The Horrific Human Supremacy of Jeff Bezos

The Horrific Human Supremacy of Jeff Bezos

By Elisabeth Robson / Art for Culture Change

On May 9, 2019 Blue Origin — Jeff Bezos’ space exploration company — posted this video of Jeff Bezos speaking at the Going to Space to Benefit Earth event. One of the visions of Blue Origin, as outlined on the web site, and the focus of Mr. Bezos’ presentation is that millions of people must live and work in space in order to “preserve Earth” and that we will “go to space to tap its unlimited resources and energy.”

He begins his presentation by making some true statements — that the Earth is not infinite (who knew!) and will eventually run out of energy for our use (again, who knew!). Mr. Bezos then quickly veers into human supremacy in the extreme, with a couple of innocuous sounding but telling remarks: that our lives are better than our parent’s lives, which were better than our grandparent’s lives (really better? Or just more energy intensive?) — completely ignoring all the non-humans we share this planet with — and that we could power our culture’s current energy needs if only we covered Nevada in solar cells. “It is mostly desert, anyway,” he says, ignoring the fact that deserts are in fact teeming with amazing life of all kinds from beautiful desert flowers to lizards, birds, tortoises, and so many more; ignoring the fact that solar farms in Nevada and other areas are bulldozed of all life before the toxic and deadly shining solar cells are installed.

As Mr. Bezos correctly points out, if we continue growing (GDP, energy use, etc.) at 3% a year, our historical trend in the modern era, we’d have to cover the entire surface of the Earth with solar panels to supply our energy needs in 200 years. Unintentionally, he’s hit upon a big problem with renewables: the land use requirements are unsustainable, and aside from the fact that along with running out of fossil fuel energy, we will eventually run out of the raw materials to make solar cells, wind turbines, batteries, smart grids, and so on long before 200 years passes. Of course, as he says, it is ridiculous to cover the Earth with solar panels, so we need something else.

Something else will include efficiency: our technology will continue to become more efficient, but Mr. Bezos acknowledges that growth in energy use will far outstrip energy efficiency. This relationship between greater efficiency and greater resource use is known as Jevons’ Paradox, discovered by William Stanley Jevons in 1865. Energy efficiency never reduces the amount of energy we use, because the more efficient our devices and cars and lighting and heating become, the cheaper they get, and the more we use. One example Mr. Bezos uses is air transportation: 50 years ago it took 109 gallons of fuel to fly one person from LA to NYC; today it takes only 24 gallons. And indeed, air travel is growing faster than any other transportation sector and is expected to double in the next 20 years, far outstripping the gains in efficiency made by airline companies. Efficiency gains just lead to more growth.

So, yet again, we need something else. Mr. Bezos never questions that growth is bad. He never suggests that maybe we should de-grow our population, our economy, our consumption, anything. He never contemplates that growth might not always be a good thing if it leads to the suffering of multitudes. No, he charges on assuming that growth is what’s best for everyone. Of course he does. As the CEO of amazon.com he is the embodiment of growth at all costs, including the lives of his own employees.

Does he even for a second think about the lives of non-humans at all? I don’t think so.

Unlimited demand + limited resources = rationing. This is the equation Mr. Bezos shows the audience, and he is correct. But rather than suggest we limit our demand, he focuses on how awful the rationing will be. According to him, that rationing means our children’s lives will be worse than our parent’s lives, and our grandparent’s lives. Again, I am blown away by the human supremacy of this thinking. It assumes that our lives have indeed, until now, been getting better. Which assumes that “our” means humans, because it surely cannot mean non-humans, whose lives have been getting demonstrably worse. Much worse. And which humans is he talking about? Clearly only the humans in the so-called Western developed world, because most humans on this planet have more recently been stripped of their land and livelihoods by colonization and “sustainable development”, and forced into menial, poverty-level jobs in factories, mines, and oil fields where their lives are demonstrably worse than they were before. For proof of this, simply imagine (or better yet, read the stories about) the life of a Native American Indigenous person who lived free on the land before white colonization and genocide and compare that with the life of a Native American relegated to living in poverty on a reservation with no access to land for traditional use, clean water, clean air, or cultural sites and activities. Mr. Bezos is arguing, as all techno-utopians do, that progress is always good. Only for people like you, Mr. Bezos.

And what is wrong with rationing? Well, god-forbid, it means we’d have to use less of everything we’re accustomed to using now. (Rich) Americans — 5% of the global population — would have to stop using the 25% of the resources on this planet that we use now. The horror! Cutting back and using less is fundamentally anathema to the American Dream(TM) — the idea that if we just work hard enough we can all achieve that fantasy of progress: having more money, owning more stuff, and of course, the unarticulated implication of using more energy that goes with that. “More” is the stuff American Dreams are made of.

The choice Mr. Bezos presents us with is between “stasis and rationing” and “dynamism and growth”. For Mr. Bezos, the choice is easy: we want dynamism and growth.

And here’s the good news: if we move out into space, we’ll have access to more! To unlimited resources!

Mr. Bezos’ solution to continued dynamism and growth is O’Neill colonies: giant tubes in space filled with a million people each. Here’s what he envisions this would look like:

[see photo here]

These will be easy to get to from Earth, easy to move amongst so we can visit our friends and neighbors. We can have the atmosphere of the best day on Hawai’i, the best cities, the best recreational spaces (complete with a deer and a bird flying over!). We can have it all, if we are willing to leave the planet behind, willing to forgo our “planetary chauvinism” as he (and a clip from Isaac Asimov) says.

Earth will, according to Bezos, be zoned for “residential”, “light industry” and people going to college. That’s weird. Why would people want to go to college on the planet, but not on the colony? He never says why. He also doesn’t mention “other species” in his zoning plans for Earth… at all. Or forests, rivers, mountains, glaciers, prairies, or wild places of any kind. Or how we’ll go about cleaning up the pollution and what will be no longer needed nuclear power plants, roads, buildings, and so much more we’ve left in our wake. He just says Earth “will be a beautiful place that people will visit.”

A trillion humans in space means a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts, according to Bezos. He doesn’t mention a thousand white rhinos, or a thousand passenger pigeons, or a thousand great auks. Of course not, because — oops! — we already killed off those species with our insatiable greed and inability to set limits on ourselves. As if a beautiful sunset isn’t as valuable as a Mozart concerto, and a thousand physics geniuses is somehow better than an entire species. Mr. Bezos claims this would be a great civilization. Only for people who care only about people, Mr. Bezos. Yes, there are a still a few of us who care about more than that.

Mr. Bezos says it won’t be up to him to build this future; it will be up to the (presumably younger) people he points to in the front row. It will be those people and their children and grandchildren, those people who will need to create the companies and the infrastructure to move to space… well they’d better hurry because we have only a couple of decades to get our CO2 emissions down to zero to avoid catastrophic climate change, and I’m not sure you can build a million colonies in space each big enough to hold a million people in two decades. Perhaps Mr. Bezos envisions that all of Earth’s remaining resources will be used up in this process? In which case it is unlikely that Earth will be a “beautiful place to visit” once we’re done building these big metal tubes in space.

