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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Delusion Revolution: We're on the Road to Extinction and in Denial
  • Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2008 15:31:54 -0600


"we will need ways of organizing ourselves to help us live in a world with
less energy and fewer material goods. We have to all develop the skills
needed for that world (such as gardening with fewer inputs, food preparation
and storage, and basic tinkering), and we will need to recover a deep sense
of community that has disappeared from many of our lives."

The Delusion Revolution: We're on the Road to Extinction and in Denial
http://www.alternet.org/story/95126/the_delusion_revolution%3A_we%27re_on_the_road_to_extinction_and_in_denial_/
By Robert Jensen, AlterNet. Posted August 15, 2008.

Our current way of life is unsustainable. We are the first species that will
have to self-consciously impose limits on ourselves if we are to survive.

A version of this essay was delivered to the Interfaith Summer Institute for
Justice, Peace, and Social Movements at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver
on Aug. 11, 2008. Audio files of the talk and discussion are available online
from the Radio Ecoshock Show.

"The old future's gone," John Gorka sings. "We can't get to there from here."

That insight from Gorka, one of my favorite singer/songwriters chronicling
the complexity of our times, deserves serious reflection. Tonight I want to
argue that the way in which we humans have long imagined the future must be
rethought, as the scope and depth of the cascading crises we face become
painfully clearer day by day.

Put simply: We're in trouble, on all fronts, and the trouble is wider and
deeper than most of us have been willing to acknowledge. We should struggle
to build a road on which we can walk through those troubles -- if such a road
is possible -- but I doubt it's going to look like any path we had previously
envisioned, nor is it likely to lead anywhere close to where most of us
thought we were going.

Whatever our individual conception of the future, we all should re-evaluate
the assumptions on which those conceptions have been based. This is a moment
in which we should abandon any political certainties to which we may want to
cling. Given humans' failure to predict the place we find ourselves today, I
don't think that's such a radical statement. As we stand at the edge of the
end of the ability of the ecosystem in which we live to sustain human life as
we know it, what kind of hubris would it take to make claims that we can know
the future?

It takes the hubris of folks such as biologist Richard Dawkins, who once
wrote that "our brains ... are big enough to see into the future and plot
long-term consequences." Such a statement is a reminder that human egos are
typically larger than brains, which emphasizes the dramatic need for a
drastic humility.

I read that essay by Dawkins after hearing the sentence quoted by Wes
Jackson, an important contemporary scientist and philosopher working at the
Land Institute. Jackson's work has most helped me recognize an obvious and
important truth that is too often ignored: For all our cleverness, we human
beings are far more ignorant than knowledgeable. Human accomplishments --
skyscrapers, the Internet, the mapping of the human genome -- seduce us into
believing the illusion that we can control a world that is complex beyond our
ability to understand. Jackson suggests that we would be wise to recognize
this and commit to "an ignorance-based worldview" that would anchor us in the
intellectual humility we will need if we are to survive the often toxic
effects of our own cleverness.

Let's review a few of the clever political and theological claims made about
the future. Are there any folks here who accept the neoliberal claim that the
triumph of so-called "free market" capitalism in electoral democracies is the
"end of history" and that there is left for us only tweaking that system to
solve any remaining problems? Would anyone like to defend the idea that
"scientific socialism" not only explains history but can lay out before us
the blueprint for a glorious future? Would someone like to offer an
explanation of how the pending return of the messiah is going to secure for
believers first-class tickets to the New Jerusalem?

To reject these desperate attempts to secure the future is not to suggest
there is no value in any aspect of these schools of thought, nor is my
argument that there's nothing possible for us to know or that the knowledge
shouldn't guide our action. Instead, I simply want to emphasize the limits of
human intelligence and suggest that we be realistic. By realistic, all I mean
is that we should avoid the instinct to make plans based on the world we wish
existed and instead pay attention to the world that exists. Such realistic
thinking demands that we get radical.

Realistically Radical

Imagine that you are riding comfortably on a sleek train. You look out the
window and see that not too far ahead the tracks end abruptly and that the
train will derail if it continues moving ahead. You suggest that the train
stop immediately and that the passengers go forward on foot. This will
require a major shift in everyone's way of traveling, of course, but it
appears to you to be the only realistic option; to continue barreling forward
is to court catastrophic consequences. But when you propose this course of
action, others who have grown comfortable riding on the train say, "Well, we
like the train, and arguing that we should get off is not realistic."

