By Chris Hedges
January 14, 2013 "Truth Dig" -- - Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.
January 14, 2013 "Truth Dig" -- - Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.
The
human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans,
has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of
conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting
the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that
stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and
scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled
luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for
the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The
mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has
become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic
and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in
the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107
years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity
to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound
ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the
draft report of the
National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory
Committee illustrates.
Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying
themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in
“The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman
in
“Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright
in
“A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar
patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this
time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with
us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands
left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new
peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human
species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the
human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained
greed and self-worship.
“There
is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization
wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its
environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,”
Wright said when I
reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia,
Canada. “They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach
their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That
pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the
Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now
southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including
smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very
things that cause societies to prosper in the short run,
especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the
invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run
because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called
in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We
have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity
and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to
make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our
demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers.
They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made
much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the
upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can
never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire
poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s
entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”
“If we
continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and
rational way, we will head into some sort of major
catastrophe, sooner or later,” he said. “If we are lucky it
will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big
enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We
must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age
hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term
thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead
mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how
to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children
forever. That is the transition our civilization has to
make. And we’re not doing that.”
Wright, who in his dystopian novel
“A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future
world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched
political and economic interests” and a failure of the human
imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical
change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain
ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.
Modern
capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book
“What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,”
derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous
cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th
centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a
workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those
natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and
other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not
conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had
crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time
around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the
Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to
occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops
for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society
in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam
Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas
as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the
start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas,
Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European
expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the
Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems,
making further subjugation, plundering and expansion
possible.
“The
experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and
colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to
the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever,”
Wright said. “It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet.
We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring
our economies and demands on nature within natural limits,
but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans,
Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world
and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem
easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger
and better. We have to understand that this long period of
expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely
happened in history and will never happen again. We have to
readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world.
But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too
much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately
distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what
being modern is all about is having more. This is what
anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a
self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and
burn. These societies go on doing things that are really
stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And
that is where we are.”
And as
the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any
guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into
what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness
we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos
will unleash further collective delusions, such as
fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to
earth and save us.
“Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if
certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go
away,” Wright said. “There are many examples of that
throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold
among people who had been colonized, attacked and
slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their
lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back
the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise.
They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults
spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th
century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being
slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns.
People came to believe, as happened in the
Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the
modern world that was intolerable—the barbed wire, the
railways, the white man, the machine gun—would disappear.”
“We
all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring,” Wright
said. “It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and
leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a
serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if
government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the
1950s would return. Look at the way we are letting oil and
gas exploration rip when we know that expanding the carbon
economy is suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The
results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where
large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same
time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in
order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with
climate change.”
“If we
fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes
becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own
destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to
let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad
idea,” Wright said.
Article Source: Informationclearinghouse
Article Source: Informationclearinghouse