To walk like ghosts or to get politically engaged again.
In a scene out of a "Walking Dead" nightmare, Hamburg's streets teemed with "zombies" in a statement over political participation ahead of Friday's G20 summit.
A performance piece orchestrated by the 1,000 Gestalten (1,000 figures) collective saw 1,000 actors descend upon the city's center on Wednesday, shuffling and clawing through the streets in eerie silence before a single demonstrator shed his zombie facade to reveal colorful clothes beneath. The rest of the group proceeded to follow suit, with the streets erupting into a rainbow of colour.
The group's orchestrators said the production was designed to emphasize that change can come from ‘ordinary’ individuals working together. "We cannot wait until change happens from the world's most powerful, we have to show political and social responsibility -- all of us -- now!" a 1,000 Gestalten spokesman said in a statement.
"We want to recall how identity-generating compassion and fellowship are for society. Our action is another sign that many people no longer want to accept the destructive effects of capitalism. What ultimately rescues us is not our account, but someone who hands us our hand."
This haunting protest against a megamachine politics that is complicit in a planetary unravelling makes me thing of one of my favourite composers, Edward Elgar, who, just before the First World War said: “We walk like ghosts.” He composed Sospiri, (meaning "sighs") at the time. War broke out 28 July 1914. Two weeks later, on 15 August 1914, Sospiri was first performed. We've been fighting that war and sighing this lament ever since.
Here's the beautiful lament of Elgar: Sospiri
Let's stop walking like ghosts, let's reclaim the future from the dead hands of money and power and the death dealing lies and delusions of the megamachine. I want to hear some music, not the tuneless noise of institutionalised politics and power, and the way it deadens people to realities, makes them cold and indifferent. “My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require.” (Edward Elgar, Edward Elgar: Letters Of A Lifetime). We need the sweet symphony of paradise, diverse voices coming together and singing as one. I don't want to be left sighing for the beautiful world we could have had. As the revelation of the rainbow of colours in this creative protest showed, we don’t have to be haunted by the ghosts of the catastrophic future to come, we don’t need to be lamenting the beautiful world we have destroyed.
The point of this protest was to call on individuals to act as eco-citizens and, as a community, to come to assume a self- and a collective responsibility.
People walking like zombies symbolizes “a society that has lost faith in solidarity and in which the individual struggles only for his own advance.” The shedding of the costumes of death to reveal the colourful clothes underneath showed how to create new solidarities by recovering our cooperative instincts, instincts that have been diverted, deadened and destroyed by the economics of selfish interest. The campaign succeeded in mobilizing broad layers of civil society, with more than 1,000 volunteers involved before and behind the scenes, and people from more than 85 cities across Europe registering as performers and helpers, and more than 20,000 euros raised in donations.
“This is the first performance art piece of the 1000 GESTALTEN. But not the last….I think we live in a time of new democratic movement. All over the world more people go on demonstrations, we see phenomenons like Science March, Woman’s March or Pulse of Europe. We see our performance as part of this movement,” said Kämmerer.
The collective explained ahead of the event that zombies were selected to represent political disengagement. "G20: Welcome to Hell" was the greeting given, because Hell is where the political elites, wedded to corporate interests and fossil fuel lobbies, in the grip of a global heat machine, are taking us. The shedding of the grey, immobilised zombie costumes and the revelation of a rainbow of colourful clothes underneath represented the throwing off of political disengagement in favour of the political reengagement required to keep us out of Hell.
“The goal of our performance today is to move the people in their hearts, to give them the motivation to get politically engaged again,” event organizer Catalina Lopez told Reuters TV.
“We want to create an image, because we believe in the power of images… we want to motivate people to take part. To free themselves from their crusted shells, to take part in the political process.”
