This letter was sent to a publisher with whom we signed a contract for our book Bright Green Lies. After the contract was signed by all parties the publisher unilaterally voided on the contract. The publisher voided the contract because we refuse to deny physical reality, that is, we refuse to say that male human beings can “identify” their way into becoming women. The book has nothing to do with that question, but is about how high technology will not stop global warming or the destruction of the planet.
This is the cult-like behavior of the postmodern left: if you disagree with any of the Holy Commandments of postmodernism/queer theory/transgender ideology, you must be silenced on not only that but on every other subject. Welcome to the death of discourse, brought to you by the postmodern left.
We are profoundly disappointed that you chose to void the contract. That’s not particularly professional or ethical. Nor is it what we expected from a press that bills itself as an alternative to the corporate model of publishing.
You asked for our views on “gender,” and then didn’t even bother to wait for an answer before voiding the contract. Again, not what we expected from a press that seems to pride itself on communication.
Here are our views on “gender.”
We are part of a global, multi-generational feminist struggle that is critical of gender. There are many aspects to this political tradition, one of which is criticism of modern gender identity politics.
To make clear our position:
We believe that physical reality is real. This includes biological sex.
We believe that women–adult human females–have been oppressed under patriarchy for several thousand years.
We believe that sex stereotypes–aka gender–are social constructions. There is nothing biological that drives women to wear high heels and makeup, and drives men to fail to show emotions. Those are created by society to keep men on top and women subordinate. Sure, it’s perfectly fine if men want to wear makeup and high heels, but a desire to do so does not make them women.
We believe that people should be allowed to dress however they want, love whomever they want, have whatever interests and personalities they want. And of course they shouldn’t be discriminated against or subjected to harassment or violence. But these fashion choices, sexual preferences, and personality characteristics do not change anyone’s sex. Insisting that they do is reactionary. The whole point of feminism was that both women and men have full human capacities and shouldn’t be constrained to half of our human potential. The catchphrase of the seventies “free to be you and me” has become its polar opposite, where a little girl who likes trucks must really be a boy and hence may be subject to profound and life-changing medical alteration.
We believe that the modern gender identity movement is resulting in concrete and widespread harm, such as via dismantling hard-won protections like Title IX, private bathrooms, separate prisons, women’s sports, changing rooms, scholarship programs for women, women’s events and groups, etc. And of course it is causing harm through the destruction of discourse by the systematic silencing of anyone who disagrees with any portion of the gender identity movement.
We believe, as did Andrea Dworkin, that “Those of us who love reading and writing believe that being a writer is a sacred trust. It means telling the truth. It means being incorruptible. It means not being afraid, and never lying.” We believe the same holds true for publishers. Or used to. Or should.
We believe that there is a crisis in publishing and in public discourse, brought on by what has been named “the regressive left.” This movement bears no relation to the historic left that has spent decades fighting for a just and sustainable world. The historic left believed in the power of education and the free exchange of ideas as the foundations of democracy and as bulwarks against authoritarianism. The regressive left has instead based itself on harassing, threatening, deplatforming, and/or assaulting–that is, silencing–anyone who dares to disagree with any of its dogma. We are certainly not alone in noticing this. It has been remarked on by everyone from Noam Chomsky to Ricky Gervais. This regressive left has embraced authoritarianism, and has empowered both petty tyrants and smug cowards. It is not an exaggeration to say that we are deeply chilled by the regressive left’s rise to power. The values necessary for civic society to function and the institutions whose job is to embody and protect those ideals are eroding, and, with a few brave exceptions [for example, the above mentioned Chomsky, Gervais, various comedians, various old-school lefties like Chris Hedges; as well as The Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago, FIRE, Heterodox Academy, and Bret Weinstein], not enough people seem willing to stand and fight. Probably because when we do, regressive lefties threaten our careers, our livelihoods, and our very lives. They deplatform us. They get us fired. They void our contracts. Many threaten to rape and kill the women, and to kill the men. This has become routine. The new orthodoxy is anti-intellectual, anti-democratic, and fundamentalist in its mindset. Its tactics of bullying, deplatforming, stalking, severe social censure, and violence will never create a just and sustainable world. It will only create autocrats, self-righteous quislings, and in the case of gender identity, a generation of children who have been sterilized and surgically altered. Children are already being harmed by this project. Some of those young people are speaking out, and we urge you to listen to them:
If no one is allowed to disagree with any one particular group of people–whether they be capitalists or Christians or Muslims or those who support (or oppose) Israel or those who identify as transgender–then there can be no reasonable discourse. Allowing any group to hold discourse hostage is the death knell for pluralistic society. It leads to fundamentalism. It is a fundamentalism. It’s a classic trick used by despots and pocket despots everywhere: to ensure agreement with your position, make certain that all other positions are literally unspeakable. For the religiously minded, the epithet of choice has often been blasphemy. For the patriot, it’s traitor. For the capitalist, it’s commie. And for the liberal regressive leftist, it’s oppressor, or in our case, transphobe.