The rest of the presentation is an advertisement for Blue Origin and how the company is putting all the basic infrastructure — the road to space — into place so that future generations can take it from there, with gratuitous phallic images of rockets launching into space accompanied by rousing movie music. Jeff Bezos’ childhood fantasy come true.

At no time in this entire presentation does Mr. Bezos mention non-human species, except implicitly when he mentions (and shows fantastical pictures of) “recreational opportunities” and “agriculture” in the colonies. It is as if, for Bezos, “nature” doesn’t exist except for recreation and food. Who, I want to ask him, is going to be responsible for building the web of life on these colonies so his deer and his bird and the pollinators (not shown) in the colonies will actually exist for more than a few weeks, days, or hours? Unfortunately, knowing what we know about Jeff Bezos, it is entirely possible that the graphical rendering of the colonies shows a robotic deer and a robotic bird, and that pollination occurs entirely via miniature drones. And what about the soil in which the plants in the “agriculture” areas and the trees shown in the “recreational” spaces grow? It is likely that the soil, too, is artificial, and artificially fertilized… oops! Synthetic fertilizer is made from petroleum products, which implies that either we find fossil fuels out in space somewhere (where we’ll be putting all the “heavy industry” of the future, according to Bezos), or that we continue mining the Earth for fossil fuels so we can grow food in space. Or maybe once established, we’ll all be pooping out the fertilizer in these closed-circuit biospheres in space. Because that’s been so successful in the past.

Who knows what is in Bezos’ addled mind. I do know one thing that isn’t there: a fundamental respect for nature, for billions of years of evolution, for the intricacy of the web of life that supports us here on planet Earth, a web of life we know virtually nothing about in comparison to what there is to know. He very obviously sees humans as separate from nature; anyone who imagines we can live in space must believe that to some degree. What Mr. Bezos fails to understand is that we are completely, utterly, inextricably part of nature; that we are human animals, and that our attempts to pretend otherwise will last only as long as the planetary ecosystem here on Earth, the ecosystem that continues to function at some diminished capacity, despite the damages we keep inflicting on the one and only planet we know of that supports life.

To fantasize that it is somehow better to try to recreate in space what we once had on Earth, than it is to contemplate limiting our demand just a bit so we can continue to live on this beautiful blue planet is human supremacy in the extreme. This won’t be a popular position, I know. Humans, especially Americans, love a new frontier to explore, and almost everyone I know gets excited about new technology and launching things into space.

But launching ourselves into space with the idea that we can somehow live without the planet to whom we are tethered with blood, guts, bacteria, cells, water, phytoplankton, oxygen, breath, fish, birds, trees, … every living thing on Earth… is the insane hallucination of someone who’s been “successful” as measured by little bits of green paper and numbers on a computer screen, but who has absolutely no idea that his fantasy, like the paper and the numbers, is a delusion.

Groomed to Consume

Groomed to Consume

Featured image: Black Friday, by John Henderson (cc by ND 2.0)

by 

With Christmas coming up, household consumption will soon hit its yearly peak in many countries. Despite homely pictures of tranquility on mass-produced greeting cards, Christmas is more about frenzied shopping and overspending than peace on earth or quality time with family and friends. As with so much of our lives, the holidays have been hijacked by the idea that satisfaction, even happiness, is only one more purchase away.

Two generations ago, my Norwegian grandmother was overjoyed as a child when she received one modest gift and tasted an imported orange at Christmastime. In the modern era of long-distance trade and excess consumption, nobody gets even mildly excited by tasting a foreign fruit or receiving a small gift. Instead, adults dive into a cornucopia of global food (typically followed by a period of dieting) while children expect numerous expensive gifts – with designer clothes and electronic toys, games, and gadgets topping the list.

This comparison is not meant to romanticize the past or demean the present: it’s just a small example of how consumption has come to replace the things that give real meaning to our lives– like creating something with our own hands, or sharing and interacting with others. In the process, we have been robbed of the ability to take pleasure from small wonders.

Most of us are aware that excessive consumption is a prime feature of modern life, and that it is the cause of multiple social and environmental problems. We are living in a so-called “consumer culture” – a rather fancy title for something that has more in common with an abusive affliction, like bulimia or alcoholism, than it does with real living culture.

Rampant consumerism doesn’t happen by itself: it is encouraged by an economic system that requires perpetual economic growth. When national economies show signs of slowing down, citizens are invariably called upon to increase their consumption, which in a country like the US represents 70 percent of GDP. Curiously, when talk turns to the downside of consumerism – resource depletion, pollution, or shoppers trampled at Wal-Mart – it is the greed supposedly inherent in human nature that gets the blame. Rather than look at the role of corporate media, advertising, and other systemic causes of overconsumption, we are encouraged to keep shopping – but to do so “responsibly”, perhaps by engaging in “green consumerism”, a galling oxymoron.

I have no doubt that consumerism is linked with greed – greed for the latest model of computer, smartphone, clothes or car – but this has nothing to do with human nature. This sort of greed is an artificially induced condition. From early childhood our eyes, ears and minds have been flooded with images and messages that undermine our identity and self-esteem, create false needs, and teach us to seek satisfaction and approval through the consumer choices we make.

And the pressure to consume is rising, along with the amount of money spent on advertising. It is forecast that global advertising expenditure will hit $568 billion for 2018, a 7.4 percent increase over 2017.[1] According to UN figures, that amount of money would be sufficient to both eradicate extreme poverty and foot the bill for measures to mitigate the effects of climate change worldwide. [2]

Instead, we are “groomed to consume”. In the US, this means that the average young person is exposed to more than 3,000 ads per day on television, the internet, billboards and in magazines, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.[3] While the figure may be lower in other countries, people everywhere are increasingly exposed to advertising – particularly through the internet, which now has over 4 billion users globally.[4] In fact, half of the global “consumer-class” can now be found in the developing world. Although per capita consumption in China and India remains substantially less than in Europe, those two countries now consume more in total than all of Western Europe.[5]

Marketing strategies – advertising, celebrity trend-setting, product placement in movies and TV shows, marketing tie-ins between media and fast food franchises, etc. – have evolved to target an ever younger audience, all the way down to the one-year old, according to sociologist Juliet Schor. In her book Born to Buy, she defines “age compression” as the marketing to children of products that were previously designed for adults.[6] Examples include makeup for young girls, violent toys for small boys, and designer clothes for the first grader. Schor’s research shows that the more children are exposed to media and advertising, the more consumerist they become; it also shows that they are more likely to become depressed, anxious and develop low self-esteem in the process.

However, children can become victims of the corporate-induced consumer culture even without direct exposure to advertising and media, as I learned during a year spent in my native Denmark, together with my then 12-year old son. Prior to our stay in Denmark, we lived in rural Mexico with limited exposure to TV, internet and advertising, and surrounded by children from homes with dirt floors, wearing hand-me-down clothes. The need for designer wear and electronic gadgets had therefore never entered my son’s mind.

