UNCHAINING THE WORLD
We are facing some hard truths and hard realities as the crisis in the climate system starts to bite.
Below are a couple of articles worth considering at length.
The Great Grief: How To Cope with Losing Our World
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/05/14/great-grief-how-cope-losing-our-world
"Climate scientists overwhelmingly say that we will face unprecedented warming in the coming decades. Those same scientists, just like you or I, struggle with the emotions that are evoked by these facts and dire projections. My children—who are now 12 and 16—may live in a world warmer than at any time in the previous 3 million years, and may face challenges that we are only just beginning to contemplate, and in many ways may be deprived of the rich, diverse world we grew up in. How do we relate to – and live – with this sad knowledge?"
Here is the second article:
The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit.
"The scenarios that show a high likelihood of avoiding 2°C also presume policy regimes that are positively utopian: a rising price on carbon, harmonized across every country in the world; the availability, maturation, and rapid deployment of every known low-carbon technology; all bets paying off, for 50 years straight. It would be quite a run of luck."
Not a message to be taking to bed.
"The obvious truth about global warming is this: barring miracles, humanity is in for ...."
https://www.facebook.com/bru.pearce/posts/10155606488325002
NO HAPPY ENDING
http://kennorphan.com/2015/05/15/no-happy-ending/
Game over? Governments know we will not break our fossil fuel addiction? Of course there's no consideration of future generations - it's not simply that they don't exist, it's that they won't exist.
Not a good future envisaged here.
"There is no happy ending to this story as it is written today. When the first spill happens there will be no way to clean it as no technology exists. There will be no one who will be able to stop the gushing of the earth’s toxic blood into the sea. The wealthy will jet away to their seclusion and count their money while the planet burns; and the poor of the world will shoulder the hardest burdens our civilization has wrought. Countless species, some yet unknown, will die silent deaths in obscurity."
The facts on climate change are not encouraging. The trends and tendencies favour those who are predicting a bleak future.
Facts on Climate Change
http://www.climate-change-guide.com/facts-on-climate-change.html
I'll stick with "building solutions together". There are solutions but we need to coordinate and concentrate force. Concerted action and coordination at the top needs to be buttressed by self-socialisation below.
"If we are to find a way to solve the climate crisis, we need to not only collaborate in taking action, but we need to join forces in spreading awareness on mankind's greatest challenge.
Millions of lives and over a million species are a stake. Choosing to make climate change mitigation a number priority is not merely a political choice; rather, it is a moral duty."
What are the Effects of Climate Change?
http://www.climate-change-guide.com/effects-of-climate-change.html
I'm avoiding predictions. I’m thinking of a quote attributed to Martin Luther here, that if he knew that the world was going to end tomorrow, he’d plant a tree. I’m writing a book called Being and Place. It should be re-titled: Here is the World we could have had.’ That's what's so galling about this failure to respond effectively in response to the climate crisis, an eco-civilisation was all so eminently doable all those years ago.
I'm seeing heads go down now in the environmental movement now, people admitting failure. I'll just say this, get your heads up, because at least you tried, and still are trying in this decisive year. I know all kinds of people who have been making all kinds of contributions on this issue, from scientists and academics to community builders and climate activists, to artists, poets, tree planters, the lot. You know who you are, you are out there. And the failure is not yours. Let's place that failure firmly where it belongs, with those who have had the money, the resources, the power to act for the long term common good, but instead continued to serve the systemic and institutional imperatives of accumulation and political aggrandisement. I think such people are called 'realists'. Their realism has brought us to this. I'll salute the people who have given their time and talent over the years for this, the Last Great Cause. I'm not sure if it's a Lost Cause now. The kind of changes that will work are civilisational changes, changes in patterns of behaviour, social identities, and they take a long time. We haven't got it. There has been a failure to re-design our institutions. And we lack social content and structural capacity to act. We can do nothing but rely on governments subject to economic constraints and corporate capture to somehow break free of the iron grip and impose some semblance of climate sense. John Ruskin wrote that we survived the Dark Ages by ‘the skin of our teeth’. It was close, but survive we did. I’m not sure the facts we were facing back then were on the scale of the wild facts we are facing now. But we have greater technological power, greater communications, greater connections now, of course ….
