The failure of imagination at work here is stunning, or at least it would be had we not already rendered ourselves relatively insensate by our addiction or enslavement to these authoritarian technics, these technics that have become some of this culture’s assumptions which must never be questioned. Humans have lived without industrially-generated electricity for nearly all of our existence; we thrived on every continent except Antarctica. And for nearly all those years, the majority of humans lived sustainably and comfortably. And let’s not forget the many traditional Indigenous peoples (plus another almost 2 billion people) who are living without electricity today. The Japanese official is so lacking in imagination that he can’t even imagine that they exist.
George Monbiot, in his Guardian article, asks some questions about living without industrial electricity: “How do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways—not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels?”
These rhetorical questions are problematical for multiple reasons. The first is that he explicitly identifies with those processes, technics, and people who are killing the planet, and not the real world. How differently would we react to his rhetorical questions if we changed just a few words? “How do the capitalists drive their textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways—not to mention advanced industrial processes. Rooftop solar panels?”
The answer? Not our problem. And unless the capitalists can come up with a way to perform these actions without harming other communities, including nonhuman communities, then the real problem we face is: how do we stop them?
Once you break your identification with the system, with the authoritarian technics that are driving planetary murder, your language and your actions become very different. Once you identify with the real, living planet, everything changes.
To be clear: it’s not my responsibility to figure out how to deliver the energy that the capitalists “need” to run their factories (no, they need to breathe clean air, and drink clean water, and eat nourishing food; they don’t need to run a factory). Nor is it the responsibility of others who are harmed by their electricity-generation. And if that electricity can’t be generated without harming other communities, it shouldn’t be generated.
In any case, Monbiot’s (one hopes, temporary) identification with the capitalists leads him to a conclusion that makes no sense to someone who is not in thrall to the technics, but that is easily understood once we realize he is being guided not by life, but by the technics itself. He states, “The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production.” Actually, no. The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment you fall out of love with the whole economy, an economy that is systematically exploitative and destructive, an economy that is killing the planet.
It is insane to favor textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces, electric railways, and advanced industrial processes over a living planet. Our ability to imagine is so impoverished that we cannot even imagine what is happening right in front of our faces.
Why is it unimaginable, unthinkable, or absurd to talk about getting rid of industrial electricity, but it is not unimaginable, unthinkable, and absurd to think about extirpating great apes, great cats, salmon, passenger pigeons, Eskimo curlews, short-nosed sea snakes, coral reef communities, entire oceans? And why is it just as accepted to allow the extinction of Indigenous humans who are also inevitably victims of this way of life (many of whom live with little or no electricity)? This failure of imagination is not only insane, it is profoundly immoral.
Imagine for a moment that we weren’t suffering from this lack of imagination. Imagine a public official saying not that he cannot imagine living without electricity, but that he cannot imagine living with it, that what he can’t imagine living without are polar bears, the mother swimming hundreds of miles next to her child, and, when the child tires, hundreds of miles more with the cub on her back. Imagine if public officials—or better, imagine if we all—were to say we cannot imagine living without rockhopper penguins (as I write this, the largest nesting grounds of endangered rockhoppers are threatened by an oil spill). Imagine if we were to say we cannot imagine living without the heart-stopping flutters and swoops and dives of bats, and we cannot imagine living without hearing frog song in spring. Imagine if we were to say that we cannot live without the solemn grace of newts, and the cheerful flight of bumblebees (some areas of China are so polluted that all pollinators are dead, which means most flowering plants are effectively dead, which means hundreds of millions of years of evolution have been destroyed). Imagine if it were not this destructive culture—and its textile mills, brick kilns, electric railways, and advanced industrial processes—that we could not imagine living without, but rather the real, physical world.
How would we act, and react, differently if we not only said these things but meant them? How would we act, and react, differently if we were not insane? And I mean that in the deepest sense, of being out of touch with physical reality. How can it be so difficult to understand that humans can survive (and have survived) quite well without an industrial economy, but an industrial economy—and in fact any economy—cannot survive without a living planet?
The truth is, the Japanese official and anybody else who states that they cannot imagine living without electricity had better start, because the industrial generation of electricity is simply not sustainable—whether it’s by coal or oil or hydro or industrial solar and wind—which means someday, and likely someday soon, people will be not only imagining living without electricity, but actually living without it, along with the more than 2 billion already doing so. About this prospect, a hapa (half Hawaiian) man recently said to me, “A lot of us are just biding our time, waiting to go back to the old ways. Can’t be more than a few decades at the latest. We did okay out here without microwave popcorn and weedwhackers and Jet Skis.”
