THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF HUMANITY
Dec 2009
From the 1940’s into the 1950’s, the writer on cities and civilisation Lewis Mumford wrote a series of books with a common theme at their heart – The Condition of Man (1944), The Conduct of Life (1952) and The Transformations of Man (1957). Mumford was full of big ideas concerning post-historic culture and post-historic man, the symptoms of regression, loss of subjectivity and the cult of anti-life in the modern Megamachine. However, if human life was imperilled, Mumford also saw hope beyond ‘the cracking monolith’. Mumford wrote of ‘designing global harmony’. He saw the emergence of the ‘one world civilisation’, a unified self in a universal culture. He saw the replacement of the money economy by the one world ‘life economy’ based on the stabilization of industry, population equilibrium, the economisation of production, normalisation of consumption and socialisation of creation. This would be a social energetics issuing in a ‘new personality’. Mumford wrote of ‘the ideal of wholeness’ and of the ‘time for living’ in ‘the new organum’. He wrote of ‘organic transformation’ and the ‘organic person’, the ‘need for human balance’ and the ‘incarnation of balance’ within society. The ‘diminution of the machine’ would be ‘the renewal of life’. The ‘displaced person’ of modern atomised society would become ‘the integral personality’ living in ‘the great good place’ of the future.
Mumford’s vision is timely. His recommendations are all based on balance, proportion, appropriate scale, human dimension, harmony, equilibrium – all qualities systematically denied and uprooted by the capital economy’s endless, relentless pursuit of monetary value. Nearly one hundred years ago, the poet W.B. Yeats wrote of the displacement and dis-ease at the hollow heart of capital’s disenchanted machine world:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The capital system and its permanent revolution sets the world and the people in it to extremes. There is no centre ground, there is no ground upon which human beings can stand together, strike roots and grow in a mutual unfolding of purpose. The anarchy that is loosed upon the world is the anarchy of the rich and the powerful, a licence that is miscalled liberty. As R.H. Tawney said, freedom for the pike is death to the minnow. The result of this global anarchy is a global heating threatening to destroy the foundations of civilisation. A ‘progress’ care of money-grubbing human activity.
The crisis in the climate system is nothing less than an existential crisis. Human beings have been socialised to equate economic growth with material wealth and material wealth with happiness, freedom and progress. It is psychologically difficult for a species used to endlessly-expanding frontiers to comprehend, but the survival of human civilisation depends on coming to recognise and accept the fact that life flourishes only within natural limits. The capital system recognises no such limits and can recognise no such limits. Without endless accumulation, the capital economy is thrown into crisis. Without an expansion in its values, capital withers and dies, and takes the economy with it. Capital is a systemic denial of natural boundaries. And modern society has been built around this accumulative dynamic. The result is a collision course between an ever-expanding capital economy towards infinity and a planet of finite resources. And it won’t be long before human civilisation is rent asunder through the increasing stresses and strains of contrary pulls. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. And it is ‘mere’ anarchy. Order is better than chaos, and it is well within human grasp, so long as we have the nerve to impose those principles of harmony, balance, proportion and scale against an irresponsible capital system and restore economic life to its true place – a mere means to ends we have determined ourselves.
Climate crisis is the moment at which human beings have to stop running on the treadmill of endless production and consumption, step off, turn and face reality. And face ourselves in the process. In the temple of Apollo at Delphi were two inscriptions, ‘know thyself’ and ‘nothing to excess’. The questions we put to the Oracle of Delphi are really questions we should be putting to and answering ourselves. Climate change should be the moment we finally see through the vain promises of ‘progress’ and instead ask the profound questions of who we are, what we could and should be, what life is and could be, what kind of lives do we want to lead.
The crisis in the climate system will force human beings to stop hiding behind the impersonal historical process and finally, consciously, determine what humankind is and what it should become. Back in 1972, Theodore Roszak wrote the book Where the Wasteland Ends. Roszak describes urban-industrialism as ‘a failed cultural experiment’ and argues ‘that the time is at hand to replace it with the visionary commonwealth’.
A refusal to decide is a choice in itself, returning us to the default position of techno-urban industrialism. Except that the status quo is not an option. If humanity ‘chooses’ to continue living as it has been doing, then it will make a wasteland of its planetary home. Humanity now needs to stop, examine and redefine itself. Climate change is forcing us to ask questions about our environment, the world we have created, and in so doing it is forcing us to ask questions about ourselves – who we are and where we are going.
