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Here's why we shouldn't celebrate Thanksgiving
After years of being constantly annoyed and often angry about the historical denial built into Thanksgiving Day, I published an essay in November 2005 suggesting we replace the feasting with fasting and create a National Day of Atonement to acknowledge the genocide of indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States.
I expected criticism from right-wing and centrist people, given their common commitment to this country's distorted self-image that supports the triumphalist/supremacist notions about the United States so common in conventional politics, and I got plenty of such critique. But I was surprised by the resistance from liberals, including a considerable number of my friends.
The most common argument went something like this: OK, it's true that the Thanksgiving Day mythology is rooted in a fraudulent story -- about the European invaders coming in peace to the "New World," eager to cooperate with indigenous people -- which conveniently ignores the reality of European barbarism in the conquest of the continent. But we can reject the culture's self-congratulatory attempts to rewrite history, I have been told, and come together on Thanksgiving to celebrate the love and connections among family and friends.
The argument that we can ignore the collective cultural definition of Thanksgiving and create our own meaning in private has always struck me as odd. This commitment to Thanksgiving puts these left/radical critics in the position of internalizing one of the central messages promoted by the ideologues of capitalism -- that individual behavior in private is more important than collective action in public. The claim that through private action we can create our own reality is one of the key tenets of a predatory corporate capitalism that naturalizes unjust hierarchy, a part of the overall project of discouraging political struggle and encouraging us to retreat into a private realm where life is defined by consumption.
So this November, rather than mount another attack on the national mythology around Thanksgiving -- a mythology that amounts to a kind of holocaust denial, and which has been critiqued for many years by many people -- I want to explore why so many who understand and accept this critique still celebrate Thanksgiving, and why rejecting such celebrations sparks such controversy.
Once we know, what do we do?
At this point in history, anyone who wants to know this reality of U.S. history -- that the extermination of indigenous peoples was, both in a technical, legal sense and in common usage, genocide -- can easily find the resources to know. If this idea is new, I would recommend two books, David E. Stannard's American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World and Ward Churchill's A Little Matter of Genocide. While the concept of genocide, which is defined as the deliberate attempt "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group," came into existence after World War II, it accurately describes the program that Europeans and their descendants pursued to acquire the territory that would become the United States of America.
Once we know that, what do we do? The moral response -- that is, the response that would be consistent with the moral values around justice and equality that most of us claim to hold -- would be a truth-and-reconciliation process that would not only correct the historical record but also redistribute land and wealth. In the white-supremacist and patriarchal society in which we live, operating within the parameters set by a greed-based capitalist system, such a process is hard to imagine in the short term. So, the question for left/radical people is: What political activity can we engage in to keep alive this kind of critique until a time when social conditions might make a truly progressive politics possible?
In short: Once we know, what do we do in a world that is not yet ready to know, or knows but will not deal with the consequences of that knowledge?
The general answer to that question is simple, though often difficult to put into practice: We must keep speaking honestly, as often as possible, in as many venues as possible. We must resist the conventional wisdom. We must reject the cultural amnesia. We must refuse to be polite when politeness means capitulation to lies.
I have not always been strong enough to meet even these basic moral obligations. Most of us in positions of unearned privilege and power would be wise to avoid pontificating about our moral superiority and political courage, given our routine failures. Can any of us not point to moments when we went along to get along? Have any of us done enough to bring our lives in line with the values we claim to hold?
Still, we need to help each other tell the truth, even when the truth is not welcome.
The illusion of redefining Thanksgiving
Imagine that Germany won World War II and that a Nazi regime endured for some decades, eventually giving way to a more liberal state with a softer version of German-supremacist ideology. Imagine that a century later, Germans celebrated a holiday offering a whitewashed version of German/Jewish history that ignored that holocaust and the deep anti-Semitism of the culture. Imagine that the holiday provided a welcomed time for families and friends to gather and enjoy food and conversation. Imagine that businesses, schools and government offices closed on this day.
What would we say about such a holiday? Would we not question the distortions woven into such a celebration? Would we not demand a more accurate historical account? Would we not, in fact, denounce such a holiday as grotesque?
Now, imagine that left/liberal Germans -- those who were critical of the power structure that created that distorted history and who in other settings would challenge the political uses of those distortions -- put aside their critique and celebrated the holiday with their fellow citizens, claiming to ignore the meaning of the holiday created by the dominant culture.
What would we say about such people? Would we not question their commitment to the principles they claim to hold? Would we not demand a more courageous politics?
Comparisons to the Nazis are routinely overused and typically hyperbolic, but this is directly analogous. These are fair, albeit painful, questions for all of us.
Left/liberals who want to claim they are rejecting that European-supremacist and racist use of Thanksgiving and "redefining" the holiday in private clearly avoid the obvious: We don't define holidays individually -- the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can't pretend to redefine it in private. One either accepts the dominant definition or resists it, publicly and privately.
Of course people often struggle for control over the meaning of symbols and holidays, but typically we engage in such battles when we believe there is some positive aspect of the symbol or holiday worth fighting for. For example, Christians -- some of whom believe that Christmas should focus on the values of universal love and world peace rather than on orgiastic consumption -- may resist that commercialization and argue in public and private for a different approach to the holiday. Those people typically continue to celebrate Christmas, but in ways consistent with those values. In that case, people are trying to recover and/or reinforce something that they believe is positive because of values rooted in a historical tradition. Those folks struggle over the meaning of Christmas because they believe the core of Christianity is experienced through the people we touch, not the products we purchase. In that endeavor, Christians are arguing the culture has gone astray and lost the positive, historical grounding of the holiday.
But what is positive in the historical events that define Thanksgiving? What tradition are we trying to return to? I have no quarrel with designating a day (or days) that would allow people to take a break from our often manic work routines and appreciate the importance of community, encouraging all of us to be grateful for what we have. But if that is the goal, why yoke it to Thanksgiving Day and a history of celebrating European/white dominance and conquest? Trying to transform Thanksgiving Day into a true day of thanksgiving, it seems to me, is possible only by letting go of this holiday, not by remaining rooted in it. If there were a major shift in the culture and a majority of people could confront these historical realities, perhaps the last Thursday in November could be so transformed. But that shift and transformation are, to say the least, not yet here.
For too long, I ignored these troubling questions. To get along, I went along. I buried my concerns to avoid making trouble. But in recent years that has become more difficult. So, this year I want to acknowledge my past failures to raise these issues and commit not only to renouncing Thanksgiving publicly but also to refusing to participate in any celebration of it privately.
The choices: Make people comfortable by engaging or by disengaging
Obviously there are people in the United States -- indigenous and otherwise -- who do not celebrate Thanksgiving or who mark it, in private and/or in public, as a day of mourning.
Also obvious is that there are people who may not have a family or community with which they celebrate such holidays; it's important to remember that there are people on such holidays who are alone and/or lonely, and to them these political questions may seem irrelevant.
But for those of us who do get invited to traditional Thanksgiving Day dinners, how do we remain true to our stated political and moral principles? I think we have two choices.
We can go to the Thanksgiving gatherings put on by friends and family, determined to raise these issues and willing to take the risk of alienating those who want to enjoy the day without politics. Or, we can refuse to go to such a gathering and make it known why we're not attending, which means taking the risk of alienating those who want to enjoy the day without politics.
This year, I've decided to disengage and explain why to the people who invited me. These are people I love, yet who have made a different decision. My love for them has not diminished, and I trust the conversation with them about this and other political/moral questions will continue.
Once I make that decision, of course, I also have the option of participating in a public event that resists Thanksgiving. I'm not aware of one happening in my community, and because of commitments to other political projects, I didn't feel I could organize an effective event in time for this Thanksgiving Day. But on the assumption that others may feel this way, I have started thinking about what kind of public gathering could make such a political statement effectively, and in the future I hope to find others who are interested in such an event locally.
So, what will I do on Thanksgiving Day this year? I'll probably spend part of the day alone. Maybe I'll take a long walk and think about all this. I'll try to be kind and decent to the people I bump into during the day. I'll miss the company of friends and family who are gathering, and I'll try to reflect on why I've made this choice and why this question matters to me. I'll think about why others made the choices they made.
But this year, whatever I do, I won't celebrate Thanksgiving. I'm going to let that parade pass me by.
5 tips for having Thanksgiving alone - Alternet.org ›
The (burning) case for a Green New Deal
Naomi Klein's new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, has one crippling flaw—it's inspiring. At this moment in history, inspiring talk about solutions to multiple, cascading ecological crises is dangerous.
At the conclusion of these 18 essays that bluntly outline the crises and explain a Green New Deal response, Klein bolsters readers searching for hope: "[W]hen the future of life is at stake, there is nothing we cannot achieve." It is tempting to embrace that claim, especially after nearly 300 pages of Klein's eloquent writing that weaves insightful analysis together with honest personal reflection.
The problem, of course, is that the statement is not even close to being true. With nearly 8 billion people living within a severely degraded ecosphere, there are many things we cannot, and will not, achieve. A decent human future—perhaps any human future at all—depends on our ability to come to terms with these limits. That is not a celebration of cynicism or a rationalization for nihilism, but rather the starting point for rational planning that takes seriously not only our potential but also the planet's biophysical constraints.
Klein's essays in this volume make it clear that she is well aware of those limits, but the book's subtitle suggests that she is writing not only to inform but also to mobilize support for Green New Deal proposals. This tension runs throughout the book—when Klein reports on and analyzes the state of the world, the prose challenges readers to face difficult realities, but when making the case for those policy proposals, she sounds more like an organizer rallying supporters.
That's not a dig—Klein is a writer who doesn't sit on the sidelines but gets involved with movements and political projects. Her commitment to activism and organizing is admirable, but it can pull a writer in conflicting directions.
This critique should not lead anyone to ignore On Fire, which is an excellent book that should be read cover to cover, without skipping chapters that had been previously published. Collections of essays can fall flat because of faded timeliness or unnecessary repetition, but neither are a problem here. As always, Klein's sharp eye for detail makes her reporting on events compelling, whether she's describing disasters (natural and unnatural) or assessing political trends. And, despite the grim realities we face, the book is a pleasure to read.
Before explaining concerns with the book's inspirational tone, I want to emphasize key points Klein makes that I agree are essential to a left/progressive analysis of the ecological crises:
First-World levels of consumption are unsustainable;
capitalism is incompatible with a livable human future;
the modern industrial world has undermined people's connections to each other and the non-human world; and
we face not only climate disruption but a host of other crises, including, but not limited to, species extinction, chemical contamination, and soil erosion and degradation.
In other words, business-as-usual is a dead end, which Klein states forthrightly:
I feel confident in saying that a climate-disrupted future is a bleak and an austere future, one capable of turning all our material possessions into rubble or ash with terrifying speed. We can pretend that extending the status quo into the future, unchanged, is one of the options available to us. But that is a fantasy. Change is coming one way or another. Our choice is whether we try to shape that change to the maximum benefit of all or wait passively as the forces of climate disaster, scarcity, and fear of the "other" fundamentally reshape us.
On Fire focuses primarily on the climate crisis and the Green New Deal's vision, which is widely assailed as too radical by the two different kinds of climate-change deniers in the United States today—one that denies the conclusions of climate science and another that denies the implications of that science. The first, based in the Republican Party, is committed to a full-throated defense of our pathological economic system. The second, articulated by the few remaining moderate Republicans and most mainstream Democrats, imagines that market-based tinkering to mitigate the pathology is adequate.
Thankfully, other approaches exist. The most prominent in the United States is the Green New Deal's call for legislation that recognizes the severity of the ecological crises while advocating for economic equality and social justice. Supporters come from varied backgrounds, but all are happy to critique and modify, or even scrap, capitalism. Avoiding dogmatic slogans or revolutionary rhetoric, Klein writes realistically about moving toward a socialist (or, perhaps, socialist-like) future, using available tools involving "public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption, and taxation" to steer out of the existing debacle.
One of the strengths of Klein's blunt talk about the social and ecological problems in the context of real-world policy proposals is that she speaks of motion forward in a long struggle rather than pretending the Green New Deal is the solution for all our problems. On Fire makes it clear that there are no magic wands to wave, no magic bullets to fire.
The problem is that the Green New Deal does rely on one bit of magical thinking—the techno-optimism that emerges from the modern world's underlying technological fundamentalism, defined as the faith that the use of evermore advanced technology is always a good thing. Extreme technological fundamentalists argue that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. (If anyone thinks this definition a caricature, read "An Ecomodernist Manifesto.")
Klein does not advocate such fundamentalism, but that faith hides just below the surface of the Green New Deal, jumping out in "A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez," which Klein champions in On Fire. Written by U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (the most prominent legislator advancing the Green New Deal) and Avi Lewis (Klein's husband and collaborator), the seven-and-a-half minute video elegantly combines political analysis with engaging storytelling and beautiful visuals. But one sentence in that video reveals the fatal flaw of the analysis: "We knew that we needed to save the planet and that we had all the technology to do it [in 2019]."
First, talk of saving the planet is misguided. As many have pointed out in response to that rhetoric, the Earth will continue with or without humans. Charitably, we can interpret that phrase to mean, "reducing the damage that humans do to the ecosphere and creating a livable future for humans." The problem is, we don't have all technology to do that, and if we insist that better gadgets can accomplish that, we are guaranteed to fail.
Reasonable people can, and do, disagree about this claim. (For example, "The science is in," proclaims the Nature Conservancy, and we can have a "future in which catastrophic climate change is kept at bay while we still power our developing world" and "feed 10 billion people.") But even accepting overly optimistic assessments of renewable energy and energy-saving technologies, we have to face that we don't have the means to maintain the lifestyle that "A Message from the Future" promises for the United States, let alone the entire world. The problem is not just that the concentration of wealth leads to so much wasteful consumption and wasted resources, but that the infrastructure of our world was built by the dense energy of fossil fuels that renewables cannot replace. Without that dense energy, a smaller human population is going to live in dramatically different fashion.
Welcome to the third rail of contemporary political life. The question that the multiple, cascading ecological crises put squarely in front of us is, "What is a sustainable human population?" That question has to be split in two: "How many people? Consuming how much?"
It's no surprise that political candidates ignore these questions, but progressive writers and activists should not back away. Honestly engaging these issues takes us well beyond the Green New Deal.
On the second of those questions—"consuming how much?"—Klein frequently highlights the problem, but with a focus on "profligate consumption." She stresses the need to:
"scale back overconsumption";
identify categories in which we must contract, "including air travel, meat consumption, and profligate energy use";
end "the high-carbon lifestyle of suburban sprawl and disposable consumption";
reject capitalism's faith in "limitless consumption" that locks us in "the endless consumption cycle"; and
make deep changes "not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system."
No argument with any of those statements, especially because Klein rejects the notion that simply improving efficiency will solve our problems, a common assumption of the techno-optimists. But challenging "overconsumption by the comparatively wealthy" focuses on the easy target: "The bottom line is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies, but also by reducing the amount of material stuff that the wealthiest 20 percent of people on the planet consume."
My goal is not to defend rich people or their consumption habits. However, constraining the lifestyles of the rich and famous is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sustainability. Here we have to deal with the sticky question of human nature. Klein rightly rejects capitalism's ideological claim that people's capacity to act out of greed and short-term self-interest (which all of us certainly are capable of doing) is the dominant human trait. Human nature also includes the capacity to act out of compassion in solidarity with others, of course, and different systems reward different parts of our nature. Capitalism encourages the greed and discourages the compassion, to the detriment of people and planet.
But we are organic creatures, and that means there is a human nature, or what we might more accurately call our human-carbon nature. As Wes Jackson of The Land Institute puts it, life on Earth is "the scramble for energy-rich carbon," and humans have gotten exceedingly good at grabbing lots of carbon. Not all cultures go after it with the same intensity, of course, but that scramble predates capitalism and will continue after capitalism. This doesn't mean we are condemned to make the planet unlivable for ourselves and other creatures, but public policy has to recognize that we not only need carbon to survive but that most people—including most environmentalists—like the work that carbon can do for us when we burn those fossil fuels. And once we get a taste of what that carbon can do, it's not easy to give it up.
As Klein points out, curbing our carbon-seeking is not merely a test of will power and matter of individual virtue; collective action through public policy is needed. I believe that requires a hard cap on carbon—limits that we can encourage people to accept through cultural advocacy but in the end must be imposed through law. In a forthcoming book, Stan Cox offers a thoughtful "cap and ration" strategy that could help in "drawing the human economy back within necessary ecological limits," a follow-up to, and expansion of, his earlier book that made a compelling case for a rationing.
There's no simple answer to how much energy and material resources we can consume without undermining the ecosystems on which our own lives depend, but I'm confident in saying that it's dramatically less that we consume today, and that reducing aggregate consumption—even if we could create equitable societies—will be difficult. But that's the easy part. Much more difficult is the first question—"how many people?"
On the question of population, On Fire is silent, and it's not hard to understand, for several reasons. First, the Earth has a carrying capacity for any species but it's impossible to predict when we will reach it (or did reach it), and failed attempts at prediction in the past have made people wary. Second, some of the most vocal supporters of population control also espouse white supremacy, which has tainted even asking the question. Third, while we know that raising the status of women and educating girls reduces birth rates, it's difficult to imagine a non-coercive strategy for serious population reduction on the scale necessary. Still, we should acknowledge ecological carrying capacity while pursuing social justice and rejecting anti-immigration projects. Progressives' unwillingness to address the issue cedes the terrain to "eco-fascists," those who want to use ecological crises to pursue a reactionary agenda.
There's no specific number to offer for a sustainable human population, but I'm confident in saying that it's fewer than 8 billion and that finding a humane and democratic path to that lower number is difficult to imagine.
The fact that these questions are troubling and/or impossible to answer does not mean the questions do not matter. For now, my answer—a lot fewer people and a lot less stuff—is adequate to start a conversation: "A sustainable human presence on the planet will mean fewer people consuming less." Agree or disagree? Why or why not?
Two responses are possible from Green New Deal supporters: (1) I'm nuts, or (2) I'm not nuts, but what I'm suggesting is politically impossible because people can't handle all this bad news.
If I am nuts, critics have to demonstrate what is unsound about the argument, without resorting to the cliché that "necessity is the mother of invention" and the faith-based claims of the technological fundamentalists.
If I am not, then those Green supporters face a quandary. When mainstream Democrats tell progressive folks that the Green New Deal is doomed to fail because it is not politically viable at this moment, supporters counter, appropriately, by saying that anything less is inadequate in the face of the crises. Those supporters argue, appropriately, that the real failure is supporting policies that don't do enough to create sustainable human societies and that we need to build a movement for the needed change. I agree, but by that logic, if the Green New Deal itself is inadequate to create sustainability, then we must push further.
The Green New Deal is a start, insufficiently radical but with the potential to move the conversation forward—if we can be clear about the initiative's limitations. That presents a problem for organizers, who seek to rally support without uncomfortable caveats—"Support this plan! But remember that it's just a start, and it gets a lot rougher up ahead, and whatever we do may not be enough to stave off unimaginable suffering" is, admittedly, not a winning slogan.
Back to what I think Klein is right about, and eloquent in expressing:
Because while it is true that climate change is a crisis produced by an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is also, in a more profound sense, a crisis produced by an extractive mind-set, by a way of viewing both the natural world and the majority of its inhabitants as resources to use up and then discard. I call it the "gig and dig" economy and firmly believe that we will not emerge from this crisis without a shift in worldview at every level, a transformation to an ethos of care and repair.
The domination/subordination dynamic that creates so much suffering within the human family also defines the modern world's destructive relationship to the larger living world. Throughout the book, Klein presses the importance of telling a new story about all those relationships. Scientific data and policy proposals matter, but they don't get us far without a story for people to embrace. Klein is right, and On Fire helps us imagine a new story for a human future.
I offer a friendly amendment to the story she is constructing: Our challenge is to highlight not only what we can but also what we cannot accomplish, to build our moral capacity to face a frightening future but continue to fight for what can be achieved, even when we know that won't be enough.
One story I would tell is of the growing gatherings of people, admittedly small in number today, who take comfort in saying forthrightly what they believe, no matter how painful—people who do not want to suppress their grief, yet do not let their grief overwhelm them.
What kind of person wants to live like that? I can offer a real-life example, my late friend Jim Koplin. He once told me, in a conversation about those multiple, cascading ecological crises (a term I stole from him, with his blessing), "I wake up every morning in a state of profound grief." He was neither depressed nor irrational but simply honest. Jim, a Depression-era farm boy who had been permanently radicalized in the 1960s, felt that grief more deeply than anyone I have known, yet every day he got up to work in his garden and then offer his time and energy to a variety of political, community, and arts groups that were fighting for a better world.
Klein speaks of this grief in On Fire, in what for me were the most moving passages, often involving her young son's future in the face of this "planetary death spiral":
There is no question that the strongest emotions I have about the climate crisis have to do with [Toma] and his generation—the tremendous intergenerational theft under way. I have flashes of sheer panic about the extreme weather we have already locked in for these kids. Even more intense than this fear is the sadness about what they won't ever know. They are growing up in a mass extinction, robbed of the cacophonous company of so many fast-disappearing life forms. It feels so desperately lonely.
The escape from loneliness, for me, starts with recognizing that Jim's "state of profound grief" was not only wholly rational but also emotionally healthy. When told that even if this harsh assessment is correct, people can't handle it, I agree. No one can handle all this. Jim couldn't handle it every waking minute. I don't handle it as well as he did. At best, we struggle to come to terms with a "bleak and austere" future.
But that's exactly why we need to engage rather than avoid the distressing realities of our time. If we are afraid to speak honestly, we suffer alone. Better that we tell the truth and accept the consequences, together.
On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein is scheduled for release September 17, 2019 by Simon & Schuster.
Robert Jensen, an emeritus professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, is part of the Ecosphere Studies team at The Land Institute. He is the author of several books, including The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men and Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully. He can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu or online at http://robertwjensen.org.
Thanksgiving? No, thanks.
One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.
In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.
Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits -- which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.
That the world's great powers achieved "greatness" through criminal brutality on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable.
But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin -- the genocide of indigenous people -- is of special importance today. It's now routine -- even among conservative commentators -- to describe the United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim, history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.
One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hearty Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims first winter.
Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it's also true that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders. The pattern would repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die off on reservations, out of the view of polite society.
Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.
The first president, George Washington, in 1783 said he preferred buying Indians' land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving "wild beasts" from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, "both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape."
Thomas Jefferson -- president #3 and author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as the "merciless Indian Savages" -- was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that didn't stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, "[W]e shall destroy all of them."
As the genocide was winding down in the early 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt (president #26) defended the expansion of whites across the continent as an inevitable process "due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway."
Roosevelt also once said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."
How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis? Here's how "respectable" politicians, pundits, and professors play the game: When invoking a grand and glorious aspect of our past, then history is all-important. We are told how crucial it is for people to know history, and there is much hand wringing about the younger generations' lack of knowledge about, and respect for, that history.
In the United States, we hear constantly about the deep wisdom of the founding fathers, the adventurous spirit of the early explorers, the gritty determination of those who "settled" the country -- and about how crucial it is for children to learn these things.
But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable -- such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States -- suddenly the value of history drops precipitously and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"
This is the mark of a well-disciplined intellectual class -- one that can extol the importance of knowing history for contemporary citizenship and, at the same time, argue that we shouldn't spend too much time thinking about history.
This off-and-on engagement with history isn't of mere academic interest; as the dominant imperial power of the moment, U.S. elites have a clear stake in the contemporary propaganda value of that history. Obscuring bitter truths about historical crimes helps perpetuate the fantasy of American benevolence, which makes it easier to sell contemporary imperial adventures -- such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq -- as another benevolent action.
Any attempt to complicate this story guarantees hostility from mainstream culture. After raising the barbarism of America's much-revered founding fathers in a lecture, I was once accused of trying to "humble our proud nation" and "undermine young people's faith in our country."
Yes, of course -- that is exactly what I would hope to achieve. We should practice the virtue of humility and avoid the excessive pride that can, when combined with great power, lead to great abuses of power.
History does matter, which is why people in power put so much energy into controlling it. The United States is hardly the only society that has created such mythology. While some historians in Great Britain continue to talk about the benefits that the empire brought to India, political movements in India want to make the mythology of Hindutva into historical fact.
Abuses of history go on in the former empire and the former colony. History can be one of the many ways we create and impose hierarchy, or it can be part of a process of liberation. The truth won't set us free, but the telling of truth at least opens the possibility of freedom.
As Americans sit down on Thanksgiving Day to gorge themselves on the bounty of empire, many will worry about the expansive effects of overeating on their waistlines. We would be better to think about the constricting effects of the day's mythology on our minds.
No Thanks to Thanksgiving
Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits—which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.
But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin—the genocide of indigenous people—is of special importance today. It's now routine—even among conservative commentators—to describe the United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim, history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.
One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hearty Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims' first winter.
Thomas Jefferson—president #3 and author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as the "merciless Indian Savages"—was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that didn't stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, "[W]e shall destroy all of them."
In the United States, we hear constantly about the deep wisdom of the founding fathers, the adventurous spirit of the early explorers, the gritty determination of those who "settled" the country—and about how crucial it is for children to learn these things.
