One of the things I’ve had occasion to notice, over the
course of the decade or so I’ve put into writing these online essays, is the
extent to which repeating patterns in contemporary life go unnoticed by the
people who are experiencing them. I’m not talking here about the great cycles
of history, which take long enough to roll over that a certain amount of
forgetfulness can be expected; the repeating patterns I have in mind come every
few years, and yet very few people seem to notice the repetition.
An example that should be familiar to my readers is the way
that, until recently, one energy source after another got trotted out on the
media and the blogosphere as the excuse du jour for doing nothing about the
ongoing depletion of global fossil fuel reserves. When this blog first got
under way in 2006, ethanol from corn was the excuse; then it was algal
biodiesel; then it was nuclear power from thorium; then it was windfarms and
solar PV installations; then it was oil and gas from fracking. In each case,
the same rhetorical handwaving about abundance was deployed for the same
purpose, the same issues of net energy and concentration were evaded, and the
resource in question never managed to live up to the overblown promises made in
its name—and yet any attempt to point out the similarities got blank looks and
the inevitable refrain, “but this is different.”
The drumbeat of excuses du jour has slackened a bit just
now, and that’s also part of a repeating pattern that doesn’t get anything like
the scrutiny it deserves. Starting when conventional petroleum production
worldwide reached its all-time plateau, in the first years of this century, the
price of oil has jolted up and down in a multiyear cycle. The forces driving
the cycle are no mystery: high prices encourage producers to bring marginal
sources online, but they also decrease demand; the excess inventories of
petroleum that result drive down prices; low prices encourage consumers to use
more, but they also cause marginal sources to be shut down; the shortfalls of
petroleum that result drive prices up, and round and round the mulberry bush we
go.
We’re just beginning to come out of the trough following the
2015 price peak, and demand is even lower than it would otherwise be, due to
cascading troubles in the global economy. Thus, for the moment, there’s enough
petroleum available to supply everyone who can afford to buy it. If the last
two cycles are anything to go by, though, oil prices will rise unsteadily from
here, reaching a new peak in 2021 or so before slumping down into a new trough.
How many people are paying attention to this, and using the current interval of
relatively cheap energy to get ready for another period of expensive energy a
few years from now? To judge from what I’ve seen, not many.
Just at the moment, though, the example of repetition that
comes first to my mind has little to do with energy, except in a metaphorical
sense. It’s the way that people committed to a cause—any cause—are so often so
flustered when initial successes are followed by something other than repeated
triumph forever. Now of course part of the reason that’s on my mind is the
contortions still ongoing on the leftward end of the US political landscape, as
various people try to understand (or in some cases, do their level best to
misunderstand) the implications of last month’s election. Still, that’s not the
only reason this particular pattern keeps coming to mind.
I’m also thinking of it as the Eurozone sinks deeper and
deeper into political crisis. The project of European unity had its initial
successes, and a great many European politicians and pundits seem to have
convinced themselves that of course those would be repeated step by step, until
a United States of Europe stepped out on the international stage as the world’s
next superpower. It’s pretty clear at this point that nothing of the sort is
going to happen, because those initial successes were followed by a cascade of
missteps and a populist backlash that’s by no means reached its peak yet.
More broadly, the entire project of liberal internationalism
that’s guided the affairs of the industrial world since the Berlin Wall came
down is in deep trouble. It’s been enormously profitable for the most affluent
20% or so of the industrial world’s population, which is doubtless a core
reason why that same 20% insists so strenuously that no other options are
possible, but it’s been an ongoing disaster for the other 80% or so, and they
are beginning to make their voices heard.
At the heart of the liberal project was the insistence that
economics should trump politics—that the free market should determine policy in
most matters, leaving governments only an administrative function. Of course
that warm and cozy abstraction “the free market” meant in practice the
kleptocratic corporate socialism of too-big-to-fail banks and subsidy-guzzling
multinationals, which proceeded to pursue their own short-term benefit so
recklessly that they’ve driven entire countries into the ground. That’s brought
about the inevitable backlash, and the proponents of liberal internationalism
are discovering to their bafflement that if enough of the electorate is driven
to the wall, the political sphere may just end up holding the Trump card after
all.
And of course the same bafflement is on display in the wake
of last month’s presidential election, as a great many people who embraced our
domestic version of the liberal internationalist idea were left dumbfounded by
its defeat at the hands of the electorate—not just by those who voted for Donald
Trump, but also by the millions who stayed home and drove Democratic turnout in
the 2016 election down to levels disastrously low for Hillary Clinton’s hopes.
A great many of the contortions mentioned above have been driven by the conviction
on the part of Clinton’s supporters that their candidate’s defeat was caused by
a rejection of the ideals of contemporary American liberalism. That some other
factor might have been involved is not, at the moment, something many of them
are willing to hear.
That’s where the repeating pattern comes in, because
movements for social change—whether they come from the grassroots or the
summits of power—are subject to certain predictable changes, and if those
changes aren’t recognized and countered in advance, they lead to the kind of
results I’ve just been discussing. There are several ways to talk about those
changes, but the one I’d like to use here unfolds, in a deliberately quirky
way, from the Hegelian philosophy of history.