However, after a few months of trying to fit in with Danish children, he became a victim of fashion, exchanging his usual trousers for the trend of the time – narrow sleek pants with diaper bottoms that impeded proper movement. Soon, style alone wasn’t enough: the right brand name of clothes was added to the list of things required for happiness. The same process was repeated in other parts of life: in Mexico, play would consist of an array of invented games, but a month in Denmark was sufficient for my son to feel too ashamed to invite anyone home because he didn’t own an Xbox. During that year, he cried bitter tears over the absence of things that he had never lacked before – video games, Samsung galaxies, iPads and notebooks.

This rapid conversion of a unique individual into a global consumer wasn’t a direct result of advertising, but of the indirect influence of corporations on our minds and lives. The other children were as much victims as my own child, having to a large extent been robbed of the possibility to develop their own (corporate-free) identity and the imagination and creativity that comes with childhood.

Shifting away from a model based on ever increasing consumption is long overdue. On a personal level, we can take positive steps by disengaging from the consumer culture as much as possible, focusing instead on activities that bring true satisfaction – like face-to-face interaction, engaging in community and spending time in nature.

In our very small rural community in Mexico, we have tried to do just that in our daily lives. Christmas for us is a communal celebration running over several days, which includes lots of homegrown, cooked and baked foods, music, dancing and playing, both indoors and outdoors. A major part of the celebration is a gift exchange that celebrates our skills and creative powers. Rather than buying a multitude of gifts, we make one gift each to give to another person. Who we give to is decided in advance in a secret draw of names, not revealed until the exchange. For a month in advance, our community is buzzing with creative energy, as everybody – children and adults alike – is busy planning and making amazing gifts. Presenting our gift is the highlight of our celebration, even for the youngest. Thus the coin has been flipped from consumption to creation and from receiving to giving.

However, while personal changes like this matter, it is not enough to turn the tide: structural changes are also required.

Despite dwindling natural resources, increasing levels of pollution and CO2 emissions, and the many social costs of consumerism, no nation-state has yet been willing to renounce the economic growth model. This will not change until people pressure their governments to disengage from this economic model and to put the brakes on corporate control. This may sound undoable, but the current system is man-made and can be unmade. The trade treaties and agreements that favor corporations over nations, global over local, profit over people and planet, can be revoked and transformed. All it may take is an alliance of a few strategic countries willing to say “STOP”, to start a movement of nations willing to reclaim their economies.

When Jorge Mario Bergoglio was ordained Pope Francis, he came out with a public critique of the prevailing economic system that still rings true:

“Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world… This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”[7]

Yet, the blind belief in the economic growth model is waning, as ever more people realize that the present economic model is playing havoc with people and planet. Even the strongest proponents of the current system are finding it harder to repeat the “more economic growth is the solution” mantra.

So let’s downscale consumption this Christmas and celebrate creativity, community and our shared home – planet earth. Rather than commit to dieting in the new year, let’s commit to joining the call for systemic change – away from a destructive global casino economy that concentrates power and wealth, towards place-based economies operating under democratic control and within ecological limits, with global wellbeing in mind.

 

[1] McNair, Corey, “Global Ad Spending”, eMarketer.com, May 4, 2018. https://www.emarketer.com/content/global-ad-spending

[2] State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015, in brief, UN http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4671e.pdf; Ritchie, Hannah, “How much will it cost to mitigate climate change?”, Our World in Data, May 27, 2017. https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-will-it-cost-to-mitigate-climate-change

[3] “Children, Adolescents, and Advertising: Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, vol. 118, number 6 http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/118/6/2563.full

[4] “Usage and Population Statistics”, Internet World Stats, https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

[5] “The State of Consumption Today”. Worldwatch Institute. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/810

[6] Schor, Juliet B., Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture” (2004).

[7] Goldfarb, Z. and Michelle Boorstein, “Pope Francis denounces ‘trickle-down’ economic theories in critique of inequality”. The Washington Post. November 26, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/pope-francis-denounces-trickle-down-economic-theories-in-critique-of-inequality/2013/11/26/e17ffe4e-56b6-11e3-8304-caf30787c0a9_story.html

 

This post was adapted from Anja’s 2012 post, “Born to Buy?”  Republished with permission.

 

Jacques Ellul: A Prophet for Our Tech-Saturated Times

Jacques Ellul: A Prophet for Our Tech-Saturated Times

     by  / Local Futures

By now you have probably read about the so-called “tech backlash.” Facebook and other social media have undermined what’s left of the illusion of democracy, while smartphones damage young brains and erode the nature of discourse in the family. Meanwhile computers and other gadgets have diminished our attention spans along with our ever-failing connection to reality.

The Foundation for Responsible Robotics recently created a small stir by asking if “sexual intimacy with robots could lead to greater social isolation.”  What could possibly go wrong?

The average teenager now works about two hours of every day – for free – providing Facebook and other social media companies with all the data they need to engineer young people’s behavior for bigger Internet profits. Without shame, technical wonks now talk of building artificial scientists to resolve climate change, poverty and, yes, even fake news.

The media backlash against Silicon Valley and its peevish moguls, however, typically ends with nothing more radical than an earnest call for regulation or a break-up of Internet monopolies such as Facebook and Google. The problem, however, is much graver, and it is telling that most of the backlash stories invariably omit any mention of technology’s greatest critic, Jacques Ellul.

The ascent of technology

Ellul, the Karl Marx of the 20th century, predicted the chaotic tyranny many of us now pretend is the good and determined life in technological society. He wrote of technique, about which he meant more than just technology, machines and digital gadgets but rather “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency” in the economic, social and political affairs of civilization.

For Ellul, technique, an ensemble of machine-based means, included administrative systems, medical tools, propaganda (just another communication technique) and genetic engineering.  The list is endless because technique, or what most of us would just call technology, has become the artificial blood of modern civilization.  “Technique has taken substance,” wrote Ellul, and “it has become a reality in itself. It is no longer merely a means and an intermediary. It is an object in itself, an independent reality with which we must reckon.”

Just as Marx deftly outlined how capitalism threw up new social classes, political institutions and economic powers in the 19th century, Ellul charted the ascent of technology and its impact on politics, society and economics in the 20th.  My copy of Ellul’s The Technological Society has yellowed with age, but it remains one of the most important books I own. Why? Because it explains the nightmarish hold technology has on every aspect of life, and also remains a guide to the perplexing determinism that technology imposes on life.

Until the 18th century, technical progress occurred slowly and with restraint. But with the Industrial Revolution it morphed into something overwhelming – due in part to population, cheap energy sources and capitalism itself.  Since then it has engulfed Western civilization and become the globe’s greatest colonizing force.  “Technique encompasses the totality of present-day society,” wrote Ellul. “Man is caught like a fly in a bottle. His attempts at culture, freedom, and creative endeavor have become mere entries in technique’s filing cabinet.”

