The "Meh" Society

There's really no better way to understand another society that to live there.  I have never known the United States better than during the years I spent studying there back in the Vietnam war era.  This is why I was drawn to the observations of Volker Stanzel, former undersecretary of political affairs at the German foreign office.  Stanzel has just wrapped up a period of teaching at an American university on the west coast.  His impressions of the country, its people and their problems are insightful and should resonate with Canadians also.

Stanzel sees Americans as a people who look at their problems, shrug, and move on.

The immense creativity and boldness to be found in research institutions in the United States, in its universities, its enterprises and the power of its industry keep this country ahead of all others.

The country is still much more than its military hardware, contrary to the critics’ claims.

Yet, many conversations about where the country is headed, even in the U.S. itself, end with an implicit acceptance that if China and the other BRICS countries are rising, then that is how it is going to be, and there is not much that can be done about it. That acceptance then extends to the general condition the United States finds itself in.

Where one detects a clear decline is in America’s internal inability to get along with itself. It is a country characterized by internal strife – fiercer now perhaps than at any time since the Vietnam War – and by the lack of improvement in an important range of social conditions.

These shortcomings appear in healthcare, racial relations as well as electronic data surveillance encroaching upon individual freedoms. It is also characterized by the recognition that when America calls, the world does not necessarily follow.

These are challenges that a vibrant, confident United States would have gladly tackled, and treated not as obstacles to but as opportunities for improvement.

Today, the challenges are seen as obstacles or impasses, and they lead to resignation, and, worse, to withdrawal from public engagement – formerly one of the strongholds of American civil society.

The problems are certainly there, and they are not small.

...Instead of pulling together and overcoming whatever hurdles present themselves by aligning all domestic forces to get the job done, here again the response is just a shrug.

...A foreign observer like me wonders what it would take to provoke an effort to tackle a problem that is visible in so many small phenomena.

All of them seem to be remediable, be it housing and employment of African-Americans, underlying racism in White society, or violent protests that require new measures. The president has given a remarkable speech on the issue of race, to no more effect than fleeting marvel and faint praise.

...The NSA scandal, in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, has led to profound, worldwide discussions about electronic monitoring of all human activity.

These discussions pertain to issues that used to be seen as the core of the American project, such as individual freedom and its limits, the social compatibility with what is technologically possible, and the responsibilities of enterprises compared to those of the realm of politics.

What is remarkable at this juncture is that these conversations in the United States about data control have largely remained confined to the sphere of intellectuals. There has been little effort to hold Congress accountable to implement at least the recommendations given by “The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies” of December 2013.

The explanation given for why that is so usually elicits the rather resigned response that things never change anyway. It is seen as pointless to go up against Big Business or the security establishment. Once again, America simply shrugs.

Americans, as Stanzel sees them, have become a "meh" society.  Indifference and resignation reign in a society that would be unrecognizable to Americans from the pre-Reagan era.  They've been worked over, blinkered, indoctrinated, conditioned, manipulated and confounded, put at each others' throats, by those for whom the quest is immediate, short-term gain at the expense of both the nation and society.

The tragic part is that these same trends are alive and well in Canada today, albeit to a less spectacular degree. The ascendancy of corporatism and illiberal democracy, inequality of all forms, the erosion of social cohesion, these ills and many others all are fueled by our indifference and resignation.  Our complacency is a rich opportunity for those who understand how to exploit it.

                      

About that Death Spiral Thingee

We had ten, maybe fifteen, years to find the sort of common resolve to mobilize our resources and focus them on the maladies that afflict us collectively.   We did nothing.

We had our "To Do" list from the outset - global warming and climate change; deforestation; desertification; air, soil and water contamination of all sorts; severe storm events of increasing frequency and intensity; both sustained and cyclical drought and floods; species migration and extinction, particularly the world's fisheries; disease and pest migration; sea level rise, coastal inundation and salination of freshwater resources; massive over-consumption of renewable resources, particularly freshwater surface and groundwater reserves; depletion and exhaustion of non-renewable resources; overpopulation and population migration; food insecurity and a host of global security challenges including major power realignments, terrorism, regional arms races and nuclear proliferation.  I may actually have overlooked a few.

Out of those items enumerated, on how many have we, the world community, reached consensus to act?   How many of them have we at least brought under control, stopped from worsening?  How many of them have we actually fixed or resolved?   Three questions and all with the same answer.   The very same answer.

Most of these are palpable, tangible, measurable, a good many even visible to the naked eye from space.   Their reality is beyond debate, impervious to obfuscation.   Perhaps that is why they're simply excluded from our political discourse.

We aren't acting and we're not going to act.   That's beyond obvious.   As Jared Diamond points out so well in his book Collapse, you can't solve any of these without solving them all and the solutions to them all are apparent from the common threads that run through them.   Once you look at them collectively and spot the common threads the solutions become apparent.   The solutions are relatively simple but enormous in their magnitude, far beyond anything the leaders of most of the world community would be willing to entertain.