That probably needs an explanation, and indeed an apology,
because Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has been responsible for more sheer
political stupidity than any other thinker of modern times. Across the
bloodsoaked mess that was the twentieth century, from revolutionary Marxism in
its opening years to Francis Fukuyama’s risible fantasy of the End of History
in its closing, where you found Hegelian political philosophy, you could be
sure that someone was about to make a mistaken prediction.
It may not be entirely fair to blame Hegel personally for
this. His writings and lectures are vast heaps of cloudy abstraction in which
his students basically had to chase down inkblot patterns of their own making.
Hegel’s great rival Arthur Schopenhauer used to insist that Hegel was a deliberate
fraud, stringing together meaningless sequences of words in the hope that his
readers would mistake obscurity for profundity, and more than once—especially
when slogging through the murky prolixities of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of
Spirit—I’ve suspected that the old grouch of Frankfurt was right. Still, we
can let that pass, because a busy industry of Hegelian philosophers spent the
last century and a half churning out theories of their own based, to one extent
or another, on Hegel’s vaporings, and it’s this body of work that most people
mean when they talk about Hegelian philosophy.
At the core of most Hegelian philosophies of history is a
series of words that used to be famous, and still has a certain cachet in some
circles: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. (Hegel himself apparently never used
those terms in their later sense, but no matter.) That’s the three-step dance
to the music of time that, in the Hegelian imagination, shapes human history.
You’ve got one condition of being, or state of human consciousness, or economic
system, or political system, or what have you; it infallibly generates its
opposite; the two collide, and then there’s a synthesis which resolves the
initial contradiction. Then the synthesis becomes a thesis, generates its own antithesis,
a new synthesis is born, and so on.
One of the oddities about Hegelian philosophies of history
is that, having set up this repeating process, their proponents almost always
insist that it’s about to stop forever. In the full development of the Marxist
theory of history, for example, the alternation of thesis-antithesis-synthesis
starts with the primordial state of primitive communism and then chugs merrily,
or rather far from merrily, through a whole series of economic systems, until
finally true communism appears—and then that’s it; it’s the synthesis that
never becomes a thesis and never conjures up an antithesis. In exactly the same
way, Fukuyama’s theory of the end of history argued that all history until 1991
or so was a competition between different systems of political economy, of
which liberal democratic capitalism and totalitarian Marxism were the last two
contenders; capitalism won, Marxism lost, game over.
Now of course that’s part of the reason that Hegelianism so
reliably generates false predictions, because in the real world it’s never game
over; there’s always another round to play. There’s another dimension of
Hegelian mistakenness, though, because the rhythm of the dialectic implies that
the gains of one synthesis are never lost. Each synthesis becomes the basis for
the next struggle between thesis and antithesis out of which a new synthesis
emerges—and the new synthesis is always supposed to embody the best parts of
the old.
This is where we move from orthodox Hegelianism to the
quirky alternative I have in mind. It didn’t emerge out of the profound
ponderings of serious philosophers of history in some famous European
university. It first saw the light in a bowling alley in suburban Los Angeles,
and the circumstances of its arrival—which, according to the traditional
account, involved the miraculous appearance of a dignified elderly chimpanzee
and the theophany of a minor figure from Greek mythology—suggest that
prodigious amounts of drugs were probably involved.
Yes, we’re talking about Discordianism.
I’m far from sure how many of my readers are familiar with
that phenomenon, which exists somewhere on the ill-defined continuum between
deadpan put-on and serious philosophical critique. The short form is that it
was cooked up by a couple of young men on the fringes of the California Beat
scene right as that was beginning its mutation into the first faint
adumbrations of the hippie phenomenon. Its original expression was the Principia
Discordia, the scripture (more or less) of a religion (more or less) that
worships (more or less) Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos, and its central theme
is the absurdity of belief systems that treat orderly schemes cooked up in the
human mind as though these exist out there in the bubbling, boiling confusion
of actual existence.
That may not seem like fertile ground for a philosophy of
history, but the Discordians came up with one anyway, probably in mockery of
the ultraserious treatment of Hegelian philosophy that was common just then in
the Marxist-existentialist end of the Beat scene. Robert Shea and Robert Anton
Wilson proceeded to pick up the Discordian theory of history and weave it into
their tremendous satire of American conspiracy culture, the Illuminatus!
trilogy. That’s where I encountered it originally in the late 1970s; I laughed,
and then paused and ran my fingers through my first and very scruffy adolescent
beard, realizing that it actually made more sense than any other theory of
history I’d encountered.
Here’s how it works. From the Discordian point of view,
Hegel went wrong for two reasons. The first was that he didn’t know about the
Law of Fives, the basic Discordian principle that all things come in fives,
except when they don’t. Thus he left off the final two steps of the dialectical
process: after thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, you get parenthesis, and then
paralysis.