Ellul, a brilliant historian, wrote like a physician caught in the middle of a plague or physicist exposed to radioactivity. He parsed the dynamics of technology with a cold lucidity.  Yet you’ve probably never heard of the French legal scholar and sociologist despite all the recent media about the corrosive influence of Silicon Valley.  His relative obscurity has many roots. He didn’t hail from Paris, but rural Bordeaux. He didn’t come from French blue blood; he was a “meteque.” He didn’t travel much, criticized politics of every stripe and was a radical Christian.

But in 1954, just a year before American scientists started working on artificial intelligence, Ellul wrote his monumental book, The Technological Society. This dense and discursive work lays out in 500 pages how technique became for civilization what British colonialism was for parts of 19th-century Africa: a force of total domination.

Ellul didn’t regard technology as inherently evil; he just recognized that it was a self-augmenting force that engineered the world on its terms.  Machines, whether mechanical or digital, aren’t interested in truth, beauty or justice. Their goal is to make the world a more efficient place for more machines.  Their proliferation, combined with our growing dependence on their services, inevitably led to an erosion of human freedom and unintended consequences in every sphere of life.

Ellul was one of the first to note that you couldn’t distinguish between bad and good effects of technology. There were just effects and all technologies were disruptive. In other words, it doesn’t matter if a drone is delivering a bomb or book or merely spying on the neighborhood, because technique operates outside of human morality: “Technique tolerates no judgment from without and accepts no limitations.”

Facebook’s mantra “move fast and break things” epitomizes the technological mindset. But some former Facebook executives such as Chamath Palihapitiya belatedly realized they have engineered a force beyond their control. (“The short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” Palihapitiya has said.) That, argued Ellul, is what technology does. It disrupts and then disrupts again with unforeseen consequences, requiring more techniques to solve the problems created by the last innovation.  As Ellul noted back in 1954, “History shows that every technical application from its beginnings presents certain unforeseeable secondary effects which are more disastrous than the lack of the technique would have been.”

Ellul also defined the key characteristics of technology. For starters, the world of technique imposes a rational and mechanical order on all things. It embraces artificiality and seeks to replace all natural systems with engineered ones.  In a technological society a dam performs better than a running river, a car takes the place of pedestrians – and may even kill them – and a fish farm offers more “efficiencies” than a natural wild salmon migration.

There is more:

  • Technique automatically reduces actions to the “one best way.”
  • Technical progress is self-augmenting: it is irreversible and builds with a geometric progression. (Just count the number of gadgets telling you what to do or where to go or even what music to play.)
  • Technology is indivisible and universal because everywhere it goes it shows the same deterministic face with the same consequences.
  • It is autonomous, by which Ellul meant that technology has become a determining force that “elicits and conditions social, political and economic change.”

The role of propaganda

The French critic was the first to note that technologies build upon each other and therefore centralize power and control. New techniques for teaching, selling things or organizing political parties also required propaganda.  Here again Ellul saw the future. He argued that in a technological society, propaganda had to become as natural as breathing air because it was essential that people adapt to the disruptions of a technological society.  “The passions it provokes – which exist in everybody – are amplified. The suppression of the critical faculty – man’s growing incapacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, the individual from the collectivity, action from talk, reality from statistics, and so on – is one of the most evident results of the technical power of propaganda.”  Faking the news may have been a common practice on Soviet radio during Ellul’s day, but it is now a global phenomenon leading us towards what Ellul called “a sham universe.”

We now know that algorithms control every aspect of digital life and have subjected almost aspect of human behavior to greater control by techniques, whether employed by the state or the marketplace.  But in 1954 Ellul saw the beast emerging in infant form. Technology, he wrote, can’t put up with human values and “must necessarily don mathematical vestments. Everything in human life that does not lend itself to mathematical treatment must be excluded… Who is too blind to not see that a profound mutation is being advocated here?”

He also warned about the promise of leisure provided by the mechanization and automatization of work.  “Instead of being a vacuum representing a break with society,” our leisure time will be “literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration.”  Good citizens today now leave their screens at work only to be guided by robots in their cars that tell them the most efficient route to drive home. At home another battery of screens awaits to deliver entertainments and distractions, including apps that might deliver a pizza to the door.  Stalin and Mao would be impressed – or perhaps disappointed – that so much social control could be exercised with such sophistication and so little bloodletting.

Ellul wasn’t just worried about the impact of a single gadget such as the television or the phone but “the phenomenon of technical convergence.” He feared the impact of systems or complexes of techniques on human society and warned the result could only be “an operational totalitarianism.”  “Convergence,” he wrote, “is a completely spontaneous phenomenon, representing a normal stage in the evolution of technique.”  Social media, a web of behavioral and psychological systems, is just the latest example of convergence. Here psychological techniques, surveillance techniques and propaganda have all merged to give the Russians and many other groups a golden opportunity to intervene in the political lives of 138 million North American voters.

Social media has achieved something novel, according to former Facebook engineer Sam Lessin. For the first time ever a political candidate or party can “effectively talk to each individual voter privately in their own home and tell them exactly what they want to hear… in a way that can’t be tracked or audited.”  In China the authorities have gone one step further. Using the Internet the government can now track the movements of every citizen and rank their political trustworthiness based on their history of purchases and associations.

The Silicon Valley moguls and the digerati promised something less totalitarian. They swore that social media would help citizens fight bad governments and would connect all of us. Facebook, vowed the pathologically adolescent Mark Zuckerberg, would help the Internet become “a force for peace in the world.” But technology obeys its own rules and prefers “the psychology of tyranny.”

The digerati also promised that digital technologies would usher in a new era of decentralization and undo what mechanical technologies have already done: centralize everything into big companies, big boxes and big government. Technology assuredly fragments human communities, but in the world of technique centralization remains the norm. “The idea of effecting decentralization while maintaining technical progress is purely utopian,” wrote Ellul.

Towards ‘hypernormalization’

It is worth noting that the word “normal” didn’t come into currency until the 1940s, along with technological society.

In many respects global society resembles the Soviet Union just prior to its collapse, when “hypernormalization” ruled the day.  A recent documentary defined what hypernormalization did for Russia: it “became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real, because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real because no one could imagine any alternative.”

In many respects technology has hypernormalized a technological society in which citizens exercise less and less control over their lives every day and can’t imagine anything different.  If you are growing more anxious about our hypernormalized existence and are wondering why you own a phone that tracks your every movement, then read The Technological Society.  Ellul believed that the first act of freedom a citizen can exercise is to recognize the necessity of understanding technique and its colonizing powers.  Resistance, which is never futile, can only begin by becoming aware and bearing witness to the totalitarian nature of technological society.

To Ellul, resistance meant teaching people how to be conscious amphibians, with one foot in traditional human societies, and to purposefully choose which technologies to bring into their communities.  Only citizens who remain connected to traditional human societies can see, hear and understand the disquiet of the smartphone blitzkrieg or the Internet circus. Children raised by screens and vaccinated only by technology will not have the capacity to resist, let alone understand, this world any more than someone born in space could appreciate what it means to walk in a forest.