Zombie-like protesters march through Hamburg ahead of G20 Summit PROTESTERS ARE DRESSING UP AS ZOMBIES TO PROTEST GOVERNMENTS AND BANKS AT THE G20 SUMMIT
Hannah Arendt wrote on the banality of evil in the twentieth century. With this phrase, she captures the normalisation of actions that do real harm to others, a moral and cultural desensitising to the reality of evil. The most salient characteristic of evil in a century of total war has been its impersonal nature. Since the First World War, society has been characterised by the mobilisation of and participation in the organised hatreds of entire nations. People look at the consequences and express horror as though someone else is responsible. It is as though nobody wants consciously to do evil, but evil gets done anyway. The shadow of death and its active production lies over us. It is not just the scale of death that is striking in the modern world but its organised preparation. Such death, war and all that follows it in terms of famine and disease, not to mention the psychological scars, is ‘the central moral as well as material fact of our time.’ Gil Elliot wrote these words before the threat of climate change came to be appreciated. It should come as no surprise that a society which produces death as an active principle of organisation, that routinizes that production, and that normalises it through death-dealing delusions, should issue in a collective threat to the conditions of civilised life in the form of global heating. The crisis in the climate system is an expression of the crisis in the social system, a loss of purpose, meaning and value. We find ourselves imprisoned within specific social relations within which certain powerful agents and decision-makers, in the grip of systemic and institutional imperatives, undertake actions that create a veritable world of the dead that first rivals, then subverts, overwhelms and finally eclipses the world of the living in size and substance. In the end, we all become complicit at various levels in the major atrocities that mark the modern world, atrocities undertaken not merely by clearly evil leaders and followers, but by bureaucrats and accountants, by impersonal institutional and economic routine, laws and force. Death on this scale is not accidental but is the result of deliberate, organised purpose embedded in the social and institutional fabric. We live in a psychic prison that generates a sociopathic insanity as the normal character structure of the society we live in, a systematic corruption of thought and values and senses. We have to come out of those shadows. We have to protest, reject and overthrow the corruption and, indeed, self-corruption of our ideals and aspirations and the way that this corrupting process generates a deep and far-reaching despair amongst those who would normally be expected to seek change for the better. We must not let the defeat and destruction of our hopes turn into a hopeless cynicism, recover the courage and show the commitment to turn this inverted social world around. The frustration, defeat and perversion of our hopes through co-option within the routinisation and normalisation of evil within the megamachine cannot ever revoke the natural force of human beings, the inextinguishable fire, that future promise of health and happiness that could ever come to be incarnated in the peaceable kingdom.
...Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;
But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
George Orwell, The Crystal Spirit
The system defeat our hopes, but that defeat but a spark of defiance remains; it may co-opt us at various levels, but we remain intransigent; it may deceive us as to where our best interests lie, but those interests remain our birthright, they may be perverted and diverted, but they remain our possession, to be reactivated in moments of self-activity and self-creativity. In short, alienation is an active condition, never a permanent ossification, and a process that can be turned around. We remain in contact with the irrefutable touchstone of truth; the force and myth of the megamachine can always be challenged, subverted and overthrown. Certainly, time and again we have witnessed human beings implicated in evil and madness in response to external imperatives, orders, desperate situations. And we have seen the times of the megamachine grow madder with the progress of unreason as an advanced malady that originates from the hollow heart of the disenchanted world. In the end, though, the grounds for hope lie in that unshatterable crystal spirit that contains the ineliminable potential for human recreation and recovery of being. The realisation of social justice, ecological health, sanity, solidarity, peace, freedom, democracy, equality begins with a call for any one of them, or any combination of them, ultimately for all of them together. And that realisation for all humankind begins when some give voice to our hope. Co-opted, deceived, beaten, we can never be completely defeated, but engage in a protracted struggle and return to contest the terrain with those who would empty it of all value and meaning. We rise, we return, we stop walking like ghosts, we resume the struggle for health and happiness, and that struggle will continue to the end.
We need to. Because the end is coming for far too many species on this planet. The Earth's sixth extinction is underway, grace of a humankind acting without thought or consideration, consuming the world with greed, drifting to their own self-annihilation.
Researchers talk of ‘biological annihilation’ as new study reveals that billions of populations of animals have been lost in recent decades.
A “biological annihilation” of wildlife in recent decades means a sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history is already well underway and is more severe than previously feared, according to new research.
Scientists analysed both common and rare species and found billions of regional or local populations have been lost. They blame human overpopulation and overconsumption for the crisis and warn that it threatens the survival of human civilisation, although there remains a short window of time in which to act.