Here are some questions. These questions aren’t rhetorical. If you’re going to break our contract and not publish us based on internet slander, on an issue that has nothing to do with the book at hand, and apparently without bothering to find out our actual positions, we think you owe us the courtesy of at least honestly considering these questions.
Do you believe that a little boy who likes to dance and play with dolls should be put on puberty blockers and possibly have his genitals removed; or do you think that a little boy who loves to dance and play with dolls should be loved precisely for who he is, which is a little boy who loves to dance and play with dolls? Likewise, do you believe that a little girl who likes to play football and fix bicycles should be put on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and then have her reproductive organs surgically removed; or do you think she should be loved precisely for who she is, which is a little girl who loves to play football and fix bicycles? If you think there is nothing wrong with these children, and they should not be put on dangerous drugs, then you will be called a bigot, and publishers will refuse to publish your book about stopping the murder of the planet.
Do you believe that women, including those who have been sexually assaulted by men, should be forced to share their most vulnerable spaces with men? This has happened in spaces like homeless shelters, women’s prisons, and battered women’s shelters. As a result of unquestioning acceptance of the idea that men can simply identify as women, women have been raped. Women have been assaulted. We have spoken up about this. How many women have to be raped before it will be acceptable for someone who stands in solidarity with women to publish books on any other subject in the world, including stopping the murder of the planet? If you believe that women should not be forced to share their most vulnerable spaces with men, then many on the regressive left will call you a bigot, and publishers will break their contracts with you.
Do you believe that women who have been sexually assaulted and call a rape crisis center should be forced to talk to a man? This has happened. The Vancouver Rape Relief Shelter operates a crisis hotline and was sued in Canadian courts by a trans-identified male who wanted to “man” the phone lines. The crisis center organizers fought back on the basis that a male voice answering the phone would create problems for women in crisis. They eventually won their case, but have since been under assault, including having funding taken away because they refuse to force women who have been raped to talk to men. If you believe that women who have been sexually assaulted by men should not be forced to speak with men when they call a rape crisis center, then those on the regressive left will call you a bigot, and publishers will break their contracts with you.
Do you believe that women in prison should be forced to share their cells with male prisoners who have been found guilty of rape? This has happened numerous times, and has led to the rape of women by these men. See, for example, Karen White in the UK. See, for example, any number of cases in the US. If you believe that women in prison should not be forced to share their cells with men, then those on the regressive left will call you a bigot, and publishers will break their contracts with you.
Do you believe that women should be allowed to compete in women-only sports leagues? Or do you believe that women should be forced to compete against males? Men who identify as transgender are already taking medals, money, and scholarships from girls and women, as, for example, in this case, in which a white male millionaire who identifies as transgender cost an indigenous Samoan woman who overcame childhood sexual abuse her gold medal. How can the regressive left rationalize supporting this? But they do. We are the ones called bigots for protesting this. This is an appalling statement of how demented, and regressive, the left has become. Women are being harmed by this–economically, socially, morally. If you believe in Title IX, and believe that women athletes should be allowed a level playing field, then you will be called a bigot and publishers will break their contracts with you.
Do you believe that women should be compelled by law to touch men’s genitals, or risk being hauled before a human rights tribunal? This is happening right now, as a trans-identified male named “Jessica Yaniv” is suing poor immigrant women of color in British Columbia because they refuse to wax his genitals. Yaniv has already forced several of these women out of business. If you do not believe that women should be forced to handle his genitals, you will be labeled a bigot and publishers will refuse to publish your work.
Do you believe that lesbians who do not want to have sex with men are bigots and should be shamed into having unwanted sex with men? This is common in modern lesbian communities. In fact it is happening right now to an entire generation of young lesbians. In any other circumstances, we would call this what it has always been called, which is “corrective rape.” But now the regressive left promotes it, and vilifies those who oppose it. If you do not believe that lesbians should be shamed into having sex with men, then you will be called a bigot and publishers will break their contracts with you.