Ellul warned that if each of us abdicates our human responsibilities and leads a trivial existence in a technological society, then we will betray freedom.  And what is freedom but the ability to overcome and transcend the dictates of necessity?

In 1954, Ellul appealed to all sleepers to awake. Read him. He remains the most revolutionary, prophetic and dangerous voice of this or any century.

This essay originally appeared in The Tyee, and republished by Local Futures.  Republished with permission of Local Futures. For permission to repost this or any other Local Futures blog, please contact them directly at info@localfutures.org

Andrew Nikiforuk has written about energy, economics and the West for a variety of Canadian publications including The Walrus, Maclean’s, Canadian Business, The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Georgia Straight, Equinox and Harrowsmith. His latest book is The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude.
Apocalypto

Apocalypto

     by Boris Forkel / Deep Green Resistance Germany

 It is very difficult for me to live in this culture.

I just can’t psychologically survive in the high performance society, where everyone is passionately exploiting themselves, while all life on this planet is being destroyed.

I have severe depression and anxiety disorders, and I have to take good care of myself to be able to take care of my son.

It is very difficult for people who have never experienced poverty to understand what poverty means. The constant nagging fear. The permanent stress and psychological terror of state authorities on which you are dependent, that harass you and try to keep you small and oppressed.

Now they want me to work underpaid, shitty jobs again. I already had a stroke not long ago. I can’t do these jobs and I can‘t stand the pressure.

I live in the age of the greatest mass extinction in 65 million years. And the cause of this mass extinction is our glorious western civilization.

Empire.

Indeed, almost all imperial forces have joined into one: The West.

“In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier…The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear -armed bombers,” writes John Pilger.

Looks like the West is encircling the strongest probable future enemies, preparing for war.

Full spectrum dominance.

 The understanding of the fact that this culture is always at war, and will indeed kill all life on planet earth made me shift my loyalty and become an activist.

My loyalty does not belong to empire and industrial capitalism. My loyalty belongs to the suppressed, the poor, the dying planet.

Where are you when we need people to take responsibility for our fellow creatures, human and nonhuman, and defend them? Always working on your professional self-fulfillment, performing until you burn out.

Do you distract yourself so manically with your work, so you don’t have to see what is happening around us? That the insects disappear, the songbirds disappear, the masses impoverish?

That the West is already bombing the near and middle east to ashes and dust and prepares for more, while you try to overtake yourself, become faster and better, without even stopping once to understand the obvious fact that this system is heading for collapse?

Instead you wonder where all the refugees come from. (Of course they come for a share of the cake of our western wealth, they might even try to take your precious job! You better join one of the aspiring right-wing movements.)

Imperialism creates the illusion of wealth as far as the masses are concerned. It usually serves to hide the fact that the ruling classes are gobbling up the natural resources of the home territory in an improvident manner and are otherwise utilizing the national wealth largely for their own purposes. Eventually the general public is called upon to pay for all of this, frequently after the military machine can no longer maintain external aggression.

–Jack Forbes

Capitalism 2.0 comes with a like-button and a smiling emoji, and it will always tell you that everything is fine.

Capitalism is exploitation, but neoliberalism is the smart self-exploitation of the alienated and indoctrinated individual. Exploitation on steroids.

Indoctrination is cheaper and more efficient than violence. It is thus called “soft power.” It works with research-based psycho-politics, and the smart manipulation of human feelings and desires.

Capitalism creates an exploited class of workers that will probably organize and resist (as it did many times).

Neoliberalism creates a population of totally alienated and indoctrinated machine-like zombies, who suppress their own humanity. Each individual a perfect slave, with a software programmed in its brain. Owner Inside®.

Zombie apocalypse.

You might already be a zombie, living in your middle class-bubble or your digital hallucination, but I am still a human being, sensitive as a frightened child, with a healthy portion of empathy and love. I‘m trying to live awake and conscious in this real, physical world, and what I see is mass extinction, ecological catastrophe and imperialist wars. Trauma.

Facing the truth isn’t easy.

I carry a trauma with me from reading A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolome de Las Casas.

I carry a trauma with me from reading Jack Forbes’ Only Approved Indians. He writes: “If a creature learns to completely accept captivity or slavery, if they erase all thoughts of freedom, they can suppress the pain. But if one wants to be free, one has to face the pain; one has to agonize, to suffer, through all of the terror.”

That’s where you are. Completely accepting captivity and slavery, driving out the pain.

That‘s where I am. Going through all the terror. Trying to free myself (and the world) of this culture.

I carry a trauma with me from reading Derrick Jensen‘s Endgame.

And I carry a deep trauma with me from seeing that he is right, from seeing my fellow beings and relatives disappear, the insects, the birds, the amphibians, all of my beloved nature, in rapid decline.

I most certainly carry a lot of trauma with me from my parents and grandparents, since I was born only 34 years after World War II. I certainly carry a trauma from watching all the documentaries and from visiting the concentration camp in Dachau.

You do not understand my language. I can say what I want, but you don‘t understand. You do not even understand the language “stroke” (red alert; Individual doesn’t function anymore within this insane culture).

Government to medical complex: Repair individual and re-integrate into the machine.

Sorry, doesn’t work for me. I’m out.

I need a lot of quiet and peaceful time to deal with all the trauma. I can’t just rush through my life and work ever harder to help to accomplish the neoliberal agenda and make Europe more competitive for the global economy (that’s how the politicians sold it to us; in fact, the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, as always).

Mental illnesses such as depression or burnout are the expression of a deep crisis of freedom. They are a pathological sign that today freedom often turns into coercion. We think we are free today. But in reality we exploit ourselves passionately until we collapse…
Neoliberalism is even capable of exploiting freedom itself. The performance society creates more productivity than the disciplinary society, because it makes excessive use of freedom. It doesn’t exploit against freedom, but it exploits freedom itself. Everything that belongs to practices and expressions of freedom, such as emotion, play and communication, is now exploited. It is not efficient to exploit someone against his or her will. With the external exploitation, the yield is very small. Only self-exploitation, as the exploitation of freedom, produces the greatest yield. The first stage of burnout syndrome is, paradoxically, euphoria. Euphorically I plunge into the work. In the end I collapse and slide into depression.

Byung-Chul Han

What will you do when the next economic collapse hits?

What will you do when you loose your job and can‘t numb yourself anymore with your work?

Alcohol, drugs, suicide?

Better to face the truth, go through all the terror, declare your loyalty to justice and life on planet earth and become a revolutionary.

New CDC Estimates: A Record 72,000 US Drug Overdose Deaths in 2017

     by Kate Randall /  World Socialist Web Site

Drug overdose deaths in the US topped 72,000 in 2017, according to new provisional estimates released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This staggering figure translates into about 200 drug overdose deaths every day, or about one every eight minutes.

