Over the last four months or so, as this blog has sketched
out the trajectory of empires in general, and then traced the intricate history
of America’s empire in particular, I’ve been avoiding a specific issue. That avoidance hasn’t come from any lack of
awareness on my part, and if it had been, comments and emails from readers
asking when I was going to get around to discussing the issue would have taken
care of that in short order. No, it’s
simply a natural reluctance to bring up a subject that has to be discussed
sooner or later, but is guaranteed to generate far more heat than light.
The subject? The role
of protest movements in the decline and fall of the American empire.
That’s an issue sufficiently burdened with tangled emotions
and unstated agendas that even finding a good starting place for the discussion
is a challenge. Fortunately I have some assistance, courtesy of Owen Lloyd, who
is involved with an organization called Deep Green Resistance and recently
wrote a review
of my book The Blood of the Earth. It’s by no means a bad
review. Quite the contrary, Lloyd made a serious effort to grapple with the
issues that book tried to raise, and by and large succeeded; where he failed,
the misunderstandings were all but inevitable, given the differences between
his views and mine. Thus it’s all the
more striking that his review points up so precisely the reasons why protest
movements have by and large been spinning their wheels in empty air for thirty
years, and will almost certainly continue to do so while America’s empire
crashes and burns around them.
The point that matters here is the review’s denunciation of
one of the central points of the book, which is that those who want to change
the world need to start by changing their own lives. According to Lloyd, we don’t have time for
that, since the biosphere is in dire peril; what’s needed instead are the
standard tools of contemporary activism—"direct action, community
building, and outreach," in his convenient summary. His reasoning is
logical enough, as far as it goes; if your house is on fire, after all, it’s a
little late to install sprinklers and smoke alarms. If the situation is as urgent as Lloyd
claims, all other considerations have to take a back seat to an all-out effort
to deal with the immediate crisis with the most effective means available.
It’s a common enough claim in the contemporary activist
community; Derrick Jensen had an
article in Orion Magazine a few years back making essentially the
same argument. Still, there’s a problem
with that argument, because the responses Lloyd, Jensen, and other activists
are promoting here have been standard across the spectrum of activist groups
for more than three decades now, and that’s more than enough time to see how
well they work. The answer? Well, let’s
be charitable and say "not very well."
For years now, leading environmentalists have been bemoaning
how much ground is being lost year after year, and how little the environmental
movement has been able to do even to slow that down. They are quite correct in that assessment, of
course. It’s standard these days to
insist that this simply shows the power differential between the corporate
interests that profit from environmental destruction and the citizen groups
that are trying to fight them. That
argument seems convincing, too, so long as you do what most people these days
are taught to do, and ignore the lessons of history.
Glance back to a slightly earlier period and at least one of
those lessons stands out in bold relief. In the 1970s, environmental activists
facing equally powerful and well-funded corporate interests built a mass
movement and forced through landmark legislation. In the United States, the Clean Air Act, the
Endangered Species Act, and a bevy of less famous but equally important environmental
bills crashed through a wall of corporate opposition and became the law of the
land. That sort of success is something that today’s environmental activists
can only daydream about, and it was accomplished using the same tools that
activists use today—with one important addition: the environmental activists of
that time recognized that the most effective way to advocate any given change
was to make that change in their own lives first. That awareness was not
limited to the environmental movement; it was pioneered by the feminists of the
1960s and 1970s, in fact, who turned it into a core principle of their
movement—"the personal is political"—and leveraged it efficiently to
bring about dramatic if still incomplete gains in women’s rights. They
recognized, as did many other activists in those years, that if your lifestyle
supports a system, and depends on that system, any efforts you may think you’re
making to force significant change on that system will be wasted breath.
It will be wasted breath because most people, reasonably
enough, want to see that there’s a life worth living on the other side of the
changes your activist movement wants to make, and the best way to give them a
glimpse of that life is to enact it yourself. It will also be wasted breath
because most people have a tolerably good nose for hypocrisy, and are highly
familiar with the kind of demagogy that calls on everybody else to make
sacrifices and get by with less so the demagogue doesn’t have to do so. Talk to
Americans who didn’t support either the climate change movement or its
corporate opposition, and you’ll find that for a good many of them, it was when
word of Al Gore’s air-conditioned mansion and frequent-flyer miles got around
that they decided that global warming was yet another manufactured threat,
meant to stampede people into acquiescing with somebody’s political agenda.