But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable—such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States—suddenly the value of history drops precipitously and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"
This is the mark of a well-disciplined intellectual class—one that can extol the importance of knowing history for contemporary citizenship and, at the same time, argue that we shouldn't spend too much time thinking about history.
This off-and-on engagement with history isn't of mere academic interest; as the dominant imperial power of the moment, U.S. elites have a clear stake in the contemporary propaganda value of that history. Obscuring bitter truths about historical crimes helps perpetuate the fantasy of American benevolence, which makes it easier to sell contemporary imperial adventures—such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq—as another benevolent action.
Yes, of course—that is exactly what I would hope to achieve. We should practice the virtue of humility and avoid the excessive pride that can, when combined with great power, lead to great abuses of power.
AlterNet originally ran this article on Thanksgiving 2005, and we have reprinted it on succeeding Thanksgiving holidays.
Will the United States Ever Transcend White Supremacy?
Now that the violence in Charlottesville has forced "white supremacy" into our political vocabulary, let's ask an uncomfortable question: "When will the United States transcend white supremacy?"
My question isn't, "What should we do about the overt white supremacists who, emboldened by Trumpism's success, have pushed their way back into mainstream politics?" I want to go beyond easy targets to ask, "When will U.S. society—not just neo-Nazis and the Klan, but the whole country—reject all aspects of white supremacist ideology and take serious steps toward rectifying the material inequality justified by that ideology?"
The answer is obvious: Never.
There's no evidence the dominant culture is interested. The wealth—in fact, the very existence—of the United States is so entwined in the two foundational racialized holocausts in our history that transcending white supremacy requires not only treating people of color differently, but understanding ourselves in new and painful ways. To transcend white supremacy, white America would have to come to terms with the barbarism of our history and our ongoing moral failures.
If that seems harsh, heartless, or hopeless, let's start with history.
The United States is the wealthiest nation in the world. The acquisition of the land base of the country and our path to industrialization and that wealth are inextricably tied to the genocide of indigenous people and African slavery. Those processes and practices, driven by dreams of domination and the nightmare of unchecked greed, were justified by white supremacist ideology. The result: millions dead, the lives of millions more impoverished, and entire cultures ravaged and sometimes destroyed.
Yes, the story of the United States also includes the quest for freedom and perseverance in the face of adversity, hard work and ingenuity. We love to tell those stories, while the barbarism typically is treated as a footnote. But there would be no United States as we know it without the genocide of indigenous people that cleared the land of "the merciless Indian Savages," as the Declaration of Independence described the native population standing in the way of a new nation. Slave-grown cotton provided a crucial raw material and equally crucial export earnings that aided U.S. economic expansion and spurred industrial development in the North.
White supremacy defines not just the states of the Confederacy, but the whole country. I was born and raised in North Dakota, and I've lived the past 25 years in Texas. Which is more virulent, the overt anti-Indian racism I grew up with or the overt anti-black racism I live around today? They're about the same. What about the unspoken sense of superiority of polite white society? About the same in both places, whether it's conservative Fargo, ND, or progressive Austin, TX.
Why do these attitudes persist? Because to face the reality of our barbaric history would be to admit that our wealth—our very existence—depends on our racialized holocausts, and hence our claim to that land and wealth is suspect. It doesn't matter if any of my ancestors participated in the genocide (they were more recent immigrants) or owned slaves (they didn't). What matters is whether we can tell the truth and remedy, to the degree possible, the consequences of that historical barbarism and the contemporary practices that flow from it. Being anti-racist means supporting anti-racist policies.
Here's one easy example: Raise taxes, primarily on the upper middle class and wealthy, to fund public schools equally. De facto racial segregation in housing means school segregation, and racialized wealth disparities mean racialized inequality in education. So get serious about giving every school the funding needed, channeling extra resources to struggling schools until they reach parity. Assign the most experienced teachers to the schools that have been neglected; let the new teachers handle the rich kids. Raise taxes, and no whining.
School equity would be one small step toward an honest reckoning, and we don't even do that. I can't say with certainty that white America will never face this honestly, but in my life I've seen no indication of a general interest in a public discussion at this level.
Not surprisingly, when I ask, "When will the United States transcend white supremacy?" the responses vary widely. Indigenous and black people often chuckle, not because the subject is funny but because the answer—never—is so obvious. In general, people of color are understandably skeptical about the commitment of white America, recognizing the clash between the good intentions of many white people and those same white people's reluctance to endorse the easy steps, let alone the radical social change, necessary to transform a society.
But the only people who routinely get indignant at the question are other white people. They're the ones who accuse me of being harsh, heartless, and hopeless. Perhaps I am all three, but even if that's the case, the question hangs uncomfortably: When will we transcend white supremacy?
Naomi Klein Pushes Us to Dream Big to Get Beyond Trump's Shock Politics
Naomi Klein understands that President Donald J. Trump is a problem, but he is not the problem.
In her new book, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, Klein reminds us to pay attention not only to the style in which Trump governs (a multi-ring circus so routinely corrupt and corrosive that anti-democratic practices seem normal), but in whose interests he governs (the wealthy, those he believes to be the rightful winners in the capitalist cage match), while recognizing the historical forces that make his administration possible (decades of market-fundamentalist/neoliberal rejection of the idea of a collective good).
Klein, one of the most prominent and insightful leftist writers in North America for two decades, analyzes how Trump's "genius" for branding, magnified by his reality TV success, carried him to the White House. But while we may have been shocked by the election of Trump—not just another celebrity, but the ultimate "hollow brand" that adds no tangible value to society—she argues that we should not have been surprised.
Trump is not a rupture at all, but rather the culmination—the logical endpoint—of a great many dangerous stories our culture has been telling for a very long time. That greed is good. That the market rules. That money is what matters in life. That white men are better than the rest. That the natural world is there for us to pillage. That the vulnerable deserve their fate and the 1 percent deserve their golden towers. That anything public or commonly held is sinister and not worth protecting. That we are surrounded by danger and should only look after our own. That there is no alternative to any of this.
Underneath all these pathologies, Klein explains, is "a dominance-based logic that treats so many people, and the earth itself, as disposable," which gives rise to "a system based on limitless taking and extracting, on maximum grabbing" that "treats people and the earth either like resources to be mined to their limits or as garbage to be disposed of far out of sight, whether deep in the ocean or deep in a prison cell."
Klein's book does not stop with an analysis of the crises. She outlines a resistance politics that not only rejects this domination/subordination dynamic, but proceeds "with care and consent, rather than extractively and through force." In addition to the "no" to the existing order, there must be a "yes" to other values, which she illustrates with the story behind the 2015 Leap Manifesto ("A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another") that she helped draft.
Klein believes the expansive possibilities of those many yeses are visible in Bernie Sanders' campaign and others like it around the world.
Near the end of the book she lists ideas already on the table: "free college tuition, double the minimum wage, 100 percent renewable energy as quickly as technology allows, demilitarize the police, prisons are no place for young people, refugees are welcome here, war makes us less safe." She goes on to identify more ambitious programs and policies: "Reparations for slavery and colonialism? A Marshall Plan to fight violence against women? Prison abolition? Democratic worker co-ops as the centerpiece of a green jobs program? An abandonment of 'growth' as a measure of progress? Why not?"
Klein is not naïve about what it will take to achieve these goals but stresses the possibilities: "there is reason to believe that many of the relationships being built in these early days [of the Trump administration] will be strong enough to counter the fear that inevitably sets in during a state of emergency."
Recognizing that the 2008 financial crisis created opportunities for more radical change that were lost not only because of the Obama administration's cautious, centrist approach but because of progressive movements' timidity, she reminds us that the most important changes in the past (expansions of justice and freedom post-Civil War, during the New Deal, and in the 1960s and '70s) "were responses to crises that unfolded in times when people dared to dream big, out loud, in public—explosions of utopian imagination."
Klein is right to challenge the pessimism that so easily sets in when we capitulate to the idea that radical change is politically impossible because of the success of decades of right-wing propaganda and organizing in the United States. Politics is a human enterprise, and therefore humans can change it. Utopian thinking in these realms is to be encouraged, as movements build the capacity to move us toward those goals.
My only critique of Klein's book—and it is not a minor point—is that while reminding us not to accept artificial, self-imposed limits on social/economic/political fronts, it glosses over the much different reality of the biophysical limits we must work within. Klein's 2014 book on climate change demonstrated how thoroughly she understands what my late friend Jim Koplin called the "multiple, cascading ecological crises" of our time.
But what are the implications of facing those crises?
Go back to Klein's list of programs, which includes "100 percent renewable energy as quickly as technology allows," alongside such goals as free tuition and a doubled minimum wage. These are very different kinds of projects that shouldn't be conflated. By building a stronger left/progressive movement, greater equity in higher education and fairer wages could be won. But much more difficult challenges are hidden in "100 percent renewable energy."
First, and most painful, is the recognition that no combination of renewable resources is going to power the world in which we now live—7.4 billion people, many living at some level of developed world affluence. That doesn't just mean the end of luxury lifestyles of the rich and famous, nor just the end of middle-class amenities such as routine air conditioning, cheap jet air travel, and fresh fruits and vegetables from the other side of the world. We are going to have to face giving up what we have come to believe we "need" to survive, what Wallace Stegner once termed "things that once possessed could not be done without." If you have trouble imagining an example, look around at the people poking at their "smart" phones or walk into a grocery store and survey the endless aisles of food kept "cheap" by fossil fuel inputs.
If we give up techno-utopian dreams of endless clean energy forever, we face a harsh question: How many people can the Earth support in a sustainable fashion, living at what level of consumption?
There is no magic algorithm to answer that question. Everyone's response will be a mix of evidence, hunches, and theology (defined not as claims about God but ideas about what it means to be human, to live a good life). I'm not confident that I have an inside track on this, but I'm fairly sure that the answer is a lot fewer people than there are now, living at much lower levels of consumption.
There are biophysical limits that we can't wish away because they are inconvenient, and they limit our social/political/economic options. Those realities include not only global warming, but also an array of phenomena, all interconnected: accelerating extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity; overexploitation of resources (through logging, hunting, fishing) and agricultural activities (farming, livestock, timber plantations, aquaculture), including the crucial problem of soil erosion; increase in sea levels threatening coastal areas; acidification of the ocean; and amplified, less predictable threats from wildfires, floods, droughts, and heat waves.
We are no longer talking about localized environmental degradation but global tipping points we may have already reached and some planetary boundaries that have been breached. The news is bad, getting worse, and getting worse faster than most scientists had predicted.
The goal of traditional left politics—sometimes explicitly, often implicitly—has been to bring more people into the affluence of the developed world, with the contemporary green version imagining this will happen magically through solar panels and wind turbines for all. Honest ecological evaluations indicate that in addition to the core left/progressive goal of equity within the human family, we have to think about what kind of human presence ecosystems can sustain.
A simple example, but one that is rarely discussed: A national health insurance program that equalizes access to treatment is needed, but what level of high-tech medicine will we be able to provide in a lower-energy world? That question requires a deeper conversation that we have not yet had about what defines a good life and what kinds of life-extending treatment now seen as routine in the developed world will not be feasible in the future. Instead of rationing health care by wealth, a decent society should make these difficult decisions collectively, and this kind of ethical rationing will require blunt, honest conversations about limits.
Here's another example: Increasing the amount of organic food grown on farms using few or no petrochemical inputs is needed, but that style of agriculture will require many to return to a countryside that has been depopulated by industrial agriculture and consumer culture. If we are to increase what Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry call "the eyes-to-acres ratio"—more farmers available to do the work necessary to take better care of the land—how will we collectively make the decisions needed in moving people from cosmopolitan cities, which young people tend to find attractive, to rural communities that may seem less exciting to many?
My point is not that I have answers but that we have yet to explore these questions in any meaningful depth, and the ecosphere is going to force them on us whether or not we are ready. If we leave such questions to be answered by the mainstream culture—within the existing distributions of wealth and power, based on that logic of domination/subordination—the outcomes will be unjust and inhumane. We need to continue left/progressive organizing in response to contemporary injustices, not only for the short-term progress that can be made to strengthen communities and protect vulnerable people, but also to build networks and capacities to face what's coming.
To ignore the ecological realities that make these questions relevant is not hope, but folly; not to incorporate biophysical limits into our organizing is to guarantee failure. Until we can acknowledge the inevitability of this kind of transition—which will be unlike anything we've faced in human history—we cannot plan for it. And we cannot acknowledge that it's coming without a shared commitment not only to hope, but grief. What lies ahead—coming in a time frame no one can predict, but coming—will be an unprecedented challenge for humans, and we are not ready.
Saying no to the pathological domination/subordination dynamic at the heart of the dominant culture is the starting point. Then we say yes to the capacity for caring collaboration that we yearn for. But we also must accept that the systems of the larger living world—the physics and chemistry of the ecosphere—set the boundaries within which we say no and yes.
No one can predict when or how this will play out, but at this moment in history, the best we can say about the fate of the human species is "maybe."
We have a chance for some kind of decent human future, if we can face the challenges honestly: How do we hold on to the best of our human nature (that striving for connection) in the face of existing systems that glorify the worst (individual greed and human cruelty)? All that we dream is not possible, but something better than what we have created certainly is within our reach. We should stop fussing about hope, which seduces too many to turn away from difficult realities. Let's embrace the joy that always exists in the possible, and also embrace the grief in what is not.
We must dare to dream big, and we must face our nightmares.
As I tell my students over and over, reasonable people with shared values can disagree, and friends and allies often disagree with my assessment of the ecological crises. So, let's start with points of agreement: We must say no not only to Trump and the reactionary politics of the Republican Party, but no to the tepid liberal/centrist politics of the Democratic Party. And we must push the platform of the social democratic campaigns of folks like Sanders toward deeper critiques of capitalism, developed world imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.
But all of that work will be undermined if we cannot recognize that remaking the world based on principles of care is limited by the biophysical realities on the planet, an ecosphere we have desecrated for so long that some options once available to us are gone, desecration that cannot magically be fixed by a technological fundamentalism that only compounds problems with false promises of salvation through gadgets.
No is not enough. But yes is not enough, either. Our fate lies in the joy and grief of maybe.
How Israel's Media Propaganda Dominates the American Mind
In the conflict over the land of Palestine, Israel's overpowering military superiority has produced decisive battlefield victories. But just as crucial to Israeli dominance in that region is its supremacy in the U.S. news media, which is captured in the title of an important new film from the Media Education Foundation, The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel's Public Relations War in the United States.
(Disclosure: I have been a consultant to, and interviewed for, other documentaries produced by MEF, including the 2004 film Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land and the 2006 film Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire.)
The film's analysis is crucial to understand why—given the longstanding international consensus for a peaceful settlement that would give both Israelis and Palestinians a secure national homeland—the conflict drags on in its seventh decade. Whatever one's position on how to resolve the conflict, it is uncontroversial that Israel could not continue occupying Palestinian territory without U.S. diplomatic, military and economic support, and it's unlikely that support could continue without the backing—or, at least, acquiescence—of the U.S. public.
Israeli officials understand that, and The Occupation of the American Mind offers a sophisticated analysis of their strategy to keep both policymakers and the public in the United States on their side, illustrated with detailed examples of how Israel successfully borrows from the contemporary advertising/marketing/public relations industries—the folks who produce what is best described as propaganda.
The basics of that propaganda are easy to identify: simplistic phrases, repeated over and over, designed to engage emotions rather than produce rational arguments, all shaped to fit into a narrative of good (Western-oriented Israel, the Middle East's only true democracy) versus evil (Arab/Muslim terrorists who seek not only to destroy the Jewish state but kill all Jews).
To accept this impoverished account of the conflict, we would have to rewrite history, reject international law and ignore the struggle over land and resources that is at the heart of the conflict. Because those realities have been so obscured, The Occupation of the American Mind begins with a straightforward account of the politics of the conflict. No summary of such a contentious issue is neutral, of course, but the film explains clearly the 1948 and 1967 wars that left Israel in its current position of overwhelming dominance. Israel's image as an underdog fighting for survival became difficult to sustain after those military victories and the beginning of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. That's where the propaganda campaign becomes central.
Israel invested considerable resources in the media project after its brutal 1982 invasion of Lebanon started to turn world opinion toward support for the Palestinian cause. Rather than reconsider its policy of maximal expansion and crushing Palestinian aspirations for a state, Israel ratcheted up its media campaign, dubbed hasbara, which translates as "explanation." In combination with aggressive lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill, that campaign has been amazingly effective at undermining an open debate in the United States.
Viewers expecting conspiracy theories about how Jews control the media or secretly run the U.S. government will be disappointed. The Occupation of the American Mind analyzes how the professional practices of U.S. news media—primarily a slavish reliance on official sources, combined with the unexamined ideological assumptions about the rightful dominance of the United States in world affairs—leave journalists susceptible to manipulation by the Israeli public relations machine. That media strategy supports the efforts of the Israel lobby that targets elected officials, who also have their own strategic interests in allying the United States with Israel.
All of this is the way media and politics work in the real world, where money and power so often trump law and moral principles. "The Occupation of the American Mind" explains how that works in the case of Israel/Palestine, a conflict in which cynicism and despair come easy for many in the United States. But the film is, in the end, a hopeful one, based on the belief that accurate information can be the basis for rational discussion that can change public policy in a democratic society.
How rational we humans really are, well, that's an open question. But nowhere is such faith in education, dialogue and people more needed than Israel/Palestine.
The Occupation of the American Mind is available via streaming and DVD at http://www.occupationmovie.com/. For information on the Media Education Foundation, visit http://www.mediaed.org/.
Humanity's Best Future Plan? Leaving the Planet Gracefully
Counterpoint Press
The following is an excerpt from the new book, Plain Radical: Living, Loving and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully, by Robert Jensen (Soft Skull Press, 2015).
Tell people that you are writing a book about a person they have never heard of, and a reasonable question is, "Who the hell is he?" My shorthand summary: Jim Koplin was a "plain radical." Not radical in the sense of dangerously extreme or a fanatical ideologue, but instead radical in its most basic meaning—going deep, to the root of a problem. Jim was radical in his analysis of the world, unflinching in his evaluation of the failures of ours systems, unwilling to fudge the facts or hedge his bets. Jim believed that the only way to make sense of, and resist, the corrosive effects of an unequal distribution of wealth and power in our society was to get radical.
Jim was not plain in the sense of drab or uninteresting, but rather in the way he offered this unvarnished analysis—in plain language without jargon or posturing. He also preferred plain living; Jim didn't try to make statements through his style or appearance, and in day-to-day life he avoided anything fancy or faddish.
The people who run the world typically try to dismiss anyone with a radical analysis as either threatening or flaky—radicals are painted as crazies who either are going to blow us up or annoy us with their self-indulgence. Jim quietly refuted those caricatures, in how he thought and how he lived. Jim was the most plainly radical person I have ever known, shaped by the unassuming farm life in which he was raised and the uncompromising left/feminist politics in which he immersed himself.
Because we need both radical analysis and plain living more than ever, I'm going to do what Jim never wanted me to do when he was alive—make a fuss about him.
Jim was not well known outside the circle of people who had met him—though in his 79 years he met a good many people—but for those of us who knew him well he was a transformative figure. Jim was the kind of teacher who, cliché as it may sound, changed lives; the kind of political comrade one could count on to act ethically; the kind of person who brought a deeper meaning to the word "friend." He also was really smart and paid attention, to politics and ecology, and to the details of life. He knew a lot about people and the larger living world.
Though Jim would not want me to overstate the case, the scope of his political vision and ecological understanding was distinctive; I have never met another person who followed both lines of inquiry so deeply and lived the ideas, however troubling, with such forbearance and equanimity. He romanticized neither rural life nor revolutionary politics, but rather drew the best from each tradition and constructed a sustainable political and ecological life that made sense for him, and to which many others were drawn. He participated in every important U.S. political movement of the last half of the twentieth century—civil rights, radical feminism, gay rights, antiwar, New Left, environmental—and from that activism learned "that the lesson is always that people have power, that hierarchy only provides the illusion of power and control," as he once wrote. His legacy is captured not just in the political actions he was part of, but even more in how he lived. In that same 1980 letter to one of his former students and closest friends, Sox Sperry, Jim said:
I believe the most important thing we can do is push to explore the boundary of human possibilities, and then to live those discoveries out visibly in our own lives for other people to see, and continue to hope that there is enough time for the good examples to catch on (and for some of our failures to just fade away). Any other approach to change, I'm afraid, will merely replicate the structures that need to be destroyed.
Rather than seek converts to his particular way of living, Jim embraced life in a diverse community and offered his attention and affection to a wide variety of people. He didn't make many specific demands on others but instead led his life in a dignified way that encouraged those of us who loved him to make demands on ourselves. By never exempting himself from the obligation to critically self-reflect, Jim made it hard for us to wiggle out of it.
That's echoed in this passage from one of Jim's favorite writers, Wendell Berry (another rather plain farm boy with radical ideas), who reflected on the compromises we face, and sometimes make, in an unsustainable world. After listing the things he happily deprives him- self of (including television, colas, TV dinners, and recreational vehicles, things that Jim also avoided), Berry avoids self-congratulation:
It is plain to me that the line ought to be drawn without fail wherever it can be drawn easily. And it ought to be easy (though many do not find it so) to refuse to buy what one does not need. . . . And yet, if we are ever again to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn. We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to "need." I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won't live long enough to es- cape my bondage to the machines. Nevertheless, on every day left to me I will search my mind and circumstances for the means of escape. And I am not without hope. I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.
Jim Koplin was a healthier and saner person than I am. Probably healthier and saner than you, too. His memory troubles my thoughts and gives me comfort, and I want his story to trouble and comfort you.
In Jim's last years, as the evidence mounted that dramatic ecological changes were inevitable, Jim saw in Oskar the hope of a new generation, the dawning of a new day, the promise of a new era.
Scratch that. That line is for the Hollywood version of Jim Koplin's life, the one with the feel-good ending. Try this, the Vergas version, with the honest ending:
In Jim's last years, as the evidence mounted that dramatic ecological changes were inevitable, Jim became increasingly annoyed with people who kept insisting that we had to have hope for a new generation, a new day, a new era.
Jim recognized that love as a great gift in the last years of his life. Jim loved me and lots of other people, and he knew how much we loved him. Jim loved his place in the world, among the tomato plants and raspberry bushes, at the café, with his childhood friends in rural Minnesota. But those loves did not change his assessment of the trajectory of the human species or lead him to spin feel-good fantasies. Jim believed the constant demand that "we have to have hope" was too often a form of denial, a way people kept themselves from looking at the dire state of the world. Over time he decided he was against hope, as it was indulged in the dominant culture.
Here's Wendell Berry, one of Jim's favorite writers, on the subject in one of his Sabbath poems:
It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
for hope must not depend on feeling good
and there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
of the future, which surely will surprise us,
and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
any more than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.
Here's what Jim, never the dithering type, said to himself (and to me, and I assume to others who were ready to hear it): The last task of the human species is to learn to leave the planet gracefully.
Jim didn't believe in grace bestowed by a loving God (or by a vengeful God, for that matter), but he did believe people could be graceful in how they chose to live. Learning to leave the planet gracefully wasn't an argument for some kind of elegantly choreographed mass suicide, but rather a call to live today in ways that minimize the human assault on the larger living world and help us become our most graceful and gracious selves. Like Berry, Jim thought the present predictions of the future were of little value, and that hope couldn't be based on predictions. But whatever future awaits us, Jim believed that we were better off living gracefully.
None of this has anything to do with giving in to despair or giving up. Jim's philosophy asked much more of people than the platitudes of the hope-peddlers, whether secular or religious; he understood that continuing to struggle for justice and sustainability when there was no evidence to support hope was the mark of real courage and character. Jim scoffed at survivalists who might share his view that a future likely would be grim—cultivating frugality and community self-reliance was always valuable, but stockpiling shotgun shells and dried food was no answer. Jim didn't give up on his obligations to others and to the world, because he understood that struggle as his obligation to himself, to being the best person he could.
Jim looked around contemporary society and saw few fellow travelers on this path. The technological fundamentalists offered fantasies of magical gadgets on Earth. The religious fundamentalists indulged fantasies of deliverance to another place. Jim rejected both but saw the seductive promises of high-energy/high-technology "solutions" as the most dangerous. Even people who claim to reject that glorification of technology often were secretly betting on it. A year after his death, in one of those many moments I wished I could pick up the phone and call Jim, I had an exchange with a fellow leftist that showed how difficult it was to put forward a critical analysis that was honest in this way.
"The Future Must Be Green, Red, Black and Female," the manifesto mentioned in "Pushing Further," emerged out of my concern that those with a sustainability vision could too easily short-change the justice vision. After I published that essay online, a short summary of the piece appeared in the weekly email from PopularResistance.org, which described itself as seeking to aid in bringing movements for peace, justice, economic fairness and environmental protection together into an independent, nonviolent and diverse movement that can end the power of concentrated wealth, shift power to the people and put human needs before corporate greed.
No argument from me about that goal, but the way my essay was summarized distorted the message. Here's what I wrote to the website:
Thanks for linking to my essay in the latest Popular Resistance email.