Whence Come We What Are We Whither Go We 1898 Gauguin
Pursuing the aphorism ren ding sheng tian ('man must conquer nature'), Mao’s China was turned into an environmental wasteland in decades. But Mao was only catching up with the west. Climate crisis is forcing humanity to resolve its primal predicament. Human beings are the intelligent ape, equipped with the ingenuity and aggression to challenge natural constraints, bring down much larger prey, explore and conquer new terrains, acquire resources beyond natural reach. By technique and organisation, humanity has conquered natural necessity. This is a source of hubristic pride. This conquest of nature is final proof of the human ability to break through and live beyond natural limits. The climate crisis has exposed this Promethean human self-image to be a delusion. Far from having conquered nature, human beings are finding themselves being increasingly enclosed by the environmental consequences of our industrial activity. Humanity is at bay, beset on all sides by the pressure over ever more scarce resources. And yet, still no action. The challenge of climate crisis has yet to provoke a commensurate response from us. Instead, for the most part, people refuse to abandon the mythology of material progress and thus cling pathetically to the machine. The bureaucratised world proceeds, in Max Weber’s phrase, ‘without regard for persons’. It’s the imperatives of the functions that matter, not the character of the functionaries. Individuals need no character to perform their functions within the machine; now they have no character. You are what you repeatedly do, wrote Aristotle. Human beings have the hearts of lions but live the lives of clerks. And, as Marx wrote, even lions get used to the bars on their cage.
Kenneth Clark ends his TV series and book Civilisation with the words that ‘the moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn't enough.’ By ‘heroic materialism’ he means the mechanical and industrial expansion achieved by the capital system. ‘The trouble is that there is still no centre.’ (Clark 1969: 347). The crisis in the climate system tells us that the age of heroism is over. Materialism has been exposed as a false philosophy. The promise of progress, defined as the endless accumulation of quantities, could never be redeemed. We can now see that. The illusion of progress could persist only so long as capital could carry on expanding its values to infinity. But we live on a planet of finite resources. There was always going to be a point when infinite ends would collide with finite means. At this stage, the tables and chairs are removed, the curtain is lifted, the pretty paintings are taken down and all we can see is the blank stone wall at the back of the cave. Progress was never anything more than flickering shadows on the wall. We have entered the age of reconciliation and restraint. It is the time of conversion. As Lewis Mumford wrote in Technics and Civilisation: ‘To increase conversion .. involves the social appropriation of natural resources, the replanning of agriculture and the maximum utilization of those regions in which kinetic energy in the form of sun, wind, and running water is abundantly available. The socialization of these sources of energy is a condition of their effective and purposive use. (Mumford 1986: 132).
All of which is well within human financial and technical and institutional capacity. Whether it is within human psychic capacity is another matter. We have been brought up to expect an ever increasing supply of material quantities. Now, it is clear, that there are, after all, such a thing as natural limits. We can no longer afford to live without restraint. We need to enter an era of rational restraint, recognising that freedom is not an absolute concept but is a relative concept, negotiated in social relationships with others and taking account of natural constraints. There is a song which repeats the line ‘enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think’. But if we continue to live in the moment in this manner, tomorrow will arrive even sooner than we could ever have thought.
Ostensibly, climate crisis is a controversy concerning chemicals: the greenhouse gases being emitted into the atmosphere as a result of human activity. But climate crisis is about much more than that, it is about different conceptions of human activity, about what it is to be a human being. The defenders of the capital system resent the whole notion of natural limits and consider such a notion an affront to their technological and industrial power. Hence the extent to which they attack the notion of environmental control and regulation with quasi-religious fervour. Capital is their god and capital must endlessly expand its values to infinity. The recognition of natural limits and the consequent acceptance of social and governmental restraints is rejected vehemently as limits upon self-fulfilment. They are true believers in the modernist religion of progress and the more that progress is denied, the more violent is the counter-reaction. Spreading from the USA and Australia, and extending across the carboniferous economies, demands to keep living, consuming and polluting at the expense of others – other parts of the world, future generations, other species – are being asserted as though ‘progress’ were a human right. This expansionary religion mistakes licence for liberty and refuses point blank to be constrained by laws, environmental regulations, health and safety, taxes. The economist Joseph Schumpeter argued for regulation for the long term general good in these terms – it is because the car has brakes that it is able to go so fast. Yet the libertarian view is to keep promoting deregulation, remove controls, speed out of control and then blame the car crash that inevitably follows upon the brakes rather than their absence. It’s all quite simplistic and primal in that it appeals to a basic instinct. These are the ‘primal spirits’ that the great religions and thinkers have always said require taming.
The libertarians appreciate the extent to which fossil fuels have granted the human ape amplification of its Palaeolithic dreams beyond natural constraints. The human species has enjoyed an extended frontier moment, living and consuming as though resources were in abundant and endless supply. The result is a human race characterised by a vicarious enjoyable mindlessness as it uses up its time and resources and destroys itself in short order.