We know the facts. The response to those facts depend on political institutions, economic relations, and social practices, and values. Have a look at ours, and see how much needs to change. This conflicts me big time. Anyone connected with, with responsibility for and love of the young, anyone with respect for those who came before, is going to do all they can and fight for the slightest possibilities for the human betterment. We are a familial species. Our tragedy has been that our cooperative sensibilities have been hijacked by a minority of free riders and turned to exploitative, destructive private ends, and we have been unable to organise to reclaim our social power. The prospects are dire, but there is something admirable in the numbers of individual men and women the world over who have found the courage and the faith, so singularly lacking in those with money and power, to try to overturn the rapacious, Earth-hating hubris that is consuming this beautiful planet, the people who continue steadfastly to take a stand and give voice to values of human and planetary health and well-being.
I am now reading the Pope being denounced as a communist. Frankly, in light of the global economic crisis, financial scandals and ecological degradation, I don’t think we should consider that as a term of abuse any more. If it is communist to denounce naked power, stupid greed, and callous self-interest for being the worthless deceits and monstrous frauds they are, and to demand their replacement by something that respects the life and dignity of all human beings and, further, embraces the fellowship of all living creatures, then we should be proud to call ourselves so. Or any name at all that adheres to these values. I don't care for names, and I've no faith in idols. There is an idolatry of words just as there is an idolatry of things, and I despise both. We can betray principles through allegiance to a symbol. It has been done many times in history, until all the great promises of politics and religion have taken petrified form in some empty, repressive system. We know the values. We give them life by practising them as best we can. And it is to those who share those values of social and ecological justice, and who continue to practise them in the most inhospitable political terrain, that I’d like to wish all the best in the dark times that undoubtedly lie ahead.
I'd say that action addressing climate change to get us through by the skin of our teeth is doable …. just. So it is worthwhile continuing to push for government action, cuts in emissions, transition to a low carbon economy (at least), renewable energy, you know the list. Because if there is a chance to preserve the conditions of civilised life, however slim, we are morally obligated to take it. But the changes required are deep, they are existential. The latter day Furies of war, social breakdown, extinction of species, climate change and global warming will not be appeased by economic growth or technological sophistication. I have news for all those who still believe in the promise of 'progress', it is here, you have arrived at your destination.
Forget technological messiahs, nothing and no-one can save us from ourselves but ourselves. Technology is us, an extension of who we are, as greedy, stupid and violent, or as wise. Pulled further and further out of our biospheric matrix, we risk becoming orphans of our technology. And there’s a need to qualify what is meant by ‘ourselves’ here. It means anything but a self-absorption. The search for community must go beyond the dualism of individualism and communitarianism, beyond the polarity of capitalism and socialism, insofar as these ideologies concern merely the terms by which the Earth is possessed and its spoils divided up. The problem with these systems is not that they are materialistic but that they are not materialist enough. They make 'man' the measure of all things. There is more to life than this. We need a reference point that is more expansive than individual or group expressions of ego. We need to see ourselves as dependent parts of a greater whole. Clever and capable, no doubt, but dependent all the same. Man may be the measurer of value, but is not the measure of all value. We can think, use concepts, categorise and define and value without being guilty of the worst excesses of anthropocentrism.
And we need more than our technological powers, we need to engage our moral capacities and see ourselves in the face of the other, and not just human life, but human and natural communities together. We need that transcendental hope to draw us out of our minimal selves into the maximal community of life.
And that community is a world beyond possession. Too often, challenges to the dominant social order are couched in the same terms of dominance. Take this famous quote from Karl Marx from the Manifesto of the Communist Party:
‘Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!’ (Marx, MCP Rev1848 1973).