Finally, it will be wasted breath because if the system you
think you want to change is also the system that supplies you with a
comfortable middle class lifestyle, with all the comforts and conveniences that
such a lifestyle supplies, the changes you will push the system to make will
pretty reliably be limited to those that
will not affect your continued access to the lifestyle, comforts and
conveniences in question. The Breton peak oil blogger Damien Perrotin has
commented amusingly on the influence of what, in France, are called
bobos—that is, bourgeois bohemians (the acronym works equally well in both
languages), members of the liberal upper middle classes. Bobos are terribly
eager to see themselves as the saviors of the world—that’s the bohemian
side—and will do absolutely anything to fulfill this role, so long as it
doesn’t require them to give up any of the benefits of their privileged
status—that’s the bourgeois side.
I hope the term catches on in this country, because we have
a lot of bobos over here, too. Last week’s discussion of captive constituencies
has a special relevance in any discussion of the species Bobo
americanus, because being active in the captive constituency of some
otherwise mainstream political faction is a very popular way to play the role
of saving the world without risking disruption to the system that gives bobos
their privileged status. There are also substantial personal rewards available
for those who take leadership positions in captive constituencies, and help
keep them captive. It’s a role bobos are well qualified to fill, especially
those who come from the upper end of the class hierarchy and so have the
connections and skills for the job.
That’s where you get the executives of mainstream environmental groups
who draw six-figure salaries, maintain cordial relationships with corporate sponsors,
and show an obvious willingness to settle for whatever scraps may fall from the
tables of wealth and power onto their corner of America’s unwashed kitchen
floor.
Still, the bobo-ization of American radicalism is not
limited to such obvious cases. When you
hear activists loudly insisting that it’s possible to save the world without
being an ascetic—and I’m sorry to say that, yes, that well-worn trope turned up
in the Owen Lloyd book review cited above—you’re hearing the echoes of bobo
influence, in the form of the popular but profoundly wrong notion that it must
somehow be possible to maintain today’s unsustainable lifestyles on a
sustainable basis. That’s not going to
happen, for reasons that reach right down into the laws of thermodynamics; no
amount of handwaving is going to make it happen; and the sooner we get used to
living with a lot less, the less damage we will do to ourselves, each other,
and the Earth as the industrial economy sputters to a halt.
Now of course that suggestion is anathema to the existing
order of things, in America and elsewhere. It’s usually anathema in a declining
imperial society. James Francis’ useful study Subversive Virtue:
Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World chronicles
how the imperial Roman government came to treat the asceticism of Stoic and
Neoplatonic philosophers as an unendurable threat to its authority. They were
quite correct to do so; a system that maintains itself in power by bribing the
lower classes with panem et circenses and the middle and
upper classes with the more lavish entertainments chronicled in Petronius’
Satyricon has no convenient lever with which to control
those who have no interest in these things.
Thus it’s probably safe to assume that there will be no
effective opposition to the status quo in this country until some movement
arises that in practice—not just in theory—embraces an essentially ascetic
approach. My guess, for what it’s worth,
is that the first movement to do so will be a revived Marxism. I’m no fan of
Karl Marx, and even less a fan of the various ideologues who filled out the
framework of his system, but Marxism has features that will give it powerful
appeal in the decades ahead. It gives
the poor someone to blame for their misfortunes, and does so in a far more
detailed manner than (say) the vague rhetoric of the Occupy movement; it is
among the few ideologies that manage to fuse a rigorous intellectual tradition
with a utopian future vision of religious intensity; and it has a strong
ascetic element—the figure of the Marxist revolutionary, lean, passionate,
doctrinaire, and contemptuous of material goods except insofar as they might
help further the cause, was a common social type in Europe for close to a
century.
Marxism also has an advantage just now that no amount of
money could buy it: the extraordinary campaign of unintended propaganda that
the Republican party is currently carrying out on its behalf. Right now, even the most moderate and
revenue-neutral attempts to use the powers of government for the benefit of
American citizens are being lambasted by the GOP as communism. It’s an embarrassing admission of
intellectual poverty—one gathers that the American right spent so long
belaboring the Red Peril that it really has no idea what to say now that
communism isn’t around any more—but it also guarantees a familiar kind of
backlash. Fundamentalist churches that spend too much time denouncing Satanism,
complete with lurid descriptions of Satanic living replete with wild parties
and orgiastic sex, get that kind of backlash; that’s why they so often find
that they’ve merely succeeded in making devil worship popular among local
teens.
In the same way, if the Republicans succeed in rebranding,
say, public assistance and food safety laws as Marxist, the most likely result
of that campaign will be to convince a great many Americans of otherwise
moderate political views that Marx might have had something going for him after
all. As suggested above, I don’t consider this a good thing; in theory, Marxist
revolution leads to the glorious worker’s paradise of the future via the
inevitable workings of the historical dialectic, but in practice the
dictatorship of the proletariat reliably turns into just another dictatorship,
with the usual quota of gulags and unmarked mass graves. Still, in a country where most people are
frighteningly ignorant of history, and are being driven to the wall by a
corrupt and spectacularly mismanaged imperial economy in headlong decline, it’s
unpleasantly unlikely that this point will be remembered.