If you don’t believe women should be forced to share their most vulnerable spaces with men, then we are baffled by your position. Our book is not about that issue, and our position on that issue has nothing to do with this book. Are you simply afraid of the backlash?
If, on the other hand, you do believe that women should be forced to share their most vulnerable spaces with men, then we are still baffled by your position. You publish lots of stuff we disagree with. Who cares? We came to you to publish a book on whether industrial wind and solar will save the planet. Your views on whether women should be forced to share their spaces with men are irrelevant to us and to that book. We are not fundamentalists, we are not afraid of open discourse, and we are not afraid of being somehow “contaminated” by contact with those who hold positions with which we disagree. But then again, we are not part of the new regressive left.
By the standards of our detractors, we have committed blasphemy and are now unclean. Our loyalty to women has rendered every other position we take on any subject to literally be unspeakable.
Welcome to the current state of discourse on the regressive left.
Resistance movements need two things: loyalty, and material support.
— Lierre Keith
As you read this, DGR organizers in Manila, Kathmandu, Auckland, Denver, Paris—all over the world—are building a resistance movement to defend the living planet and rebuild sustainable human communities.
To do our work, we need sustainable funding. We need to sign up at least thirty more people to our monthly donor program in the next month. Can you be one of those people?If you can’t donate, no problem. Most of us are poor. But we’re working hard. This weekend, for example, our permaculture wing distributed native trees, seedlings, planter boxes, and revolutionary literature to unhoused people on the West Coast; DGR Asia Pacific held its second-ever organizing meeting; and we planned the next steps in our tactical direct action training curriculum.
All this takes money. And our radical, uncompromising stance comes at a price. Liberal foundations and big corporations won’t fund any organization that actually represents a threat to the ruling class.
Instead, we rely on small, grassroots donations – averaging less than $50 per person – and have only one paid staff. Our current funding levels aren’t sustainable in the long-term, and we need to expand our fundraising base significantly to build a stronger movement and take our revolutionary action to the next level.
Can you join us as a monthly donor?For those who are already donating: we cannot thank you enough.
In this short excerpt from the last episode of The Green Flame podcast, Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith offer a poetic reading from a piece by C.S. Lewis, originally written in 1948, in which the author speaks of the threat of nuclear war and how to live in an age of existential threats.
“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. How are we to live in an atomic age? I am tempted to reply, ‘why as you would have lived in the 16th century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might have landed and cut your throat every night, or indeed as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented, and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors: anesthetics. We have that still.
It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things: working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a a game of darts, not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies, a microbe can do that, but they need not dominate our minds.”
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
We are happy to announce that the DGR book is available in German! Our thanks goes to the volunteer translaters, editors and the Austrian publisher who did very good work.
The book can be ordered as print and e-book from the publishers website:
Wir freuen uns mitteilen zu können, dass das DGR-Buch in deutscher Sprache erhältlich ist! Unser Dank gilt den ehrenamtlichen Übersetzern, Redakteuren und dem österreichischen Verlag, die sehr gute Arbeit geleistet haben.
Das Buch kann als Print- und E-Book auf der Website des Verlags bestellt werden.
„In diesem Buch geht es darum, zurückzuschlagen. Die vorherrschende Kultur, genannt Zivilisation, tötet den Planeten. Und es ist längst an der Zeit für diejenigen von uns, denen das Leben auf der Erde etwas bedeutet, die notwendigen Maßnahmen zu ergreifen, um diese Kultur daran zu hindern, alle lebenden Wesen zu zerstören.“
Tiefenökologischer Widerstand („Deep Green Resistance“) beginnt dort, wo die Umweltbewegung aufhört: Denn für die Anhänger dieser Idee ist die industrielle Zivilisation unvereinbar mit dem Leben. Sie glauben nicht daran, dass irgendeine Form von zukünftiger Technologie dem Klimawandel, dem Artensterben, der Luftverschmutzung, der Bodenversiegelung oder irgendeiner anderen ökologischen Katastrophe, die die Menschheit ausgelöst hat, Einhalt gebieten kann.
Auch mit „bewusstem“ Konsumieren oder „nachhaltigem“ Wirtschaften lässt sich der Planet Erde nicht retten, sondern nur mit einer ernsthaften Widerstandsbewegung, die die zerstörerische industrielle Wirtschaft zum Erliegen bringt.