I have one bit of feedback. The link to my work comes under the subhead "A time of crisis and opportunity," and begins:
"We live in a time of crisis, but also in a time of opportunity. Robert Jensen tells us that we must face reality: 'If today, everywhere on the planet, everyone made a commitment to the research and organizing necessary to ramp down the demands that the human project places on ecosystems, we could possibly create a plan for a sustainable human presence on the planet, with a dramatic reduction in consumption and a gradual reduction of population.'"
That key word in that sentence is "could," because I go on to say:
"But when we reflect on our history as a species and the nature of the systems that govern our lives today, the sensible conclusion is that the steps we need to take won't be taken, at least not in the time frame available for meaningful change. This is not defeatist. This is not cowardly. This is not self-indulgent. This is reality, and sensible planning should be reality-based."
I believe in organizing for social justice and ecological sustain- ability, and I spend more of my own time, energy, and money on these projects than I ever have. But the point of my essay was to come to terms with the fact that we have to face not only what we can achieve, but what we almost certainly can't achieve at this point in history, given the damage already done and the forces unleashed.
As I argue in the essay, that need not paralyze us. Instead, it can help us make better choices about what kind of organizing is likely most productive, given the realities that we have long been ignoring.
So, I think your incomplete quotation from the essay likely leads readers to an interpretation that strays from what I argue in the piece.
The response from Popular Resistance was polite but avoided the challenge I was offering to traditional "we can fix it if we work harder" organizing. The question isn't whether we should continue to organize for justice and sustainability—I agree that we should— but whether we can tell the truth about the state of the world. I responded one last time, not so much to try to change anyone's mind but because I don't like people avoiding the issue:
My own view is that in addition to participating in and highlighting the successes of existing organizing projects, we need to talk more about what's coming. Out of an understandable desire to keep people in movements focused on what can be achieved in the moment, I believe we are avoiding our obligation to prepare for the serious changes that are coming, likely sooner than we imagine. I included myself in this critique; I fall prey to this as well. That's partly why I keep writing about this, to force myself to face it.
I agree that no one can predict how close we are to transformation, just as no one can predict how close we may be to a major ecological collapse/massive social dislocation. But we have to make our best estimates based on what evidence there is, and right now I think the evidence suggests the collapse/dislocation will arrive before any serious transformation. That's the future we are not prepared for, and for the most part are not preparing for. I fear that if we don't talk about this on the left, we cede the territory to "doomers" and right-wing populists, whose "solutions" we would find unacceptable.
The more graceful path that Jim advocated and tried to live, albeit imperfectly, means dramatically lower consumption of energy and materials, and the recognition that in the future there would have to be fewer people on the planet. Jim believed in the importance of modeling that way of living but understood that the level of change required could be achieved only through collective action, through politics. At the same time, he didn't believe that the kind of change required could be achieved within any existing frameworks and thought that should be acknowledged out loud instead of whispered behind closed doors.
Again, to be clear: Jim didn't think his own decisions about how to live were the answer, either. Although he was the most frugal person I knew living in a city, Jim didn't fool himself into thinking he was living a sustainable lifestyle. He drove a car, ate in restaurants, burned fossil fuel to heat his home. The point wasn't to construct some allegedly sustainable bubble in an otherwise unsustainable world in order to feel better about himself. Instead, he cultivated habits that he thought were important on that more graceful path.
Jim had no illusions, about the personal or political. Two decades earlier, thinking about these questions, Jim had written to me with a sense of urgency about the need to do more than simply confront the fossil-fuel industry, to get to the core problem of modern society's dependence on excessive energy. He worried that if a significant challenge were not mounted soon, "we will pass into the sleep from which there is no awakening." (June 6, 1991) A few years after that he confided:
I do see things now to be more desperate than at any time in my memory. The disasters lurking are universal and global. The pre- vious problems were relatively local and self-contained. And, as I said on the phone, I have a sense of the possibilities closing down as opposed to opening up, as I felt even in the worst of times in the '60s. (January 31, 1995)
In our most unguarded moments together in the last few years of his life, this was the subject of many of our conversations, as well as the source of all of our silences, those moments when we both were left without words because it felt too overwhelming to say out loud what we both thought: The culture had already passed into that sleep from which there would be no awakening.
For Jim, this awareness demanded no particular change in his daily life. He continued to garden, lend a hand at the Land Stewardship Project, read extensively and share what he learned with others, and support his younger friends involved in political and artistic endeavors. My decisions about local organizing were set for the coming years after groups I was part of bought property and began establishing a progressive community center in Austin. But after publishing the book on religion, I had to decide where to focus on my writing and speaking. With Jim's blessing, I decided it was time to get apocalyptic—not in the context of fundamentalist Christianity (more on the meaning of the term shortly) but in the sense of not backing down from what the evidence from the world reveals.
In Arguing for Our Lives, the last book of mine that Jim read in draft (but did not live to see published), I introduced the material on critical thinking with an acknowledgement of the anxiety that so many feel living in an unsustainable society, and ended the book with a recommendation that people not turn away from the anguish that such knowledge can bring. After that, I wrote a long pamphlet/short book titled We Are All Apocalyptic Now, which made a more explicit argument for not backing down from blunt talk about the state of the world. If I had tried to publish such a thing when Jim and I first started discussing these matters in the 1990s, few on the left would have paid any attention. When I did publish it a year after Jim died, it didn't seem quite as crazy to many.
I'm the Guy Who People Think Hates Thanksgiving
"Are you the guy who hates Thanksgiving?"
The man posing that question on my voicemail continued with a sharply critical comment about one of the essays I have written in recent years about the holocaust-denial that is at the heart of that U.S. holiday. My first reaction was not to argue but to amend: "I don't hate Thanksgiving—I just think it's appropriate to critique a celebration that obscures the reality of the European conquest of the Americas."
That description is accurate, at one level—my rejection of Thanksgiving is more intellectual than emotional, a political decision to reject that distortion of history. Whatever the actual details of the 1621 celebration involving Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians (and there is ongoing debate about various factual claims), Thanksgiving is one way the dominant culture minimizes or denies the larger historical context of Europeans' genocidal campaign against indigenous people to acquire the land base of the United States. Without that genocide, there is no United States. For the victors' descendants to take a day off to give thanks without acknowledging that seems, well, just a bit sociopathic.
I have taken several cracks at making this case, from several different angles:
"Why We Shouldn't Celebrate Thanksgiving"
"How I Stopped Hating Thanksgiving and Learned to Be Afraid"
"The Meaning of Thanksgiving"
And I continue to believe the argument is sound and that we should all take it seriously. Until we can tell the truth about our history, there is little hope for the future. But rather than restate that case, this year I'm thinking more about the questions raised by that one word, "hate."
I recognize that my discomfort with Thanksgiving can't be explained completely by a judgment based on an intellectual argument. I don't hate Thanksgiving, in some irrational way, but it's true that as an adult I have never really much enjoyed the holiday, even before I developed a clear political critique. Some of the sources of that discomfort are mundane: I'm a vegetarian who comes from a dysfunctional family, and I don't care for football or shopping. So, a holiday identified with turkey and traveling home doesn't have much to offer me. I get by just fine without the NFL, and the increasingly inescapable connection between Thanksgiving and the beginning of the pathological consumption cycle known as "Christmas shopping" makes me surly.
OK, so maybe I do hate Thanksgiving, but my critics should at least recognize there are some perfectly rational reasons behind the emotional reaction. As with most human responses, the intellectual and emotional elements are intertwined and hard to tease apart. If I can acknowledge that about my critique of Thanksgiving, it seems only fair that the staunch defenders of the holiday do the same. Is not the intense defense of Thanksgiving also in some ways an emotional reaction?
And, if those of us on different sides of the Thanksgiving divide can recognize the complexity of our reactions, can we consider whether there are any shared values before concentrating on disagreements? I feel alienated from the dominant culture on Thanksgiving, not because I dislike the idea of gathering with others to give thanks but because of both the larger political context (about which I recognize my critics and I disagree) and an increasingly numbed culture (about which my critics and I may find common concerns).
In other words: Don't many of us feel just a bit uncomfortable with a holiday that is defined by obligatory family gatherings that often cover up unresolved strife and/or apathy; thoughtless overeating simply because so much food is available; spectacle sports that have become painfully close to Roman gladiator contests; and relentless consumption that often involves buying stuff that many people don't really want and no one really needs? Of course not everyone in the United States has access to all these markers of affluence, but these Thanksgiving Day routines are more the norm than aberration.
These reflections are not confined to one day; we live in this corrosive culture 365 days a year. For me, much of what is considered "normal" in the United States isn't very appealing. I think we eat too much cheap food, are spectators to too much cheap entertainment, and buy too much stuff (some of it cheap and some expensive, but all costly to the larger living world). And many people struggle with family dynamics that are stuck in unresolved pathologies which quietly coerce people into ignoring problems for the sake of family "harmony."
I have long felt that at the heart of Thanksgiving is a denial of reality and an exercise in numbing ourselves, individually and as a culture. I am not claiming that everyone's celebration of Thanksgiving is defined by these negatives; individual experiences vary widely, of course. But the alienation I'm describing is not hard to understand, and not limited to a few surly people on the margins.
And whatever one's personal relationship to the holiday, the political question remains: Why is it "normal" in the United States to celebrate a holiday that is based on a profound distortion of history? That kind of inquiry should lead us to related questions.
Why is it "normal" to embrace the hierarchy and wealth inequality of corporate capitalism, even though most of us claim to hold moral and/or theological principles that are rooted in the centrality of human dignity, equality, and solidarity? How compatible is capitalism with the values that are essential to a decent human community?
Why is it "normal" to assert that we are the world's most advanced democracy, without acknowledging that the concentration of wealth in the U.S. economy has left most of the population outside of the formal political process? Are capitalism and democracy compatible?
Why is it "normal" to express concern about environmental issues without ever questioning an economic system that is obsessed with the very growth that is undermining the integrity of the ecosystems on which are own lives depend? Is capitalism compatible with a sustainable human presence on the planet?
I do not believe there are simple answers to those political questions but I'm pretty sure they are relevant questions, and I can't imagine dealing honestly with the steadily mounting problems of social injustice and ecological unsustainability unless we face such questions. I'm also pretty sure that my personal reaction to Thanksgiving raises relevant questions about our family relationships and culture that also demand an honest accounting.
And I am absolutely certain that in both political and personal arenas, denial is an impediment to meaningful progress. If we can't deal honestly with these problems, it's unlikely that we will have much to give thanks for in the years to come.
We Have to Embrace Apocalypse If We're Going to Get Serious About Sticking Around on This Planet
The following is an excerpt from We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out , in print at Amazon.com and on Kindle (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013):
Here's my experience in speaking apocalyptically about the serious challenges humans face: No matter how carefully I craft a statement of concern about the future of humans, no matter how often I deny a claim to special gifts of prognostication, no matter now clearly I reject supernatural explanations or solutions, I can be certain that a significant component of any audience will refuse to take me seriously. Some of those people will make a joke about "Mr. Doom and Gloom." Others will suggest that such talk is no different than conspiracy theorists' ramblings about how international bankers, secret cells of communists, or crypto-fascists are using the United Nations to create a one-world government. Even the most measured and careful talk of the coming dramatic change in the place of humans on Earth leads to accusations that one is unnecessarily alarmist, probably paranoid, certainly irrelevant to serious discussion about social and ecological issues. In the United States, talk of the future is expected to be upbeat, predicting expansion and progress, or at least maintenance of our "way of life."
Apocalyptic thinking allows us to let go of those fanciful visions of the future. As singer/songwriter John Gorka puts it: "The old future's gone/We can't get to there from here." The comfortable futures that we are comfortable imagining are no longer available to us because of the reckless way we've been rolling the dice; there is nothing to save us from ourselves. Our task is to deal with our future without delusions of deliverance, either divine or technological. This planet is not a way station in a journey to some better place; it is our home, the only home we will know. We will make our peace with ourselves, each other, and the larger living world here.
The first step in thinking sensibly about the future, of course, is reviewing the past. The uncertainty of our future will be easier to accept and the strength to persevere will be easier to summon if we recognize:
--We are animals. For all our considerable rational capacities, we are driven by non-rational forces that cannot be fully understood or completely controlled. Even the most careful scientist is largely an emotional creature, just like everyone else.
--We are band/tribal animals. Whatever kind of political unit we live in today, our evolutionary history is in small groups; that's how we are designed to live.
--We are band/tribal animals living in a global world. The consequences of the past 10,000 years of human history have left us dealing with human problems on a global scale, and with 7 billion people on the planet, there's no point in fantasizing about a retreat to Eden.
With that history in mind, we should go easy on ourselves. As Wes Jackson said, we are a species out of context, facing the unique task of being the first animals who will have to self-consciously impose limits on ourselves if we are to survive, reckoning not just with what we do in our specific place on the planet but with what other people are doing around the world. This is no small task, and we are bound to fail often. We may never stop failing, and that is possibly the most daunting challenge we must face: Can we persevere in the quest for justice and sustainability even if we had good reasons to believe that both projects ultimately will fail? Can we live with that possibility? Can we ponder that and yet still commit ourselves to loving action toward others and the non-human world?
Said differently: What if our species is an evolutionary dead end? What if those adaptations that produced our incredible evolutionary success -- our ability to understand certain aspects of how the world works and manipulate that world to our short-term advantage -- are the very qualities that guarantee our human systems will degrade the life-sustaining systems of the world? What if that which has allowed us to dominate will be that which destroys us? What if humanity's story is a dramatic tragedy in the classical sense, a tale in which the seeds of the hero's destruction are to be found within, and history is the unfolding of the inevitable fall?
We love stories of individual heroes, and collectively we tend to think of ourselves as the heroic species. The question we might ask, uncomfortably, about those tales of heroism: Is Homo sapiens an epic hero or a tragic one? Literature scholars argue over the specific definitions of the terms "epic" and "tragedy," but in common usage an epic celebrates the deeds of a hero who is favored by, and perhaps descended from, the gods. These heroes overcome adversity to do great things in the service of great causes. Epic heroes win.
A tragic hero loses, but typically not because of an external force. The essence of tragedy is what Aristotle called "hamartia," an error in judgment made because of some character flaw, such as hubris. That excessive pride of protagonists becomes their downfall. Although some traditions talk about the sin of pride, most of us understand that taking some pride in ourselves is psychologically healthy. The problem is excessive pride, when we elevate ourselves and lose a sense of the equal value of others. When we fall into hubris individually, the consequences can be disastrous for us and those around us. When we fall into that hubris as a species -- when we ignore the consequences of the exploitation on which our "lifestyle" is based -- the consequences are more dramatic.
What if our task is to give up the dream of the human species as special? And what if the global forces set in motion during the high-energy/high-technology era are beyond the point of no return? Surrounded by the big majestic buildings and tiny sophisticated electronic gadgets created through human cleverness, it's easy for us to believe we are smart enough to run a complex world. But cleverness is not wisdom, and the ability to create does not guarantee we can control the destruction we have unleashed. It may be that there is no way to rewrite this larger epic, that too much of the tragedy has already been played out.
But here's the good news: While tragic heroes meet an unhappy fate, a community can learn from the protagonist's fall. Even tragic heroes can, at the end, celebrate the dignity of the human spirit in their failure. That may be our task, to recognize that we can't reverse course in time to prevent our ultimate failure, but that in the time remaining we can recognize our hamartia, name our hubris, and do what we can to undo the damage.
That may be the one chance for us to be truly heroic, by learning to leave center stage gracefully, to stop trying to run the world and to accept a place in the world. We have to take our lives seriously but take Life more seriously.
We certainly live in a dangerous time, if we take seriously the data that our vast intellectual enterprises have produced. Ironically, the majority of intellectuals who are part of those enterprises prefer to ignore the implications of that data. The reasons for that will of course vary, and there is no reason to pretend these issues are simple or that we can line up intellectuals in simple categories of good/bad, brave/cowardly, honest/dishonest. Reasonable people can agree on the data and disagree on interpretation and analysis. Again, my argument is not that anyone who does not share my interpretation and analysis is obviously wrong or corrupt; many of the assertions I have made require more lengthy argument than available in this space.
But I hold to one point without equivocation: When the privileged intellectuals subsidized by the institutions of the dominant culture look away from the difficult issues that we face today, they are failing to meet their moral obligations. The more privileged the intellectual, the greater the responsibility to use our resources, status, and autonomy to face these issues. There is a lot riding on whether we have the courage and the strength to accept that danger, joyfully. This harsh assessment, and the grief that must accompany it, is not a rejection of joy. The two, grief and joy, are not mutually exclusive but, in fact, rely on each other, and define the human condition. As Wendell Berry puts it, we live on "the human estate of grief and joy."
This inevitably leads to the question: where can we find hope? My short answer: Don't ask someone else where to find it. Create it through your actions. Hope is not something we find, but is something we earn. No one has the right to be hopeful until they expend energy to make hope possible. Gorka's song expresses this: "The old future's dead and gone/Never to return/There's a new way through the hills ahead/This one we'll have to earn/This one we'll have to earn."
Berry speaks repeatedly of the importance of daily practice, of building a better world in a practical ways that nurture real bonds in real communities that know their place in the world. He applies this same idea to a discussion of hope:
[Y]ou're not under any obligation to construct a hope for the whole human race. What you are required to do is to be intelligent. And that means you've got to have an array of examples you want more or less to understand. Some are not perfect, and others are awful, and to be intelligent you've got to know why some are better than the others.
If people demand that intellectuals provide hope -- or, worse, if intellectuals believe it is their job to give people hope -- then offering platitudes about hope is just another way of avoiding the difficult questions. Clamoring for hope can be a dangerous diversion. But if the discussion of hope leads to action, even in the face of situations that may be hopeless, then we can hold onto what Albert Camus called a "stubborn hope":
Tomorrow the world may burst into fragments. In that threat hanging over our heads there is a lesson of truth. As we face such a future, hierarchies, titles, honors are reduced to what they are in reality: a passing puff of smoke. And the only certainty left to us is that of naked suffering, common to all, intermingling its roots with those of a stubborn hope.
I would call this a hope beyond hope, the willingness not only to embrace that danger but to find joy in it. The systems that structure our world have done more damage than we can understand, but no matter how dark the world grows, there is a light within. That is the message of the best of our theological and secular philosophical traditions, a recurring theme of the best of our art. Wendell Berry has been returning to this theme for decades in essays, fiction, and poetry, and it is the subject of one of his Sabbath poems:
This is what I say to myself: Whatever our chances of surviving, we define ourselves in the present moment by what we do. There are two basic tasks in front of us. First, we should commit some of our energy to movements that focus on the question of justice in this world, especially those of us with the privilege that is rooted in that injustice. As a middle-class American white man, I can see plenty of places to continue working, in movements dedicated to ending white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and U.S. wars of domination.
I also think there is important work to be done in experiments to prepare for what will come in this new future that we can't yet describe in detail. Whatever the limits of our predictive capacity, we can be pretty sure we will need ways of organizing ourselves to help us live in a world with less energy and fewer material goods. We all have to develop the skills needed for that world (such as farming and gardening with fewer inputs, food preparation and storage, and basic tinkering), and we will need to recover a deep sense of community that has disappeared from many of our lives. This means abandoning a sense of ourselves as consumption machines, which the contemporary culture promotes, and deepening our notions of what it means to be humans in search of meaning. We have to learn to tell different stories about our sense of self, our connection to others, and our place in nature. The stories we tell will matter, as will the skills we learn.
Berry's basis for hope begins with a recognition of where we are and who we are, at our best:
Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
underfoot. Be lighted by the light that falls
freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
and the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
which is the light of imagination. By it you see
the likeness of people in other places to yourself
in your place. It lights invariably the need for care
toward other people, other creatures, in other places
as you would ask them for care toward your place and you.
In my own life, I continue to work on those questions of justice in existing movements, but I have shifted a considerable amount of time to helping build local networks that can create a place for those experiments. Different people will move toward different efforts depending on talents and temperaments; we should all follow our hearts and minds to apply ourselves where it makes sense, given who we are and where we live. After offering several warnings about arrogance, I'm not about to suggest I know best what work other people should do. If there is any reason for hope, it will be in direct proportion to our capacity for humility and seeing ourselves as part of, not on top of, the larger living world. Berry ends that Sabbath poem not with false optimism but a blunt reminder of how easy it is for us to fall out of right relation with ourselves, others, and the larger living world:
No place at last is better than the world. The world
is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.
The argument I have made rests on an unsentimental assessment of the physical world and the life-threatening consequences of human activity over the past 10,000 years. We would be wise not to plan on supernatural forces or human inventions to save us from ourselves. It is unlikely that we will be delivered to a promised land by divine or technological intervention. Wishing the world were less harsh will not magically make it less harsh. We should not give into the temptation to believe in magic. As James Howard Kunstler puts it, we should stop "clamoring desperately for rescue remedies that would allow them to continue living exactly the way they were used to living, with all the accustomed comforts."
But we should keep telling stories. Our stories do not change the physical world, but they have the potential to change us. In that sense, the poet Muriel Rukeyser was right when she said, "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."
Whatever particular work intellectuals do, they are also storytellers. Artists tell stories, but so do scientists and engineers, teachers and preachers. Our work is always both embedded in a story and advancing a story. Intellectual work matters not just for what it discovers about how the world works, but for what story it tells about those discoveries.
To think apocalyptically is not to give up on ourselves, but only to give up on the arrogant stories we modern humans have been telling about ourselves. Our hope for a decent future -- indeed, any hope for even the idea of a future -- depends on our ability to tell stories not of how humans have ruled the world but how we can live in the world. The royal must give way to the prophetic and the apocalyptic. The central story of power -- that the domination/subordination dynamic is natural and inevitable -- must give way to stories of dignity, solidarity, equality. We must resist not only the cruelty of repression but the seduction of comfort.
The songs we sing matter at least as much as the machines we build. Power always assumes it can control. Our task is to resist that control. Gorka offers that reminder, of the latent power of our stories, in the fancifully titled song "Flying Red Horse":
They think they can tame you, name you and frame you,
Aim you where you don't belong.
They know where you've been but not where you're going,
And that is the source of the songs.
Mining the World to Death
The following is an excerpt from We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out, in print at Amazon.com and on Kindle (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013).
Progressive analyses of inequality and injustice focus on the illegitimate hierarchies in patriarchy, white supremacy, the imperial nation-state system, and capitalism. The final hierarchal system—and in some ways the most dangerous—is the industrial model of human development, the latest and most intense version of an unsustainable extractive economy.
The bounty that makes contemporary mass consumption possible did not, of course, drop out of the sky. It was ripped out of the ground and drawn from the water in a fashion that has left the continent ravaged, a dismemberment of nature that is an unavoidable consequence of a worldview that glorifies domination.
"From [Europeans'] first arrival we have behaved as though nature must be either subdued or ignored," writes the scientist and philosopher Wes Jackson, one of the leading thinkers in the sustainable agriculture movement. As Jackson points out, our economy has always been extractive, even before the industrial revolution dramatically accelerated the assault in the 19th century and the petrochemical revolution began poisoning the world more intensively in the 20th. We mined the forests, soil, and aquifers, just as we eventually mined minerals and fossil fuels, leaving ecosystems ragged and in ruin, perhaps beyond recovery in any human timeframe. All that was done by people who believed in their right to dominate.
One way to understand that domination is the context of the two major revolutions in human history—the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
The agricultural revolution started about 10,000 years ago when a gathering-hunting species discovered how to cultivate plants for food and domesticate animals. Two crucial things resulted from that, one ecological and one political. Ecologically, the invention of agriculture kicked off an intensive human assault on natural systems. Gathering-hunting humans were capable of damaging a local ecosystem, but the large-scale destruction we cope with today has its origins in agriculture when humans began exhausting the energy-rich carbon of the soil, what Jackson has described as the first step in the entrenchment of an extractive economy and Jared Diamond has called "the worst mistake in human history."
Human agricultural practices vary from place to place but have never been sustainable over the long term. Politically, the ability to stockpile food made possible concentrations of power and resulting hierarchies that were foreign to gathering-hunting societies. Again, this is not to say that humans were not capable of doing bad things to each other prior to agriculture, but only that what we understand, as large-scale institutionalized oppression has its roots in agriculture. We need not romanticize pre-agricultural life to recognize the ways in which agriculture made possible dramatically different levels of unsustainability and injustice.
The industrial revolution that began in the last half of the 18th century in Great Britain intensified the magnitude of the human assault on ecosystems. Unleashing the concentrated energy of coal, oil and natural gas to run a machine-based world has produced unparalleled material comfort for some. Whatever one thinks of the effect of such comforts on human psychology (and, in my view, the effect has been mixed), the processes that produce the comfort are destroying the capacity of the ecosphere to sustain human life as we know it into the future, and in the present those comforts are not distributed in a fashion that is consistent with any meaningful conception of justice. The ecological consequences of this revolution are painfully obvious.
These two changes in human history come together today in what typically is called "industrial agriculture," the dominant method of producing food at this moment in history in the United States, the rest of the developed world, and increasingly in the developing world. It is a style of agriculture that everyone agrees has produced substantial increases in yields, tripling the world grain harvest in the second half of the 20th century. Critics, however, point out that those yields have come at the cost of deep, and possibly permanent, injuries to the land, people and other species.