Which leads me to the third article I read, titled “What Are You Willing to Sacrifice to Give Up Nuclear Energy?” In it, the author talks, as did the Japanese official, as does more or less everyone for whom this culture’s economy is more important than life on the planet, about the importance of cheap energy to the industrial economy. But he’s got it all wrong. The real question is: what are you willing to sacrifice to allow the continuation of nuclear energy? And more broadly: what are you willing to sacrifice to allow the continuation of this industrialized way of life?
Given that industrial-scale electricity is unsustainable, and that a lot of people, including nonhuman people, are dying because of it, another question worth asking is: what will be left of the world when the electricity goes off? Just as with the temporary ability of industrial humans to move very fast, we all need to ask for how long will (some) humans have industrially-generated electricity, and at what cost? I can’t speak for you, but I’d rather be living on a planet that is healthier and more capable of sustaining life, than on one that is less. And I’m sure nonhumans would as well.
•••
Remind me yet again, who’s in charge?
•••
Lewis Mumford wrote, “My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late Neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other [hu]man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable. If I am right, we are now rapidly approaching a point at which, unless we radically alter our present course, our surviving democratic technics will be completely suppressed or supplanted, so that every residual autonomy will be wiped out, or will be permitted only as a playful device of government, like national balloting for already chosen leaders in totalitarian countries.”110
•••
Would you like to vote for a Democrat, or a Rep
ublican? Would you like a cherry-flavored pellet, or a banana-flavored pellet? Sure, we’ve all got choices.
Just not the choice to live on a living planet.
•••
Mumford wrote that while “democratic technics goes back to the earliest use of tools, authoritarian technics is a much more recent achievement: it begins around the fourth millennium BC in a new configuration of technical invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control that gave rise to the peculiar mode of life we may now identify, without eulogy, as civilization. Under the new institution of kingship, activities that had been scattered, diversified, cut to the human measure, were united on a monumental scale into an entirely new kind of theological-technological mass organization. In the person of an absolute ruler, whose word was law, cosmic powers came down to earth, mobilizing and unifying the efforts of thousands of men, hitherto all-too-autonomous and too decentralized to act voluntarily in unison for purposes that lay beyond the village horizon. The new authoritarian technology was not limited by village custom or human sentiment: its herculean feats of mechanical organization rested on ruthless physical coercion, forced labor and slavery, which brought into existence [social] machines that were capable of exerting thousands of horsepower centuries before horses were harnessed or wheels invented. This centralized technics drew on inventions and scientific discoveries of a high order: the written record, mathematics and astronomy, irrigation and canalization: above all, it created complex human machines composed of specialized, standardized, replaceable, interdependent parts—the work army, the military army, the bureaucracy. These work armies and military armies raised the ceiling of human achievement: the first in mass construction, the second in mass destruction, both on a scale hitherto inconceivable [I would say that both are destructive: the latter is the army for the war against humans, and the former the army for the war against nonhumans]. Despite its constant drive to destruction, this totalitarian technics was tolerated, perhaps even welcomed, in home territory, for it created the first economy of controlled abundance: notably, immense food crops that not merely supported a big urban population but released a large trained minority for purely religious, scientific, bureaucratic, or military activity. But the efficiency of the system was impaired by weaknesses that were never overcome until our own day.”111
•••
Do you remember the story of the chimpanzees who outperform humans at games that require players to perceive and respond to patterns in other players’ game play? And do you remember the conclusions the human supremacists reached regarding the chimpanzees’ superiority at this game? One was that the nonhumans were using a “simpler model” while humans were “overthinking” it. Another was that chimpanzees are deceitful, manipulative cheaters, and humans, on the other hand, the clearly superior ones, have developed language, semantic thought, and cooperation.
At the time, I made snarky comments about how the people claiming humans are cooperative are among those systematically imprisoning, exploiting, and/or exterminating nonhumans the world over, refusing to participate in (or cooperate with) natural communities, and in their failure to cooperate with other members of natural communities, and instead in their attempts to dominate these communities, are killing the planet. I cannot imagine anything less cooperative than trying to convert the entire planet to use by you and others like you.
The use of the word cooperation stuck with me. How could they say something so completely counterfactual and just plain stupid? Yes, I know that believing is seeing, such that your ideology can pretty much determine what you perceive and what you don’t. And yes, I understand that human supremacism causes its adherents to project “all things bad” onto nonhumans (and onto the body) and “all things good” onto the wonderful amazing human mind. And yes, I understand that human supremacists believe the human brain is the most complex phenomenon in the universe, and yes, I understand that for human supremacists, all meaning comes only from humans. I saw another example of this latter just yesterday (actually, I see examples of this all the time, but I’ll share this one). I was reading a G.K. Chesterton Father Brown story, and he had the following throwaway paragraph that illustrates yet again this culture’s unquestioned belief that humans are the only bearers of meaning: “Far as the eye could see, farther and farther as they mounted the slope, were seas beyond seas of pines, now all aslope one way under the wind. And that universal gesture seemed as vain as it was vast, as vain as if that wind were whistling about some unpeopled and purposeless planet. Through all that infinite growth of grey-blue forests sang, shrill and high, that ancient sorrow that is in the heart of all heathen things. One could fancy that the voices from the underworld of unfathomable foliage were cries of the lost and wandering pagan gods: gods who had gone roaming in that irrational forest, and who will never find their way back to heaven.”112 If there are no “people” there is no purpose. There is no rationality. There is, however, sorrow. And of course, there is no heaven.