Die AutorInnen Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith und Aric McBay vertreten diesen radikalökologischen Ansatz, der in den USA und an anderen Orten immer mehr AnhängerInnen findet. In ihrem erstmals auf Deutsch übersetzten Manifest erzählen sie davon, wie täglich 200 Spezies von der Erde verschwinden, jährlich eine Fläche im Ausmaß des Aral-Sees verwüstet wird und wie pro Jahr 23 Millionen Menschen an den Folgen von Wasser-, Luft- oder Erdverschmutzung sterben. Sie erzählen von einer Welt, die kurz vor dem Ableben steht – wenn wir uns nicht sofort organisieren und handeln.
Das Buch „Deep Green Resistance“ erläutert bis ins Detail unterschiedliche Möglichkeiten des tiefenökologischen Widerstands, von gewaltlosen Aktionen bis zur Guerilla-Kriegsführung. Und es nennt die Bedingungen, die für den Erfolg dieser Optionen erforderlich sind. Es ist ein Handbuch und Aktionsplan für all jene, die entschlossen sind, für diesen Planeten zu kämpfen und den Kampf zu gewinnen.
Die AutorInnen
Derrick Jensen, geboren 1960, ist ein US-amerikanischer Autor und radikaler Umweltaktivist. Er hat über fünfzehn Bücher verfasst, zu den bekanntesten zählen: „Endgame“, „A Language Older Than Words“ und „What We Leave Behind“ (gemeinsam mit Aric McBay).
Lierre Keith, geboren 1964, lebt als Schriftstellerin, Kleinbäuerin und radikal-feministische Aktivistin in den USA.
Aric McBay ist Autor mehrerer Sachbücher, Aktivist und Kleinbauer und lebt in Ontario, Kanada.
For years, Derrick Jensen has asked his audiences, “Do you think this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of life?” No one ever says yes.
Deep Green Resistance starts where the environmental movement leaves off: industrial civilization is incompatible with life. Technology can’t fix it, and shopping—no matter how green—won’t stop it. To save this planet, we need a serious resistance movement that can bring down the industrial economy. Deep Green Resistance evaluates strategic options for resistance, from nonviolence to guerrilla warfare, and the conditions required for those options to be successful. It provides an exploration of organizational structures, recruitment, security, and target selection for both aboveground and underground action. Deep Green Resistance also discusses a culture of resistance and the crucial support role that it can play.
Deep Green Resistance is a plan of action for anyone determined to fight for this planet—and win.
This excerpt from Chapter 4 of the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet was written by Lierre Keith. Click the link above to purchase the book or read online for free.This is part 4 of this chapter.
While the alternative culture “celebrates political disengagement,” what it attacks are conventions, morals, and boundaries. It comes down to a simple question: Are we after shock value or justice? Is the problem a constraining set of values or an oppressive set of material conditions? Remember that one of the cardinal points of liberalism is that reality is made up of values and ideas, not relationships of power and oppression. So not only is shock value an adolescent goal, it’s also a liberal one.
This program of attacking boundaries rather than injustice has had serious consequences on the left, and to the extent that this attack has won, on popular culture as a whole. When men decide to be outlaw rebels, from Bohemians to Hell’s Angels, one primary “freedom” they appropriate is women. The Marquis de Sade, who tortured women, girls, and boys—some of whom he kidnapped, some of whom he bought—was declared “the freest spirit that has yet existed” by Guillaume Apollinaire, the founder of the surrealist movement.63 Women’s physical and sexual boundaries are seen as just one more middle-class convention that men have a right to overcome on their way to freedom. Nowhere is this more apparent—and appalling—than in the way so many on the left have embraced pornography.
The triumph of the pornographers is a victory of power over justice, cruelty over empathy, and profits over human rights. I could make that statement about Walmart or McDonalds and progressives would eagerly agree. We all understand that Walmart destroys local economies, a relentless impoverishing of communities across the US that is now almost complete. It also depends on near-slave conditions for workers in China to produce the mountains of cheap crap that Walmart sells. And ultimately the endless growth model of capitalism is destroying the world. Nobody on the left claims that the cheap crap that Walmart produces equals freedom. Nobody defends Walmart by saying that the workers, American or Chinese, want to work there. Leftists understand that people do what they have to for survival, that any job is better than no job, and that minimum wage and no benefits are cause for a revolution, not a defense of those very conditions. Likewise McDonalds. No one defends what McDonalds does to animals, to the earth, to workers, to human health and human community by pointing out that the people standing over the boiling grease consented to sweat all day or that hog farmers voluntarily signed contracts that barely return a living. The issue does not turn on consent, but on the social impacts of injustice and hierarchy, on how corporations are essentially weapons of mass destruction. Focusing on the moment of individual choice will get us nowhere.