What world to ‘win’? What does this ‘winning’ entail? We need to pull well clear of attempts to conquer nature and take the world as our possession. We need to dispense with the naive faith that technological mastery of the world will produce human freedom and happiness, and we need to discard the naive faith in science and technology as benevolent masters. They are not. Listen to this from a social scientist in 1972:
"Deliberate control, once begun, would soon benefit science and technology, which in turn would facilitate further hereditary improvement, which again would extend science, and so on in a self-reinforcing spiral without limit. In other words, when man has conquered his own biological evolution he will have laid the basis for conquering everything else. The universe will be his, at last." (Davis, 1972, p. 379). That view is not just naive, it is dangerous, it puts science and technology in the service of powerful forces within specific social relations. We are entitled to ask just who, in the end, will be this master of the universe. For if 'man' does ever succeed in conquring his own biological evolution, then he will be the vanquished as well as the victory, making any conquest self-contradictory. This is a hollow victory if ever there was one.
We need a genuine revolution, one that goes beyond contesting the terms by which the world is possessed and divided up to achieve a peace on Earth beyond possessive relationships. It's not only the workers who need to lose their chains, but the world as a whole. That’s the world to win that we need to aim for, a classless society which has put an end to relations of domination and exploitation.
Socialist revolution for Marx meant more than the victory of one class over another, something which merely perpetuated a class society in possession of the Earth.
Marx thought we could win this world, that by social organisation we could reclaim our alienated powers and reorganise and exercise them as social powers. Weber’s pessimistic assessment is that the machine world we have built, the ‘iron cage’ which determines our lives with ‘irresistible force’ was beyond our control. In Politics as a Vocation, Weber gives a pessimistic prognosis: 'Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but the proletarian has lost his rights' (Weber 1970: 128).
We need to understand this, and make it central to our political life. The more we drift away from the sources of life, the more we degrade and destroy our life support systems, the less of a world there will be to 'win'. Until one day there really will be 'nothing', and all the political struggles and class conflicts will count for nothing - both victor and vanquished will have nothing to win.
'There is no wealth but life', wrote John Ruskin. In The Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx argued that there are two sources of wealth, labour and nature. The problem is that we have an economic system that is parasitic on both and a political system which is its servant. The world of politics deals with surrogate and secondary realities, its concerns and priorities becoming plainly delusional the more distanced it is from the sources of life and wealth.
Weber’s point is that, in conquering nature by technique and organisation, we have set up a machine system which is beyond the control of any class. The victory of one class or another means nothing when it is the system as such that is in control. We have, effectively, lost one world, the natural world upon which we depend, and become imprisoned in another world, a second nature of our own making.
Clearly, we need the end of class society and an end to these endless conflicts over the terms of the Earth’s possession. Weber would doubt that possibility.
We need to value 'who' we are and 'where' we are. Only the recovery of warm, affective ties, bonds and solidarities in the context of closely integrated human and natural communities will be sufficient to lay these Furies to rest and bring peace to the world. And that requires a transformation in our way of life, a recovery of values and a moral growth on our part. And just so much time ...
Look after the skin on your teeth, because we are going to need it. But success or fail, heads up. Like Jack Nicholson trying the almost impossible in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, at least we tried. And still are.
And there is still .. just ... time. "The impossible missions are the only ones that succeed" said Jacques Cousteau. I do hope so.
There’s a little book that I bought for £1 from a second hand book shop in Liverpool back in the early 1990s, and it had a lasting influence on me. The Alternative Future by Roger Garaudy. The book concludes with these lines: ‘Anyone who talks about a model of society that has to be created is invariably treated as utopian. That is how the aristocrats reasoned before 1789: “It has never been seen; it exists nowhere. Therefore it is impossible.” The revolutionaries surprised such forecasts. “They did not know it was impossible, so they did it.”’
There’s more than wishful thinking involved here, or some passive reliance on ‘things turning out well’, when all things seem contrary. Check out the work of theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman or Owen Flanagan. We live in a ceaselessly creative universe; we are co-creators of this universe. We can never have complete knowledge but must always act with faith, courage and imagination, use the practical tools that evolution has equipped us with and live our lives forward into mystery. We co-create our futures. And the future can be more than the present enlarged, if – if – we can intervene and turn threatening trends and tendencies in other directions.
Just to add, though, none of this means that our politics has to be 'one big change'. There are a lot of lesser changes that are perfectly feasible and well within institutional reach, even without a substantial social transformation.
For instance:
We can isolate the big emitters and polluters.
Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions.
