Dying On the Edges

Neoliberalism is not conducive to our health or to our survival.

Neoliberalism has brought us to a place where we have to choose to either step back or accept the butcher's bill to keep it going. We're running out of room, we're running out of stuff, somebody - a lot of somebodies - are going to have to die to keep this party going, to keep us in our big trucks, to keep us in our McMansions. There's simply not enough to go around.

We cannot pretend to bend the Earth to conform to our politics any more. We must now reconcile our politics to the imperatives of our planet. We are going to have to harness consciousness to conscience.

Even in generally affluent Europe there's a movement of people who say, "we can't see a future." These people, from across Europe, are suing the EU for failing to protect their fundamental rights to life, health, occupation and property. They are acting in their own right and on behalf of their children and generations to follow. They are saying that all governments have responsibilities now and to the future. Nobody gets to wreck the future. No government has that right. Not even yours. Implicit in that is that governments must heed "should" as much as "can." Yes they can do things, especially vote-winning things today, but should they do them if the immediate benefit is outweighed by future consequences.

Imagine you're in a lifeboat (which, as I'll explain you now are) and you're in command (you've got the pistol).  All of the survivors, a dozen in all, haven't eaten for a while and they're getting hungry and thirsty. You've got enough water to slake everyone's thirst and enough food to fill their tummies. They get angry and tell you they want that water and they want that food and you had damn well better deliver. You know if you go along they're not going to be happy by Day 3, the days following will be worse and by Day 6 they may be turning on each other. So are you going to ration that food, make it last, or will you let everything go all to Hell? Or, Option 3, you've got six rounds in that revolver. You could shoot the six people you like least, toss them over the side, and relieve the pressure - for a while.

We live on a very finite planet, Earth. It's our one and only biosphere. It operates much like a space ship hurtling through the universe at astonishing speed. (When you combine the speed Earth turns on its axis, the speed of Earth's orbit around the sun, the speed of our solar system's transit through our galaxy and the speed of our galaxy's travel through the universe, it's mind-boggling.) The point is, Earth is still our one and only. Earth - not Elon Musk, not Jeff Bezos, not the Koch Brothers - provides everything you own, everything you use, everything that keeps you alive and happy - the lot. The point is that you, me, all life plant or animal, have to live within the limit of what Earth provides. Go beyond that limit and your chances are about the same as an astronaut going on a spacewalk and removing her helmet. Not good - at all.

Here's the problem. We want everything Earth provides, all of it. We want all of it and more. We have found ways to get more. We now use the Earth's resources far beyond what the planet can sustainably provide. We do this by pillaging the Earth's resource reserves. You can't really argue with that because the evidence is tangible, calculable, some of it is even visible to the naked eye from space. It's visible in deforestation, the clearing of vast tracts of forests. It's visible in desertification, the exhaustion of once fertile farmland and its transformation into barren desert. It's visible in dried up lakes and rivers that no longer flow to the sea. NASA's Grace satellites record it in the subsidence of surface levels caused by the draining of freshwater from aquifers below. We see it in global fisheries that are being collapsed, one by one, as the industrial fishing fleet "fishes down the food chain." It's visible in the algae blooms that now regularly appear in our lakes and along our coasts. It is manifest in the global collapse of biodiversity of both terrestrial and marine species.

The signs are everywhere. They're inescapable, irrefutable. There ain't no getting around it. This is a planet in peril. We're now using the Earth's resources in excess of the planet's carrying capacity by a factor of 1.7.

The neoliberal model of political/economic governance holds that if you can still stock the store shelves it's okay, don't stop. The neoliberal model of governance cares little if at all for the future. That's what has those "we can't see a future" folks in Europe up in arms. They can't see a future. The difference between those brave few and the neoliberals who govern them is that those few have bothered to look to the future. Neoliberals don't look up. Neoliberals look down. Neoliberals can't look up because they know what they'll see utterly contradicts their ethos. It puts the lie to their mode of governance. They won't have that. They're already in too deep to worry about the future.

Look at what's happened during the era of neoliberalism (in addition to all that business about desertification, deforestation, fisheries collapse, etc.). We have doubled in population. We have significantly extended human lifespans. We have substantially increased our per capita consumption. So, more people, living longer, consuming more. As an equation that's more people X living longer X consuming more = the mess we're in today. It has exhausted Earth's resources and caused other life, terrestrial and marine, to plummet in numbers by 50%, half. The bottom is now falling out. The 2016 LivingPlanet Report found that we're on track to lose 67 per cent of wildlife by 2020. This has all happened since the era of Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney.