In the contemporary United States, we are trapped in a similar delusion. We
are told that it is "realistic" to capitulate to the absurd idea that the
systems in which we live are the only systems possible or acceptable because
some people like them and wish them to continue. But what if our current
level of First World consumption is exhausting the ecological basis for life?
Too bad -- the only "realistic" options are those that take that lifestyle as
non-negotiable. What if real democracy is not possible in a nation-state with
300 million people? Too bad -- the only "realistic" options are those that
take this way of organizing a polity as immutable. What if the hierarchies on
which our lives are based are producing extreme material deprivation for the
oppressed and a kind of dull misery among the privileged? Too bad -- the only
"realistic" options are those that accept hierarchy as inevitable.

Let me offer a different view of reality: (1) We live in a system that, taken
as a whole, is unsustainable, not only over the long haul but in the near
term, and (2) unsustainable systems can't be sustained.

How's that for a profound theoretical insight? Unsustainable systems can't be
sustained. It's hard to argue with that; the important question is whether or
not we live in a system that is truly unsustainable. There's no way to prove
definitively such a sweeping statement, but look around at what we've built
and ask yourself whether you really believe this world can go forward
indefinitely, or even for more than a few decades? Take a minute to ponder
the end of the era of cheap fossil energy, the lack of viable large-scale
replacements for that energy, and the ecological consequences of burning what
remains of it. Consider the indicators of the health of the planet --
groundwater contamination, topsoil loss, levels of toxicity. Factor in the
widening inequality in the world, the intensity of the violence, and the
desperation that so many feel at every level of society.

Based on what you know about these trends, do you think this is a sustainable
system? When you take a moment to let all this wash over you, does it feel to
you that this is a sustainable system? If you were to let go of your
attachment to this world, is there any way to imagine that this is a
sustainable system? Consider all the ways you have to understand the world:
Is there anything in your field of perception that tells you that we're on
the right track?

To be radically realistic in the face of all this is to recognize the failure
of basic systems and to abandon the notion that all we need do is recalibrate
the institutions that structure our lives today. The old future -- the way we
thought things would work out -- truly is gone. The nation-state and
capitalism are at the core of this unsustainable system, giving rise to the
high-energy/mass-consumption configuration of privileged societies that has
left us saddled with what James Howard Kunstler calls "a living arrangement
with no future." The future we have been dreaming of was based on a dream,
not on reality. Most of the world that doesn't live with our privilege has no
choice but to face this reality. It's time for us to come to terms with it.

The Revolutions of the Past

To think about a new future, we need to understand the present. To do that, I
want to suggest a way of thinking about the past that highlights the three
major revolutions in human history -- the agricultural, industrial and
delusional revolutions.

The agricultural revolution started about 10,000 years ago when a
gathering-hunting species discovered how to cultivate plants for food. Two
crucial things resulted from that, one ecological and one political.
Ecologically, the invention of agriculture kicked off an intensive human
assault on natural systems. By that I don't mean that gathering-hunting
humans never did damage to a local ecosystem, but only that the large-scale
destruction we cope with today has its origins in agriculture, in the way
humans have exhausted the energy-rich carbon of the soil, what Jackson would
call the first step in the entrenchment of an extractive economy. Human
agricultural practices vary from place to place but have never been
sustainable over the long term. Politically, the ability to stockpile food
made possible concentrations of power and resulting hierarchies that were
foreign to gathering-hunting societies. Again, this is not to say that humans
were not capable of doing bad things to each other prior to agriculture, but
only that what we understand as large-scale institutionalized oppression has
its roots in agriculture. We need not romanticize pre-agricultural life to
recognize the ways in which agriculture made possible dramatically different
levels of unsustainability and injustice.

The industrial revolution that began in the last half of the 18th century in
Great Britain intensified the magnitude of the human assault on ecosystems
and on each other. Unleashing the concentrated energy of coal, oil and
natural gas to run a machine-based world has produced unparalleled material
comfort for some. Whatever one thinks of the effect of such comforts on human
psychology (and, in my view, the effect has been mixed), the processes that
produce the comfort are destroying the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain
human life as we know it into the future, and in the present those comforts
are not distributed in a fashion that is consistent with any meaningful
conception of justice. In short, the way we live is in direct conflict with
common sense and the ethical principles on which we claim to base our lives.
How is that possible?

The delusional revolution is my term for the development of sophisticated
propaganda techniques in the 20th century (especially a highly emotive,
image-based advertising system) that have produced in the bulk of the
population (especially in First World societies) a distinctly delusional
state of being. Even those of us who try to resist it often can't help but be
drawn into parts of the delusion. As a culture, we collectively end up acting
as if unsustainable systems can be sustained because we want them to be. Much
of the culture's storytelling -- particularly through the dominant
storytelling institution, the mass media -- remains committed to maintaining
this delusional state. In such a culture, it becomes hard to extract oneself
from that story.