Pretty much everything that is wrong with how this culture perceives the natural world in just four sentences.
Anyway, I understand all of this, but still couldn’t wrap my mind around the presumption that humans had “developed” cooperation, and most especially that we had done so after we “left the trees.” These people have never heard of flowers and bees cooperating in pollination? Salmon and forests cooperating? Hell, bacteria in our own guts cooperating so we can, you know, digest? And I just don’t see how a culture that created capitalism, the selfish gene theory, and more broadly, human supremacism, and that is destroying the planet, could be even remotely accused of “cooperating.” I just read that in the North Atlantic, cod populations are at about 2 to 3 percent of what they once were, and are not recovering, but continuing to decline. Yet commercial fishing corporations are refusing to allow measures—such as halting bottom trawling, sufficiently lowering (or eliminating entirely) the catch, and so on—to let the cod have even a chance at recovery. They call this cooperating?
But now I get it. And Mumford helped me understand. Let’s take this step by step. Within this supremacist culture our epistemology—how we know whether something is true—is tied to domination. As Dawkins stated, “Science bases its claims to truth on its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.” This tie between domination and epistemology is generally accepted without question or thought in this culture. Likewise, within this supremacist culture it is authoritarian technics that are generally considered the greatest achievements. This tie between domination and achievement is also generally accepted without question or thought in this culture. So why should it surprise us when the notion of cooperation is likewise coopted into the service of authoritarianism and domination? Cooperation, in this supremacist perspective, does not in fact mean reading the needs of those in your community and responding to them by helping these others. And it certainly doesn’t mean reading the needs of those in your larger biotic community and acting to improve the capacity of this biotic community to support life. It does not mean cooperating with the living planet to make this living planet healthier, as is normal behavior for residents of this planet.113
No, cooperation in this context means something completely different, something completely in line with the thrust of this whole authoritarian culture. Cooperation in this case means the creation of “complex human machines composed of specialized, standardized, replaceable, interdependent parts—the work army, the military army, the bureaucracy.” Cooperation has been perverted into its toxic mimic through the conversion of living human animals into cogs in hierarchical social machines.
•••
In the case of wiping out the cod, cooperating means forming corporations to control armies of workers who are “cooperating” to build huge fishing vessels; forming academic bureaucracies to task armies of researchers to “cooperate” to discover ways to use so
nar to find and destroy schools of cod; forming corporations to control armies of fishermen to “cooperate” in killing fish; forming corporations to charge armies of workers with “cooperating” to transport fish to markets; forming corporations to send armies of lobbyists to “work together” with “decision-makers” to make sure the catch doesn’t go down so long as there is a single cod who can be turned into fish sticks (and hence, money); and forming huge armies of “fisheries scientists” and bureaucrats to cooperate in overseeing the extermination of the cod, via managing them to death.
•••
Gosh, it’s a lot more flattering to say that humans are superior because we learned to “cooperate,” rather than to say we’re superior because we learned the power of top-down, military-style bureaucratic organization, isn’t it? Although this organizational form does bring a lot of benefits (that is, for the few at the expense of the many, including nonhumans); and it’s also completely fantastic at getting large numbers of perhaps otherwise moral people to act in profoundly immoral ways.
For the sake of our own vanity and sense of superiority, let’s keep calling it “cooperation,” okay?
•••
Mumford then describes some of the weaknesses of the authoritarian system: “To begin with, the democratic economy of the agricultural village resisted incorporation into the new authoritarian system. So even the Roman Empire found it expedient, once resistance was broken and taxes were collected, to consent to a large degree of local autonomy in religion and government. Moreover, as long as agriculture absorbed the labor of some 90 per cent of the population, mass technics were confined largely to the populous urban centers. Since authoritarian technics first took form in an age when metals were scarce and human raw material, captured in war, was easily convertible into machines, its directors never bothered to invent inorganic mechanical substitutes. But there were even greater weaknesses: the system had no inner coherence: a break in communication, a missing link in the chain of command, and the great human machines fell apart. Finally, the myths upon which the whole system was based—particularly the essential myth of kingship—were irrational, with their paranoid suspicions and animosities and their paranoid claims to unconditional obedience and absolute power. For all its redoubtable constructive achievements, authoritarian technics expressed a deep hostility to life.”114
The Myth of Human Supremacy Page 26