Climate crisis makes clear the extent to which the frontier has closed and the golden age has gone. We are now into a world of natural limits setting a boundary on human action of all sides. And this means the recognition that freedom is based upon constraint. Clinging pitifully to the god of gain, a god that is failing them, the libertarians assert their freedom more vehemently and more violently, accusing all those calling for balance, order, restraint, equilibrium of being communists, eco-fascists, eco-zealots, alarmists, misanthropes, proponents of a new religion, New Age nonsense, pagans …. The violence of the reaction tells the truth that a sensitive nerve has been hit. It’s over and they know it.
The old politics of a division between left and right is outmoded. Indeed, parties and governments of both left and right are united in their attempts to breath life into the capitalist corpse, none of them seeing the irony of using public resources to keep the private economy afloat. It’s a fake socialism, a substitute for the real thing. The older politics retains a relevance to the extent that the climate problem is clearly related to the capital system, the accumulative imperative, class division and exploitation. But the new politics is about a division between those who remain wedded to the endless expansion of the capital system – ‘economic growth’ – and those who seek to restrain human activity within social relationships and natural boundaries. The former reject all impediments upon human activity, the latter argue that we must live within planetary limits. This new political division is organised around how we conceive the character of human freedom. Which side we are on depends upon whether we see freedom as something which is individual and which proceeds without limits, or whether we see constraints to be integral to a freedom that recognises the relation of each individual and all individuals, holding that all together are dependent upon nature’s life support systems.
So here we are, in the land beyond heroic materialism, a world in which the centre ground has dissolved, the natural frontiers are closing in and the need for human beings to accommodate to the new necessity has become imperative. The space for heroism is diminishing rapidly.
I suspect that even though governments and politicians know this, they will continue to sell out the people they represent. The people that they don’t represent – the future generations who don’t yet exist – can forget about having their interests being taken into consideration at all. The simple fact is that under the capital system capital must simply expand its values. The process of accumulation must be facilitated, it is the dynamic upon which modern civilisation rests. Upon this central mechanism rests investment, employment, income and the essentials of everyday living. The creation of a new civilisation is not on the to-do list of governments and politicians. Government must facilitate the process of private capital accumulation as a condition of its own power, resources and legitimacy. So it should come as no surprise to find that very few in the government and parties aiming at government are willing to recognise, let alone accept, the implications of living within natural boundaries, let alone of living with future generations in mind. They tell themselves that technological innovation will enable us to escape natural constraints and open up another frontier, permitting us to dump our effluence onto other people, in other places or other times.
The elephant in the room that everyone knows about but no-one dares call by its name is capital. There is still a presumption that ‘economic growth’ – that bland euphemism for capital accumulation - is the magic formula which allows us to escape the conflicts and crises that are looming. Economic growth is the panacea. Indeed, so powerful is the fetishism of economic growth that, even living in the middle of a long, slow depression, the mere promise of economic growth suffices to blind many to the key issues of social justice, redistribution of income and power, the need to challenge irresponsible elites. Instead, a growing economy encourages our animal spirits, fostering the illusion that it is possible to keep buying our way out of trouble, gambling our way out of reality. But it’s an illusion. Like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only at the expense of multiplying it tomorrow. The obsessive pursuit of economic growth allows us to borrow time today but at punitive rates of interest exacted by nature sometime tomorrow.
Unless that central accumulative dynamic of capital is addressed, we will never have that centre ground upon which to restore balance, proportion and scale. The centre can never hold for long under the relentless expansionary pressure of capital accumulation. The assertion that this is the way things have to be is the language of ideologues and tyrants, ‘prophets with armies at their backs’ as Isaiah Berlin would say, people with a single vision of the good life and who are prepared to sacrifice the lives of others in its attainment. Such people are the proselytisers of the capital system, ensuring that economic growth is never questioned, never challenged. Even if, by some miracle, these climate conferences manage to postpone climate catastrophe, the central dynamic of accumulation means that it's only a matter of time before economic growth runs into an ecological constraint of one form or another: oil, water, phosphate, soil. And environmental crisis will continue to provoke existential crisis until we find the nerve to address the underlying cause: capital’s endless expansion of its values cannot be accommodated within the planet’s natural boundaries.
The attainment of what Lewis Mumford called the ‘great good place’ requires an organic transformation that establishes the renewal of life within natural boundaries. Far from being a diminution of freedom, the recognition of such boundaries is the condition of freedom. Freedom is bounded. The incarnation of balance is based upon the recognition of limits. Limits imply the possibility of fulfilment and enable the pursuit and attainment of feasible goals. By contrast, an unlimited expansion can never attain fulfilment, only an endless of extension of ambition into infinity. Climate crisis is an opportunity for human beings to recognise their dependence upon natural boundaries, accommodating themselves to those boundaries and thus pursuing realisable goals by light of nature’s parsimony, prudence and moderation. ‘Know thyself’ and ‘nothing to excess’.