capitalism had plundered us of our bodies. In his view, we would need a considerable political transformation in order to come to our senses.’ (Eagleton, After Theory 2003 ch 6).
We have been plundered in both body and soul. Returning to our senses is also calling back the soul. The words of the Magnificat (Latin: [My soul] magnifies) are apposite:
He hath put down the mighty from their seat : and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificat
The mighty fear the humble. And with good reason. The historian and Christian Socialist R.H. Tawney writes well here:
‘A society which is fortunate enough to possess so revolutionary a basis, a society whose Founder was executed as the enemy of law and order, need not seek to soften the materialism of principalities and powers with mild doses of piety administered in an apologetic whisper… It will appeal to mankind, not because its standards are identical with those of the world, but because they are profoundly different. It will win its converts, not because membership involves no change in their manner of life, but because it involves a change so complete as to be ineffaceable. It will expect its adherents to face economic ruin for the sake of their principles with the same alacrity as, not so long ago, it was faced by the workman who sought to establish trade unionism among his fellows… It will rebuke the open and notorious sin of the man who oppresses his fellows for the sake of gain as freely as that of the drunkard or adulterer.’ (Tawney, The Acquisitive Society 1982 ch 11).
We see here clearly the reason why the mighty fear the humble – because the humble are those who are outside of, reject and thus threaten to transform the possessive relations that make for the acquisitive society. Where the acquisitive society hollows out the soul, the humble call it back. And they call us back to the soul of the world. The demand for an end to ‘soulless conditions’ is a demand for a world which is beyond possession. The humble speak truth to power and, in repudiating possession, they speak a truth that impacts harder than physical force. This is the flood I want to write about, the psychic flood that engulfs the false, inauthentic, power-over, ego-driven reality of the domination systems that have held sway in human history, systems which have dispossessed us of our land, our bodies and souls, even, in light of climate change, our future.
Those outside of possession know that there is more to being human being than pandering to the physical self. There is a world beyond ego, and it is a world of rich and expansive possibilities. The minimal, narcissistic ego cannot live life in any great depth. Such an ego lives an inauthentic existence in denial of psychic needs and truths. It is such individuals and systems which are most vulnerable to the flood I am talking about – the flood of truth, beauty and goodness, of sense and sensibility, of autonomy and authenticity, spontaneity and sincerity, of feeling and passion, of creativity and care, of all those qualities which the prevailing sociopathology of possessive systems have driven out of the world. The soul and the body together. ‘If power had a body, it would be forced to abdicate. It is because it is fleshless that it fails to feel the misery it inflicts.’ (Eagleton 2003: 183). The flood I am talking about holds out hope for the redemption of the human condition, giving us both the flesh and the spirit, bringing an end not to the world as such, only the false world, the world of soulless conditions and dispossessed people, the world of disembodied power. That would be to achieve a world beyond the ego, a larger world characterised by a deep sense of being and belonging rooted in place. The Earth belongs to no-one but is shared by all. We thus reject the common lie for membership within a common place.
The causes of climate change are the greenhouse gases produced by our carbon-based energy system. But, in one way or another, as workers and consumers, we are all complicit to some degree. Some much more than others, certainly, but the tentacles of this all pervasive economic system means that we are all drawn in in some way. In the article The climate change deniers have won, Nick Cohen argues that whilst scientists continue to warn us about global warming, most people have a vested interest in not wanting to think about it. He also makes the point that climate change denial is not merely a corporate lobbying campaign but a belief system. ‘Their denial fits perfectly with their support for free market economics, opposition to state intervention and hatred of all those latte-slurping, quinoa-munching liberals, with their arrogant manners and dainty hybrid cars, who presume to tell honest men and women how to live. If they admitted they were wrong on climate change, they might have to admit that they were wrong on everything else and their whole political identity would unravel.
The politicians know too well that beyond the corporations and the cultish fanatics in their grass roots lies the great mass of people, whose influence matters most. They accept at some level that manmade climate change is happening but don't want to think about it.’