The new CDC estimates are 6,000 deaths more than 2016 estimates, a rise of 9.5 percent. This has been primarily driven by a continued rise of deaths involving synthetic opioids, a category of drugs that includes fentanyl. Nearly 30,000 deaths involved these drugs in 2017, an increase of more than 9,000 (nearly 50 percent) over the previous year, according to preliminary data.

This catastrophic toll of opioid deaths casts a grim light on the state of America in the 21st century. At its root lies a society characterized by vast social inequality, corporate greed and government indifference. While the opioid crisis spares no segment of society, the most profoundly affected are workers and the poor, along with the communities where they live.

Deaths involving the stimulant cocaine also rose significantly, placing them on par with heroin and the category of natural opiates including painkillers such as oxycodone and hydrocodone. The CDC estimates suggest that deaths involving the latter two drugs appear to have flattened out.

The highest mortality rates in 2017 were distributed similarly to previous years, with parts of Appalachia and New England showing the largest figures. West Virginia again saw the highest death rates, with 58.7 overdose deaths per 100,000 residents, followed by the District of Columbia (50.4), Pennsylvania (44.2), Ohio (44.0) and Maryland (37.9). Nebraska had the lowest rate, 8.2 deaths per 100,000, one-seventh the West Virginia rate.

Two states with relatively high rates of overdose deaths, Vermont and Massachusetts, saw some decreases. The CDC credits this decrease to a leveling off of synthetic opioid availability and a modest increase in these states of funding for programs to fight addiction and provide treatment and rehabilitation.

Driving the increase in overdose deaths is fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is roughly 50 times more potent that heroin. It is marketed under more than a dozen brand names in the US. Nebraska became the first state to use fentanyl in a state-sanctioned killing, using it Tuesday to execute Carey Dean Moore.

Fentanyl is also made illegally relatively easily and mixed with black market supplies of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines and anti-anxiety medicines known as benzodiazepines. Individuals who have become addicted to prescription opioids often turn to illegally manufactured fentanyl, or related drugs that can be far more potent and dangerous, when prescription opioids are not available. Users cannot know the potency of such drugs or drug mixtures and are more likely to overdose.

The CDC reports that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) National Forensic Laboratory Information System (NFLIS), which identifies drugs from submissions tested for analysis, estimated that submissions testing positive have included two extremely potent drugs related to fentanyl, carfentanil and 3-methylfentanyl, which are 100 and 4 times more potent than fentanyl, respectively.

Purdue Pharma has drawn widespread criticism for its aggressive marketing and sale of the opioid OxyContin, which has a high potential for abuse, particularly for those with a history of addiction. The company also produces pain medications such as hydromorphone, oxycodone, fentanyl, codeine and hydrocodone.

Regions with high levels of unemployment and poverty have been the target of drug distributors, shipping vast quantities of opioid painkillers to these areas. For example, McKesson Corporation shipped 151 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone between 2007 and 2012 to West Virginia, the state with the highest rate of overdose mortality.

Workers, both employed and unemployed, have found themselves in the grip of the opioid crisis. In an interview with Vox.com, Beth Macy, author of the new book Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America, describes the high levels of addiction in Machias, Maine, an early center of the opioid crisis. People in this logging and fishing community were already on painkillers from injuries due to these jobs and then became addicted to opioids—both prescription and illegal—and continue to overdose at high rates.

A study by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health examined 4,302 opioid deaths from 2011 to 2015 among workers in all occupations in the state. It found that construction workers were six times more likely to die from opioid overdoses than the average worker, and that one in three construction-worker deaths were the result of overdoses.

There are fewer workers in farming, fishing and forestry in Massachusetts, but the report found these jobs also had an opioid mortality rate five times the average. The study found a link between higher rates of opioid abuse in occupations where back injuries are more common and paid sick leave is less so. In other words, workers become addicted to drugs—and face potential overdose—when they are forced to choose between working through pain or suffering a loss of wages.

Conservative estimates place the number of Americans with opioid abuse disorder at 2.6 million, but the real total is undoubtedly higher. To the 72,000 who succumbed to drug overdose in 2017 must be added those directly impacted by the crisis—family members, friends, coworkers, medical responders, social workers, treatment center workers, and many others.

Drug overdoses are part of a greater social crisis that is claiming the lives of increasing numbers. In December 2017, the CDC released reports revealing that life expectancy of the American working class is declining due to an increase in both drug overdoses and suicides. “Deaths of despair”—overdoses, suicides, alcohol-related deaths—are causing a dramatic increase in the mortality rate among those under the age of 44.

The decline in life expectancy, a fundamental measure of social progress, is an indication of both American capitalism’s decline and the sharp intensification of social inequality. While the richest five percent of the population owns 67 percent of the wealth, the poorest 60 percent owns just 1 percent.

Of the 72,000 Americans who died in drug overdoses in 2017, workers and the poor were the most affected. By contrast, the wealthiest Americans have access to the best medical care and technology available, and as a result live on average 20 years longer than the poorest members of US society.

The rise in drug overdoses is the product of a bipartisan assault of the social gains of the working class. Over the past 40 years, both the Democrats and Republicans have engaged in a conscious strategy to claw back the gains won by the working class in the first half of the 20th century. The response of both the Obama and Trump administrations to this crisis has amounted to a combination of indifference and disdain for the lives lost.

The Obama administration slashed the number of DEA cases brought against drug distributors by 69.5 percent between 2011 and 2014. The Trump administration last year declared the opioid epidemic a “public health emergency,” but then allocated no new funding to the states to address it. Yet hundreds of billions are budgeted to fund the myriad wars prosecuted by the US military and for the persecution of immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

A health emergency on the scale of the drug epidemic requires an emergency, socialist response. Billions of dollars must be allocated to fund rehabilitation centers, utilizing the latest scientific treatments methods. The wealth of the drug manufacturers must be expropriated and their facilities placed under the control of the working class, as part of a socialized health care system that provides free health care for all.

Originally published at WSWS.  Republished with permission.

Our New, Happy Life? The Ideology of Development

Our New, Happy Life? The Ideology of Development

Editor’s note: this article critiques elements of Steven Pinker’s absurd claim that “things are better than they ever were, but still gives too much creedence in our view to some of his propositions. Nonetheless, the piece adds some valuable elements to the discussion. We publish a variety of views that are associated with DGR positions on this website, not just material that we agree with in every detail.

     by Charles Eisenstein

In George Orwell’s 1984, there is a moment when the Party announces an “increase” in the chocolate ration – from thirty grams to twenty. No one except for the protagonist, Winston, seems to notice that the ration has gone down not up.

“Comrades!” cried an eager youthful voice. “Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 percent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us.”

The newscaster goes on to announce one statistic after another proving that everything is getting better. The phrase in vogue is “our new, happy life.” Of course, as with the chocolate ration, it is obvious that the statistics are phony.