So, in summary: The agricultural revolution set us on a road to destruction.
The industrial revolution ramped up our speed. The delusional revolution has
prevented us from coming to terms with the reality of where we are and where
we are heading. That's the bad news. The worse news is that there's still
overwhelming resistance in the dominant culture to acknowledging that these
kinds of discussions are necessary. This should not be surprising because, to
quote Wes Jackson, we are living as "a species out of context." Jackson likes
to remind audiences that the modern human -- animals like us, with our brain
capacity -- have been on the planet about 200,000 years, which means these
revolutions constitute only about 5 percent of human history. We are living
today trapped by systems in which we did not evolve as a species over the
long term and to which we are still struggling to adapt in the short term.

Realistically, we need to get on a new road if we want there to be a future.
The old future, the road we imagined we could travel, is gone -- it is part
of the delusion. Unless one accepts an irrational technological
fundamentalism (the idea that we will always be able to find
high-energy/advanced-technology fixes for problems), there are no easy
solutions to these ecological and human problems. The solutions, if there are
to be any, will come through a significant shift in how we live and a
dramatic downscaling of the level at which we live. I say "if" because there
is no guarantee that there are solutions. History does not owe us a chance to
correct our mistakes just because we may want such a chance.

I think this argues for a joyful embrace of the truly awful place we find
ourselves. That may seem counterintuitive, perhaps even a bit psychotic.
Invoking joy in response to awful circumstances? For me, this is simply to
recognize who I am and where I live. I am part of that species out of
context, saddled with the mistakes of human history and no small number of my
own tragic errors, but still alive in the world. I am aware of my limits but
eager to test them. I try to retain an intellectual humility, the awareness
that I may be wrong, while knowing I must act in the world even though I
can't be certain. Whatever the case and whatever is possible, I want to be as
fully alive as possible, which means struggling joyfully as part of movements
that search for the road to a more just and sustainable world.

In this quest, I am often tired and afraid. To borrow a phrase from my friend
Jim Koplin, I live daily with "a profound sense of grief." And yet every day
that I can remember in recent years -- in the period during which I have come
to this analysis -- I have experienced some kind of joy. Often that joy comes
with the awareness that I live in a creation that I can never comprehend,
that the complexity of the world dwarfs me. That does not lead me to fear my
insignificance, but sends me off in an endlessly fascinating search for the
significant.

To put it in a bumper-sticker phrase for contemporary pop culture, "The world
sucks/it's great to be alive."

About These Crises

I have been talking about multiple crises without naming them in detail. As I
have been speaking, I suspect you all have been cataloging them for yourself.
For me, they are political (the absence of meaningful democracy in
large-scale political units such as the modern nation-state), economic (the
brutal inequalities that exist internal to all capitalist systems and between
countries in a world dominated by that predatory capitalism), and ecological
(the unsustainable nature of our systems and the lifestyles that arise from
them). Beyond that, I am most disturbed by a cultural and spiritual crisis, a
condition that goes to the core of how we understand what it means to be
human.

For me, an understanding of this crisis is rooted in my feminist work on the
contemporary pornography industry. Shaped by patriarchy, white supremacy and
that predatory corporate-capitalism, pornography provides a disturbing mirror
on our collective soul. We live in a world in which large numbers of people
(mostly men) derive sexual pleasure from images of cruelty toward and the
degradation of women. A smaller number of people (again, mostly men) profit
from this industry. And except for a few people rooted in feminism and other
radical philosophies on the margins, there is no significant progressive
critique of it in contemporary society. Pornography is a place where we can
see what the death of empathy looks like; it offers a picture of a world
bereft of the fundamental values of compassion and solidarity; it provides a
narrative of a people with no sense of shared humanity. Many aspects of the
modern world -- this mass-mediated, mass-marketed, mass-medicated world --
can easily strip us of our humanity in ways that slowly leave us incapable of
responding to these crises. Along with fretting about the other crises, I
worry about that.

Add all this up and it's pretty clear: We're in trouble. Based on my
political activism and my general sense of the state of the world, I have
come to the following conclusions about political and cultural change in my
society:

* It's almost certain that no significant political change will happen in
the coming year in the United States because the culture is not ready to face
these questions. That suggests this is a time not to propose all-encompassing
solutions but to sharpen our analysis in ongoing conversation about these
crises. As activists we should continue to act, but there also is a time and
place to analyze.