Cohen’s assessment is bleak: ‘the task feels as hopeless as arguing against growing old. Whatever you do or say, it is going to happen. How can you persuade countries to accept huge reductions in their living standards to limit (not stop) the rise in temperatures? How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of the present?’
‘We cannot admit it, but … we need a miracle to save us from the floods.
(http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/22/climate-change-deniers-have-won-global-warming)
So here comes the flood, as the Peter Gabriel song warns.
Peter Gabriel - Here Comes the Flood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb7htoJAK7g
I am putting these words to song for this purpose.
‘Here Comes the Flood’ is a phrase which echoes in the subconscious of each and all of us, something repressed but also universal, which is now breaking out into the open. It is an apocalypse, a revelation of truth. The term ‘apocalypse', is entirely appropriate. Not just in the sense of catastrophe, but most of all in the sense of revelation, bringing something to light. And it is prophecy. 'Don't be afraid to cry at what you see'.
The scale and the universality of the crisis is such that no one is able any longer to hide. The time for fear and denial and concealment is over. It’s a judgement day. All over the world, records are being broken, rain, drought, the lot. All the individual incidents of climate change form one big picture and make the point that this is something which affects us all, rich and poor, north, south, east and west, all creatures great and small.
And it begs the question: Where we you and what did you do when the slow apocalypse of climate change unfolded?
What did you do with the life and the world that were given to you?
The old world is dying and the new one is struggling to be born.
What did you do to put an end to the old world of possession and dispossession, the world that robbed us of our senses, our very souls?
What did you do to usher in the new world?
More than two hundred years of industrialisation and urbanisation has brought us to this impasse. We thought that we had mastered nature by technique and organisation, only to find that the ecological debt is beyond our ability to pay.
Progress?
‘the world was riding high, waves of steel and metal at the sky, as the nails sunk in the cloud, the rain was warm and soaked the crowd’.
Endless economic growth has brought the possibility of runaway climate change. Nature does not do bailouts and when the planet is on the move, all bets are off.
‘when the flood comes, you have no home, you have no warmth’.
And when the flood does come, there will be no place to hide.
The universal flood. Revelation and judgement. Who can stand? How far does complicity go?
The song Here Comes the Flood was inspired by a vision of a society in which each individual can read the minds of all others. In the ensuing psychic flood, ‘we say goodbye to flesh and blood’ and people will be exposed for who they really are. The open and the honest will survive and thrive, the others, those closed up in fear and denial, will not.
“Stranded starfish have no place to hide...” There will be no hiding place. It’s a call for naked honesty. Everyone will be able to hear the thoughts of everyone else. The "flood" is the overwhelming rush of each having to deal with the thoughts of all others, having to express their own thoughts, their own hidden fears and desires. There will be no place for bad faith. It is the end for all those who are nurturing deep secrets that they are afraid others may learn; it is the new beginning for all those unafraid to share those secrets with others.
Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.
“When will people learn the robustness of truth?” asked the philosopher Bertrand Russell.
Well, the time is coming when we will have to learn the robustness of truth, about the world around us, about others and about ourselves. “I loved life and real people, and wished to get rid of the shams that prevent us from loving real people as they really are. I believed in laughter and spontaneity, and trusted to nature to bring out the genuine good in people, if once genuineness could come to be tolerated.” (Bertrand Russell to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 27 August 1918).
Looking back from some future time, should the future ever come, it may be more apparent than it is to us who are kiving through it that climate change is a "slow apocalypse," a new beginning, a transition to a new earth, as the old reality of metal and steel, of the nails into the earth and the skies, passes away.
In which case, those who proclaim the robustness and naked honesty of truth are the prophets of the new world to come. There is a world coming to an end. The world of possession can no longer be sustained. We have to get beyond possession to have any world to stand on at all. No longer can we all be complicit in the acquisitive society. The flood is coming to put an end to complicity and inauthenticity, a psychic flood which will bring us back to our senses.