Apocalypse
I have reached for the sword.
I can’t or won’t tell you how or when.
Let me then make the argument.
1) We are at seven billion humans now, expected to rise to at least nine billion.
2) If everybody lived like an American, we would need about eight planets. For Europeans the number is about four.
3) Voluntary (individual and community) efforts to reduce environmental impact by changing behavior have been ineffective.
4) Coercive (government) efforts to reduce environmental impact have been effective in some instances (ozone, dioxins) but not on other big environmental threats.
5) Therefore, as consumption continues to increase as the rich continue to find new ways to consume, poor people cease being peasant farmers and get jobs, and population continues to rise, we are going to damage the planet extremely severely, perhaps even kill it.
6) Furthermore, we are giving rise to entirely new classes of threat, including biotechnology and nanotechnology, either one of which could result in massive permanent damage, including completely annihilation, of the world. Our willingness to retain our nuclear capacity speaks volumes about our ability to handle such technologies.
In the long run, if we are going to survive, there are two unambiguous options.
A) A peaceful and sane technological breakthrough, such as ultra-cheap solar panels or safe molecular manufacturing, which allows humans to consume at these rates or higher without killing nature by degrees.
or
B) Global enforcement of planet-saving environmental policies at the expense of human comfort, at least for those consuming most at the moment.
I still believe A) is partially possible, in that we may get the technological breakthroughs. However, most of the advanced novel technologies are used for war, and you are likely to see a Terminator from nanotechnology long before a Cornucopia Machine.
However, B) is much more plausible. The utter destructive, homicidal madness of human beings, as seen in the age of Pol Pot, could arise and turn on hyperconsumers at any time. The bloodshed would be immense, but a planetary interregnum while concerned humans simply tore down the technical foundations of over-consumption to protect the planet is entirely plausible to me – far more so than a simple renunciation of war, and an acceptance of a peaceful high-technology future for humanity.
This is, fundamentally, what has been kicking my ass. This is the crisis.
However I roll the dice, I wind up back here, and I can’t find a way out that gels with what I know. The ultratech solution is fine – apart from the nanowar. The peasant revolution is fine, apart from the machete war.
But all we are doing right now is winching a roller-coaster up and up and up, and the tracks it will roll down go over a cliff, into planetary extinction.
Why are we doing this? Because the dominant cultures on this planet have believed for thousands of years that the way to a better world lies on the other side of a planetary catastrophe called The Apocalypse, in which various horrors from the divine world are unleashed upon the earth, culminating in a global fascism under a single just ruler.
The secret impulse in all hearts to destroy the world is a perverted desire to see the face of god, or some similarly benign condition, upon the face of the earth.
It is bad theology which underlies every belching smoke stack and every abattoir. Nature is not sacred, it is simply the growth medium for humanity, one part to be judged, one part to be saved, to live under unipolar divine law forever more.
Sacred cow becomes sacred hamburger.
Bad myths make bad people.
People like Dick Cheney are demonized. They may, indeed, act like demons, but the special power we afford them, and Hitler, and Mao, and Stalin is the reflected darkness of the Antichrist, the Sum of All Fears, the Adversary, the thing set against God which controls some aspect of the fate of man. We imbue the darker facets of power with a metaphysical horror, an elemental Evil which owes nothing to the pre-Monotheist conceptions of power. A bad king is no longer a bad man, but a facet of The Power Which Opposes, the Heart of Darkness, and eventually, dare we say it, Satan. Our cultural mythology is full of Good Guys, leading us up, and Bad Guys, leading us down. People expect these Agents of Evil to triumph, some literally, creating the need for a just ruler who will reward the innocent and punish the guilty and non-believers. But first the world must die.
If a Hindu fundamentalist had not killed Gandhi in 1948, at 78, Gandhi would have lead the global campaign against nuclear weapons, for world peace. If he had lived to 100, he would have lived all the way through the 1960s, and perhaps provided us with the spiritual leadership we needed to slip the yoke of these evil dreams, and find happiness and freedom on this earth. Imagine the 1960s with Gandhi at its head.
Instead, there was no effective force to oppose the settlement we have with the nuclear issue, Mutually Assured Destruction, which lasts to this very day.
You expect goodness and sanity in a world where we are never more than minutes from complete annihilation if one power group or another presses the red button? The very fact of those weapons is the proof of our madness.
As it is, I fear a dark path is upon us. The cleansing of the world by fire is a deep, deep myth in India culture – the Kalki Avatar, the incarnation of Vishnu who comes “when Thieves dress as Kings” and puts the lot to the sword to make way for a new age. This may be the mythology which killed Gandhi – a man who wished for Gandhi to make war with the Muslims, or at least maintain the sacred barriers of Caste, rather than ushering in peace and egalitarian freedom for all. I wonder if, perhaps, he was killed because he was not Kalki enough. But now I must ask you something.
Do you really believe we’re going to turn this thing around?
Look at the world. We’ve gone crazy. We plod on through our days, and each one of the seven billion of us, or at least the two billion rich, carries a little share of the death of the world and the massacre of the poor within us. One two-billionth share of the death of the world does not seem very much – a hamburger, a six pack and a decent car and house will do it. Our individual shares of the damage seem so small, and so necessary. None of us are responsible because all of us are.
That sword cuts both ways. We, whose over-consumption is killing the world, bear collective responsibilities for our actions.
The polluter pays. We say qui bono, “to who’s advantage” and the answer is, “ours.”
It’s going to get settled by coercive force. It’s probably not going to be governments, because they’re causing most of these problems.
If the world is to live, it’s going to come down to one of two things, and the interaction between them.
i) Hail-Mary pass benign technologies, like Nanosolar, arriving without God Help Us technologies like nanowar.
ii) Effective coercion of polluters and over-consumers from non-state actors. Think Sea Shepherd on steroids.
Both of these, frankly, call for use of coercive force by people who take the survival of the planet a hell of a lot more seriously than governments, who are the number one threat to it right now, given their nuclear stockpiles and sponsorship of insanely destructive technologies on all sides.
Corporations are not the problem. Governments which allow them to run amok are the problem. Voters allow governments to run amuck, voters are the problem. Voters = buyers = consumers = We The People are The Problem.
Because right at the bottom of it, in some narrow little Freudian place, you don’t care what we’re doing to the planet, because when it dies, Jesus comes back.
Now I don’t know if this analysis is correct. I am going through a dark patch here, and I’m putting this out here for discussion. Perhaps there’s a different explanation.
But I cannot see, for the life of me, that this doesn’t all root back into the desire to end the world in pursuit of something better than life. That’s what we’re buying at the mall: little unitized packets of the death of the world, packaged into products, and enjoyed not in spite of, but because of, the worldeath they represent.
Bad myths make bad people.
When the time comes, as it might, we may all be forced to consider the role of violence and bad mythology at the roots of our culture.
The world is not guaranteed a future, and neither are we. It may, or may not, all just work out this time, as it has for humanity every other time.
It is different now, because we ourselves are in charge.
Nearly everything about cars and houses is controlled by the State, and as a result, they completely suck from an energy and environment perspective. All innovation is crushed flat. Most of heavy industry likewise – subsidies for what is old and dirty, disincentives for what is new and clean. Consider nuclear vs. renewable subsidies, when all costs are taken into account. Are we really so stupid we can’t make a green car and a green house? No! But the aggregated will-to-destroy in people, bad myths, leads us to accept this fate as our own. We will ruin the global economy for futile religious wars in the middle east, but not tax carbon slightly to encourage the move towards a sustainable world – a world with a future.
I don’t know how you dig 6,000 years plus of bad software out of something without a reformat.
Maybe Kalki was right.