Various characteristics of industrial agriculture have been evolving over time, but by the second half of the 20th century the industrial system was firmly in place in the United States. The features of the current system include: (1) heavy use of nonrenewable inputs purchased off the farm, such as chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides; (2) extensive mechanization, making farming both capital- and technology-intensive; (3) heavy reliance on fossil fuels for those inputs and mechanization, to such an extent that critics joke that modern farming is the use of land to covert petroleum into food; (4) decreased self-sufficiency for individuals and communities, and increased dependence on corporations; and (5) a lack of concern for, if not outright hostility toward, systems and living things that do not directly contribute to production.
Along with the dramatic increases in food production, the predictable results of this system have been: (1) drastic and continuing loss of topsoil; (2) declining soil fertility; (3) a severe reduction in farm population; and (4) the resulting loss of knowledge of traditional methods that require fewer inputs, less technology, less capital, and more people.
This is what Jackson calls "the failure of success," the paradox of a system that results in more food coming from fields that have less, and less fertile, soil. The so-called "Green Revolution"—a variety of research and social programs associated with the work of Nobel Prize-winning agronomist Norman Borlaug—was not really a revolution but an extension of industrial agriculture to the Third World, which resulted in short-term reductions in hunger but also exported this extremely fragile model to the developing world, creating the same long-term problems.
The agricultural revolution produced the first systematic extractive model, which set us on a road to eventual collapse. The industrial revolution ramped up our speed. The material benefits of those revolutions are not spread equally or equitably around the world, which challenges us to create a more just world as we struggle to find a new model for a sustainable world.
How Unchecked Capitalism Has Brought the World to the Brink of Apocalypse -- and What We Must Do Now
The following is an excerpt from We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out, in print at Amazon.com and on Kindle (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013):
The first step in dealing with a difficult situation is to muster the courage to face it honestly, to assess the actual depth and severity of a problem and identify the systems from which the problem emerges. The existing social, economic, and political systems produce a distribution of wealth and well-being that is inconsistent with moral principles, as the ecological capital of the planet is drawn down faster than it can regenerate. The systems that structure almost all human societies produce profoundly unjust and fundamentally unsustainable results. We have both a moral obligation and practical reasons to work for justice and sustainability.
We need first to imagine, and then begin to create, alternative systems that will reduce inequality and slow, and we hope eventually reverse, the human assault on the ecosphere. To work toward those goals, individuals can (and should) make changes in their personal lives to consume less; corporations can (and should) be subject to greater regulation; and the most corrupt political leaders can (and should) be turned out of office. But those limited efforts, while noble and important in the short term, are inadequate to address the problems if no systemic and structural changes are made.
That sounds difficult because it will be, and glib slogans can't change that fact. A longstanding cliché of progressive politics -- organizers' task is to "make it easy for people to do the right thing" -- is inadequate in these circumstances. Given the depth of the dysfunction, it will not be easy to do the right thing. It will, in fact, be very hard, and there's no sense pretending otherwise. At this point in history, anything that is easy and can be achieved quickly is almost certainly insufficient and likely irrelevant in the long run. Attempting to persuade people that large-scale social change will come easily is not only insulting to their intelligence but is guaranteed to fail. If organizers can persuade people to join a movement based on promises of victories that won't disrupt privileged lives -- victories that cannot be achieved -- the backlash is likely worse than the status quo.
There's one simple reason that serious change cannot be easy: We are the first species in the history of the planet that is going to have to will itself to practice restraint across the board, especially in our use of energy. Like other carbon-based creatures, we evolved to pursue energy-rich carbon, not constrain ourselves. Going against that basic fact of nature will not be easy.
Modern humans -- animals like us, with our brain capacity -- have been on the planet about 200,000 years, which means that we've lived within the hierarchical systems launched by agriculture for only about 5 percent of human history. We are living today in a world defined by systems in which we did not evolve as a species and to which we are still struggling to adapt. What today we take to be normal ways of organizing human societies -- nation-states with capitalist economies -- are recent developments, radically different than how we lived for 95 percent of our evolutionary history. We evolved in small gatherer-hunter groups, band-level societies that were basically egalitarian. Research on human social networks suggest that there is a limit on the "natural" size of a human social group of about 150 members, which is determined by our cognitive capacity. This has been called "Dunbar's number" (after anthropologist Robin Dunbar) -- the number of individuals with whom any one of us can maintain stable relationships. In that world, we pursed that energy-rich carbon without the knowledge or technology that makes that same pursuit so dangerous today.
So we are, as Wes Jackson puts it, "a species out of context." We are living in a world that is in many ways dramatically out of sync with the kind of animals we are. If we are to create systems and structures that will make possible an ongoing human presence on the planet, we have to understand our evolutionary history and adapt our institutions to reflect our essentially local existence -- people live, after all, not on "the planet" but in a specific place, as part of an ecosystem -- on a scale and with a scope that we are capable of managing. But we also have to acknowledge that we are inextricably connected to others around the world because of more recent history. As a result of the centuries of imperialism that have advantaged some and disadvantaged others, we are all morally connected, as well as literally connected by modern transportation and communication technology. The task is not to go backward to some imagined Eden, but to understand our history to create a more just and sustainable future.
This means we have to recognize that the biological processes that govern the larger living world, along with our own evolutionary history, impose limits on human societies. Either we start shaping our world to reflect those limits so that we can control to some degree the dramatic changes coming, or we will be reacting to changes that can't be controlled. That isn't an easy task; as James Howard Kunstler points out, "the only thing that complex societies have not been able to do is contract, to become smaller and less complex, and to do it in a programmatic way that reduces the pain of transition." Though history suggests that "people do what they can until they can't," it's still imperative that we face the challenge:
Our longer-term destination is a society run at much lower levels of available energy, with much lower populations, and a time-out from the kinds of progressive innovation that so many have taken for granted their whole lives. It was an illusory result of a certain sequencing in the exploitation of resources in the planet earth that we have now pretty much run through. We have an awful lot to contend with in this reset of human activities.
If there is to be a decent future, we have to give up on the imperial fantasy of endless power, the capitalist fantasy of endless growth, the technological fantasy of endless comfort. Those systems have long been celebrated as the engines of unprecedented wealth, albeit for a limited segment of the world's population. Instead of celebrating, we should mourn the world that these systems have created and search for something better. Systems that celebrate domination are death cults, not the basis for societies striving for justice and sustainability.
Our task can be stated simply: We seek justice, the simple plea for decent lives for all, and sustainability, a balance in which human social systems can thrive within the larger living world. Justice and sustainability have a common economics, politics, ethics, and theology behind them -- rooted in a rejection of concentrated power and hierarchy -- but there is no cookbook we can pull off the shelf with a recipe for success. We can articulate principles, identify rough guidelines, and search for specific solutions to immediate problems.
On justice: Our philosophical and theological systems all acknowledge the inherent dignity of all human beings. We say that we believe that all people are equal, though we accept conditions in the world in which all people cannot live with dignity, where any claim of equality is a farce. In that case we understand the principles but do not live accordingly.
On sustainability: There is less consensus on the philosophy and theology on which we ground a concern for sustainability. Is it purely pragmatic? Do we need to conserve the world to sustain ourselves? Should we have some more expansive concern about the non-human living world? Do other living things have a claim on us? There are no simple or obvious answers. We may have some general reverence for all life, but most of us value the lives of our children, our friends, and other humans more than we value the lives of other animals. But even with a lack of clarity about how to value various forms of life, we have to understand that we are part of that larger living world and that we should be careful about how we carve it up into categories.
For example, we should be careful not to value the pristine and ignore the human-built. We should not value the part of a forest that is untouched by human hands more than the part that has been cleared for human shelter. It is seductive to label wilderness as sacred and development as profane. Instead we should learn to see all the world -- the last stands of old-growth redwoods in northern California and the most burned-out block of the South Bronx -- as sacred ground. Until we do that, we have little hope of saving the former from destruction or restoring the latter to health. At its core, sustainability is about the acknowledgment of interdependence: the interdependence of people on each other, of people and other animals, of all living species and the non-living earth. We must see the interdependence of the redwoods and the South Bronx.
Again, no one has a blueprint for creating a just and sustainable society, but here is a list of a few basic assumptions and assertions that make justice and sustainability imaginable: (1) nature is not something humans have a right, divine or natural, to subdue and exploit; (2) for most of human beings' evolutionary history, our social systems encouraged the solidarity and cooperation required for survival, and our social systems today should foster those same values, (3) systems that place profit above other values inevitably cause problems they cannot solve; (4) solutions must be holistic, linking the always interdependent parts of a system, such as producers and consumers; (5) technology is not automatically beneficial and must be scrutinized before being used; and, perhaps most importantly, (6) humans have the moral and intellectual capacity to make choices that will preserve rather than destroy the larger living world.
That human capacity to choose wisely does not guarantee we always will. The ease with which intellectuals can be co-opted is a reminder of that.
American Intellectuals' Widespread Failure to Stand Up to Billionaires and Authoritarian Power
This article is an excerpt from Robert Jensen's new book, We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out, available in print and on Kindle.
Given the considerable resources in the United States spent to subsidize intellectual work, why are so many intellectuals—journalists, academics, writers—not critiquing the many hierarchical institutions and not highlighting the disastrous consequences of these systems? Why are so many intellectuals instead providing support for the institutions and systems? Why is the majority of intellectual work in the United States not challenging but instead helping to prop up the unjust distribution of wealth and power, and the unsustainable extractive/industrial system?
Both intellectuals and the people who provide the resources that allow intellectuals to work should ponder this crucial question.
I am not suggesting that to be a responsible intellectual one must agree with me on all these issues, that anyone who does not agree with my approach to these issues is a soulless sell-out. My argument is that if we take seriously the basic moral principles at the core of modern philosophical and theological systems we claim to believe in, in light of the data on social injustice and the serious threats to ecological sustainability, these questions should be central in the work of intellectuals. Based on my experience as a journalist, professor, and political activist—a life in which I have always worked in intellectual professions and interacted with many other intellectuals in various settings—I have learned that the story is complicated but that a sharp critique of intellectuals as a social formation is warranted.
First, let's recognize that intellectual work generally comes with considerable privilege. That does not mean that intellectuals don't work hard, make sacrifices, or feel stress. But in general, intellectuals are compensated well for work that is not physically hazardous and can be rewarding on many levels. There are many intellectuals-in-training (graduate students) and underemployed intellectuals (adjunct faculty) who face overwhelming workloads and few perks, and so we should be cautious about generalizing too much about the category of "intellectual." This analysis focuses on those doing intellectual work with the most privilege and the most autonomy.
Ideally, we pay intellectuals to help us deepen our understanding of how the world works, toward the goal of shaping a world more consistent with our moral and political principles, and our collective self-interest. What are the forces that keep people, especially relatively privileged people, mute in the face of such a clear need for critical intellectual work? The first, and easiest, answer is individual self-interest—the status and economic rewards that come to intellectuals who serve power. Upton Sinclair put it most succinctly: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
No doubt some intellectuals make calculations about how to use their abilities to enrich themselves, but in my experience such crass greed is relatively rare. I suspect that a desire to be accepted by peers is at least as powerful a motivation for intellectuals to accept the status quo. Humans are social animals who generally seek a safe and secure place in a social group, and there's no reason intellectuals would be different. Even when concentrated wealth and power do not threaten people with serious punishments, the desire to be a well-regarded member of an intellectual community is a powerful conformity-inducer. When one's professional cohort works within the worldview that the wealthy and powerful construct, the boundaries of that world seem appropriate. Curiosity about what lies beyond those boundaries tends to atrophy.
Those forces have been in play for a long time, but another potentially crucial factor is the way in which confronting the reality of injustice and unsustainability can be morally and psychologically overwhelming for anyone. As the documentation of human suffering and the threats to ecological sustainability accumulate, in an era when multiple communication channels make it easy to be aware of more and more of this information, that awareness can seem to be too much to face. The desire to rationalize the suffering and imagine an easy escape is easy to understand.
Rationalization #1: Justifying Hierarchy
When humans suffer in extreme situations, such as war or natural disasters, most people in most situations find it easy to care and respond. When the suffering is ongoing and apparently endemic to the systems of the world, staying connected to that suffering is more difficult. In such situations, it can be attractive to find ways to justify hierarchy and the resulting suffering, rather than to challenge power.
There is wide consensus on the values that are central to constructing a decent human society: justice, equality, compassion, honesty, opportunity, sharing. It is difficult to imagine such a society without these basic elements: (1) the belief in the inherent dignity of all human beings; (2) a sense of solidarity with at least those in one's community, if not beyond; and (3) a commitment to achieving a rough equality so that everyone has access to the material requirements for a decent life. That list does not assume that people are morally perfect or perfectible, but instead articulates common aspirations for ourselves, others, and society.
How do we explain the fact that most people's stated philosophical and theological systems are rooted in concepts of equality, solidarity, and the inherent dignity of all people, yet we allow violence, exploitation, and oppression to flourish? Only a small percentage of people in any given society are truly sociopaths, those who engage in cruel and oppressive behavior openly and without a capacity for empathy. In my experience, the most common way in which people make their peace with that contradiction is to accept the claim that hierarchy and injustice are inevitable, and that the best we can do is try to smooth off the rough edges of such systems. The process can be summed up like this:
--The systems and structures in which we live are hierarchical.
--Hierarchical systems and structures deliver to those in the dominant class certain privileges, pleasures, and material benefits.
--People are typically hesitant to give up such privileges, pleasures, and benefits.
--But, those benefits clearly come at the expense of those in the subordinated class.
--Given the widespread acceptance of basic notions of dignity, solidarity, and equality, the existence of hierarchy has to be justified in some way other than crass self-interest.
--One of the most persuasive arguments for systems of domination and subordination is that they are "natural."
So, oppressive systems work hard to make it appear that the hierarchy -- and the disparity in power and resources that flow from hierarchy -- is natural and, therefore, beyond modification. If white people are naturally smarter and more virtuous than people of color, then white supremacy is inevitable and justifiable. If men are naturally stronger and more capable of leadership than women, then patriarchy is inevitable and justifiable. If rich people are naturally clearer-thinking and harder-working than poor people, then economic inequality is inevitable and justifiable. If the strong are, well, stronger than the weak, then the strong will rule.
As John Stuart Mill noted in his argument for women's rights, "[W]as there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?" For unjust hierarchies, and the illegitimate authority that is exercised in them, maintaining their naturalness is essential. Not surprisingly, people in the dominant class exercising the power gravitate easily to such a view. And because of their power to control key intellectual institutions (especially education and mass communication), those in the dominant class can fashion a story about the world that leads some portion of the people in the subordinated class to internalize the ideology. A social order that violates almost everyone's basic principles is transformed into a natural order that cannot be changed.
Rationalization #2: Celebrating Technology
Facing the ecological realities is even more overwhelming. People once spoke of "environmental problems" that seemed limited and manageable, but now the questions are about whether a large-scale human presence on the planet will be viable within the foreseeable future. An honest assessment of the state of the ecosphere is frightening, and it is easier to believe that the world's systems can magically continue rather than thinking about how radical changes in those systems are necessary -- and how even with such radical changes there is no guarantee that we can avoid catastrophe.
That frightening possibility is why the culture in general, and intellectuals in particular, are quick to embrace technological fundamentalism, a form of magical thinking that promises a way out of the problems that the extractive/industrial economy has created. Technological fundamentalists believe that the increasing use of evermore sophisticated high-energy advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. Perhaps the ultimate example of this is "geo-engineering," the belief that we can intervene at the planetary level in the climate system to deal effectively with global warming. Given massive human failure at much lower levels of intervention, this approach—which "offers the tantalizing promise of a climate change fix that would allow us to continue our resource-exhausting way of life, indefinitely"—is, quite literally, insane.
Those who question such "solutions" are often said to be anti-technology, which is a meaningless insult. All human beings use technology of some kind, whether stone tools or computers. An anti-fundamentalist position does not assert that all technology is bad, but that the introduction of new technology should be evaluated carefully on the basis of its effects -- predictable and unpredictable -- on human communities and the non-human world, with an understanding of the limits of our knowledge. We have moved too far and too fast, outstripping our capacity to manage the world we have created. The answer is not some naïve return to a romanticized past, but a recognition of what we have created and a systematic evaluation to determine how to recover from our most dangerous missteps.
But the technological fundamentalists see no reason to consider such things. They have faith in human cleverness. The title of a recent book by an environmentalist—The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans—sums it up: Technological fundamentalists believe humans can play God and control an infinitely complex universe with enough competence to save not only ourselves but the planet. There's nothing new about that arrogance. In 1968, Stewart Brand began the Whole Earth Catalog with that famous line, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." Four decades later, with the evidence of human failure piling up, Brand remained the loyal technological fundamentalist, arguing that his suggestion had become an imperative: "We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it."
Our experience with the unintended consequences of modern technology is fairly extensive. For example, there's the case of automobiles and the burning of petroleum in internal-combustion engines, which give us the ability to travel considerable distances with a fair amount of individual autonomy. This technology also has given us traffic jams and road rage, strip malls and smog, while contributing to rapid climate change that threatens sustainable life on the planet. We haven't quite figured out how to cope with these problems, and in retrospect it might have been wise to go slower in the development of a system geared toward private, individual transportation based on the car and spend more time considering potential consequences.
Or how about CFCs and the ozone hole? Chlorofluorocarbons have a variety of industrial, commercial and household applications, including in air-conditioning. They were thought to be a miracle chemical when introduced in the 1930s—non-toxic, non-flammable and non-reactive with other chemical compounds. But in the 1980s, researchers began to understand that while CFCs are stable in the troposphere, when they move to the stratosphere and are broken down by strong ultraviolet light they release chlorine atoms that deplete the ozone layer. This unintended effect deflated the exuberance a bit. Depletion of the ozone layer means that more UV radiation reaches the Earth's surface, and overexposure to UV radiation is a cause of skin cancer, cataracts and immune suppression.
But wait, the technological fundamentalists might argue, our experience with CFCs refutes your argument—humans got a handle on that one and banned CFCs, and now the ozone hole is closing. These gases, which were once commonly used in air-conditioning, were regulated in 1987 through the Montreal Protocol, which has reduced damage to the ozone layer. The oldest and most damaging CFC coolants have been largely eliminated from use, and the newer hydrochlorofluorocarbons that are now widely used have little or no effect on the ozone layer. That's all true, but unfortunately we now know that the HCFC gases contribute to global warming. Scientists estimate that up to a quarter of all global warming will be attributable to those gases by 2050, so that "the therapy to cure one global environmental disaster is now seeding another."
So the reasonable question is: If the dangerous HCFCs that replaced the dangerous CFCs are replaced by a new chemical that appears harmless, how long will it take before the dangerous effects of that replacement become visible? There's no way to predict, but it seems reasonable to ask the question. Society didn't react to the news about CFCs or HCFCs by thinking about ways to step back from a developed world that has become dependent on air-conditioning, but instead continues to search for replacements to keep the air conditioning running.
Intellectuals are in the business of assessing problems and offering solutions. Technological fundamentalism allows intellectuals to offer solutions that don't threaten existing institutions and don't make demands on society in general, which allows intellectuals to retain their status and level of comfort, at least in the short term. The obvious problem is that if we look only for "solutions" that don't disturb existing systems, and those existing systems are unsustainable, then our solutions are at best irrelevant and at worst will exacerbate the fundamental problems and make it harder for people to imagine new systems.
This is not an argument to abandon all attempts to improve technology, stop exploring ways technology can contribute to a healthier planet, or halt research on renewable energy. A sensible approach to our cascading ecological crises is to pursue multiple strategies that mitigate the worst of what exists today while planning for a radically different tomorrow. Technological fundamentalism is dangerous because it encourages us to focus on the former and ignore the latter.
The problem, succinctly stated: When intellectuals limit themselves to inquiry that stays safely within existing systems, they are being unrealistic. That claim turns the tables on establishment intellectuals, who routinely criticize more radical colleagues for not being realistic. But imagine that you are riding comfortably on a train. You look out the window and see that not too far ahead the tracks end abruptly and that the train will derail if it continues moving ahead. You suggest that the train should stop immediately and that the passengers go forward on foot. This will require a major shift in everyone's way of traveling, of course, but it appears to you to be the only realistic option; to continue barreling forward is to guarantee catastrophic consequences. But when you propose this course of action, others who have grown comfortable riding on the train say, "Everybody likes riding the train, and so telling us to get off is not realistic."
In the contemporary United States, we are trapped in a similar delusion. We are told that it is "realistic" to capitulate to the absurd idea that the systems in which we live are the only systems possible because some people like them and wish them to continue. But what if our current level of First-World consumption is exhausting the ecological basis for life? Too bad; the only "realistic" options are those that take that lifestyle as non-negotiable. What if real democracy is not possible in a nation-state with 300 million people? Too bad; the only "realistic" options are those that take this way of organizing a polity as immutable. What if the hierarchies on which our lives are based are producing extreme material deprivation for subordinated people and a kind of dull misery among the privileged? Too bad; the only "realistic" options are those that accept hierarchy as inevitable.
The ultimate test of our intellectual abilities is whether we can face the possibility that there may be no way out of these traps and yet continue to work for a more just and sustainable world (more on that later). That is not easy, but to be a responsible intellectual is to be willing to get apocalyptic, and the first step in that process is to give up on the myth of neutrality. Intellectuals shouldn't claim to be neutral, and the public shouldn't take such claims seriously.
Get Apocalyptic - The Case for the New Radical
Feeling anxious about life in a broken-down society on a stressed-out planet? That's hardly surprising: Life as we know it is almost over. While the dominant culture encourages dysfunctional denial—pop a pill, go shopping, find your bliss—there's a more sensible approach: Accept the anxiety, embrace the deeper anguish—and then get apocalyptic.
We are staring down multiple cascading ecological crises, struggling with political and economic institutions that are unable even to acknowledge, let alone cope with, the threats to the human family and the larger living world. We are intensifying an assault on the ecosystems in which we live, undermining the ability of that living world to sustain a large-scale human presence into the future. When all the world darkens, looking on the bright side is not a virtue but a sign of irrationality.
In these circumstances, anxiety is rational and anguish is healthy, signs not of weakness but of courage. A deep grief over what we are losing—and have already lost, perhaps never to be recovered—is appropriate. Instead of repressing these emotions we can confront them, not as isolated individuals but collectively, not only for our own mental health but to increase the effectiveness of our organizing for the social justice and ecological sustainability still within our grasp. Once we've sorted through those reactions, we can get apocalyptic and get down to our real work.
Perhaps that sounds odd, since we are routinely advised to overcome our fears and not give in to despair. Endorsing apocalypticism seems even stranger, given associations with "end-timer" religious reactionaries and "doomer" secular survivalists. People with critical sensibilities, those concerned about justice and sustainability, think of ourselves as realistic and less likely to fall for either theological or science-fiction fantasies.
Many associate "apocalypse" with the rapture-ranting that grows out of some interpretations of the Christian Book of Revelation (aka, the Apocalypse of John), but it's helpful to remember that the word's original meaning is not "end of the world." "Revelation" from Latin and "apocalypse" from Greek both mean a lifting of the veil, a disclosure of something hidden, a coming to clarity. Speaking apocalyptically, in this sense, can deepen our understanding of the crises and help us see through the many illusions that powerful people and institutions create.
But there is an ending we have to confront. Once we've honestly faced the crises, then we can deal with what is ending—not all the world, but the systems that currently structure our lives. Life as we know it is, indeed, coming to an end.
Let's start with the illusions: Some stories we have told ourselves—claims by white people, men, or U.S. citizens that domination is natural and appropriate—are relatively easy to debunk (though many cling to them). Other delusional assertions—such as the claim that capitalism is compatible with basic moral principles, meaningful democracy, and ecological sustainability—require more effort to take apart (perhaps because there seems to be no alternative).
But toughest to dislodge may be the central illusion of the industrial world's extractive economy: that we can maintain indefinitely a large-scale human presence on the earth at something like current First-World levels of consumption. The task for those with critical sensibilities is not just to resist oppressive social norms and illegitimate authority, but to speak a simple truth that almost no one wants to acknowledge: The high-energy/high-technology life of affluent societies is a dead end. We can't predict with precision how resource competition and ecological degradation will play out in the coming decades, but it is ecocidal to treat the planet as nothing more than a mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump.
We cannot know for sure what time the party will end, but the party's over.
Does that seem histrionic? Excessively alarmist? Look at any crucial measure of the health of the ecosphere in which we live—groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of "dead zones" in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species, and reduction of biodiversity—and ask a simple question: Where are we heading?
Remember also that we live in an oil-based world that is rapidly depleting the cheap and easily accessible oil, which means we face a major reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds daily life. Meanwhile, the desperation to avoid that reconfiguration has brought us to the era of "extreme energy," using ever more dangerous and destructive technologies (hydrofracturing, deep-water drilling, mountaintop coal removal, tar sands extraction).
Oh, did I forget to mention the undeniable trajectory of global warming/climate change/climate disruption?
Scientists these days are talking about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about how human activity is pushing Earth beyond its limits. Recently 22 top scientists warned that humans likely are forcing a planetary-scale critical transition "with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience," which means that "the biological resources we take for granted at present may be subject to rapid and unpredictable transformations within a few human generations."