Those words, “our new, happy life,” came to me as I read two recent articles, one by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times and the other by Stephen Pinker in the Wall Street Journal, both of which asserted, with ample statistics, that the overall state of humanity is better now than at any time in history. Fewer people die in wars, car crashes, airplane crashes, even from gun violence. Poverty rates are lower than ever recorded, life expectancy is higher, and more people than ever are literate, have access to electricity and running water, and live in democracies.

Like in 1984, these articles affirm and celebrate the basic direction of society. We are headed in the right direction. With smug assurance, they tell us that thanks to reason, science, and enlightened Western political thinking, we are making strides toward a better world.

Like in 1984, there is something deceptive in these arguments that so baldly serve the established order.

Unlike in 1984, the deception is not a product of phony statistics.

Before I describe the deception and what lies on the other side of it, I want to assure the reader that this essay will not try to prove that things are getting worse and worse. In fact, I share the fundamental optimism of Kristof and Pinker that humanity is walking a positive evolutionary path. For this evolution to proceed, however, it is necessary that we acknowledge and integrate the horror, the suffering, and the loss that the triumphalist narrative of civilizational progress skips over.

What hides behind the numbers

In other words, we need to come to grips with precisely the things that Stephen Pinker’s statistics leave out. Generally speaking, metrics-based evaluations, while seemingly objective, bear the covert biases of those who decide what to measure, how to measure it, and what not to measure. They also devalue those things which we cannot measure or that are intrinsically unmeasurable. Let me offer a few examples.

Nicholas Kristof celebrates a decline in the number of people living on less than two dollars a day. What might that statistic hide? Well, every time an indigenous hunter-gatherer or traditional villager is forced off the land and goes to work on a plantation or sweatshop, his or her cash income increases from zero to several dollars a day. The numbers look good. GDP goes up. And the accompanying degradation is invisible.

For the last several decades, multitudes have fled the countryside for burgeoning cities in the global South. Most had lived largely outside the money economy. In a small village in India or Africa, most people procured food, built dwellings, made clothes, and created entertainment in a subsistence or gift economy, without much need for money. When development policies and the global economy push entire nations to generate foreign exchange to meet debt obligations, urbanization invariably results. In a slum in Lagos or Kolkata, two dollars a day is misery, where in the traditional village it might be affluence. Taking for granted the trend of development and urbanization, yes, it is a good thing when those slum dwellers rise from two dollars a day to, say, five. But the focus on that metric obscures deeper processes.

Kristof asserts that 2017 was the best year ever for human health. If we measure the prevalence of infectious diseases, he is certainly right. Life expectancy also continues to rise globally (though it is leveling off and in some countries, such as the United States, beginning to fall). Again though, these metrics obscure disturbing trends. A host of new diseases such as autoimmunity, allergies, Lyme, and autism, compounded with unprecedented levels of addiction, depression, and obesity, contribute to declining physical vitality throughout the developed world, and increasingly in developing countries too. Vast social resources – one-fifth of GDP in the US – go toward sick care; society as a whole is unwell.

Both authors also mention literacy. What might the statistics hide here? For one, the transition into literacy has meant, in many places, the destruction of oral traditions and even the extinction of entire non-written languages. Literacy is part of a broader social repatterning, a transition into modernity, that accompanies cultural and linguistic homogenization. Tens of millions of children go to school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic; history, science, and Shakespeare, in places where, a generation before, they would have learned how to herd goats, grow barley, make bricks, weave cloth, conduct ceremonies, or bake bread. They would have learned the uses of a thousand plants and the songs of a hundred birds, the words of a thousand stories and the steps to a hundred dances. Acculturation to literate society is part of a much larger change. Reasonable people may differ on whether this change is good or bad, on whether we are better off relying on digital social networks than on place-based communities, better off recognizing more corporate logos than local plants and animals, better off manipulating symbols rather than handling soil. Only from a prejudiced mindset could we say, though, that this shift represents unequivocal progress.

My intention here is not to use written words to decry literacy, deliciously ironic though that would be. I am merely observing that our metrics for progress encode hidden biases and neglect what won’t fit comfortably into the worldview of those who devise them. Certainly, in a society that is already modernized, illiteracy is a terrible disadvantage, but outside that context, it is not clear that a literate society – or its extension, a digitized society – is a happy society.

The immeasurability of happiness

Biases or no, surely you can’t argue with the happiness metrics that are the lynchpin of Pinker’s argument that science, reason, and Western political ideals are working to create a better world. The more advanced the country, he says, the happier people are. Therefore the more the rest of the world develops along the path we blazed, the happier the world will be.

Unfortunately, happiness statistics encode as assumptions the very conclusions the developmentalist argument tries to prove. Generally speaking, happiness metrics comprise two approaches: objective measures of well-being, and subjective reports of happiness. Well-being metrics include such things as per-capita income, life expectancy, leisure time, educational level, access to health care, and many of the other accouterments of development.  In many cultures, for example, “leisure” was not a concept; leisure in contradistinction to work assumes that work itself is as it became in the Industrial Revolution: tedious, degrading, burdensome. A culture where work is not clearly separable from life is misjudged by this happiness metric; see Helena Norberg-Hodge’s marvelous film Ancient Futures for a depiction of such a culture, in which, as the film says, “work and leisure are one.”

Encoded in objective well-being metrics is a certain vision of development; specifically, the mode of development that dominates today. To say that developed countries are therefore happier is circular logic.

As for subjective reports of individual happiness, individual self-reporting necessarily references the surrounding culture. I rate my happiness in comparison to the normative level of happiness around me. A society of rampant anxiety and depression draws a very low baseline. A woman told me once, “I used to consider myself to be a reasonably happy person until I visited a village in Afghanistan near where I’d been deployed in the military. I wanted to see what it was like from a different perspective. This is a desperately poor village,” she said. “The huts didn’t even have floors, just dirt which frequently turned to mud. They barely even had enough food. But I have never seen happier people. They were so full of joy and generosity. These people, who had nothing, were happier than almost anyone I know.”

Whatever those Afghan villagers had to make them happy, I don’t think shows up in Stephen Pinker’s statistics purporting to prove that they should follow our path. The reader may have had similar experiences visiting Mexico, Brazil, Africa, or India, in whose backwaters one finds a level of joy rare amidst the suburban boxes of my country. This, despite centuries of imperialism, war, and colonialism. Imagine the happiness that would be possible in a just and peaceful world.

I’m sure my point here will be unpersuasive to anyone who has not had such an experience first-hand. You will think, perhaps, that maybe the locals were just putting on their best face for the visitor. Or maybe that I am seeing them through romanticizing “happy-natives” lenses. But I am not speaking here of superficial good cheer or the phony smile of a man making the best of things. People in older cultures, connected to community and place, held close in a lineage of ancestors, woven into a web of personal and cultural stories, radiate a kind of solidity and presence that I rarely find in any modern person. When I interact with one of them, I know that whatever the measurable gains of the Ascent of Humanity, we have lost something immeasurably precious. And I know that until we recognize it and turn toward its recovery, that no further progress in lifespan or GDP or educational attainment will bring us closer to any place worth going.