The second thing Hegel missed is that the synthesis is never
actually perfect. It never succeeds
wholly in resolving the conflict between thesis and antithesis; there are
always awkward compromises, difficulties that are papered over, downsides that
nobody figures out at the time, and so on. Thus it doesn’t take long for the
synthesis to start showing signs of strain, and the inevitable response is to
try to patch things up without actually changing anything that matters. The
synthesis thus never has time to become a thesis and generate its own
antithesis; it is its own antithesis, and ever more elaborate arrangements have
to be put to work to keep it going despite its increasingly evident flaws;
that’s the stage of parenthesis.
The struggle to maintain these arrangements, in turn,
gradually usurps so much effort and attention that the original point of the
synthesis is lost, and maintaining the arrangements themselves becomes too
burdensome to sustain. That’s when you enter the stage of paralysis, when the
whole shebang grinds slowly to a halt and then falls apart. Only after
paralysis is total do you get a new thesis, which sweeps away the rubble and
kickstarts the whole process into motion again.
There are traditional Discordian titles for these stages.
The first, thesis, is the state of Chaos, when a group of human beings look out
at the bubbling, boiling confusion of actual existence and decide to impose
some kind of order on the mess. The second, antithesis, is the state of
Discord, when the struggle to impose that order on the mess in question
produces an abundance of equal and opposite reactions. The third, synthesis, is
the state of Confusion, in which victory is declared over the chaos of mere
existence, even though everything’s still bubbling and boiling merrily away as
usual. The fourth, parenthesis, is the state of Consternation,* in which the
fact that everything’s still bubbling and boiling merrily away as usual becomes
increasingly hard to ignore. The fifth and final, paralysis, is the state of
Moral Warptitude—don’t blame me, that’s what the Principia Discordia
says—in which everything grinds to a halt and falls to the ground, and everyone
stands around in the smoldering wreckage rubbing their eyes and wondering what
happened.
*(Yes, I know, Robert Anton Wilson called the last two
stages Bureaucracy and Aftermath. He was a heretic. So is every other
Discordian, for that matter.)
Let’s apply this to the liberal international order that
emerged in the wake of the Soviet Union’s fall, and see how it fits. Thesis,
the state of Chaos, was the patchwork of quarrelsome nations into which our
species has divided itself, which many people of good will saw as barbarous
relics of a violent past that should be restrained by a global economic order.
Antithesis, the state of Discord, was the struggle to impose that order by way
of trade agreements and the like, in the teeth of often violent resistance—the phrase
“WTO Seattle” may come to mind here. Synthesis, the state of Confusion, was the
self-satisfied cosmopolitan culture that sprang up among the affluent 20% or so
of the industrial world’s population, who became convinced that the temporary
ascendancy of policies that favored their interests was not only permanent but
self-evidently right and just.
Parenthesis, the state of Consternation, was the
decades-long struggle to prop up those policies despite
the disastrous economic consequences those policies inflicted on
everyone but the affluent. Finally, paralysis, the state of Moral Warptitude,
sets in when populist movements, incensed by the unwillingness of the 20% to
consider anyone else’s needs but their own, surge into the political sphere and
bring the entire project to a halt. It’s worth noting here that the title
“moral warptitude” may be bad English, but it’s a good description for the
attitude of believers in the synthesis toward the unraveling of their preferred
state of affairs. It’s standard, as just noted, for those who benefit from the
synthesis to become convinced that it’s not merely advantageous but also
morally good, and to see the forces that overthrow it as evil incarnate; this
is simply another dimension of their Confusion.
Am I seriously suggesting that the drug-soaked ravings of a
bunch of goofy California potheads provide a better guide to history than the
serious reflections of Hegelian philosophers? Well, yes, actually, I am. Given
the track record of Hegelian thought when it comes to history, a flipped coin
is a better guide—use a coin, and you have a 50% better chance of being right.
Outside of mainstream macroeconomic theory, it’s hard to think of a branch of
modern thought that so consistently turns out false answers once it’s applied
to the real world.
No doubt there are more respectable models that also provide
a clear grasp of what happens to most movements for social change—the way they
lose track of the difference between achieving their goals and pursuing their
preferred strategies, and generally end up opting for the latter; the way that
their institutional forms become ends in themselves, and gradually absorb the
effort and resources that would otherwise have brought about change; the way
that they run to extremes, chase off potential and actual supporters, and then
busy themselves coming up with increasingly self-referential explanations for
the fact that the only tactics they’re willing to consider are those that
increase their own marginalization in the wider society, and so on. It’s a
familiar litany, and will doubtless become even more familiar in the years
ahead.
For what it’s worth, though, it’s not necessary for the two
additional steps of the post-Hegelian dialectic, the fourth and fifth sides of
his imaginary triangle, to result in the complete collapse of everything that
was gained in the first three steps. It’s possible to surf the waves of
Consternation and Moral Warptitude—but it’s not easy. Next week, we’ll explore
this further, by circling back to the place where this blog began, and having a
serious talk about how the peak oil movement failed.
*************
In other news, I’m delighted to report that
Retrotopia, which originally appeared here as a series of
posts, is now in
print in book form and available for sale. I’ve revised and somewhat
expanded Peter Carr’s journey to the Lakeland Republic, and I hope it meets
with the approval of my readers.