That conclusion is the product of science and common sense, not supernatural beliefs or conspiracy theories. The political/social implications are clear: There are no solutions to our problems if we insist on maintaining the high-energy/high-technology existence lived in much of the industrialized world (and desired by many currently excluded from it). Many tough-minded folk who are willing to challenge other oppressive systems hold on tightly to this lifestyle. The critic Fredric Jameson has written, "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism," but that's only part of the problem—for some, it may be easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of air conditioning.
We do live in end-times, of a sort. Not the end of the world—the planet will carry on with or without us—but the end of the human systems that structure our politics, economics, and social life. "Apocalypse" need not involve heavenly rescue fantasies or tough-guy survival talk; to get apocalyptic means seeing clearly and recommitting to core values.
First, we must affirm the value of our work for justice and sustainability, even though there is no guarantee we can change the disastrous course of contemporary society. We take on projects that we know may fail because it's the right thing to do, and by doing so we create new possibilities for ourselves and the world. Just as we all know that someday we will die and yet still get out of bed every day, an honest account of planetary reality need not paralyze us.
Then let's abandon worn-out clichés such as, "The American people will do the right thing if they know the truth," or "Past social movements prove the impossible can happen."
There is no evidence that awareness of injustice will automatically lead U.S. citizens, or anyone else, to correct it. When people believe injustice is necessary to maintain their material comfort, some accept those conditions without complaint.
Social movements around race, gender, and sexuality have been successful in changing oppressive laws and practices, and to a lesser degree in shifting deeply held beliefs. But the movements we most often celebrate, such as the post-World War II civil rights struggle, operated in a culture that assumed continuing economic expansion. We now live in a time of permanent contraction—there will be less, not more, of everything. Pressuring a dominant group to surrender some privileges when there is an expectation of endless bounty is a very different project than when there is intensified competition for resources. That doesn't mean nothing can be done to advance justice and sustainability, only that we should not be glib about the inevitability of it.
Here's another cliché to jettison: Necessity is the mother of invention. During the industrial era, humans exploiting new supplies of concentrated energy have generated unprecedented technological innovation in a brief time. But there is no guarantee that there are technological fixes to all our problems; we live in a system that has physical limits, and the evidence suggests we are close to those limits. Technological fundamentalism—the quasi-religious belief that the use of advanced technology is always appropriate, and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences can be remedied by more technology—is as empty a promise as other fundamentalisms.
If all this seems like more than one can bear, it's because it is. We are facing new, more expansive challenges. Never in human history have potential catastrophes been so global; never have social and ecological crises of this scale threatened at the same time; never have we had so much information about the threats we must come to terms with.
It's easy to cover up our inability to face this by projecting it onto others. When someone tells me "I agree with your assessment, but people can't handle it," I assume what that person really means is, "I can't handle it." But handling it is, in the end, the only sensible choice.
Mainstream politicians will continue to protect existing systems of power, corporate executives will continue to maximize profit without concern, and the majority of people will continue to avoid these questions. It's the job of people with critical sensibilities—those who consistently speak out for justice and sustainability, even when it's difficult—not to back away just because the world has grown more ominous.
Adopting this apocalyptic framework doesn't mean separating from mainstream society or giving up ongoing projects that seek a more just world within existing systems. I am a professor at a university that does not share my values or analysis, yet I continue to teach. In my community, I am part of a group that helps people create worker-cooperatives that will operate within a capitalist system that I believe to be a dead end. I belong to a congregation that struggles to radicalize Christianity while remaining part of a cautious, often cowardly, denomination.
I am apocalyptic, but I'm not interested in empty rhetoric drawn from past revolutionary moments. Yes, we need a revolution—many revolutions—but a strategy is not yet clear. So, as we work patiently on reformist projects, we can continue to offer a radical analysis and experiment with new ways of working together. While engaged in education and community organizing with modest immediate goals, we can contribute to the strengthening of networks and institutions that can be the base for the more radical change we need. In these spaces today we can articulate, and live, the values of solidarity and equity that are always essential.
To adopt an apocalyptic worldview is not to abandon hope but to affirm life. As James Baldwin put it decades ago, we must remember "that life is the only touchstone and that life is dangerous, and that without the joyful acceptance of this danger, there can never be any safety for anyone, ever, anywhere." By avoiding the stark reality of our moment in history we don't make ourselves safe, we undermine the potential of struggles for justice and sustainability.
As Baldwin put it so poignantly in that same 1962 essay, "Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
It's time to get apocalyptic, or get out of the way.
"Apocalyptic Journalism" and Why We Need Reporters to Face the Reality of Our Crumbling Society
For those who care about a robust human presence on the planet, the 21st century has been characterized by really bad news that keeps getting really, really worse.
Whatever one's evaluation of high-energy/high-technology civilization (and I have been among its critics; more on that later), it's now clear that we are hitting physical limits; we cannot expect to maintain contemporary levels of consumption that draw down the ecological capital of the planet at rates dramatically beyond replacement levels. It unrealistic to imagine that we can go on treating the planet as nothing more than a mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump.
We have no choice but to deal with the collapse of journalism, but we also should recognize the need for a journalism of collapse. Everyone understands that economic changes are forcing a refashioning of the journalism profession. It's long past time for everyone to pay attention to how multiple, cascading ecological crises should be changing professional journalism's mission in even more dramatic fashion.
It's time for an apocalyptic journalism (that takes some explaining; a lot more on that later).
The Basics of Journalism: Ideals and Limitations
With the rapid expansion of journalistic-like material on the Internet, it's especially crucial to define "real" journalism. In a democratic system, ideally journalism is a critical, independent source of information, analysis, and the varied opinions needed by citizens who want to play a meaningful role in the formation of public policy. The key terms are "critical" and "independent"—to fulfill the promise of a free press, journalists must be willing to critique not only specific people and policies, but the systems out of which they emerge, and they must be as free as possible from constraining influences, both overt and subtle. Also included in that definition of journalism is an understanding of democracy—"a meaningful role in the formation of public policy"—as more than just lining up to vote in elections that offer competing sets of elites who represent roughly similar programs. Meaningful democracy involves meaningful participation.
This discussion will focus on what is typically called mainstream journalism, the corporate-commercial news media. These are the journalists who work for daily newspapers, broadcast and cable television, and the corporately owned platforms on the Internet and other digital devices. Although there are many types of independent and alternative journalism of varying quality, the vast majority of Americans continue to receive the vast majority of their news from these mainstream sources, which are almost always organized as large corporations and funded primarily by advertising.
Right-wing politicians and commentators sometimes refer to the mainstream media as the "lamestream," implying that journalists are comically incompetent and incapable of providing an accurate account of the world, likely due to a lack of understanding of conservative people and their ideas. While many elite journalists may be dismissive of the cultural values of conservatives, this critique ignores the key questions about journalism's relationship to power. Focusing on the cultural politics of individual reporters and editors—pointing out that they tend to be less religious and more supportive of gay and women's rights than the general public, for example—diverts attention from more crucial questions about how the institutional politics of corporate owners and managers shapes the news and keeps mainstream journalism within a centrist/right conventional wisdom.
The managers of commercial news organizations in the United States typically reject that claim by citing the unbreachable "firewall" between the journalistic and the business sides of the operation, which is supposed to allow journalists to pursue any story without interference from the corporate front office. This exchange I had with a newspaper editor captures the ideology: After listening to my summary of this critique of the U.S. commercial news media system, this editor (let's call him Joe) told me proudly: "No one from corporate headquarters has ever called me to tell me what to run in my paper." I asked Joe if it were possible that he simply had internalized the value system of the folks who run the corporation (and by extension, the folks who run most of the world), and therefore they never needed to give him direct instructions. He rejected that, reasserting his independence from any force outside his newsroom.
I countered: "Let's say, for the purposes of discussion, that you and I were equally capable journalists in terms of professional skills, that we were both reasonable candidates for the job of editor-in-chief that you hold. If we had both applied for the job, do you think your corporate bosses would have ever considered me for the position, given my politics? Would I, for even a second, have been seen by them to be a viable candidate for the job?"
Joe's politics are pretty conventional, well within the range of mainstream Republicans and Democrats—he supports big business and U.S. supremacy in global politics and economics. I'm a critic of capitalism and U.S. foreign policy. On some political issues, Joe and I would agree, but we diverge sharply on these core questions of the nature of the economy and the state.
Joe pondered my question and conceded that I was right, that his bosses would never hire someone with my politics, no matter how qualified, to run one of their newspapers. The conversation trailed off, and we parted without resolving our differences. I would like to think my critique at least got Joe to question his platitudes, but I never saw any evidence of that. In his subsequent writing and public comments that I read and heard, Joe continued to assert that a news media system dominated by for-profit corporations was the best way to produce the critical, independent journalism that citizens in a democracy needed. Because he was in a position of some privilege and status, nothing compelled Joe to respond to my challenge.
Partly as a result of many such unproductive conversations, I continue to search for new ways to present a critique of mainstream journalism that might break through that ideological wall. In addition to thinking about alternatives to this traditional business model, we should confront the limitations of the corresponding professional model, with its status-quo-supportive ideology of neutrality, balance, and objectivity. Can we create conditions under which journalism—deeply critical and truly independent—can flourish in these trying times?
In this essay I want to try out theological concepts of the royal, prophetic, and apocalyptic traditions. Though journalism is a secular institution, religion can provide a helpful vocabulary. The use of these terms is not meant to imply support for any particular religious tradition, or for religion more generally, but only recognizes that the fundamental struggles of human history play out in religious and secular settings, and we can learn from all of that history. With a focus on the United States, I'll drawn on the concepts as they understood in the dominant U.S. tradition of Judaism and Christianity.
Royal Journalism
Most of today's mainstream corporate-commercial journalism—the work done by people such as Joe—is royal journalism, using the term "royal" not to describe a specific form of executive power but as a description of a system that centralizes authority and marginalizes the needs of ordinary people. The royal tradition describes ancient Israel, the Roman empire, European monarchs, or contemporary America—societies in which those with concentrated wealth and power can ignore the needs of the bulk of the population, societies where the wealthy and powerful offer platitudes about their beneficence as they pursue policies to enrich themselves.
In his books The Prophetic Imagination and The Practice of Prophetic Imagination, theologian Walter Brueggemann points out that this royal consciousness took hold after ancient Israel sank into disarray, when Solomon overturned Moses—affluence, oppressive social policy, and static religion replaced a God of liberation with one used to serve an empire. This consciousness develops not only in top leaders but throughout the privileged sectors, often filtering down to a wider public that accepts royal power. Brueggemann labels this a false consciousness: "The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death."
The inclusion of the United States in a list of royalist societies may seem odd, given the democratic traditions of the country, but consider a nation that has been at war for more than a decade, in which economic inequality and the resulting suffering has dramatically deepened for the past four decades, in which climate change denial has increased as the evidence of the threat becomes undeniable. Brueggemann describes such a culture as one that is "competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing."
Almost all mainstream corporate-commercial journalism is, in this sense, royal journalism. It is journalism without the imagination needed to move outside the framework created by the dominant systems of power. CNN, MSNBC and FOX News all practice royal journalism. The New York Times is ground-zero for royal journalism. Marking these institutions as royalist doesn't mean that no good journalism ever emerges from them, or that they employ no journalists who are capable of challenging royal arrangements. Instead, the term recognizes that these institutions lack the imagination necessary to step outside of the royal consciousness on a regular basis. Over time, they add to the numbness rather than jolt people out of it.
The royal consciousness of our day is defined by unchallengeable commitments to a high-energy/high-technology worldview, within a hierarchical economy, run by an imperial nation-state. These technological, economic, and national fundamentalisms produce a certain kind of story about ourselves, which encourages the belief that we can have anything we want without obligations to other peoples or other living things, and that we deserve this. Brueggemann argues that this bolsters notions of "US exceptionalism that gives warrant to the usurpatious pursuit of commodities in the name of freedom, at the expense of the neighbor."
If one believes royal arrangements are just and sustainable, then royal journalism could be defended. If the royal tradition is illegitimate, than a different journalism is necessary.
Prophetic Journalism
Given the multiple crises that existing political, economic, and social systems have generated, the ideals of journalism call for a prophetic journalism. The first step in defending that claim is to remember what real prophets are not: They are not people who predict the future or demand that others follow them in lockstep. In the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament, prophets are the figures who remind the people of the best of the tradition and point out how the people have strayed. In those traditions, using our prophetic imagination and speaking in a prophetic voice requires no special status in society, and no sense of being special. Claiming the prophetic tradition requires only honesty and courage.
When we strip away supernatural claims and delusions of grandeur, we can understand the prophetic as the calling out of injustice, the willingness not only to confront the abuses of the powerful but to acknowledge our own complicity. To speak prophetically requires us first to see honestly—both how our world is structured by systems that create unjust and unsustainable conditions, and how we who live in the privileged parts of the world are implicated in those systems. To speak prophetically is to refuse to shrink from what we discover or from our own place in these systems. We must confront the powers that be, and ourselves.
The Hebrew Bible offers us many models. Amos and Hosea, Jeremiah and Isaiah—all rejected the pursuit of wealth or power and argued for the centrality of kindness and justice. The prophets condemned corrupt leaders but also called out all those privileged people in society who had turned from the demands of justice, which the faith makes central to human life. In his analysis of these prophets, the scholar and activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel concluded:
Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual's crime discloses society's corruption.
Critical of royal consciousness, Brueggemann argues that the task of those speaking prophetically is to "penetrate the numbness in order to face the body of death in which we are caught" and "penetrate despair so that new futures can be believed in and embraced by us." He encourages preachers to think of themselves as "handler[s] of the prophetic tradition," a job description that also applies to other intellectual professions, including journalism.
Brueggemann argues that this isn't about intellectuals imposing their views and values on others, but about being willing to "connect the dots":
Prophetic preaching does not put people in crisis. Rather it names and makes palpable the crisis already pulsing among us. When the dots are connected, it will require naming the defining sins among us of environmental abuse, neighborly disregard, long-term racism, self-indulgent consumerism, all the staples from those ancient truthtellers translated into our time and place.
None of this requires journalists to advocate for specific politicians, parties, or political programs; we don't need journalists to become propagandists. Journalists should strive for real independence but not confuse that with an illusory neutrality that traps mainstream journalists within ideological boundaries defined by the powerful. Again, real independence means the ability to critique not just the worst abuses by the powerful within the systems, but to critique the systems themselves.
This prophetic calling is consistent with the aphorism many journalists claim as a shorthand mission statement: The purpose of journalism is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. That phrase focuses on injustice within human societies, but what of the relationship of human beings to the larger living world? How should journalists understand their mission in that arena?
Ecological Realties
Let's put analysis of journalism on hold and think about the larger world in which journalism operates. Journalistic ideals and norms should change as historical conditions change, and today that means facing tough questions about ecological sustainability.
There is considerable evidence to help us evaluate the health of the ecosphere on which our own lives depend, and an honest evaluation of that evidence leads to a disturbing conclusion: Life as we know it is almost over. That is, the high-energy/high-technology life that we in the affluent societies live is a dead-end. There is a growing realization that we have disrupted planetary forces in ways we cannot control and do not fully understand. We cannot predict the specific times and places where dramatic breakdowns will occur, but we can know that the living system on which we depend is breaking down.
Does that seem histrionic? Excessively alarmist? Look at any crucial measure of the health of the ecosphere in which we live—groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of "dead zones" in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity—and the news is bad. Add to that the mother of all ecological crises—global warming, climate change, climate disruption—and it's clear that we are creating a planet that cannot indefinitely support a large-scale human presence living this culture's idea of the good life.
We also live in an oil-based world that is rapidly depleting the cheap and easily accessible oil, which means we face a huge reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds our lives. Meanwhile, the desperation to avoid that reconfiguration has brought us to the era of "extreme energy" using even more dangerous and destructive technologies (hydrofracturing, deep-water drilling, mountain-top removal, tar sands extraction) to get at the remaining hydrocarbons.
Where we are heading? Off the rails? Into the wall? Over the cliff? Pick your favorite metaphor. Scientists these days are talking about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about how human activity is pushing the planet beyond its limits. Recently 22 top scientists in the prestigious journal Nature warned that humans likely are forcing a planetary-scale critical transition "with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience." That means that "the biological resources we take for granted at present may be subject to rapid and unpredictable transformations within a few human generations."
That means that we're in trouble, not in some imaginary science-fiction future, but in our present reality. We can't pretend all that's needed is tinkering with existing systems to fix a few environmental problems; significant changes in how we live are required. No matter where any one of us sits in the social and economic hierarchies, there is no escape from the dislocations that will come with such changes. Money and power might insulate some from the most wrenching consequences of these shifts, but there is no permanent escape. We do not live in stable societies and no longer live on a stable planet. We may feel safe and secure in specific places at specific times, but it's hard to believe in any safety and security in a collective sense.
In short, we live in apocalyptic times.
To be clear: Speaking apocalyptically need not be limited to claims that the world will end on a guru's timetable or according to some allegedly divine plan. Lots of apocalyptic visions—religious and secular—offer such certainty, imaging the replacement of a corrupt society by one structured on principles that will redeem humanity (or at least redeem those who sign onto the principles). But this need not be our only understanding of the term.
Most discussions of revelation and apocalypse in contemporary America focus on the Book of Revelation, also known as The Apocalypse of John, the final book of the Christian New Testament. The two terms are synonymous in their original meaning; "revelation" from Latin and "apocalypse" from Greek both mean a lifting of the veil, a disclosure of something hidden from most people, a coming to clarity. Many scholars interpret the Book of Revelation not as a set of predictions about the future but as a critique of the oppression of the empire of that day, Rome.
To speak apocalyptically, in this tradition, is first and foremost about deepening our understanding of the world, seeing through the obfuscations of people in power. In our propaganda-saturated world (think about the amount of advertising, public relations, and marketing that we are bombarded with daily), coming to that kind of clarity about the nature of the empires of our day is always a struggle, and that notion of revelation is more crucial than ever.
Thinking apocalyptically, coming to this clarity, will force us to confront crises that concentrated wealth and power create, and reflect on our role in these systems. Given the severity of the human assault on the ecosphere, compounded by the suffering and strife within the human family, honest apocalyptic thinking that is firmly grounded in a systematic evaluation of the state of the world is not only sensible but a moral obligation. Rather than thinking of revelation as divine delivery of a clear message about some fantastic future above, we can engage in an ongoing process of revelation that results from an honest struggle to understand, a process that requires a lot of effort.
Things are bad, systems are failing, and the status quo won't last forever. Thinking apocalyptically in this fashion demands of us considerable courage and commitment. This process will not produce definitive answers but rather help us identify new directions.
Again, to be very clear: "Apocalypse" in this context does not mean lakes of fire, rivers of blood, or bodies lifted up to heaven. The shift from the prophetic to the apocalyptic can instead mark the point when hope in the viability of existing systems is no longer possible and we must think in dramatically new ways. Invoking the apocalyptic recognizes the end of something. It's not about rapture but a rupture severe enough to change the nature of the whole game.
Apocalyptic Journalism
The prophetic imagination helps us analyze the historical moment we're in, but it's based on an implicit faith that the systems in which we live can be reshaped to stop the worst consequences of the royal consciousness, to shake off that numbness of death in time. What if that is no longer possible? Then it is time to think about what's on the other side. "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," said Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the more well-known voices in the prophetic tradition. But if the arc is now bending toward a quite different future, a different approach is needed.
Because no one can predict the future, these two approaches are not mutually exclusive; people should not be afraid to think prophetically and apocalyptically at the same time. We can simultaneously explore immediate changes in the existing systems and think about new systems.
Invoking the prophetic in the face of royal consciousness does not promise quick change and a carefree future, but it implies that a disastrous course can be corrected. But what if the justification for such hope evaporates? When prophetic warnings have not been heeded, what comes next? This is the time when an apocalyptic sensibility is needed.
Fred Guterl, the executive editor of Scientific American, models that spirit in his book The Fate of the Species. Though he describes himself on the "techno-optimistic side of the spectrum," he does not shy away from a blunt discussion of the challenges humans face:
There's no going back on our reliance on computers and high-tech medicine, agriculture, power generation, and so forth without causing vast human suffering—unless you want to contemplate reducing the world population by many billions of people. We have climbed out on a technological limb, and turning back is a disturbing option. We are dependent on our technology, yet our technology now presents the seeds of our own destruction. It's a dilemma. I don't pretend to have a way out. We should start by being aware of the problem.
I don't share Guterl's techno-optimism, but it strikes me as different from a technological fundamentalism (the quasi-religious belief that the use of advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology can be remedied by more technology) that assumes that humans can invent themselves out of any problem. Guterl doesn't deny the magnitude of the problems and recognizes the real possibility, perhaps even the inevitability, of massive social dislocation:
[W]e're going to need the spirit with which these ideas were hatched to solve the problems we have created. Tossing aside technological optimism is not a realistic option. This doesn't mean technology is going to save us. We may still be doomed. But without it, we are surely doomed.
Closer to my own assessment is James Lovelock, a Fellow of the Royal Society, whose work led to the detection of the widespread presence CFCs in the atmosphere. Most famous for his "Gaia hypothesis" that understands both the living and non-living parts of the earth as a complex system that can be thought of as a single organism, he suggests that we face these stark realities immediately:
The great party of the twentieth century is coming to an end, and unless we now start preparing our survival kit we will soon be just another species eking out an existence in the few remaining habitable regions. … We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia.
Anything that blocks us from looking honestly at reality, no matter how harsh the reality, must be rejected. It's a lot to ask, of people and of journalists, to not only think about this, but put it at the center of our lives. What choice do we have? To borrow from one of 20th-century America's most honest writers, James Baldwin, "Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
That line is from an essay titled "As Much Truth as One Can Bear," about the struggles of artists to help a society, such as the white-supremacist America, face the depth of its pathology. Baldwin suggested that a great writer attempts "to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more." If we think of Baldwin as sounding a prophetic call, an apocalyptic invocation would be "to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then all the rest of the truth, whether we can bear it or not."
That task is difficult enough when people are relatively free to pursue inquiry without external constraints. Are the dominant corporate-commercial/advertising-supported media outlets likely to encourage journalists to pursue the projects that might lead to such questions? If not, the apocalyptic journalism we need is more likely to emerge from the margins, where people are not trapped by illusions of neutrality or concerned about professional status.
[INSERT HOPEFUL ENDING HERE]
That subhead is not an editing oversight. I wish there were an easy solution, an upbeat conclusion. I don't have one. I've never heard anyone else articulate one. To face the world honestly at this moment in human history likely means giving up on easy and upbeat.
The apocalyptic tradition reminds us that the absence of hope does not have to leave us completely hopeless, that life is always at the same time about death, and then rejuvenation. If we don't have easy, upbeat solutions and conclusions, we have the ability to keep telling stories of struggle. Our stories do not change the physical world, but they have the potential to change us. In that sense, the poet Muriel Rukeyser was right when she said, "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."
To think apocalyptically is not to give up on ourselves, but only to give up on the arrogant stories that we modern humans have been telling about ourselves. The royal must give way to the prophetic and the apocalyptic. The central story that power likes to tell—that the domination/subordination dynamic that structures so much of modern life is natural and inevitable—must give way to stories of dignity, solidarity, equality. We must resist not only the cruelty of repression but the seduction of comfort.
The best journalists in our tradition have seen themselves as responsible for telling stories about the struggle for social justice. Today, we can add stories about the struggle for ecological sustainability to that mission. Our hope for a decent future—indeed, any hope for even the idea of a future—depends on our ability to tell stories not of how humans have ruled the world but how we can live in the world.
Whether or not we like it, we are all apocalyptic now.
Ready for Rationing? Why We Should Put the Brakes on Consumption If We Want to Survive
This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.
It's not clear whether Stan Cox is a plant breeder with a penchant for politics, or a political provocateur who finds time to do science. Whichever aspect of his personality is dominant, Cox artfully draws on both skill sets to make the case for rationing, perhaps the most important concept that is not being widely discussed these days. The power of his new book, Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing, comes from his blending of scientific analyses of dire resource trends with a compelling moral argument about the need to reshape politics and economics.
In his day job at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, the country's premier sustainable agriculture research facility, Cox works to develop perennial sorghum. A member of the editorial board of the magazine Green Social Thought (formerly Synthesis/Regeneration), Cox also has been thinking long and hard about the multiple ecological crises we face. In 2010 he published Losing Our Cool, a sharp-edged examination of the impacts of our society's obsession with air-conditioning.
In this new book on rationing, he argues that we have to become a society that puts the brakes on consumption—in an egalitarian fashion—if we want to survive. A society dependent on reckless growth that enriches a small minority of people cannot expect to endure and flourish for the long haul. Cox believes that the right kind of rationing can produce a happier and healthier life for everyone.
Robert Jensen: In your book, you mention that some have compared raising the possibility of rationing to "shouting an obscenity in church." Why is that idea so unacceptable today?
Stan Cox: People have shown a willingness to accept rationing in a broad variety of situations in which society-wide scarcity is obvious—wartime, say, or when governments have a fixed supply of subsidized food to sell, or in a drought when there's only so much water to go around. But if rationing is proposed as a way to preserve resources and ecological life-support systems for the future—for dealing with environmental problems or providing equitable healthcare, for example—then we are talking about limiting consumption when there is no apparent scarcity. In that situation, we all like to believe that we exercise freedom in the marketplace, and to many it seems outrageous to limit that freedom.