"There are thousands of oil, gas and coal producers in the world," climate researcher and author Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in Colorado said. "But the decision makers, the CEOs, or the ministers of coal and oil if you narrow it down to just one person, they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two."
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/20/90-companies-man-made-global-warming-emissions-climate-change
Oh, and this is worth a read too.
Pope Francis endorses climate action petition to world leaders.
"Climate change hits the poorest first and hardest, and will leave an unnecessarily dire legacy for future generations. We Catholics need to step up against climate change and raise a strong voice asking political leaders to take action urgently."
The Pope has urged Catholics around the world to sign a new faith-inspired petition calling on world leaders to limit global warming to 1.5C, shortly after declaring that there is 'clear, definitive and ineluctable ethical imperative to act' on climate change.
"Once Pope Francis' encyclical on ecology is published in June, it is expected that action will continue to intensify."
It had better. We are going to see very shortly. But well done to the Pope. I shall try to find the reference, but I remember historian Eric Hobsbawm, lifelong Marxist, Communist and materialist posing a difficult question for all would be reformers and revolutionaries out there. He noted that, in recent years, the only leader of a major institution or government or political party to have denounced capitalism as such, not just this or that part of it, has been the Pope, and that was Pope Benedict too, not the current 'communist' Pope. As we live through economic crisis, financial anarchy and ecological destruction, not one leader of a major social democratic/labour party in the west has denounced capitalism as such. The Pope has. Interesting.
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/2870951/pope_francis_endorses_climate_action_petition_to_world_leaders.html
Maybe we will, after all, recover some sense of the world as objectively valuable, come to see ourselves as part of something bigger.
Max Weber described capitalist rationalisation as 'the disenchantment of the world'. That disenchantment has stripped the world of values, worth, purpose, ends. The result is that we now live in a steel hard cage, a machine world of monetary values and system imperatives.
'This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the 'saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment'. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.' (Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1985).
Weber paints a gloomy picture of the future to come: 'Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but the proletarian has lost his rights' (Weber 1970: 128).
And that's what progress as external conquest of nature amounts to, a hollowing out of the soul of the world and the endless accumulation of material quantities powered by fossil fuels. The result is the icy hardening of the inner and outer life in the machine world - and a whole lot of global heating.
This is probably the last year that politics may actually mean something... I affirm a politics of creative self-actualisation. And that kind of politics is linked to utopianism, in the sense of connecting values to a vision of an alternative future, the good society, and the practice to bring that future about.
Here's the case for a politics of the good society that is utopian in the best sense, affirming a voluntary, collective effort based on the active consent and involvement of individuals as knowledgeable and creative change agents.
'Underlying all forms of utopianism is the conviction that optimistic, imaginative thought and action are capable of bringing about a change towards not only a new social existence, but a better one. The sources of such optimism are, in the last analysis, difficult to define, and it may be that the only logical justification for optimism is that optimism seems to be a characteristic of the individual's psychology and (arguably) biology. What would life be like if optimism were eradicated from the individual's personality and his creative imagination? And what, furthermore, would be the consequences if optimism were eradicated from our attempts to comprehend and mould the society in which we live? In this book we have tried to show that a certain kind of optimism is a precondition for a worthwhile earthly existence. As long as man has the capacity to identify evil, then he is likely to feel the urge to transcend evil and seek goodness and beauty in his personal relationships, his artistic creations, his religious life and his social and political organization. Historically, beginning in the civilization of the ancient Greeks, the study of politics first emerged as a rigorous method of assisting man in this quest for the good life. Consciousness of the difference between existing reality and a non-existent, but potentially existent, future - a morally desirable future - was one of the most important ingredients of this quest. Unless we feel absolutely confident that we have now reached the limits of our capabilities and creativity that we have advanced to perfection already, to dispense with utopianism would be to renounce a large part of what it is to be a political animal.' (B Goodwin and K Taylor, The Politics of Utopia 1982).
For now, I'm biting my tongue, controlling my anger at those who have brought us to this, embracing sadness and loss, thinking of practical solutions within larger visions ... and going to bed. 'Sleep on it'. Let the subconscious mind do some work. Earthcare, Earthdream. Magic to be worked.