So if we won't act, the remaining option is to react.  It's an exercise in ultimate futility but it's powerfully instinctual, ingrained and even institutionalized in our modern civilization.   Here's how Chris Hedges sees this new reality, the one we'll be left to react to:

When I was a boy and came to this coast on duck hunting trips with my uncle, fishing communities were vibrant. The fleets caught haddock, cod, herring, hake, halibut, swordfish, pollock and flounder. All these fish have vanished from the area, victims of commercial fishing that saw huge trawlers rip up the seafloor and kill the corals, bryozoans, tubeworms and other species that nurtured new schools of fish. The trawlers left behind barren underwater wastelands of mud and debris. It is like this across the planet. Forests are cut down. Water is contaminated. Air is saturated with carbon emissions. Soil is depleted. Acidity levels in the oceans skyrocket. Atmospheric temperatures soar. And someone, somewhere, makes obscene sums of money from it. Corporations, indifferent to what is sacred, see the death of the planet as another investment opportunity. They are scurrying to mine the exposed polar waters for the last vestiges of oil, gas, minerals and fish. And since the corporations dictate our relationship to the ecosystem on which we depend for life, the chances of our survival look bleaker and bleaker. The final phase of 5,000 years of settled human activity ends with collective insanity.

“All my means are sane,” Captain Ahab says of his suicidal pursuit of Moby-Dick, “my motive and my object mad.”

...Our political leaders, Democrat and Republican, are complicit in our demise. Our political system, like that in the declining days of ancient Rome, is one of legalized bribery. Politicians, including Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, serve the demented ends of corporations that will, until the final flicker of life, attempt to profit from our death spiral. Civil disobedience, including the recent decision by Greenpeace activists to chain themselves to a Gazprom supply vessel and obstruct a Russian oil rig, is the only meaningful form of resistance. Voting is useless. But while I support these heroic acts of resistance I increasingly fear they may have little effect. This does not mean we should not resist. Resistance is a moral imperative. We cannot use the word “hope” if we do not fight back. But the corporations will employ deadly force to protect their drive to extract the last bit of profit from life. We can expect only mounting hostility from the corporate state. Its internal and external security apparatus, as the heedless exploitation and its fatal consequences become more apparent, will seek to silence and crush all dissidents. Corporations care nothing for democracy, the rule of law, human rights or the sanctity of life. They are determined to be the last predator standing. And then they too will be snuffed out. Unrestrained hubris always leads to self-immolation.

The Guardian's enviro-scribe and author, George Monbiot, writes of a world gone mad.


Our governments do nothing. Having abandoned any pretence of responding to the environmental crisis during the earth summit in June, now they stare stupidly as the ice on which we stand dissolves. Nothing – or worse than nothing. Their one unequivocal response to the melting has been to facilitate the capture of the oil and fish it exposes.

The companies which caused this disaster are scrambling to profit from it. On Sunday, Shell requested an extension to its exploratory drilling period in the Chukchi Sea, off the north-west coast of Alaska. This would push its operations hard against the moment when the ice re-forms and any spills they cause are locked in. The Russian oil company Gazprom is using the great melt to try to drill in the Pechora Sea, north-east of Murmansk. After turning its Arctic lands in the Komi Republic into the Niger Delta of the north (repeated oil spills are left unremediated in the tundra), Russia [and Harper] wants to extend this industry into one of the world’s most fragile ecosystems, where ice, storms and darkness make decontamination almost impossible.

 Is this how our children will see it: that we destroyed the benign conditions which made our world of wonders possible, then used the opportunity to amplify the damage? All of us, of course, can claim to have acted with other aims in mind, or not to have acted at all, as the other immediacies of life seemed more important. But – unless we respond at last – the results follow as surely as if we had sought to engineer them.

Stupidity, greed, passivity? Just as comparisons evaporate, so do these words. The ice, that solid platform on which, we now discover, so much rested, melts into air. Our pretensions to peace, prosperity and progress are likely to follow. “And like the baseless fabric of this vision, / The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve.”

I expect Stephen Harper hasn't spent much time on Shakespeare whether it be The Tempest or Macbeth or (more aptly) even Richard III.  More's the pity.   The weekend news is of his closed doors, sit down with Vlad Putin, at which the two miscreants explored options for exploiting Arctic seabed oil and gas reserves.   Really, in a world that already has five times more identified fossil fuel reserves than our civilization can possibly endure and survive, they want to dig up vastly more.

Putin and Harper are detached from reality.   They see the world in a twenty-year time frame beyond which lies, in their minds, a greyness of obscurity.   They have convinced themselves they can't possibly see into the future so they should simply ignore the warnings of science.  But, as Monbiot writes, the results of their neglect shall follow as surely as if they had sought to engineer them.

I'll take heed of another warning from Shakespeare, from King Lear, Act III:

"He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health,
a boy's love, or a whore's oath."