Over that interval, China's population has grown from 982 million (1980) to nearly 1.4 billion. India has gone from 696 million to 1.324 billion. The US grew from 226 million to 323 million. Consider this. It took all but 200 years of the 12,000 year history of human civilization to grow our entire global population to one billion. It took the past 200 years to grow that to 7.5 billion and we're expected to hit 9 billion in just another two or three decades.

China's GDP grew from 192 billion (1980) to 11.2 trillion. India grew from 36 billion to nearly 2.4 trillion. The US grew from 543 billion to 18.6 trillion. India today has almost five times the total GDP of the US in 1980.

In 1980, GWP, Gross World Production, was about 18.8 trillion. In 2000, GWP was 41 trillion. By 2014 it had grown to 77.8 trillion dollars. By way of perspective, in 1900 GWP hit a blistering, all time record 1.1 trillion dollars.

Do you see a trend there?

Those figures - population, GDP, GWP - they're exponential. That's the course neoliberalism has us on, exponential growth. Not for nothing is it called "The Great Acceleration."  And that's the biggest problem with neoliberalism - it only comes with a gas pedal, the steering is shite and there ain't no brake. But even the most powerful locomotive, the greatest ship will stop - when it runs into something.

When I began this post I started with the title "Living On the Edges." Only we're not really living on the edges any more. We're dying on the edges. We don't notice it because we're killing off the rest of nature first. Those other species are dying so that we might live this way a little longer, but only a little. It caused George Monbiot to ask why mankind has chosen to go to war on our living world.

...In a society bombarded by advertising and driven by the growth imperative, pleasure is reduced to hedonism and hedonism is reduced to consumption. We use consumption as a cure for boredom, to fill the void that an affectless, grasping, atomised culture creates, to brighten the grey world we have created. 

We care ever less for the possessions we buy, and dispose of them ever more quickly. Yet the extraction of the raw materials required to produce them, the pollution commissioned in their manufacturing, the infrastructure and noise and burning of fuel needed to transport them are trashing a natural world infinitely more fascinating and intricate than the stuff we produce. The loss of wildlife is a loss of wonder and enchantment, of the magic with which the living world infects our lives. 

...A system that makes us less happy, less secure, that narrows and impoverishes our lives, is presented as the only possible answer to our problems. There is no alternative – we must keep marching over the cliff. Anyone who challenges it is either ignored or excoriated.
And the beneficiaries? Well they are also the biggest consumers, using their spectacular wealth to exert impacts thousands of times greater than most people achieve. Much of the natural world is destroyed so that the very rich can fit their yachts with mahogany, eat bluefin tuna sushi, scatter ground rhino horn over their food, land their private jets on airfields carved from rare grasslands, burn in one day as much fossil fuel as the average global citizen uses in a year. 

Thus the Great Global Polishing proceeds, wearing down the knap of the Earth, rubbing out all that is distinctive and peculiar, in human culture as well as nature, reducing us to replaceable automata within a homogenous global workforce, inexorably transforming the riches of the natural world into a featureless monoculture.

We are dying on the edges and we're killing off everything in our way to cling to our suicidal lifestyle for just as long as we can.

...farmed poultry today makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The picture is even more stark for mammals – 60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are human and just 4% are wild animals. 

But comparison of the new estimates with those for the time before humans became farmers and the industrial revolution began reveal the full extent of the huge decline. Just one-sixth of wild mammals, from mice to elephants, remain, surprising even the scientists. In the oceans, three centuries of whaling has left just a fifth of marine mammals in the oceans.

The important question isn't how did we do this but rather why are we still doing this? If this neoliberal trap leads to our possible extinction, why don't we stop and find other ways of organization - political, economic, industrial, social - that can bring humanity back into harmony with our planet, our one and only biosphere?

We have a shared responsibility for our predicament and some bear more responsibility than others. It stops when we say it stops. It stops when enough of us say, no more. There's a lot to undo and it won't be painless or free of sacrifice. But when you're in a lifeboat, your ultimate survival depends entirely on sacrifice.

Has Conservatism Become a Death Cult?

Some day our grandchildren will ask "why?"

They'll want to know why their grandparents' generation failed to act against climate change while there was still time to prevent their own generation from getting the worst of it.

That's how they're going to judge us; not by how bad, how dangerous, how punishing the environment they have to live in but rather how much worse is it than it had to be.  And that's what we're doing now with our inaction on climate change.  We're determining how much worse things are going to be for our grandchildren due to us, our excessive emissions, our refusal to rein ourselves in.

In many ways we're already writing their future and we're writing it indelibly.