The new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, eschews the normally sober tone of scientific papers and calls the massive loss of wildlife a “biological annihilation” that represents a “frightening assault on the foundations of human civilisation”.
Prof Gerardo Ceballos, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, who led the work, said: “The situation has become so bad it would not be ethical not to use strong language.”
The scientists conclude: “The resulting biological annihilation obviously will have serious ecological, economic and social consequences. Humanity will eventually pay a very high price for the decimation of the only assemblage of life that we know of in the universe.”
They say, while action to halt the decline remains possible, the prospects do not look good: “All signs point to ever more powerful assaults on biodiversity in the next two decades, painting a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life.”
“The serious warning in our paper needs to be heeded because civilisation depends utterly on the plants, animals, and microorganisms of Earth that supply it with essential ecosystem services ranging from crop pollination and protection to supplying food from the sea and maintaining a livable climate,” Ehrlich told the Guardian. Other ecosystem services include clean air and water.
We don’t need denial, drift or despair.
We need to check denial with respect to problems and solutions. That means giving short shrift to those who remain unpersuaded by the wealth of resources on climate science that are available, and expect us to engage in lengthy discussion meeting all-too-familiar objections. No. Those days are over. And it means paying closer attention to the solutions that are available. Here, debate is at least justified, in that it is based on tacit recognition that there is indeed a problem, plus it involves people in working on resolving that problem, building a sense of will, legitimacy and ownership. But we don’t need drift here. The most dangerous denial has moved from the science – where the evidence is overwhelming – to the practical implications of acting on the science. I say there is legitimate scope for deliberation and debate here – politics is the field of practical reason, it involves consent and agreement, not dictatorship – and it is in this process that human beings come to determine their way of life. But that determination has to come quickly, for any viable way of life to be possible in the future. For some, it is already too late. And they tell us endlessly that it is so. I have little time for it. It would be time better spent in either coming to terms with the failure of the ‘men as gods’ delusion of the technological conquest of nature, or in climate litigation, at least threatening to settle accounts with those who have brought us to this.
I don’t think it’s over yet. I don’t like the numbers. I don’t like predictions based on optimism and pessimism either. That’s never been the way history has been made. Some of the greatest human achievements in history have been won in the teeth of contrary facts and events. Nothing of any worth has been achieved by those so without hope they didn’t think it worth making the effort to even try. I make this criticism cautiously, because I have friends who are called ‘doomsters’, and I know they have spent lifetimes making the effort to protect the planet against those who would exploit it to death. And I know that there is plenty of evidence to back their case that we face bleak times indeed. But I have to declare that I am in agreement with Michael Mann when he says that he is ‘not a fan of this sort of doomist framing.’
The risks of unmitigated climate change are real enough, but we should avoid overstating the science so as to give the impression that climate problems are unsolvable, feeding a sense of doom, inevitability and hopelessness that paralyses the will to act. ‘The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now, is overwhelming on its own. There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.’
I’m not a fan of speculating one way or the other, and try not to comment at all. We cannot know that we will fail if we try. We do know that we will fail if we do not try. I hold views which give me a transcendent hope fosters the effort to make a difference for the better. I can never succumb to climate fatigue and give up the commitment to live well on this good earth. We can never be doomed. But not all share those beliefs. I think this is an existential crisis for all of those who subscribe to the view that self-legislating reason in politics and ethics, scientific advance, technological innovation and industrial expansion gave human beings the power to create Heaven on Earth. I can understand why those who believed in the ‘men as gods’ thesis may well be overcome by feelings of doom. Their delusions are ending in self-destruction, self-made man the master of nowhere and nothing, coming undone. It was always going to end thus, and I’m not interested in the whining and crying of would-be-gods as they are crushed by their own diabolical powers.
Frankly, though, if the doomsters are right and the situation is hopeless, then there is nothing more hopeless than the philosophy that says it is so. And I don’t believe that anyone has that level of knowledge and certainty. Dante’s Hell is full of people who foreclosed on the future out of despair. To that extent, there is always hope. And we should act on it. We are not ghosts and we are not the living dead.