What other elements of deep well-being elude our measurements? Authenticity of communication? The intimacy and vitality of our relationships? Familiarity with local plants and animals? Aesthetic nourishment from the built environment? Participation in meaningful collective endeavors? Sense of community and social solidarity? What we have lost is hard to measure, even if we were to try. For the quantitative mind, the mind of money and data, it hardly exists. Yet the loss casts a shadow on the heart, a dim longing that no assurance of new, happy life can assuage.

While the fullness of this loss – and, by implication, the potential in its recovery – is beyond measure, there are nonetheless statistics, left out of Pinker’s analysis, that point to it. I am referring to the high levels of suicide, opioid addiction, meth addiction, pornography, gambling, anxiety, and depression that plague modern society and every modernizing society. These are not just random flies that have landed in the ointment of progress; they are symptoms of a profound crisis. When community disintegrates, when ties to nature and place are severed, when structures of meaning collapse, when the connections that make us whole wither, we grow hungry for addictive substitutes to numb the longing and fill the void.

The loss I speak of is inseparable from the very institutions – science, technology, industry, capitalism, and the political ideal of the rational individual – that Stephen Pinker says have delivered humanity from misery. We might be cautious, then, about attributing to these institutions certain incontestable improvements over Medieval times or the early Industrial Revolution. Could there be another explanation? Might they have come despite science, capitalism, rational individualism, etc., and not because of them?

The empathy hypothesis

One of the improvements Stephen Pinker emphasizes is a decline in violence. War casualties, homicide, and violent crime, in general, have fallen to a fraction of their levels a generation or two ago. The decline in violence is real, but should we attribute it, as Pinker does, to democracy, reason, rule of law, data-driven policing, and so forth? I don’t think so. Democracy is no insurance against war – in fact, the United States has perpetrated far more military actions than any other nation in the last half-century. And is the decline in violent crime simply because we are better able to punish and protect ourselves from each other, clamping down on our savage impulses with the technologies of deterrence?

I have another hypothesis. The decline in violence is not the result of perfecting the world of the separate, self-interested rational subject. To the contrary: it is the result of the breakdown of that story, and the rise of empathy in its stead.

In the mythology of the separate individual, the purpose of the state was to ensure a balance between individual freedom and the common good by putting limits on the pursuit of self-interest. In the emerging mythology of interconnection, ecology, and interbeing, we awaken to the understanding that the good of others, human and otherwise, is inseparable from our own well-being.

The defining question of empathy is, What is it like to be you? In contrast, the mindset of war is the othering, the dehumanization and demonization of people who become the enemy. That becomes more difficult the more accustomed we are to considering the experience of another human being. That is why war, torture, capital punishment, and violence have become less acceptable. It is not that they are “irrational.” To the contrary: establishment think tanks are quite adept at inventing highly rational justifications for all of these.

In a worldview in which competing self-interested actors is axiomatic, what is “rational” is to outcompete them, dominate them, and exploit them by any means necessary? It was not advances in science or reason that abolished the 14-hour workday, chattel slavery, or debtors’ prisons.

The worldview of ecology, interdependence, and interbeing offers different axioms on which to exercise our reason. Understanding that another person has an experience of being, and is subject to circumstances that condition their behavior, makes us less able to dehumanize them as a first step in harming them. Understanding that what happens to the world in some way happens to ourselves, reason no longer promotes war. Understanding that the health of soil, water, and ecosystems is inseparable from our own health, reason no longer urges their pillage.

In a perverse way, science & technology cheerleaders like Stephen Pinker are right: science has indeed ended the age of war. Not because we have grown so smart and so advanced over primitive impulses that we have transcended it. No, it is because science has brought us to such extremes of savagery that it has become impossible to maintain the myth of separation. The technological improvements in our capacity to murder and ruin make it increasingly clear that we cannot insulate ourselves from the harm we do to the other.

It was not primitive superstition that gave us the machine gun and the atomic bomb. Industry was not an evolutionary step beyond savagery; it applied savagery at an industrial scale. Rational administration of organizations did not elevate us beyond genocide; it enabled it to happen on an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented efficiency in the Holocaust. Science did not show us the irrationality of war; it brought us to the very extreme of irrationality, the Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War. In that insanity was the seed of a truly evolutive understanding – that what we do to the other, happens to ourselves as well. That is why, aside from a retrograde cadre of American politicians, no one seriously considers using nuclear weapons today.

The horror we feel at the prospect of, say, nuking Pyongyang or Tehran is not the dread of radioactive blowback or retributive terror. It arises, I claim, from our empathic identification with the victims. As the consciousness of interbeing grows, we can no longer easily wave off their suffering as the just deserts of their wickedness or the regrettable but necessary price of freedom. It as if, on some level, it would be happening to ourselves.

To be sure, there is no shortage of human rights abuses, death squads, torture, domestic violence, military violence, and violent crime still in the world today. To observe, in the midst of it, a rising tide of compassion is not a whitewash of the ugliness, but a call for fuller participation in a movement. On the personal level, it is a movement of kindness, compassion, empathy, taking ownership of one’s judgments and projections, and – not contradictorily – of bravely speaking uncomfortable truths, exposing what was hidden, bringing violence and injustice to light, telling the stories that need to be heard. Together, these two threads of compassion and truth might weave a politics in which we call out the iniquity without judging the perpetrator, but instead seek to understand and change the circumstances of the perpetration.

From empathy, we seek not to punish criminals but to understand the circumstances that breed crime. We seek not to fight terrorism but to understand and change the conditions that generate it. We seek not to wall out immigrants, but to understand why people are so desperate in the first place to leave their homes and lands, and how we might be contributing to their desperation.

Empathy suggests the opposite of the conclusion offered by Stephen Pinker. It says, rather than more efficient legal penalties and “data-driven policing,” we might study the approach of new Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who has directed prosecutors to stop seeking maximum sentences, stop prosecuting cannabis possession, steer offenders toward diversionary programs rather than penal programs, cutting inordinately long probation periods, and other reforms. Undergirding these measures is compassion: What is it like to be a criminal? An addict? A prostitute? Maybe we still want to stop you from continuing to do that, but we no longer desire to punish you. We want to offer you a realistic opportunity to live another way.

Similarly, the future of agriculture is not in more aggressive breeding, more powerful pesticides, or the further conversion of living soil into an industrial input. It is in knowing soil as a being and serving its living integrity, knowing that its health is inseparable from our own. In this way, the principle of empathy (What is it like to be you?) extends beyond criminal justice, foreign policy, and personal relationships. Agriculture, medicine, education, technology – no field is outside its bounds. Translating that principle into civilization’s institutions (rather than extending the reach of reason, control, and domination) is what will bring real progress to humanity.

This vision of progress is not contrary to technological development; neither will science, reason, or technology automatically bring it about. All human capacities can be put into service to a future embodying the understanding that the world’s wellbeing, human and otherwise, feeds our own.

Republished under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License