In this it's time we saw conservatives for what they have chosen to become, a death cult.  Like many cults it's hierarchical.  There's a priesthood.  People like Stephen Harper, Tony Abbott and James Inhofe are in its elevated ranks.  They're the visible faces.  The others, the leaders of Big Fossil and the great Bourses, are concealed by the cowl of their robes.

It's not that these people don't "get" climate change.  They do. What they also "get" are the solutions that climate change demands and it's these they cannot abide.  A new study from Duke University finds that conservatives (and neoliberals generally) exhibit "solution aversion."

The paper looks at the relationship between political ideology and rejection of scientific evidence.  The researchers look most closely at climate change and other environmental challenges, an area where those who identify as liberals ...mostly accept scientific conclusions while conservatives ...largely reject them. The researchers conclude that on climate and other important societal issues, this denial is "rooted not in a fear of the general problem, per se, but rather in fear of the specific solutions associated with that problem."

The authors blame this denial of climate science on what they deem "solution aversion," i.e. the proposed solutions are "more aversive and more threatening to individuals who hold an ideology that is incompatible with or even challenged by the solution." 

This sort of thing happens all the time to people of any ideological or political stripe but it's usually the sort of thing we indulge on relatively minor issues.  We set this sort of thinking aside when we discover the house is on fire. When that happens we all - left, right or centre -  man the hoses and ladders.  Just not this time.

Today we're on the verge of what some believe is the 6th great extinction event. We've already lost half the wild life on Earth over just the past 40-years (which coincides with our embrace of neoliberalism).  We've drained the aquifers and we've broken the hydrological cycle. We're now dependent, utterly dependent (let that sink in) on consuming the Earth's renewable resources, it's life-sustaining bounty, at 1.5 times the planet's replenishment rate.  We're melting the sea ice and raising sea levels.  We, mankind, have demolished  a geological epoch, the Holocene, and substituted one of our own making, the Anthropocene.

All of these things, and more, are happening yet the Death Cult simply doubles down.  It's a bad bet, deadly bad, but the worst part is that everyone's future hangs on the outcome.  They have brought us to the very edge of irreversible harm and yet they have no intention of stopping or being stopped.

As Murray Dobbin wrote last month in The Tyee, High Priest Harper has been deliberate in his manipulations.

Harper hoped to establish what Orwell referred to as "protective stupidity" -- a kind of mass denial of the obvious. Freud referred to it as "knowing with not knowing" and when it comes to most of Canada's military adventures, it is epidemic. 

In Afghanistan the war went for so long that the facts eventually broke through the protective stupidity, but only partially. Even with the total failure of the mission to accomplish a single worthwhile goal, it is likely that most Canadians still see it as having been a "good war."

As [Henry] Giroux puts it: "Neoliberal authoritarianism has changed the language of politics and everyday life through a poisonous public pedagogy that turns reason on its head and normalizes a culture of fear, war and exploitation."

It wouldn't be a Death Cult without a fear fetish, something the New York Times' Richard Cohen believes has taken hold even inside our very homes.

What has happened.  Why this shadow over the dinner table and such strange fears? It seems we have the remorse of Pandora. The empowering, all-opening, all-devouring technological spirit we have let slip from the box has turned into a monster giving the killers-for-a-caliphate new powers to recruit, the dictators new means to repress, the spies new means to listen in, the fear mongers new means to spread alarm, the rich new means to get richer at the expense of the middle class, the marketers new means to numb, the tax evaders new means to evade, viruses new means to spread, devices new means to obsess, the rising powers new means to block the war-weary risen, and anxiety new means to inhabit the psyche. 

Fear is the tool the High Priests of the Death Cult use to block the exit doors. Fear is employed to confuse. It is what they use to keep you confined in mind and body. It is how they take your power and, with it, your will to stand.

The neoliberals are ensnarled in fears of their own.  They fear change that might jeopardize their control and usher in a new order.  They fear dislocation.  They fear loss.  It's all a house of cards, sure enough, but it's their house and they will defend it to the death, theirs and yours if need be.

The question becomes whether we are going to live their fears, bend to them, incorporate them into our own lives and. by default, our children's.  If so, there's nothing to be done and that's precisely what they intend to do - nothing.  They're not going to give up the petro-state.  They're not going to even try to wean themselves off perpetual, exponential growth.  They're not going to adopt an economic model that makes the economy subordinate to the environment. They're not going to curb environmental degradation and the over-exploitation of our resources.  The Cult is not going to do any of those things and they won't stand by while you do it either.