The problem is the material conditions that make going blind in a silicon chip factory in Taiwan the best option for some people. Those people are living beings. Leftists lay claim to human rights as our bedrock and our north star: we know that that Taiwanese woman is not different from us in any way that matters, and if going blind for pennies and no bathroom breaks was our best option, we would be in grim circumstances.
And the woman enduring two penises shoved up her anus? This is not an exaggeration or “focusing on the worst,” as feminists are often accused of doing. “Double-anal” is now standard fare in gonzo porn, the porn made possible by the Internet, the porn with no pretense of a plot, the porn that men overwhelmingly prefer. That woman, just like the woman assembling computers, is likely to suffer permanent physical damage. In fact, the average woman in gonzo porn can only last three months before her body gives out, so punishing are the required sex acts. Anyone with a conscience instead of a hard-on would know that just by looking. If you spend a few minutes looking at it—not masturbating to it, but actually looking at it—you may have to agree with Robert Jensen that pornography is “what the end of the world looks like.”
“By that I don’t mean that pornography is going to bring about the end of the world; I don’t have apocalyptic delusions. Nor do I mean that of all the social problems we face, pornography is the most threatening. Instead, I want to suggest that if we have the courage to look honestly at contemporary pornography, we get a glimpse—in a very visceral, powerful fashion—of the consequences of the oppressive systems in which we live. Pornography is what the end will look like if we don’t reverse the pathological course that we are on in this patriarchal, white-supremacist, predatory corporate-capitalist society. . . . Imagine a world in which empathy, compassion, and solidarity—the things that make decent human society possible—are finally and completely overwhelmed by a self-centered, emotionally detached pleasure-seeking. Imagine those values playing out in a society structured by multiple hierarchies in which a domination/subordination dynamic shapes most relationships and interaction. . . . [E]very year my sense of despair deepens over the direction in which pornography and our pornographic culture is heading. That despair is rooted not in the reality that lots of people can be cruel, or that some number of them knowingly take pleasure in that cruelty. Humans have always had to deal with that aspect of our psychology. But what happens when people can no longer see the cruelty, when the pleasure in cruelty has been so normalized that it is rendered invisible to so many? And what happens when for some considerable part of the male population of our society, that cruelty becomes a routine part of sexuality, defining the most intimate parts of our lives?” 64
All leftists need to do is connect the dots, the same way we do in every other instance of oppression. The material conditions that men as a class create (the word is patriarchy) mean that in the US battering is the most commonly committed violent crime: that’s men beating up women. Men rape one in three women and sexually abuse one in four girls before the age of fourteen. The number one perpetrator of childhood sexual abuse is called “Dad.” Andrea Dworkin, one of the bravest women of all time, understood that this was systematic, not personal. She saw that rape, battering, incest, prostitution, and reproductive exploitation all worked together to create a “barricade of sexual terrorism”65 inside which all women are forced to live. Our job as feminists and members of a culture of resistance is not to learn to eroticize those acts; our task is to bring that wall down.
In fact, the right and left together make a cozy little world that entombs women in conditions of subservience and violence. Critiquing male supremacist sexuality will bring charges of being a censor and a right-wing antifun prude. But seen from the perspective of women, the right and the left create a seamless hegemony.
Gail Dines writes, “When I critique McDonalds, no one calls me anti-food.”66 People understand that what is being critiqued is a set of unjust social relations—with economic, political, and ideological components—that create more of the same. McDonalds does not produce generic food. It manufactures an industrial capitalist product for profit. The pornographers are no different. The pornographers have built a $100 billion a year industry, selling not just sex as a commodity, which would be horrible enough for our collective humanity, but sexual cruelty.67 This is the deep heart of patriarchy, the place where leftists fear to tread: male supremacy takes acts of oppression and turns them into sex. Could there be a more powerful reward than orgasm?
And since it feels so visceral, such practices are defended (in the rare instance that a feminist is able to demand a defense) as “natural.” Even when wrapped in racism, many on the left refuse to see the oppression in pornography. Little Latina Sluts or Pimp My Black Teen provoke not outrage, but sexual pleasure for the men consuming such material. A sexuality based on eroticizing dehumanization, domination, and hierarchy will gravitate to other hierarchies, and find a wealth of material in racism. What it will never do is build an egalitarian world of care and respect, the world that the left claims to want.