* It's probable that no mass movements will emerge in the next few years
in the United States that will force leaders and institutions to face these
questions. Many believe that until conditions in the First World get
dramatically worse, most people will be stuck in the inertia created by
privilege. That suggests that this is a time to expand our connections with
like-minded people and create small-scale institutions and networks that can
react quickly when political conditions change.

* It's plausible that the systems in place cannot be changed peacefully
and that forces set in motion by patriarchy, white supremacy, nationalism and
capitalism cannot be reversed without serious ruptures. That suggests that as
we plan political strategies for the best-case scenarios, we not forget to
prepare ourselves for something much worse.

* Finally, it's worth considering the possibility that our species -- the
human with the big brain -- is an evolutionary dead end. I say that not to be
depressing but, again, to be realistic. If that's the case, it doesn't mean
we should give up. No matter how much time we humans have left on the planet,
we can do what is possible to make that time meaningful.

Globalized Tribal Animals

I want to end by celebrating human beings. That may sound odd, given the
rather grim nature of my remarks. But I think there's a way to put all this
in a perspective that is heartening. I return to Wes Jackson, who doesn't shy
away from naming the problems we face and holding humans accountable for our
mistakes, individual and collective. But Jackson also often says we also
should go easy on ourselves, precisely because we are a species out of
context, facing a unique challenge. He reminds us that we are the first
species that will have to self-consciously impose limits on ourselves if we
are to survive. This is no small task, and we are bound to fail often. I
believe that our failures will be easier to accept and overcome if we
recognize:

* We are animals. For all our considerable rational capacities, we are
driven by forces that cannot be fully understood rationally and cannot be
completely controlled.

* We are tribal animals. Whatever kind of political unit we live in, our
evolutionary history is in tribes and we are designed to live in relatively
small groups, some would say of no more than 150 persons.

* We are tribal animals living in a global world. The consequences of the
past 10,000 years of human history have left us dealing with human problems
on a global scale, and we can't retreat to gathering-hunting groups of 150 or
smaller. Even if our future is going to return us to life at a more local
level, as many think it will, at the moment we have a moral obligation to
deal with injustice and unsustainability on a global level. That's especially
true for those of us living in imperial societies that over the past 500
years have extracted considerable wealth from others around the world.

What does this mean in practice? I think we should proceed along two basic
tracks. First, we should commit some of our energy to movements that focus on
the question of justice in this world, especially those of us with the
privilege that is rooted in that injustice. As a middle-class American white
man, I can see plenty of places to continue working, in movements dedicated
to ending patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, economic domination by the
First World, and U.S. wars of aggression.

I also think there is important work to be done in experiments to prepare for
what will come in this new future we can't yet describe in detail. Whatever
the limits of our predictive capacity, we can be pretty sure we will need
ways of organizing ourselves to help us live in a world with less energy and
fewer material goods. We have to all develop the skills needed for that world
(such as gardening with fewer inputs, food preparation and storage, and basic
tinkering), and we will need to recover a deep sense of community that has
disappeared from many of our lives. This means abandoning a sense of
ourselves as consumption machines, which the contemporary culture promotes,
and deepening our notions of what it means to be humans in search of meaning.
We have to learn to tell different stories about our sense of self, our
connection to others, and our place in nature. The stories we tell will
matter, as will the skills we learn.

In my own life, I continue to work on those questions of justice in existing
movements, but I have shifted a considerable amount of time to helping build
local networks that can create a place for those experiments. Different
people will move toward different efforts depending on talents and
temperaments; we should all follow our hearts and minds to apply ourselves
where it makes sense, given who we are and where we live. After starting with
a warning about arrogance, I'm not about to suggest I know best what work
people should do.

I am, however, reasonably confident that if we are to make a decent future
for ourselves and our children, we have a lot of work to do. John Gorka also
expresses that in his song: "The old future's dead and gone/Never to
return/There's a new way through the hills ahead/This one we'll have to
earn/This one we'll have to earn."

We should not be afraid to face the death of the old future, nor should we be
afraid to try to earn a new one. It is the work of all the ages, and it is
our work today, more than ever. It is the work that allows one to live,
joyously, while in a profound state of grief.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin
and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest
book, All My Bones Shake: Radical Politics in the Prophetic Voice, will be
published in 2009 by Soft Skull Press. He also is the author of Getting Off:
Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007).




  • [Livingontheland] The Delusion Revolution: We're on the Road to Extinction and in Denial, Tradingpost, 08/17/2008

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