The exit doors are blocked.  You can sweep them aside at the ballot box but you'll only discover that the new tenant has blocked those same doors again for the same reasons.

Make up your own mind but spare a thought for what you're going to tell the grandkids when they ask "why?"  

To the Big Picture, Does the White House Matter?

A substantial majority of Canadians want to see Barack Obama re-elected.  Why?

To be sure, the Republican offerings of late have been unpopular here and pretty much around the world, Israel perhaps excepted.  It could be that Ike was last truly popular conservative president of the United States on the world stage.

Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II - slim pickings at best.  Anyone believe that gang left the world a better place than they found it?  (Hint - if you do, seek help)

The other team put forward Kennedy, Johnson (don't undervalue his civil rights achievements), Carter, Clinton and Obama.  Of course they struck out often enough but, remember, you're comparing them against Team Republican.   Enough said.

The comparison plainly justifies Canadians' preference for Obama over the slash and burn Republican contender but does it really matter?  To my mind, that's a clear "no."

Why doesn't it matter?   Because we're using the wrong metrics, that's why.   We measure one side against the other and that's like choosing one dwarf over another in Olympic high-jumping.   You have to look at the bar first.   Only once you see what they have to clear can you get a real measure of the contenders.

It's not just Democrats versus Republicans.   It's not just what's going on in Washington.  It's a global problem.  It's a Canadian problem.

In the six decades of the post-war period, politics has atrophied and become the preserve of "baby step" technocrats.   They're tweakers at best.   They tinker with tax rates and trade arrangements and they sometimes launch small (or even large) indecisive wars that everyone quickly enough tries to forget.   They're stuck in economic, social and geopolitical models that often pre-date manned flight and are of increasingly marginal utility in a world of 7+ billion human beings en route to 9+ billion.

Liberals used to contend this this sort of technocratic backwardness was an affliction of Conservatives.   Liberals still like to think of themselves as progressives.   They're not.   Don't get smug, Dippers.  You're in the same boat.   You're not progressive if you still believe in a future of economic growth.   You're not progressive if you believe in a petro-economy.   You're not progressive, you're something else.   You're obsolete.

Progressives don't fixate on the dwarfs.   They study the bar and try to figure just how they might possibly clear it.   They know what's at stake if we don't clear that bar and they know that only progressivism can do it.

The bar has never been higher.  It has risen and risen and risen steadily over the past several decades but we didn't notice because, well before then, we stopped bothering to try to jump over it.  We were too busy tinkering, tweaking, and taking the measure of our equally diminutive rivals.   We adopted the baby step as our mode of conveyance.

The bar today represents all the challenges our civilization faces that will determine how mankind and how many of us get through this century.   The Big Three - global warming, overpopulation and the freshwater crisis - have to be met and mastered as best we can.  The dwarfs no longer get to set the agenda for us.   Their agenda can no longer be ours because it remains immersed in 18th century economics, 19th century industrialism and 20th century geopolitics.

Which brings us back to Obama versus Romney, the contest to determine who will be the mightiest dwarf on Earth.   In these presidential elections we delude ourselves that one of the candidates will soon chart a new course for his country, for the world.  It's a preposterous chimera, something last seen, albeit imperfectly, in the 40's.  Democracy has yielded to corporatism and oligarchy.   Of the vaunted three branches of government, at any given time, each seems mainly preoccupied with fettering rather than balancing the other two.

Does it matter whether we have a dysfunctional president Obama or a dysfunctional president Romney beset by an even more dysfunctional, "bought and paid for" Congress and a shamelessly corporatist Supreme Court?   It is a plateau fit solely for dwarfs that will never clear the bar.

The challenges of the 21st century will not be met by political progression because the dwarf beast cannot evolve nearly fast enough for that.  The very nature of these challenges - rapidly growing in size and power, intractable, destructive - defies solution by our outmoded institutions locked in the past.

The last twenty years, the last ten in particular, have revealed that change in this 21st century will not be had from baby-steppers no longer capable of clearing the bar.   If there is any sign of life coming from today's political class it is the sound of shoveling as they dig in to try to preserve their privileged past. 

Soon enough today's youth and the generation that follows them will realize the party apparatus of Republicans and Democrats; Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats; is tightly integrated in a broken machine that itself has to be swept aside if they're to stand much chance.   And so they will. 

We give them no other choice.  We continue to advance an agenda tailored for dwarfs even as events rapidly overtake us.   Our agenda is to preserve our comforts from the past.   Their agenda, the one we quite wilfully ignore, is to survive into an increasingly unpredictable future.   You cannot reconcile the two.