On a global scale, the naked female body—too thin to bear live young and often too young as well—is for sale everywhere, as the defining image of the age, and as a brutal reality: women and girls are now the number one product for sale on the global black market. Indeed, there are entire countries balancing their budgets on the sale of women.68 Is slavery a human rights abuse or a sexual thrill? Of what use is a social change movement that can’t decide?
We need to stake our claim as the people who care about freedom, not the freedom to abuse, exploit, and dehumanize, but freedom from being demeaned and violated, and from a cultural celebration of that violation.
This is the moral bankruptcy of a culture built on violation and its underlying entitlement. It’s a slight variation on the Romantics, substituting sexual desire for emotion as the unmediated, natural, and privileged state. The sexual version is a direct inheritance of the Bohemians, who reveled in public displays of “transgression, excess, sexual outrage.” Much of this ethic can be traced back to the Marquis de Sade, torturer of women and children. Yet he has been claimed as inspiration and foundation by writers such as “Baudelaire, Flaubert, Swinburne, Lautréamont, Dostoevski, Cocteau, and Apollinaire” as well as Camus and Barthes.69 Wrote Camus, “Two centuries ahead of time . . . Sade extolled totalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom.”70 Sade also presents an early formulation of Nietzsche’s will to power. His ethic ultimately provides “the erotic roots of fascism.”71
Once more, it is time to choose. The warnings are out there, and it’s time to listen. College students have 40 percent less empathy than they did twenty years ago.72 If the left wants to mount a true resistance, a resistance against the power that breaks hearts and bones, rivers and species, it will have to hear—and, finally, know—this one brave sentence from poet Adrienne Rich: “Without tenderness, we are in hell.”73
—
The alternative culture of the ’60s offered a generalized revolt against structure, responsibility, and morals. Being a youth culture, and following out of the Bohemian and the Beatniks, this was predictable. But a rejection of all structure and responsibility ends ultimately in atomized individuals motivated only by self interests, which looks rather exactly like capitalism’s fabled Economic Man. And a flat out refusal of the concept of morality is the province of sociopaths. This is not a plan with a future.
Take the pull of the alternative culture across the left. Now add the ugliness and the authoritarianism of the right’s “family values.” It’s no surprise that the left has ceded all claim to morality. But it’s also a mistake. We have values, too. War is a moral issue. Poverty is a moral issue. Two hundred species driven extinct every day is a moral issue. Underneath every instance of injustice is a violation of what we know is right. Unrestricted personal license in a context that abandons morals to celebrate outrage will not inspire a movement for justice, nor will it build a culture worth living in. It will grant the powerful more entitlements—for instance, the rich will get richer, and the poor will be conceptually nonexistent, except as a resource. “If it feels good, do it” isn’t even the province of adolescence; it’s the morality of a toddler. For the entitled individual, in whatever version—Homo economicus, Homo bohemicus, or Homo sadeus—pleasure is reduced to cheap thrills, while the deepest human joys—intimacy, belonging, participation from community to cosmos—are impossible. This is because those joys depend on a realization that we need other people and other beings, ultimately a whole web of existence, all of whom deserve our protection and respect. In return we get rewards, rewards that can accrue into profound satisfaction: from the contented joy of communal well-being to the animal ecstasy of sex to the grace of participation in the mystery.
Currently, the right places the blame for the destruction of both family and community at the feet of liberalism. The real culprit, of course, is capitalism, especially the corporate and mass media versions. But as long as the left refuses to fight for our values as values—and to enact those values in our lives and our movements—the right will be partially correct. They will also have recruitment potential that we’re squandering: people know that civic life and basic social norms have degenerated.
It is a triumph for capitalism that the right is winning the US culture war by pinning this decay of family and community on the left. But the right is willing to take a moral stance, even though the man behind the curtain isn’t Sodom or Gomorrah, it’s corporate capitalism. Meanwhile the left might identify capitalism as the problem, but by and large refuses a moral stance.
The US is dominated by corporate rule. The Democrats and Republicans are really the two wings of the Capitalist Party. Neither is going to critique the masters. It is up to us, the people who hold human rights and our living planet dear above all things, to speak the truth. We need to rise above individualism and live in the knowledge that we are the only people who are going to defend what is good in human possibility against the destructive overlapping power-grab of capitalism, patriarchy, and industrialization.