RJ: Before getting to the specifics of how rationing might work, let's talk about those cultural assumptions about freedom and abundance. We live in a world that routinely tells us there are no limits, that whatever limits we bump up against we can overcome with human creativity and advanced technology. You seem to believe that we live in a physical world with physical limits.
That's a rather sensible position, of course, but it seems to cast you in the role of Eeyore, always the gloomy one. How do you defend yourself?
SC: OK, you're getting down to the heart of the matter right away here. When opposing any kind of environmental responsibility, the Right loves to raise the specter of rationing, but it's really the bigger idea of overall limits to growth that's at the heart of our anxiety. We face an irresolvable contradiction: We all know intellectually that no kind of growth can go on to infinity, yet if we exist within a capitalist economy, our lives and livelihoods wholly depend on unceasing expansion of economic activity. A year, even a quarter, of slack or negative growth might reduce national carbon emissions but it also triggers widespread human misery. The converse isn't true; robust growth doesn't necessarily bring prosperity to all. In recent decades, the benefits of growth have flowed almost exclusively to the top of the economic pyramid.
With the imposition of any serious physical or ecological limits on the economy, familiar capitalist economic relations would malfunction, to say the least. So those at the top of the economy who benefit from growth have every reason to be alarmed by the idea of fair rationing. And if we agree to overall limits but remain committed to the current means of rationing resources and goods—that is, "to each according to ability to pay"—then the rest of us should be alarmed as well. But with a commitment to "fair shares for all," as they put it back during World War II, and with everyone playing by the same rules (and of course with a much smaller chance of global ecological breakdown), life under physical limits could well be a better life for the great majority of us.
RJ: You mention WWII, one of the cases of successful rationing. As you say, the conventional wisdom is that such rationing is only possible in times of crisis, when the need to limit consumption is clear. So, how would you explain the crises we face today that make rationing necessary?
SC: In the 1940s, Washington did shore up support for the ration system by promising a world of plenty once the war was over. And except in a few resources like rubber, there was no absolute scarcity. Farms and factories were highly productive, there was no unemployment, and wages were rising. But a huge share of what was produced—for example, 4,000 calories worth of food per soldier per day—was diverted to Europe and the Pacific. People could see that with the end of the war, all those resources and goods were to be available again to everyone.
Now the green future, if there is one, will parallel the wartime '40s in the sense that a large part of the economy will have to be diverted for a period of years, or in this case, decades. We won't be using resources to pump up the consumer economy, because they will have to be shifted into vast projects needed to build non-fossil, non-nuclear energy sources; convert to a much less energy-dependent infrastructure; build or convert to more compact, low-consumption housing; rework agriculture; and rearrange living and working patterns to reduce the amount of transportation required. The economist Minqui Li has estimated for the United States that building the necessary wind and solar capacity alone would cost $120 trillion.
All of that production will be unavailable to the consumer economy. It may provide stimulus, but with a nationwide policy of leaving resources in the ground, bigger paychecks will serve to drive up the prices of goods that are available. If the past is any guide, the only acceptable solution will be price controls and fair-shares rationing. Indeed, in both the '40s and the '70s, there was popular demand for formal rationing. Next time around, as you say, we won't have the consolation that we can look forward to a peacetime or post-energy-crisis cornucopia. For example, alternative energy sources, even at full capacity, will provide far less total energy than do fossil fuels today. However, we may still be able to anticipate better times to come, once the physical conversion of society has achieved its goals.
At that point, not only will most of the economic effort that had gone into the conversion become once again part of the "civilian" economy, but that new economy will be able to satisfy more real needs for each unit of physical consumption. I guess if there is any light at the end of the tunnel, that's it. If the conversion is successful, there won't be as much easy energy around, and GDP won't be rising, but quality of life will have been given the space needed for improvement.
RJ: Let's go back to these two basic points that are so contentious. Your pitch for rationing is partly based on an assessment of physical realities: Resources are finite, and technological capacities to stretch resources have limits. Lots of people don't accept that. You also are arguing that we are going to live with a much a lower level of consumption. For lots of people, that is depressing. Let's tackle both of those.
First, one of the major things you argue we have to ration is energy, at a time when lots of people are celebrating new technologies that allow humans to tap into new sources of fossil fuels (fracking, tar sands, etc.). How do you see our energy future?
SC: Until a few years ago, a lot of environmentally minded people were hoping that the imminent peak and subsequent decline in the annual extraction of conventional fossil fuels would do our work for us, enforcing strict limits on consumption. Now a bonanza of so-called unconventional fuel reserves has blown that possibility away, forcing us to face the necessity of practicing self-restraint. Can we leave precious energy in the ground when we have the ability to bring it out? If we manage to do that, I guess it will be a first. But that's what we need to do.
It will be a test of how addicted to dense energy we really are. Are we willing to launch an all-out assault on the Earth, just to avoid a disruption of economic business-as-usual? Unconventional fuels are a disaster—destroying vast landscapes, wrecking water supplies, causing spills of petroleum and nasty chemicals, increasing carbon emissions, and giving the human economy the capacity to do all the usual ecological damage that potent energy sources encourage. And these fuels are no free lunch. Individual gas wells are small and dry up quickly, so enormous numbers of them have to be drilled. They require a huge investment of energy and other resources to produce each unit of usable fossil energy. Yet even with all those problems, that energy is too valuable not to use, and we face a seemingly irresistible temptation to use up these resources as fast as we can extract them. You could say we've met our 21st-century Mephistopheles in the sands of Alberta and the Marcellus shale.
RJ: Second, in a world where so many people associate happiness with consumption, how do you make the argument that for those of us in the more affluent parts of the world, less can be more?
SC: In the early 1990s, several economists took note of an apparent statistical anomaly. While people in richer countries tend to be happier than those in poorer countries, increases in average real income in richer countries have not conferred an increase in happiness. In the words of Richard Easterlin, a University of Southern California economics professor whose name has become attached to this seeming paradox, "raising the incomes of all" will not "raise the happiness of all."
It's a fascinating problem, but the solution is just as dreary as most explanations of modern life. As society becomes materially richer in the aggregate, it takes a higher income every year just to keep up and maintain the same level of contentment. When everyone has an increasing income, it becomes harder and harder for anyone to achieve greater happiness. In this sense, times haven't changed much in the century-plus since Thorstein Veblen described this phenomenon. Erosion of happiness is largely a result of everyone trying to keep up with the Joneses.
It's not just the global north. In many nations once considered poor (and in which most people still are poor), rising incomes are not bringing happiness. On the contrary, examination of average income levels in countries worldwide has shown that more rapid aggregate growth is associated with a reduction in average happiness. The kind of breakneck growth that can carry a nation as a whole from poverty to affluence in a single generation also tends to worsen inequality and eat away at its citizens' sense of well-being. But make no mistake, simply putting more emphasis on the pursuit of happiness cannot tame a capitalist economy any more effectively than can appeals to life or liberty. Inequitable growth in consumption is in the DNA of capitalism, and that has to be faced directly.
RJ: It's clearer now why rationing is like an obscenity in church. It means leaving fossil fuels in the ground and permanently reducing overall consumption for almost everyone in the United States. That will require collective action through government and a serious overhaul of the economy. All this has to happen at a moment when what passes for leadership in the political system can't face the basic problems, let alone imagine serious systemic change.
So, last question: What do you hope your book will accomplish? It's a clear, compelling argument for rationing in a society that seems unwilling to accept limits and unable to comprehend the need for them. How do we get this into the public conversation?
SC: My aim is, in a way, parallel to what I tried to do with Losing Our Cool—to touch off a debate where there seemed to be total agreement. Air-conditioning has always been viewed as being of pure benefit to humanity, which it's not. Rationing is constantly being held out by the Right as an unutterably nightmarish fate that awaits us if we get serious about ecological restraint and fairness. Meanwhile, the environmental establishment (in basic agreement with the Right) wants to go on letting people believe that the human economy can just keep on growing, that the market can allocate fairly, and that rationing is indeed an evil to be avoided at all costs.
My purpose with this book is to ask, so rationing's the worst that could happen? Really? Well, let's see how bad it might actually be—which may not be as bad as you think. And then let's compare it to major-league worst-case scenarios, like the global ecological meltdown and all-against-all conflict that we could well see if we don't restrain ourselves.
Texas Right-Wingers Want Their History Taught 'Politics Free'
Academe Blog
Here's an interesting question for historians: Why do ideologues never seem to be aware of their own ideology?
Such is the case with the recent report from the Texas Association of Scholars and the National Association of Scholars' Center for the Study of the Curriculum, "Recasting History: Are Race, Class, and Gender Dominating American History?"
The groups' answer to the title's question is "yes," which is hardly surprising given the NAS' longstanding critique of scholars who raise questions about the mythology of American greatness.
Based on an examination of the assigned readings for all 85 sections of lower-division American history courses at the University of Texas at Austin (where I've been a professor in the School of Journalism for 20 years) and Texas A&M, the report concludes that:
...all too often the course readings gave strong emphasis to race, class, or gender (RCG) social history, an emphasis so strong that it diminished the attention given to other subjects in American history (such as military, diplomatic, religious, intellectual history). The result is that these institutions frequently offered students a less-than-comprehensive picture of U.S. history.
I share the NAS' concern that research and teaching have become so specialized that insufficient attention is paid to the big picture. But the key question is, what kind of big picture should be painted? Here I part company with the conservative politics of the group—the mythology of American greatness is, in fact, mythology, and good research and teaching should challenge myths. As is the case with all imperial powers, the United States' record includes not only examples of greatness but also some of the most barbaric crimes in recorded human history.
Scholars can, and should, argue those points, based on "reasoned scholarship and civil debate," as the NAS advises. But such debate should begin with the recognition of the obvious: in attempts to understand humans and human societies, everyone has a politics and everyone's politics matter.
That's why the final recommendation of the "Recasting History" report—that we "depoliticize history"—is so troubling. Do the report's authors not recognize their own political position? Apparently they do not get the humor in ideologues decrying the ideology of others.
Political biases are, of course, present throughout any course in the humanities and social sciences, no matter whether a professor acknowledges them or not. From decisions about what topics to cover, to the list of readings, to the framing of lectures and discussions—teaching is always political, if by that one means that judgments about the nature of power in a society affect what, and how, one teaches. To recognize that all research and teaching have a politics is not to claim that the work of professors is nothing but politics, in the sense of proselytizing. Quality research and reasoned argument are important, but the value of our work is heightened, not diminished, when the political nature of that work is understood and acknowledged.
That's as true of those who accept the status quo as those who challenge it. The issue is not whether teaching reflects political judgments, but whether one can defend those judgments on intellectual grounds. There may be no final consensus among faculty members on how a course should be structured or taught, but we faculty members can collectively sharpen our understanding and improve our practice by discussing these matters.
In that discussion, it is absurd for one side to claim it speaks from a neutral position, outside or above politics. In its final "depoliticize history" recommendation, the NAS report argues:
The root of the problem is that colleges and universities have drifted from their main mission. They and particular programs within them, increasingly think of themselves as responsible for reforming American society and curing it of prejudice and bigotry. When universities and university programs consider it necessary to atone for, and help erase, oppressions of the past; one way in which they do so is by depicting history as primarily a struggle of the downtrodden against rooted injustice. This pedagogical conception may be well-intended, but it is also a limited and partisan one, and history teaching should not allow itself to become imprisoned within a narrow interpretation. A depoliticized history would provide a comprehensive interpretation of American history that does not shortchange students by denying them exposure to intellectual, political, religious, diplomatic, military, and economic historical themes.
And what of the politics of this "depoliticized history"? Apparently, the political goal of the NAS to escape the prison of the narrow interpretation is not political. Or maybe it's a political judgment in the service of transcending politics. Or maybe it just doesn't make any sense to take a partisan position and claim that one isn't partisan.
The report continues:
The dominance of race, class, and gender themes in history curricula came about through disciplinary mission creep. Historians and professors of United States history should return to their primary task: handing down the American story, as a whole, to future generations.
It would be interesting to find how the report's authors came to understand the "disciplinary mission" of history (maybe it was revealed to them in a vision), but—sorry to have to repeat myself—any description of the mission of history has an underlying politics.
I don't know if NAS scholars actually believe there is an "American story" that can be told from a neutral point of view, or whether this is merely a cynical debating tactic. But if we are going to address the very real problems facing the contemporary university, attempts at imposing ideology by claiming to be beyond ideology aren't likely to help clarify problems or help generate solutions.
"The Longer I Teach, the Less Certain I Am of What I Know"
New Left Project
"Good teaching is living your life honestly in front of students."
I don't recall exactly when Jim Koplin first told me that, but I know that he had to say it several times before I began to understand what he meant. Koplin was that kind of teacher—always honing in on simple, but profound, truths; fond of nudging through aphorisms that required time to understand their full depth; always aware of the connection between epistemology and ethics; and patient with slow learners.
But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Some background: Jim Koplin was, by way of a formal introduction, Dr. James H. Koplin, granted a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1962 with a specialization in language acquisition, tenured at Vanderbilt University and later a founding faculty member of Hampshire College, retired early in 1980 to a rich life of community building and political organizing. I never took a class from him, though in some sense the 24 years I knew him constituted one long independent study. That finally ended on December 15, 2012, not upon satisfactory completion of the course but when Jim died at the age of 79. He left behind a rich and diverse collection of friends, all of whom have a special connection with him. But I hang onto the conceit that I am his intellectual heir, the one who most directly continued his work in the classroom.
So, with that conceit firmly in place and his death fresh in my mind, it seems proper and fitting that I offer lessons learned from Koplin to the world outside his circle of students and friends.
I've spent a considerable amount of time in my 20 years of teaching at the University of Texas at Austin reflecting on Jim's core insight, that good teaching is living your life honestly in front of students. The first, and most obvious, implication is a rejection of the illusory neutrality that some professors claim. From the framing of a course, to the choice of topics for inclusion on the syllabus, to the selection of readings, to the particular way we talk about ideas—teaching in the social sciences and humanities is political, through and through. Political, in this sense, does not mean partisan advocacy of a particular politician, party, or program, but rather recognizing the need to assess where real power lies, analyze how that power operates in any given society, and acknowledge the effect of that power on what counts as knowledge.
Every professor's "politics" in this sense has considerable influence on his/her teaching, and I believe it is my obligation to make clear to students the political judgments behind my decisions. The objective is not to strong-arm students into agreement, but to explain those choices and defend them when challenged by students. At the end of a successful semester, students should be able to identify my assumptions, critique them, and be clearer about their own.
I would recommend this approach for all faculty members, but it has been particularly important for me because I am politically active in fairly public ways, which students often learn about through mass media and the internet. To make clear the difference between the goals of Jensen-in-the-classroom (encouraging critical thinking) and Jensen-in-public (advocating political positions), I have taken extra care to be transparent in front of students. This also was a product of my time with Jim, who insisted that if intellectual inquiry led one to conclusions about what is needed to advance social justice and ecological sustainability, then one should contribute to those projects. Jim's life offered me a model for how intellectual work need not be separated from community and political work. In one of my early conversations with Jim about this balance, he referred me to one of his elders, Scott Nearing, who said that three simple principles guided his life: the quest "to learn the truth, to teach the truth, and to help build the truth into the life of the community." Each of those endeavors feeds the other two; scholarship, teaching, and community engagement are a package deal for me. But Jim always reminded me that what one does in front of students is not the same as what one does in front of a crowd at a rally, or in an organizing meeting.
Perhaps Jim's most important contribution to my development as a teacher came in his advocacy of interdisciplinary undergraduate education. In the contemporary academy, the reward system and culture tend to push professors toward intellectual specialization over the big picture, and toward working with graduate students over undergraduate teaching. In my connection with Jim, I saw the importance of—and joy in—a truly interdisciplinary approach to knowledge that took as its primary task teaching at the most basic levels.
The first course I taught in the university-wide program called First-Year Seminars, "The Ethics and Politics of Everyday Life," was straight out of Koplin: I had students read five books that touched on the political, economic, and ecological implications of our choices in our daily lives. Every time I worried that I would be pushing students too far, Jim would tell me that the students were hungry for honest, jargon-free radical talk, and he was right.
I devised my current interdisciplinary course, "Freedom: Philosophy, History, Law," in conversation with Jim. As it came into focus, I told Jim that I wanted the course to not only challenge the culture's simplistic definition of freedom but to undermine the confidence of anyone who thinks the term can be easily defined. On the first day of class, I tell students that the minute they think they have nailed down a definitive definition of freedom, some new experience will force them to modify that. It is the struggle to understand the concept that matters, and I am just another person struggling with them, albeit with the advantage of more extensive reading and experience.
That reflects another of Jim's other lessons, the understanding that a good teacher learns alongside students. That doesn't mean pretending that students have as much to teach me as I have to teach them (if that were the case, why am I the one getting paid?); the excitement comes from genuinely being open to that discovery with students. As a teacher, I shape—but cannot control—the experience. There's always a certain kind of thrill in that process, especially in front of a class of 300. There are days when I feel a bit like I am doing an intellectual high-wire act. Those tend to be my favorite classes.
That thrill is rooted in another Koplin lesson: Good teaching is based in recognizing our intellectual limits, our ignorance. By that, he did not just mean that any single teacher can't know everything. Instead, Jim meant that we humans are always more ignorant than knowledgeable, that even in fields in which we have dramatically deepened our understanding of the world, there is—and always will be—far more that we do not know than we do know. I have come to realize that the longer I teach, the more I know and the less certain I am about what I know. The more aware I am of the limits of my knowledge, the better teacher I become.
Jim also believed that all teaching required an appreciation of the arts, and he taught me to look for wisdom in poetry. To the best of my knowledge, Jim never wrote a line of poetry in his life, but that made him only more appreciative of the form. I cannot remember if I shared this poem with him or vice versa; at some point, as it is with a good teacher, the flow of information and insight was two-way and impossible to track. Whomever it came from first, Jim and I came across the poem "Dropping Keys" by Hafiz, the 14th century Sufi poet from Persia.
The small person
Builds cages for everyone
Sees.
Instead, the sage,
Who needs to duck her head,
When the moon is low,
Can be found dropping keys, all night long
For the beautiful,
Rowdy,
Prisoners.
For too many students, education too often feels like a cage. If we aren't careful, we teachers can find ourselves building cages, guarding cages, and then locking ourselves inside those cages.
Jim Koplin never stopped dropping keys for me. To honor his memory, I will try to do the same for my students.
No Thanks for Thanksgiving
A Decade of Delusion
Ten years ago, critics of the United States' mad rush to war were right, but it didn't matter.
Within hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it was clear that political leaders were going to use the attacks to justify war in Central Asia and the Middle East. And within hours, those of us critical of that policy began to offer principled and practical arguments against aggressive war as a response to the crimes.
It didn't matter because neither the public nor policymakers were interested in principled or practical arguments. People wanted revenge, and the policymakers seized the opportunity to use US military power. Critical thinking became a mark not of conscientious citizenship but of dangerous disloyalty.
We were right, but the wars came.
The destructive capacity of the US military meant quick "victories" that just as quickly proved illusory. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on, it became clearer that the position staked out by early opponents was correct - the wars not only were illegal (conforming to neither international nor constitutional law) and immoral (fought in ways that guaranteed large-scale civilian casualties and displacement), but a failure on any pragmatic criteria. The US military has killed some of the people who were targeting the United States and destroyed some of their infrastructure and organisation, but a decade later we are weaker and our sense of safety is more fragile. The ability to dominate militarily proved to be both inadequate and transitory, as predicted.
Ten years later, we are still right and it still doesn't matter.
There's a simple reason for this: Empires rarely learn in time, because power tends to dull people's capacity for critical self-reflection. While ascending to power, empires believe themselves to be invincible. While declining in power, they cling desperately to old myths of remembered glory.
Today, the United States is morally bankrupt and spiritually broken. The problem is not that we have strayed from our founding principles, but that we are still operating on those principles - delusional notions about manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, the right to take more than our share of the world's resources by whatever means necessary. As the United States grew in wealth and power, bounty for the chosen came at the cost of misery for the many.
After World War II, as the United States became the central character not just in the Americas but on the world stage, the principles didn't change. US foreign policy sought to deepen and extend US power around the world, especially in the energy-rich and strategically crucial Middle East; always with an eye on derailing any Third World societies' attempts to pursue a course of independent development outside the US sphere; and containing the possibility of challenges to US dominance from other powerful states.
Does that summary sound like radical hysteria? Recall this statement from President Jimmy Carter's 1980 State of the Union address: "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." Democrats and Republicans, before and after, followed the same policy.
The George W Bush administration offered a particularly intense ideological fanaticism, but the course charted by the Obama administration is much the same. Consider this 2006 statement by Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense in both administrations:
"I think the message that we are sending to everyone, not just Iran, is that the United States is an enduring presence in this part of the world. We have been here for a long time. We will be here for a long time and everybody needs to remember that - both our friends and those who might consider themselves our adversaries."
If the new boss sounds a lot like the old boss, it's because the problem isn't just bad leaders but a bad system. That's why a critique of today's wars sounds a lot like critiques of wars past. Here's Martin Luther King, Jr's assessment of the imperial war of his time: "[N]o one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over."
Will our autopsy report read "global war on terror"?
That sounds harsh, and it's tempting to argue that we should refrain from political debate on the 9/11 anniversary to honour those who died and to respect those who lost loved ones. I would be willing to do that if the cheerleaders for the US empire would refrain from using the day to justify the wars of aggression that followed 9/11. But given the events of the past decade, there is no way to take the politics out of the anniversary.
We should take time on 9/11 to remember the nearly 3,000 victims who died that day. But as responsible citizens, we also should face a harsh reality: While the terrorism of fanatical individuals and groups is a serious threat, much greater damage has been done by our nation-state caught up in its own fanatical notions of imperial greatness.
That's why I feel no satisfaction in being part of the anti-war/anti-empire movement. Being right means nothing if we failed to create a more just foreign policy conducted by a more humble nation.
Ten years later, I feel the same thing that I felt on 9/11 - an indescribable grief over the senseless death of that day and of days to come.
In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Mass., one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.
One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hardy Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims' first winter.
Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it's also true that by 1637, Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders. The pattern would repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die off on reservations, out of the view of polite society.
Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the nonwhite but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.
Thomas Jefferson -- president No. 3 and author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as the "merciless Indian Savages" -- was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that didn't stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, "[W]e shall destroy all of them."
As the genocide was winding down in the early 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt (president No. 26) defended the expansion of whites across the continent as an inevitable process "due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway."
Roosevelt also once said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of 10 are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the 10th."
How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis? Here's how "respectable" politicians, pundits and professors play the game: When invoking a grand and glorious aspect of our past, then history is all-important. We are told how crucial it is for people to know history, and there is much hand-wringing about the younger generations' lack of knowledge about, and respect for, that history.
But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable -- such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States -- suddenly the value of history drops precipitously, and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"
History does matter, which is why people in power put so much energy into controlling it. The United States is hardly the only society that has created such mythology. While some historians in Great Britain continue to talk about the benefits the empire brought to India, political movements in India want to make the mythology of Hindutva into historical fact.
What White People Fear
In the struggle for racial justice, it's time to pay more attention to the fears of white people.
In a white-dominated world, that may seem counterintuitive. In the racial arena, what do we white people have to be afraid of?
There are lots of things to fear in this world, of course; race is not the only aspect of life in which people face injustice and inequality. A majority of people of all colors (including working-class and poor whites) struggles economically in a predatory corporate capitalist system, and all women, regardless of race, cope with gender discrimination and the threat of sexual violence in a male-dominated world.
But what fears could white people have as white people?
Understanding the fears behind the racial politics of both conservative and liberal whites can help guide strategy for changing a society in which wealth and well-being are still tied to race. And make no mistake, there is still a racialized gap between white and non-white America on measures of wealth and well-being—income, home ownership, graduation rates, access to health care, infant mortality, etc. In fact, the gap between white and black America on some of these measures is greater today than in the immediate aftermath of the major legislative achievements of the civil rights movement, and on some measures the rate of improvement is so glacial that it will be decades, if not centuries, before we reach equality. The legislative achievements that ended legal apartheid in America were a great victory, but the economic apartheid that remains is a reminder of our failures.
Put bluntly: The United States abolished a formal apartheid system but remains a white-supremacist society. After more than a decade of writing and speaking about these issues, which has sparked lots of feedback from all political angles, here's what I have concluded about white folks and our fears.
Aren't We Special?
For conservative white people, the dominant fear is of someday living without the privilege that comes with whiteness. Polite conservatives defend the primacy of "Western civilization." More reactionary whites are openly racist about the threat that non-white peoples pose to "our way of life." Both versions defend the existing distribution of wealth and power, even though many of the working-class and poor whites who endorse such views have access to precious little wealth or power. Race is used by white elites today, just as it was in the nation's formative years, to drive a wedge between people who would otherwise come together to challenge those elites. Divide-and-conquer strategies, it seems, never go out of style.