Still, other forces are pushing American society toward a
crisis that its existing political and economic arrangements are unlikely to
survive, and the rehabilitation of Marxism is unlikely to proceed fast enough
to reach any sort of critical mass before that crisis hits in earnest. It’s probably a safe bet that the more
mainstream groups will increasingly side with the established order of
things—I’ve long suspected that before all this is over with, the Sierra Club
will come out in favor of strip mining the national park system so long as it’s
done in, ahem, an environmentally sensitive way. Outside the bobosphere, things
are much less clear, for the twilight years of a disintegrating political
system tolerably often create a fiercely Darwinian environment for ideologies
and political movements, in which the only thing that matters is which set of
beliefs and personalities can build the strongest coalition at the right time,
absorb or marginalize the largest fraction of opposing groups, and make the most
successful bid for power. As that
bubbling cauldron of competing belief systems boils over in violence and
systemic disruption, it’s anyone’s guess who or what will come out on top.
Whoever ends up more or less in charge of what’s left of the
United States of America when the flames die down and the rubble stops
bouncing, though, will have to face a predicament far more difficult than the
ones encountered by the winners in 1932, or 1860, or for that matter 1776. All
three of these past crises happened when the United States was still a rising
power, with vast and largely untapped natural resources, and social and
economic systems not yet burdened with the aftermath of a failed empire; the
winning side could safely assume that once the immediate crisis was resolved,
the nation would return to relative prosperity, pay off its debts, and proceed
from there.
That won’t be happening this time around. When the crisis is
over, whatever form it takes, the United States—or whatever assortment of
successor nations end up dividing its territory between them—will be a
shattered, bankrupt, resource-poor Third World failed state (or collection of
failed states) that will likely have to struggle hard even to regain basic
levels of political and economic stability. That struggle will be pursued in a
world in which energy and other resources are getting scarcer each year,
energy- and resource-intensive technologies are being abandoned by all but a
very few rich and powerful nations, and unpredictable swings in temperature,
rainfall, and other climatic and ecological factors make life a good deal more
difficult for everyone. In that
not-so-far-future America, the comforts and conveniences most of us now take
for granted will be available only to the rich and powerful, if they can be had
by anyone at all.
That’s the world our choices over the last three decades or
so have been preparing for us, and for our grandchildren’s grandchildren. In
such a world, the people who will have the most to offer their communities,
their societies, and the biosphere that supports all our lives will be those
who have the courage, now, to walk away from the consumer economy and its
smorgasbord of dubious pleasures, and learn, now, how to get by with less, use
their own capacities of body and mind, and work with the patterns and processes
of nature. For the time
being—specifically, until we get close enough to the crisis period that even
the most nonviolent challenge to the existing order calls down massive violence
in response—protest can still accomplish goals worth pursuing, especially if
activists wake up once again to the power of personal example; over the longer
run, though, it’s the change on the individual, family, and community level
that so many of today’s activists reject as pointless that have the most to
offer the world.
****************
End of the World of the Week #22
Comets are fascinating things, and they have an ancient
reputation as omens of trouble. Still, you might expect the industrial world in
1973 to have responded with a little less frenzy to the appearance of the
much-ballyhooed Comet Kohoutek. It was discovered by Czech astronomer Luboš Kohoutek on March 7 of that year,
while it was still a very long way from the sun, and back-of-the-envelope
calculations suggested that it might put on a spectacular show. The mass media proceeded to lose the word
"might" and fill headlines with claims that Kohoutek would be
"the comet of the century."
That was all it took to catch the attention of the
apocalyptically minded. David Berg aka Moses David, leader of the Children of
God sect, did the most to publicize a Kohoutek apocalypse; his
proclamation that the comet would
destroy the world in January of 1974, printed on bright orange flyers, was
handed out by his followers to people all over North America. (I think I may
still have one in a file box in the basement.) All through the last months of
1973, the comet had something of the same cachet that the supposed end of the
Mayan calendar has today.
As it turned out, though, the prophets were wrong, and so
was the media. Far from being "the comet of the century," Comet
Kohoutek turned out to be a very modest spectacle indeed, barely visible in the
night sky above my backyard—I think we were too close to the streetlights or
something. Fans of apocalyptic prophecies quickly found some new prediction of
doom to discuss, and the phrase "Comet Kohoutek" had a brief moment
of fame as a synonym for "dud."
—for more failed end time prophecies, see my book Apocalypse
Not