Liberals are quick to denounce both the thinly veiled and the openly reactionary conservative racism. But what of the fears of liberals? White liberals might reject the very idea that they are afraid, citing their support for diversity and multiculturalism. But my experience suggests that while white liberals reject assertions of white supremacy, many fear the loss of white centrality. They are willing to renounce the idea that white people are superior, as long as they are allowed to live comfortably in a world where white is the norm.
In short, both the conservative and liberal positions are based on the same underlying assertion: "I'm white, and I'm special." Conservatives are more likely to say it openly, while liberals tend to offer platitudes about racial justice while avoiding the risks required to make good on anti-racist principles.
What remains obscured is the distinctly uncivilized nature that Europeans and European Americans exhibited during their barbarous conquest of much of the world. The inherently fragile sense of white self-importance that emerges from that history is at the core of white fears—at some level, we all know that the truth of the depravity of white supremacy belies claims of white superiority.
In the institutions that adopt the liberal view, diversity is just fine (as long as whites remain in control) and multiculturalism can flourish (as long as white norms remain dominant). Institutions defined by the values and practices rooted in white Europe can open up to non-white people, as long as we white people remain comfortable. In such a white-defined liberal world, "people of color"—abstracted into a single group, erasing the particularity of people—are welcome, even sought after, to prove that we have transcended white supremacy.
Getting Uncomfortable
This analysis of the dynamics of mixed-race settings is hardly original. Non-white people have long recognized that white liberals are happy to engage with folks who aren't white as long as their white-centric worldview isn't threatened, and that white groups are happy to have non-white members as long as the power dynamics don't change.
I observe all this not from some arrogant high ground, but as someone stuck in the same dynamic, struggling to get out. I know that for all my writing and political work on racial justice, I still feel most comfortable in settings where my understanding of the world defines the interaction, no matter the racial composition of the group. Rather than pretend otherwise, I start with that reality and search for ways to move forward.
I have a choice: I can rest comfortably in the privileges that come with being white, or I can struggle to be fully human.
A first step for me has been to question the value of the seemingly endless "race dialogues" that are popular in white liberal groups. In the pseudo-therapeutic setting of such dialogues, with more talk about personal healing than about political change, white people are guaranteed that we won't be forced out of a white-defined world. White-dominated institutions—corporations, nonprofits, universities, government agencies—are happy to sponsor such dialogues, diversity trainings, and multicultural events, precisely because they don't threaten the fundamental distribution of wealth and power.
I have been involved in many of those events myself, as a facilitator or a participant, and I have learned from them (typically as much from my failures as successes). The most important lesson I take away is that race dialogues are not enough. As long as we stay confined in a safe world that doesn't challenge power, we guarantee failure—if our goal really is to change the distribution of that power.
There's no easy recipe for this kind of challenge, but we move in the right direction when we seek out places where we don't feel comfortable, looking for relationships in which we can help change the dynamic. For me, that means putting myself in situations where I have to face my fear of being seen—or, more accurately, being seen-through—by non-white people. What if I step into those uncomfortable spaces and non-white people see the ways in which I hang onto some sense of my own supremacy/centrality? What if they see the ways in which I haven't shaken off my racist cultural training?
A desire to confront that fear has led me, over the past year, to organizing efforts with the Workers Defense Project. It's a local group that advocates for workplace justice for immigrant workers, addressing problems such as wage theft within a larger social justice framework.
This project has forced me to cross lines around race and ethnicity, class, language, and age. The members and staff are predominantly Latina/Latino and working class. They speak Spanish and/or English, while I'm monolingual in English, and the leaders of the group include a number of people who are at least two decades younger than me.
The collaboration between WDP and the Third Coast Activist Resource Center (a predominantly white group to which I belong) to buy and renovate a building for a progressive community center has gone forward with explicit conversations about all these differences and how they affect decision-making. The trust necessary to move forward has been built slowly over time, and I'm aware that the WDP staff and members are watching for signs that we are serious about establishing a truly egalitarian relationship.
As tricky as this Latina/Latino-white collaboration can be, we also recognize that a successful community center with progressive politics cannot leave out African Americans, the third largest racial group in Austin. That means not just casting around for some black people to add to the mix, but engaging in serious discussions with people from that part of the community to find out what kinds of collaborations are needed and possible. Austin is a white-dominated city, but that's no guarantee that black and Latina/Latino groups will automatically come together; such alliances have to be built as carefully as any other. For us white folks in the mix, our contribution is to use the resources we have to aid in that process—not trying to control it, but also not pretending to be detached.
While there is a lot of dialogue necessary in this work, the dialogue is focused on a common goal: to provide office space for organizers, rehearsal space for artists, meeting space for the community, and a place for people to get to know each other. That common goal doesn't mean we will naturally, or easily, put aside differences, but it means we all have a tangible stake in our collective success.
My interest in this project flows from moral and political principles—a belief in the dignity of all and the struggle to eliminate hierarchy in all forms. But I would be naïve or dishonest if I pretended that was my only, or even my most powerful, motive. In the end, I have committed to this project out of selfishness—I would like to claim my full humanity before I check out of this world. To do that, I have to move beyond the framework of conservative versus liberal and adopt a truly radical politics.
I have a choice: I can be white—that is, I can refuse to challenge white supremacy or centrality—or I can be a human being. I can rest comfortably in the privileges that come with being white, or I can struggle to be fully human. But I can't do both. Though the work is difficult, the choice for those of us who are white should be easy.
Can Engaging with a Radical Religion Help Save Progressives from Self-Indulgence?
Soft Skull Press
The following is an excerpt from the new book All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice by Robert Jensen from Soft Skull Press.
To imagine a just and sustainable world, we need not just a politics but a theology that can help us face the delusional arrogance and disastrous self-indulgence of humans, especially we humans of the modern industrial era. These qualities have put us on a collision course with natural forces more powerful than we can ever hope to understand fully or control much at all.
There's a chance -- with no guarantee, of course -- that we can draw on the best of our traditions and find the strength within ourselves that will be required to alter that course and create a world that is both just and sustainable. If we cannot create such a world, we will need that deepest strength to cope with the grim realities we will face in a future that we cannot now imagine.
These are the end times, of a sort. I am not talking about Rapture and tribulation, but about rupture and triangulation. The challenge isn't to anticipate the return of Christ but to face the reality that we modern humans have created unsustainable social and ecological systems that have ruptured the world, and we need the insights of all our best traditions to triangulate from multiple viewpoints and devise new ways to live.
We are facing the end of an era of irresponsible human domination of the planet, which cannot -- and will not -- continue much longer. I do not fear the apocalypse as it is imagined by end-time Christians (a dramatic finish with the saved being lifted up and the damned left behind), but rather a steady erosion of the conditions that make possible a minimally decent human existence in the context of respect for other forms of life.
With those realities, threats and challenges in mind, I offer the following thesis:
There is no God, and more than ever we all need to serve the One True Gods.
All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice is an attempt to make sense of that apparently nonsensical sentence with its deliberate singular/plural confusion. In proposing this idea to those who are religious, I have to defend vigorously the first clause in the sentence, the assertion that there is no God. That task wouldn't be quite so difficult if we would keep reminding ourselves of one simple reality:
Humans created religion; religion did not create humans.
Whatever one believes about the nature of the divine, it clearly was humans who developed the doctrines and ceremonies to express spirituality. That means we can change and update those traditions as we learn more about ourselves and the world around us.
To those who are secular, the second clause -- the assertion that "we all need to serve the One True Gods" -- needs considerable explanation. But the statement wouldn't seem so obscure if we could keep reminding ourselves of another fundamental reality:
Inanimate matter created life; life did not create inanimate matter.
At a point when human activity is threatening to undermine the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain human life as we know it, it's crucial that we keep our arrogance in check and remember that we are not a creator but instead a part of Creation.
Taken together, these two simple reminders suggest that when we look to the spiritual realm and religion for insights into how we should live in this world, we must remember that religion is our creation. Likewise, when we look to the secular realm and science for insights into how the world works, we must remember our place in Creation.
I want to articulate a conception of theology, and argue for its importance, in a way that may provoke some folks on all sides -- religious fundamentalists and relativists, as well as secular fundamentalists and relativists.
Although I have a deep contrarian streak in me, that instinct is not the motive force here. I have spent most of my 50 years studiously ignoring theological debates, which seemed annoying and irrelevant. I still often find them annoying, but I no longer feel I have the luxury of opting out of theological conversations. After a period of listening to the conversations of others, I have concluded that two important things must happen if we are to move forward. Stated provocatively, by design:
To the fundamentalists on both sides: Grow up. To the moderates on both sides: Buck up.
Both religious and secular fundamentalists tend to be convinced that they really know what they claim to know, which makes them unrealistically confident in their judgments based on those knowledge claims. These are childlike claims; respectfully, I will argue that people who make them need to grow up.
Moderates, both religious and secular, typically are less insistent about the absolute truth of what they claim to know, and as a result often are hesitant to judge. These are irresponsible positions; respectfully, I will argue that people who take them need to buck up.
Although these two "requests" are formulated in what could be seen as harsh language ("grow up" and "buck up" typically are instructions to the immature and the weak-willed), they are not meant that way. It is not difficult to understand why so many people seek certainty in a complex and confusing world, nor is it hard to understand the desire to avoid making judgments about others when one is aware of the limits of one's own knowledge. The crucial work of theology today is to help us abandon any pretense of secure knowledge, but at the same time provide the confidence and courage to judge -- and act on those judgments -- despite the inevitable risks that come with human limits.
It's time to face questions for which we have no answers, to address problems for which there may be no solutions. We have to accept the radical uncertainty of our lives, yet meet the challenges that life puts in front of us.
To help us cope, what kind of theology -- what ideas about what it means to be a human being at this moment in time -- will we need?
Is America on the Brink of a Food Crisis?
As everyone scrambles for a solution to the crises in the nation's economy, Wes Jackson suggests we look to nature's economy for some of the answers. With everyone focused on a stimulus package in the short term, he counsels that we pay more attention to the soil over the long haul.
"We live off of what comes out of the soil, not what's in the bank," said Jackson, president of the Land Institute. "If we squander the ecological capital of the soil, the capital on paper won't much matter."
Jackson doesn't minimize the threat of the current financial problems but argues that the new administration should consider a "50-year farm bill," which he and the writer/farmer Wendell Berry proposed in a New York Times op-ed earlier this month.
Central to such a bill would be soil. A plan for sustainable agriculture capable of producing healthful food has to come to solve the twin problems of soil erosion and contamination, said Jackson, who co-founded the research center in 1976 after leaving his job as a environmental studies professor at California State University, Sacramento.
Jackson believes that a key part of the solution is in approaches to growing food that mimic nature instead of trying to subdue it. While Jackson and his fellow researchers at the Land Institute continue their work on natural systems agriculture, he also ponders how to turn the possibilities into policy. He spoke with me from his office in Salina, Kansas.
Robert Jensen: This is a short-term culture, and federal policies typically are aimed at short-term results. Why the call for a farm bill that looks so far ahead, especially in tough economic times?
Wes Jackson: For the past 50 or 60 years, we have followed industrialized agricultural policies that have increased the rate of destruction of productive farmland. For those 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe the absurd notion that as long as we have money we will have food. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy.
We need to reverse that destructive process, which means recognizing the need for fundamental changes in the way agriculture is practiced. That requires thinking beyond the next quarterly earnings report of the agribusiness corporations and beyond this fiscal year of the feds. We need farm bills -- laid out in five-year segments, with a view to the next 50 years -- that can be mileposts for moving agriculture from an extractive to a renewable economy.
RJ: What are some of the key aspects of a long-term solution?
WJ: Support for soil conservation and protecting water resources have to be central. There needs to be funding for research on a different model for agriculture. And we have to avoid wasting any more resources on biofuels made from annual crops, especially corn, which is certain to exacerbate soil erosion, chemical contamination and a larger dead zone in the gulf.
RJ: But it is true that most people, including those in the new administration, are focused on short-term problems in the financial and industrial economy. Is there any chance people -- especially people in an overwhelmingly urban nation -- will pay attention right now?
WJ: Remember, if our agriculture is not sustainable then our food supply is not sustainable, and food is an issue as close to every one of us as our own stomachs. Either we pay attention or we pay a huge price, not so far down the road. When we face the fact that civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland, it's clear that we don't really have a choice. Beyond that, changing the way agriculture is practiced would incorporate partial solutions to major problems that people do care about: climate change, overconsumption of energy, water problems. Yes, a 50-year bill is sensible right now.
RJ: What would such a 50-year plan look like? What are the key features?
WJ: We start by acknowledging the necessity of moving from an extractive, unsustainable economy to one that is renewable and sustainable, and the first place to look is to the production of the most basic commodity -- food. Once we face that necessity, we move to examining the possibilities for achieving this, recognizing that we have to act now while we still have slack, some room to move. Here's a sobering thought: If we don't achieve this sustainability first in agriculture, it's highly unlikely we will in any other sector of the economy and society. That's what makes this so imperative.
RJ: OK, start with the necessity: How is agriculture, as it is practiced today, an extractive enterprise that is unsustainable?
WJ: All organisms are carbon-based and in a constant search for energy-rich carbon. About 10,000 years ago, humans moved from gathering/hunting to agriculture, tapping into the first major pool of energy-rich carbon -- the soil. It was agriculture that allowed us effectively to mine, as well as waste, the soil's carbon and other soil-bound nutrients. Humans went on to exploit the carbon of the forests, coal, oil and natural gas. But through all that, we've continued to practice agriculture that led to soil erosion beyond natural replacement levels. That's the basic problem of agriculture.
Added to the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has given us pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. We have less soil and it is more degraded. We've masked that for years through the use of petrochemicals -- pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers. But that "solution" is no solution and is, in fact, part of the problem. There are no technological substitutes for healthy soil and no miraculous technological fixes for the problem of agriculture. We need to move past the industrial model and adopt an ecological model.
RJ: This concern about chemicals has led to increased support for organic agriculture. Is that the solution?
WJ: Organic agriculture is a start but by itself is insufficient. Eliminating the chemicals is only half the problem -- we still have to deal with soil erosion. Remember that we humans had organic agriculture until very recently, when we got industrial agriculture, and we still lost soil all along the way, for the last 10,000 years. There is good reason to believe we started the increase of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere about then (with the carbon compound of the soil being oxidized). It has only become a crisis in our time due to the scale increase of people and material and energy throughput.
RJ: OK, so organic alone isn't the answer. Isn't that where no-till or minimum-till farming comes in?
WJ: Those methods help deal with erosion, but as practiced today they require unacceptable levels of chemical inputs and end up eliminating biodiversity. Once again, it doesn't offer a way out of the extractive economy and the problem of contamination.
RJ: So, where does that leave us?
WJ: Let's go back to basics: The core of this idea is the marriage of agriculture and ecology. As Wendell [Berry] says, we need to take nature as the measure. We need to look to nature for models of how to manage ecosystems in a sustainable fashion. At the Land Institute, we think that leads to perennial polycultures. Instead of annual crops grown in monocultures on an industrial model, we are looking at perennials in mixtures, which we think can solve a number of problems regarding erosion and contamination.
RJ: Before I ask about the details, a basic question: Is that feasible, given the 6.5 billion people on the planet? Can such strategies focused on perennials produce enough food?
WJ: First, let's recognize that without fossil fuels, the industrial-agriculture strategies we have now could not feed even the current population, and population growth makes these changes more important than ever. As populations grow, there's increasing pressure to put more and more marginal land into production, which increases the rate of degradation. A new model is essential.
At the Land Institute, we've been working on perennializing the major crops and domesticating a few promising wild species. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can not only better protect the soil but also help reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution. Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient.
RJ: Let's assume that natural systems agriculture and similar projects hold the promise you suggest. Those practices will have to be implemented in the real world, which is structured by the larger extractive economy in capitalism, at a time of crisis -- some would say, even, a time of collapse. What has to happen to make that possible?
WJ: You're right that it's not just about plants and science; it's also about people and society. We think that protecting the soil is not only an ecological imperative but an opportunity for positive economic and cultural change as well. The proposals we're discussing would increase employment opportunities in agriculture -- sustainable farming will require more "eyes per acre," and replacing fossil-fuel energy with human energy and ecological knowledge makes good economic sense. With the reduced need for the hoe or plow, and land management relying more on fire and grazing, we draw on the naturalist instinct in nearly all of us, rather than presenting farm work as nothing but the "sweat of the brow" amid "thistles and thorns." This will be necessary to counter the longstanding denigration of the countryside and rural communities, which has been a feature of our so-called cosmopolitan culture.
We're seeing that on a small scale now, with more young farmers staying on the land, with creative new endeavors in community-supported agriculture. People recognize that life is more than working in a small cubicle and consuming in a big-box store. People are hungry for good food, and they're also hungry for a good life. People are ready to explore what it would mean to come home, not to a romanticized vision of the past but to a sustainable future.
RJ: How would a farm bill that you and Wendell might write differ from what we see today?
WJ: The farm bills we've had largely address exports, commodity problems, subsidies and food programs. They all involve here-and-now concerns. A 50-year farm bill represents a vision that stresses the need to protect soil from erosion, cut the wastefulness of water, cut fossil-fuel dependence, eliminate toxins in soil and water, manage carefully the nitrogen of the soil, reduce dead zones, restore an agrarian way of life and preserve farmland from development. The best way to accomplish most of these goals is to gradually increase the number of acres with perennial vegetation, first of all through rotations and increase in the number of grass-fed dairies sprinkled about the countryside, and second, through progress toward perennializing the major crops. A good bill could help farmers accomplish those things.
RJ: It's also likely that many people reading this will dismiss you as idealistic, as unrealistic. How would you answer that?
WJ: These are the same people who believe it's realistic to continue practices they know to be unsustainable. The basic choice is simple: Do we want to work at coming up with a system that can produce healthful food and healthy communities, one that is economically and ecologically viable? Or do we want to continue to contaminate our soil and water as we watch that soil continue to be eroded by that water? That contamination and erosion are both material reality and metaphor for our cultural and economic condition.
Look, I'm a scientist from the countryside, which means I have spent my life dealing with reality in research and on the farm. These are necessary and possible goals. Without the necessity, it may be considered grandiose. Without the possibility, it could be regarded as grandiose. The test for grandiosity, in my view, fails. As a nation, we are blessed with some of the world's best soils. Increasingly, city people want healthier and safer food. And we're at a political moment when everybody and his dog is talking about the need for change. So, let's get to it.
AlterNet originally ran this article on Thanksgiving 2005.
Canadian Media Giant Attacks Free Speech
When the bottom line is threatened, corporations typically show little concern for holding the line on political principles such as freedom of expression. In capitalism, freedom is too often just another word for maximizing profits.
But even when we have no illusions about the predatory nature of modern corporate capitalism, there's something particularly disheartening when a media corporation abandons free-speech principles. Journalists are supposed to be the good guys on freedom of expression, right? If for no other reason than self-interest, shouldn't media managers support these principles?
Yes, but apparently not when ideology gets in the way, as seems to be the case at Canada's largest media corporation.
CanWest -- owner of newspaper, television, and online properties, including one of the country's national dailies and a TV network -- is trying to use trademark law to punish political activists' free speech in a classic SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation).
This case is relatively simple: CanWest's founder, Izzy Asper, was a vocal supporter of Israel, (he's been quoted as telling the Jerusalem Post, "In all our newspapers, including the National Post, we have a very pro-Israel position. ... we are the strongest supporter of Israel in Canada.") and CanWest papers have maintained that ideological commitment since Asper's death in 2003.
To highlight this pro-Israeli slant in CanWest papers, the Palestine Media Collective produced a parody of the Vancouver Sun that included such stories as "Study Shows Truth Biased against Israel, By Cyn Sorsheep." As with most parodies, some of the attempts are clever and some fall flat. But there's no way to not recognize it as a parody. (You can see for yourself by reading it here.)
Because the folks who produced the parody were anonymous (they've since stepped up to identify themselves publicly), CanWest sued the printer and another activist who had passed out a few copies, Mordecai Briemberg, claiming a trademark violation. Such a suit is legitimate only when the plaintiff can show there's a reasonable likelihood that people will confuse the fake with the real and that some harm will result. In this case, there clearly is no confusion and no harm, and hence no serious claim. But CanWest presses on.
Calling the Collective's paper "a counterfeit version" that amounts to "identity theft," CanWest seems to want to frame this as a kind of intellectual-property terrorism: "This piece was not satirical. It was not a clever spoof. It was a deliberate act to mislead and misinform thousands of people by using the actual Vancouver Sun masthead, logo and layout," reads a company statement on the case.
According to a 2007 story in the Vancouver Sun, CanWest believes that the defendants were "motivated by hostility to the principal shareholders of the plaintiff and by a desire to undermine, or hurt, the business of the plaintiff and its principal shareholders" and "harbor antagonistic views towards the plaintiff, its principal shareholders and the reporting and editorial opinions expressed in the plaintiff's publications, including in the Vancouver Sun."
This all seems a bit thin-skinned for a media company, given how journalists take pride in their role as tough critics. It's true enough that the activists in question don't seem to like the reporting and editorial opinions of the Sun and its parent company. And it's not unusual for those who believe that an information source is unreliable to encourage people to seek information elsewhere. So, I suppose there's a fair amount of antagonism on all sides. As for motivation, I have interviewed Briemberg, and I didn't pick up on any hostility. He's a longtime activist, driven by the concerns for social and economic justice that motivate most people on the political left. If he's hostile to anything, it's to injustice.
But this can't be about feelings, of course; it's about freedom of speech and press in a democratic society. If CanWest prevails -- if citizens' judgments about the quality of a newspaper's coverage can be the grounds for a lawsuit -- then media criticism in Canada is made more difficult and democracy suffers. In a mass-mediated society, people must be free to critique that powerful institution just as they critique government and other businesses.
That brings us back to journalists and freedom of expression. Given this situation, one might expect a flood of stories by Canadian journalists to defend freedom of expression and criticize CanWest for its bullying tactics. But apart from the story in the Sun, my search revealed one news story in the Toronto Globe and Mail and a mention of the case by one of that paper's columnists. Some web sites have reported the story, and activist groups are weighing in. Professional associations of librarians and teachers are on record opposing the suit. But where are the journalists from the corporate press? It's no surprise that journalists at CanWest papers are keeping their heads down, but why the silence from most others?
CanWest is a big company with an ideological axe to grind. We should critique the company's abuse of power in filing the suit and count this as a reminder of the potential problems that come with media concentration. But the silence of other journalists should trouble us even more. When a profession that provides so much of our information won't hold itself accountable, it's a threat not just to journalism but to democracy.
The Sorrows of Race and Gender in the 2008 Election
[This is an expanded version of a talk given to the University Democrats at the University of Texas at Austin, April 16, 2008.]
It may seem odd to talk of sorrows around race and gender in politics when we are a few months away from being able to vote for a white woman or a black man for president of the United States. When I was born in 1958, any suggestion that such an election was on the horizon would have been laughed off as crazy. In the first presidential campaign I paid attention to as an eighth-grader in 1972, Shirley Chisholm -- who four years earlier had become the first black woman to win a seat in Congress -- was to most Americans a curiosity not a serious contender. Today, things are different.
Today Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's battle for the Democratic Party nomination suggests progress. Though the pace of progress toward gender and racial justice may seem slow, we should take a moment to honor the people whose struggles for the liberation of women and non-white people have brought us to this historic moment. If not for the vision and courage of those in the feminist and civil-rights movements there would be no possibility of a contest between Clinton and Obama, and the debt we owe those activists is enormous.
But instead of getting too caught up in this moment, we should reflect more deeply on that history -- not just on what was won but what has been lost. We have an obligation to those who sacrificed in those struggles for liberation to reflect honestly, and if we do that I believe it will lead to sorrow.
I don't take this sorrow to be a bad thing. Today one of the most important virtues is the ability to understand sorrow clearly, to confront sorrow openly, to feel sorrow deeply, and in the end to accept the sorrows that come with being human in the modern world. Such sorrow is especially important in a society built on delusional beliefs about manifest destiny and endless expansion, world domination and American exceptionalism. The best of a people is carried not by those who pander to a pathological sense of entitlement, but by those who are not afraid to live with sorrow.
As one of my favorite songwriters has put it, "Those are lost who/try to cross through/the sorrow fields too easily."[1]
So, let us heed Eliza Gilkyson and not race across those sorrow fields. Let us walk through them deliberately, carefully, and responsibly. Let us learn from that journey.
What are the sorrows to which I'm referring? I don't mean the disgust and distress that many of us feel when we read the blogs, listen to talk radio, or watch cable TV news -- places where some of our fellow citizens and journalists wallow in the sexism and racism that still infects so much of this society. I don't mean the ways in which, even in polite liberal circles, Hillary Clinton is scrutinized in ways no man would ever be. I don't mean the ways in which, even in polite liberal circles, Barack Obama's blackness is examined for either its inadequacies or excesses.
The attacks on Clinton because she is a woman and Obama because he is black should make us angry and may leave us feeling dejected, but for me they are not the stuff of sorrow. We can organize against those expressions of sexism and racism; we can mobilize to counter those forces; we can respond to those people.
Remembering the radicals
My sorrow comes from the recognition that the radical analyses of the feminist and civil-rights movements -- the core insights of those movements that made it possible when I was young to imagine real liberation -- are no longer recognized as a part of the conversation in the dominant political culture of the United States. It's not just that such analyses have not been universally adopted -- it would be naïve to think that in a few decades too many dramatic changes could be put into place, after all -- but that they have been pushed even further to the margins, almost completely out of public view.
For example, when I talk about these ideas with students at the University of Texas it is for some the first time they have heard such things. It's not that they have rejected the analyses or condemned the movements, but they did not know such radical ideas exist or had ever existed. These students often do not know that these movements did not simply condemn the worst overt manifestations of sexism and racism, but went to the heart of the patriarchal and white-supremacist nature of U.S. society while at the same time focusing attention on the imperialist nature of our foreign policy and predatory nature of corporate capitalism. The most compelling arguments emerging from those movements didn't suggest a kindler-and-gentler imperialist capitalist state, but an end to those unjust and unsustainable systems.
The irony is that Clinton and Obama, who today are viable candidates because of those movements, provide such clear evidence of the death of the best hopes of those movements. Those two candidates have turned away from these compelling ideas so completely that neither speaks of patriarchy and white supremacy. These are not candidates opposing imperialism and capitalism but candidates telling us why we should believe that they can better manage the system.
I recognize that this may seem condescending coming from a white man living in the American middle class -- that is, someone whose material standard of living is enhanced by these very systems of domination and subordination. One might point out that it's easy for me as a person with privilege (especially one who is not running for office and not appealing for votes in a reactionary country) to talk about liberation and radical movements. What right do I have to demand that Clinton and Obama articulate a radical political vision as they grapple with the reality of a political campaign?
Let me be clear that I am not attacking Clinton and Obama for not sharing my politics; I'm not really attacking them at all, though I disagree with many of their political positions. Instead I'm arguing that these candidates offer a political ideology very different from that which animated the best of the movements that made it possible for them to run. This is not simply a critique of the candidates' campaign platitudes, not an examination of whether either candidate talks enough about "women's issues" or "racism." This is part of a larger examination of the unjust and unsustainable systems -- patriarchy and white supremacy, imperialism and capitalism -- that we must take seriously if we are to talk seriously about the possibility of a decent future, or of a future at all.
Radical feminism, which I think was the crucial core of that movement, offered a critique of patriarchy and the hierarchy created by patriarchal values. Those activists spoke not only of equal rights for women but of an end to all hierarchies. The radical civil-rights forces, which I think were at the core of that movement, offered a critique of white supremacy and the hierarchies reinforced by white-supremacist values. Those activists spoke not only of equal rights for non-white people but of an end to systems of domination more generally. The most powerful articulations of feminism and the civil-rights movement did not simply say, "Let's leave these fundamentally unjust and unsustainable systems in place but put some women and non-white people in positions of power." They argued for a transformation of the systems.
For example, as the U.S. pursued its brutal attack on the people of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and '70s, these movements argued for the end not only of that war but of U.S. imperialism. Radical feminist and civil-rights activists weren't dreaming of the day that Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell could be appointed Secretary of State to help run an imperialist U.S. foreign policy that would continue to engage in crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes -- as all three did during the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The goal was not simply to change the players, but to change the nature of the deadly game.
Albright, Rice, and Powell are not the fulfillment of a liberatory dream but are part of our long national nightmare. If Clinton or Obama were elected and continued the same basic policies that allow the United States to consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources -- as they both indicate they will -- then they will haunt us as well.
More radical understandings of the source of social problems were common in the civil-rights movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. made that clear in his April 4, 1967, speech in opposition to the Vietnam War:
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.[2]
Feminists routinely argued that patriarchal conceptions of power would prove to be the end of the world if not challenged. The poet Muriel Rukeyser identified the nature of this power and why we should reject it:
Dead power is everywhere among us -- in the forest, chopping down the songs; at night in the industrial landscape, wasting and stiffening a new life; in the streets of the city, throwing away the day. We wanted something different for our people: not to find ourselves an old, reactionary republic, full of ghost-fears, the fears of death and the fears of birth. We want something else.[3]
Many of us still want something else. At this moment in history, the writers and activists who carry forward the radical vision of the feminist and civil-rights movements, such as bell hooks, argue against nationalism and for a vision of self-determination rooted in a critical analysis of race, gender, and class:
It's no accident that people like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were destroyed at those moments of their political careers when they had begun to critique nationalism as a platform of organization; and where, in fact, they replace nationalism with a critique of imperialism; which then, unites us with the liberation struggles of so many people on the planet. If we don't have that kind of global perspective about our social realities, we will never be able to re-envision a revolutionary movement for Black self-determination that is non-exclusive, and doesn't assume some kind of patriarchal nationhood.[4]
This vision of the world rejects patriarchy and white supremacy, in the context of a critique of U.S. imperialism and capitalism. It is not the vision of the Democratic Party or its candidates. I don't know what Clinton and Obama really think about such an analysis, but whatever they may think they do not articulate such ideas in public. While they have plans that may help curb the worst excesses of the imperial state and corporate capitalism, they do not confront the brutal nature of these systems.
The problem isn't that they fail as revolutionaries (one doesn't expect revolutionary rhetoric from mainstream candidates), but that their calls for reform have no radical -- and therefore no realistic -- analysis at their core. Clinton and Obama offer rhetoric about empowering people and protecting the environment, but both propose to do that without coming to terms with the nature of the institutions that disempower people and draw down the ecological capital necessary for life. Both candidates offer more of the same failed "solutions," trying to take their place among the gang that exercises "dead power."
A plea for politics
While this is not the first time the human community has faced trying times, the stakes have been raised in new ways. Dead power has put us on a trajectory that can end only one way. When I was younger, I thought that trajectory would play out over many decades, maybe even centuries. As we see the consequences of dead power mounting -- in human and ecological terms -- I now think we have decades, maybe only years, to correct our course. But most of the modern world, especially the narcissistic United States, is unwilling to even think about what it will take to change that trajectory. Political leaders, including Clinton and Obama, cater to these delusional fantasies rather than confront difficult realities.
The sorrow of which I speak flows not from the fact that liberation has not yet been achieved but from a fear that the possibility of liberation may be lost forever, that our world may have passed the point of no return, psychologically and ecologically. Such fears are not grounds for abandoning politics, however. If you believe there is something to what I've said, it suggests only that we should think more carefully about where we put our political energies. I believe that the last place we should be sinking our energy is into presidential politics. When the political leaders vying for our votes make it clear they are committed to systems and institutions that keep us locked in the death trajectory, why should we offer them anything that is precious to us?
The most common response I get to that challenge is the claim that these candidates actually have a more radical agenda but realize that they must keep it under wraps in order to get elected. Just wait, I'm told, until after an election victory. That is likely to be a long wait, for there is no historical precedent for such a development, and nothing in the biography of either candidate that suggests a break with history. This observation typically is dismissed as cynicism, but I am not cynical. I am simply trying to deal with reality.
If only a center/right candidate who plays to the greed and delusional self-indulgence of the United States can win, that is more evidence that this empire cannot be transformed into a decent society in the time available and that it is time to say of conventional politics, simply, "game over." If that is the case -- and I believe it's a reasonable account of our society -- more than ever the work is not to turn over our time, energy, and resources to any political candidate but to build alternatives on the ground. That is a political response to a political problem. It isn't a question of hope v. no hope. It's a question of reality v. delusion. To believe that an unsustainable system can be sustained indefinitely -- and to support political candidates who believe that -- is a sign not of hope but of desperation and defeat. To be realistic and hopeful, one must be radical.
Yes, we can
Let me end with the popular call to action, "Yes, we can/Sí, se puede." I agree that we can, but the slogan is incomplete. Yes, people can do things, but what is it that we believe we can do? Can we remain an imperial state -- as both Clinton and Obama want us to remain -- but somehow become a force for peace in the world? By what logic is that possible? What historical example is there to support such an assertion? Can we remain a corporate capitalist economy -- as both Clinton and Obama want us to remain -- but somehow eliminate inequality? By what logic is that possible? What historical example is there to support such an assertion? It is in the nature of imperial states and capitalist economies to be predatory and destructive, and the affluence of the United States is based on those predatory and destructive practices. To pretend these systems can remain in place but be transformed into vehicles for justice and sustainability is, quite literally, insane.
There is no easy route to a different future. In our laziness and greed we have narrowed the range of our choices and eliminated too many options for us to pretend there are easy solutions. I can't predict the future, but I am relatively certain that the future will be hard. There is sorrow in coming to terms with all of this, but sorrow is not the same thing as despair. Sorrow need not lead to paralysis; sorrow isn't the end. Sorrow is simply a part of life, which can help us understand where we've been and in what direction we must move.
So, is there hope? Of course, but hope is not the kind of thing one gets from speeches and slogans, from rock-star political rallies and emotionally charged music videos. Hope, like anything of value, must be earned. Hope comes not from believing but from doing. If we want to feel a sense of hope, we should study the world and come to our own conclusions about the systems and structures of power in which we live. We should decide whether those systems and structures are compatible with justice and sustainability. If they are not, then we should work to build alternatives on the ground where we live.
Yes, we can. We can name honestly the death trajectory of this culture.
Yes, we can. We can stop pretending that rhetoric -- no matter how inspirational -- will mask the fundamentally unjust and unsustainable nature of the systems in which we live.
Yes, we can. We can stop looking to those who peddle delusional hope and start creating the conditions that make authentic hope possible.
Yes, we can. Sí, se puede.
But if we are to do this, first we must not turn away from the sorrow. We must grieve.
Shortly after September 11, 2001, the writer Alice Walker reminded us that:
To grieve is above all to acknowledge loss, to understand there is a natural end to endless gain. To grieve means to come to an understanding, finally, of inevitable balance; Life will right itself, though how it does this remains, and will doubtless remain, mysterious. … It is this natural balancing of life that we fear.[5]
We are out of balance, within the human community and with the non-human world. We are reaping what we have sown in the fields of greed and self-indulgence. If we are to live in a decent future -- if there is to be a future for our children -- it will be because we moved out of those fields left dead by power and into fields of liberation to plant anew.
Between those two fields lie the sorrow fields. It is time -- long past time -- that we begin the difficult journey through those fields. If we are deliberate, careful, and responsible in that journey there is no guarantee, but there is hope, that yes we can find our way.
[1] Eliza Gilkyson, "He Waits for Me," from the CD "Beautiful World," Red House Records, 2008.
[2] Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., James M. Washington, ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 240.
[3] Muriel Rukeyser, quoted in Adrienne Rich, What is Found There, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), page preceding preface. Originally published in The Life of Poetry (New York: Current Books, 1949).
[4] "Challenging Capitalism and Patriarchy," interview with bell hooks. http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/dec95hooks.htm
[5] Alice Walker, Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), p. 42.
Does Porn Make the Man?
South End Press
The following is an excerpt from Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, by Robert Jensen.
The object of the children's game King of the Hill is to be the one who remains on top of the hill (or, if not an actual hill, a large pile of anything or the center of any designated area). To do that, one has to repel those who challenge the king's supremacy. The king has to push away all the other kids who charge the hill. That can be done in a friendly spirit with an understanding that a minimal amount of force will be used by all, or it can be violent and vicious, with both the king and the challengers allowed to use any means necessary. Games that start with such a friendly understanding can often turn violent and vicious. This scenario is also used in some video games, in which a player tries to control a specific area for a predetermined amount of time.
In my experience, both male and female children can, and did, play King of the Hill, but it was overwhelmingly a game of male children. It's one of the games that train male children to be men. No matter who is playing, it is a game of masculinity. King of the Hill reveals one essential characteristic of the dominant conception of masculinity: No one is ever safe, and everyone loses something.
Most obviously, this King-of-the-Hill masculinity is dangerous for women. It leads men to seek to control "their" women and define their own pleasure in that control, which leads to epidemic levels of rape and battery. But this view of masculinity is toxic for men as well.
One thing is immediately obvious about King-of-the-Hill masculinity: Not everyone can win. In fact, by definition in this conception of masculinity, there's only one real man at any given moment. In a system based on hierarchy, by definition there can be only one person at the top of the hierarchy. There's only one King of the Hill.
In this conception of masculinity, men are in constant struggle with each other for dominance. Every other man must in some way be subordinated to the king, but even the king can't feel too comfortable -- he has to be nervous about who is coming up that hill to get him. This isn't just a game, of course. A friend who once worked on Wall Street, one of the preeminent sites of masculine competition in the business world, described coming to work as like "walking into a knife fight when all the good spots along the wall were taken." Every day you faced the possibility of getting killed -- figuratively, in business terms -- and there was no spot you could stand where your back was covered. This is masculinity lived as endless competition and threat. Whatever the benefits of it, whatever power it gives one over others, it's also exhausting and, in the end, unfulfilling.
No one man created this system. Perhaps no man, if given a real choice, would choose it. But we live our lives in that system, and it deforms men, narrowing our emotional range and depth, and limiting our capacity to experience the rich connections with others -- not just with women and children, but with other men -- which require vulnerability but make life meaningful. The Man Who Would Be King is the Man Who Is Broken and Alone.
That toxic masculinity hurts men doesn't mean it's equally dangerous for men and women. As feminists have long pointed out, there's a big difference between women dealing with the constant threat of being raped, beaten, and killed by the men in their lives, and men not being able to cry. But we can see that the short-term material gains that men get in patriarchy -- the name for this system of male dominance -- are not adequate compensation for what we men give up in the long haul, which is to surrender part of our humanity to the project of dominance.
This doesn't mean, of course, that in this world all men have it easy. Other systems of dominance and oppression -- white supremacy, heterosexism, predatory corporate capitalism -- mean that non-white men, gay men, poor and working-class men suffer in various ways. A feminist analysis doesn't preclude us from understanding those problems but in fact helps us see them more clearly.
What feminism is and isn't to me
Each fall in my seminar class for first-year students at the University of Texas, I lead a discussion about gender politics that will sound familiar to many teachers. I ask the students about their opinions about various gender issues, such as equal pay, sexual harassment, men's violence, and gender roles. Most of the women and some of the men express views that would be called feminist. But when I ask how many identify as feminists, out of the 15 students in any semester, no more than three (always women) have ever claimed the label. When I ask why, the typical answers are not about the political positions of feminism but the perception that feminism is weird and that weird people are feminists.
This pattern is no doubt connected to the assault on feminism in the mainstream culture, captured most succinctly in the phrase "femi-nazi" made popular by right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh. One response to this by some feminists has been to find a least-common-denominator definition of the term, to reassure both men and women that feminism doesn't really aim to undermine established gender norms and isn't threatening to men. I believe that to be the wrong strategy. If feminism is to make a meaningful difference in the sex/gender crisis we face, and contribute to a broader social change so desperately needed, I believe it must be clear in its challenge to the existing order -- and that inevitably will be threatening to many men, at least at first. Feminism, then, should get more radical than ever.
In general, the term "radical" conjures up images of extremes, of danger, of people eager to tear things down. But radical has another meaning -- from the Latin, for root. Radical solutions are the ones that get to the root of the problem. When the systems in which we live are in crisis, the most honest confrontations with those systems have to be radical. At first glance, that honesty will seem frightening. Looking deeper, it is the radical ideas that offer hope, a way out of the crisis.
Because these ideas are denigrated in the dominant culture, it's important to define them. By feminist, I mean an analysis of the ways in which women are oppressed as a class in this society -- the ways in which men as a class hold more power, and how those differences in power systematically disadvantage women in the public and private spheres. Gender oppression plays out in different ways depending on social location, which makes it crucial to understand men's oppression of women in connection with other systems of oppression -- heterosexism, racism, class privilege, and histories of colonial and postcolonial domination.
By radical feminist, I mean the analysis of the ways that in this patriarchal system in which we live, one of the key sites of this oppression -- one key method of domination -- is sexuality. Two of the most well-known women who articulated a radical feminist view have been central to the feminist critique of pornography -- the writer Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, a lawyer and law professor. The feminist philosophy and politics that have shaped my thinking are most clearly articulated by those two and others with similar views.
What I also learned from this radical feminism is not just a way of critiquing men's domination of women but a broader approach to understanding systems of power and oppression. Feminism is not the only way into a broader critique of the many types of oppression, of course, but it is one important way, and was for me the first route into such a framework. My real political education started on the issue of gender and from there moved to issues of racial and economic injustice, the imperialist wars that flow out of that injustice, and the ecological crisis. Each system of power and oppression is unique in its own way, but there are certain features in common. Here's my summary:
How do we explain the fact that most people's stated philosophical and theological systems are rooted in concepts of justice, equality, and the inherent dignity of all people, yet we allow violence, exploitation, and oppression to flourish? Only a small percentage of people in any given society are truly sociopaths, engaging in cruel and oppressive behavior openly and with relish. Feminism helped me understand the complex process, which tends to work like this:
The systems and structures in which we live are hierarchical.
Hierarchical systems and structures deliver to those in the dominant class certain privileges, pleasures, and material benefits.
People are typically hesitant to give up such privileges, pleasures, and benefits.
But, those benefits clearly come at the expense of those in the subordinated class.
Given the widespread acceptance of basic notions of equality and human rights, the existence of hierarchy has to be justified in some way other than crass self-interest.
One of the most persuasive arguments for systems of domination and subordination is that they are "natural."
So, oppressive systems work hard to make it appear that the hierarchy -- and the disparity in power and resources that flow from hierarchy -- is natural and, therefore, beyond modification. If men are naturally smarter and stronger than women, then patriarchy is inevitable and justifiable. If white people are naturally smarter and more virtuous than people of color, then white supremacy is inevitable and justifiable. If rich people are naturally smarter and harder working than poor people, then economic injustice is inevitable and justifiable. And, if human beings have special status in the universe, justified either on theological or biological grounds, then humans' right to extract from the rest of Creation whatever they like is inevitable and justifiable.
For unjust hierarchies, and the illegitimate authority that is exercised in them, maintaining their own naturalness is essential. Not surprisingly, people in the dominant class exercising the power gravitate easily to such a view. And because of their power to control key story-telling institutions (especially education and mass communication), those in the dominant class can fashion a story about the world that leads some portion of the people in the subordinate class to internalize the ideology.
For me, feminism gave me a way to see through not only male dominance, but all the systems of illegitimate authority. I saw the fundamental strategy they held in common, and saw that if we could more into a space in which we were true to our stated ideals, we would reject those systems as anti-human. All these systems cause suffering beyond the telling. All of them must be resisted. The connections between them must be understood.
Enforcing masculinity
Systems of oppression are interlocked and enmeshed; perhaps the classic example is the way in which white men identify black men as a threat to the sexual purity of white women, requiring white men to maintain control of both black people and white women. While keeping in mind those connections, we can train our attention on how each individual power system operates. This book attempts such a focus on masculinity. The King-of-the-Hill Masculinity I have described is articulated and enforced in a variety of places in contemporary culture, most notably athletics, the military, and business, with underpinnings in the dominant monotheistic religions. We can look at all those arenas and see how masculinity-as-dominance plays out. In all those endeavors, the quality of relationships and human values become secondary to control that leads to victory, conquest, and closing the deal.
We teach our boys that to be a man is to be tough, to be acquisitive, to be competitive, to be aggressive. We congratulate them when they make a tough hit on the football field that takes out an opponent. We honor them in parades when they return from slaughtering the enemy abroad. We put them on magazine covers when they destroy business competitors and make millions by putting people out of work. In short, we train boys to be cruel, to ignore the feelings of others, to be violent.
U.S. culture's most-admired male heroes reflect those characteristics: They most often are men who take charge rather than seek consensus, seize power rather than look for ways to share it, and are willing to be violent to achieve their goals. Victory is sweet. Conquest gives a sense of power. And after closing the deal, the sweet sense of power lingers.
Look around in the contemporary United States, and masculinity is paraded in front of us, sometimes in displays that border on self-parody:
George W. Bush dons a flight suit and lands on an aircraft carrier; the self-proclaimed "war president" announces victory (albeit somewhat prematurely). John Kerry, fearing a masculinity gap, serves up a hunting photo-op in the 2004 campaign to show that not only does he have combat experience that Bush lacks but still likes to fire a weapon.
Arnold Schwarzenegger moves from action-movie hero to governor of California, denigrating opponents he deems insufficiently tough as "girly men."
Donald Trump, a businessman famous mostly for being famous and attracting conventionally attractive female partners, boosts a sagging public image with "The Apprentice" television show that pits young wannabe executives against each other in cutthroat competition.
And then there is sex, where victory, conquest, and dealing come together, typically out of public view. Masculinity played out in sexual relationships, straight or gay, brings King of the Hill into our most intimate spaces. Again, this doesn't mean that every man in every sexual situation plays out this dominance, but simply that there exists a pattern. When I speak to mixed groups about these subjects, I often describe the sex-as-dominance paradigm, and then I ask the women in the room if they have any experience with men behaving in such fashion. There is considerable rolling of the eyes and many exasperated sighs at that point. I present it in light-hearted fashion because to put it too harshly makes most mixed audiences very nervous.
And then there is pornography, where brings the private imposition of masculinity into public, putting King-of-the-Hill sex onto the screen.
Pornography's whisper to men
We think of the call of pornography as crass, like a carnival barker's. Like the neon lights of Times Square in its pornographic heyday. Men go to buy pornography in the "red-light" district, the "combat zone." Pornography seems to shout out at us, crudely.
But in reality, pornography speaks to men in a whisper. We pretend to listen to the barker shouting about women, but that is not the draw. What brings us back, over and over, is the voice in our ears, the soft voice that says, "It's OK, you really are a man, you really can be a man, and if you come into my world, it will all be there, and it will all be easy."
Pornography knows men's weakness. It speaks to that weakness, softly. Pornography ends up being about men's domination of women and about the ugly ways that men will take pleasure. But for most men, it starts with the soft voice that speaks to our deepest fear: That we aren't man enough.
Trump and Biden have competing views of masculinity – here's what they mean for presidential leadership - Alternet.org ›
A Call for an Open Discussion of Mass-Marketed Pornography
At a progressive media reform conference dedicated to resisting corporate control of mass media, where many of the participants focus on gender and racial justice, it shouldn't be difficult to interest people in the feminist critique of mass-marketed pornography.
After all, the pornography industry creates a steady stream of relentlessly sexist and racist films and web sites that undermine attempts to build a healthy sexual culture, while filling the pornographers' pockets with substantial profits. A general critique of the effects of misogyny, white supremacy, and predatory corporate capitalism on mass media dovetails perfectly with the feminist critique of sexual-exploitation media.
Yet as I circulated at last month's National Conference on Media Reform and distributed fliers for an upcoming feminist conference on pornography, the responses I got were often skeptical and sometimes hostile. The questions that were commonly asked of me that weekend revealed the need for the left/progressive political community to deepen its understanding of the issue.
The most common of those questions was, "Is your conference an anti-sex project?" reflecting the common distortion that feminist critics of pornography share the right-wing's obsessions about containing sexuality within traditional "family values."
My co-author Gail Dines has developed a clear response to the question, which I borrowed during the weekend in Memphis: When we criticize McDonald's for its unhealthy food, environmentally destructive business practices, and targeting of children through manipulative advertising, does anyone ask whether we are "anti-food"? Of course not, because no one conflates McDonald's with food; we recognize that there are many ways to prepare food, and it's appropriate to critique the more toxic varieties. The same holds for pornography; pursuing a healthy sexuality does not mean we have to support toxic pornography.
Another common response was, "Do you support censorship?" reflecting a distortion of what feminists have proposed as remedies to the problem of pornography. First, the original feminist anti-pornography movement in the 1980s rejected state censorship that works through existing obscenity law and proposed a civil-rights approach that would give people hurt by pornography a chance in court to prove the harm. There are questions to ask about any legal strategy involving expression, and concerns about suppression of free speech are important; there are even disagreements within the feminist anti-pornography movement about this. But that discussion should start from an accurate account of the alternatives.
Second, at this point in the feminist anti-pornography movement the focus is on public education. The goal is to begin an honest conversation about the way in which "mainstream" pornography, the bulk of which is marketed to heterosexual men, is increasingly cruel and degrading to women and more openly racist than ever -- at the same time that it is increasingly accepted as mainstream entertainment. It's ironic to be accused of trying to suppress free speech when trying simply to exercise free speech in critique of profit-driven sexism and racism.
There was much insightful criticism at the conference of the subtle sexism and racism that still pervades mainstream corporate-commercial mass media. Although men and white people -- including in progressive circles -- are sometimes resistant to that analysis, no one argues that it's an inappropriate topic for discussion. Yet for some reason, many of those same progressives -- men and women alike -- don't consider a left/feminist/anti-racist critique of pornography to be part of the media reform/media justice agenda. Why? I think it has to do with fear.
Facing the pornography industry forces us to acknowledge the deep misogyny and white supremacy that still exists in the culture, even with the gains of the feminist and civil-rights movements. Both women and men might understandably be afraid of confronting what pornography tells us about the cruelty of our culture, our own sexual socialization, and the difficult struggles we face to create a world free of sexual violence.
That fear is real, and all the more reason to confront the issue of pornography more openly.
One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hardy Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims first winter.
AlterNet orginally ran this article on Thanksgiving 2005.