Are you starting to see how this all fits together? Do you begin to see how this culture is at war with the world itself, with life itself?
•••
Actually, I have a third response. As I write this, it is midterm election season in the United States, which means sure as shootin’ it is prime time for the United States to bomb and invade more countries. Is there a more reliable way for US politicians to increase their popularity than by killing people, especially when they are able to outsource this killing to machines?
Who’s in charge?
•••
Mumford continues, “The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like the pharaohs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike Job’s God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.”123
* * *
120 I have experienced this directly. I hit an overturned flatbed load of plywood going fifty-five miles per hour. I walked away. My mother broke her neck. Had I been going sixty-five, would she have died? Had I been going forty-five, would she have walked away?
121 Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” 5.
122 Ibid.
123 Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” 5–6.
Chapter Seventeen
Supremacism
I think a lot of self-importance is a product of fear. And fear, living in sort of an un-self-examined fear-based life, tends to lead to narcissism and self-importance.
MOBY
With respect to the idea of possession, I think that with this kind of person [serial sex killers], control and mastery is what we see here. . . . In other words . . . people who take their victims in one form or another out of a desire to possess and would torture, humiliate, and terrorize them elaborately—something that would give them a more powerful impression that they were in control.
SERIAL SEX KILLER TED BUNDY
Every supremacism is unique. Human supremacism is not the same as male supremacism, which is not the same as white supremacism.
However, they do share characteristics. One of these characteristics is their requirement that the supremacists create the perception—and a mythology to promote that perception—that members of classes or groups or sub-groups other than their own are inferior.
And one of the best ways to create and then validate the notion that you are superior to these others is by violating or exploiting them. Surely you couldn’t violate or exploit them if you weren’t superior, right?
There’s a sense, then, in which supremacism is always other-oriented. Not in the sense of caring for or about others, but instead in the sense that supremacism is always comparative, because we can’t be superior by ourselves. In this sense, supremacism is about classifying those who are immediately identifiable as different—such as those of different sex, different color of skin, different economic or social class, different species—as inferior to us, making up rationales (from the religious to the scientific to the economic to whatever the hell we can conjure up) for our perceived superiority, and then victimizing these “inferior” others. This victimization then validates our perception of these others as inferior, thereby reinforcing our own sense of superiority to them. Violation becomes not merely an action, but an identity: who we are, and how we and society define who we are. Each new violation then reaffirms our superiority, as through these repeated acts of violation we come to perceive each new violation as reinforcement not only of our superiority over this other we violated, but as simply the way things are.
So without this identification of others as inferior, without this violation, we are not. We are a void. And so we must fill this void, fill it with validations of our superiority, fill it with violations. Thus the violation of every boundary set up by every Indigenous culture. Thus the extinctions. Thus the insane belief in an economic system based on infinite growth despite the fact that we live on a finite planet. Thus the refusal to accept any limits on technological escalation or on scientific “knowledge.” Thus the sending of probes to penetrate the deepest folds of the ocean floor. Thus the bombing of the moon. Thus the obsessive repetitions of our claims to superiority. By sufficient repetition of both the violations and the claims of superiority we hope to convince ourselves.
What makes this problem even worse is that because there are always those who have yet to be violated, and because this violation isn’t really solving the needs it purports to meet, this drive to violate is insatiable. This culture will continue to violate, until there is nothing left to violate, nothing left.
So what is at stake in this whole discussion is life on this planet. This cult of human supremacism must not merely be left, and must not merely be exposed. Those of us who are not supremacists must stop the supremacists from violating their way to the end of all that is alive.
•••
Mumford wrote, “Why has our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics? The answer to this question is both paradoxical and ironic. Present day technics differs from that of the overtly brutal, half-baked authoritarian systems of the past in one highly favorable particular: it has accepted the basic principle of democracy, that every member of society should have a share in its goods. By progressively fulfilling this part of the democratic promise, our system has achieved a hold over the whole community that threatens to wipe out every other vestige of democracy.
“The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community [by which he means the global elite] may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at the source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified.”124
•••
I am begging you to reread that last paragraph. Read it again. Put down this book. Wait a couple of days. Read it again. Look at this culture.
•••
Mumford also said, “I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, ‘This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!’”125
Unfortunately, Mumford was no fool, and even more unfortunately, things are much worse than I’m sure even he ever imagined
.
•••
He wrote, and this is the last I shall quote him at length in this book, “‘Is this not a fair bargain?’ those who speak for the system will ask. ‘Are not the goods authoritarian technics promises real goods? Is this not the horn of plenty that mankind has long dreamed of, and that every ruling class has tried to secure, at whatever cost of brutality and injustice, for itself?’ I would not belittle, still less deny, the many admirable products this technology has brought forth, products that a self-regulating economy would make good use of. I would only suggest that it is time to reckon up the human [and I would add nonhuman] disadvantages and costs, to say nothing of the dangers, of our unqualified acceptance of the system itself. Even the immediate price is heavy; for the system is so far from being under effective human direction that it may poison us wholesale to provide us with food or exterminate us to provide national security, before we can enjoy its promised goods. Is it really humanly profitable to give up the possibility of living a few years at Walden Pond, so to say, for the privilege of spending a lifetime in Walden Two? Once our authoritarian technics consolidates its powers, with the aid of its new forms of mass control, its panoply of tranquillizers and sedatives and aphrodisiacs, could democracy in any form survive? That question is absurd: life itself will not survive, except what is funneled through the mechanical collective. The spread of a sterilized scientific intelligence over the planet would not, as Teilhard de Chardin so innocently imagined, be the happy consummation of divine purpose: it would rather ensure the final arrest of any further human development.”126
Far more to the point, it would kill the planet.
•••
And even more to the point, it already is killing the planet.
•••
Today I read an article in The New York Times entitled, “In Alaska, a Battle to Keep Trees, or an Industry, Standing.” The article details how in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the United States Forest Service is planning on putting out its biggest timber sale—read: giveaway—in more than ten years: 9.7 square miles of old growth forest, home to many endangered species, such as the Alexander Archipelago wolf (population less than 1300, and falling). The Forest Service has plans to “sell”—read: give away—another eleven square miles of ancient forest in the near future.
Why?
Well, we know the answer to that: this culture hates the natural world, and is doing everything it can to destroy life on this planet.
Let’s ask again: why?
Because this culture is enslaved to authoritarian technics. Even the title of this article gives that away, pretending that in decision-making processes an industry should, for some insane reason, be given equivalent weight to the life of a biome.
Of course representatives from the Forest Service would not answer this honestly.
So now let’s ask it in a way they can possibly answer honestly: what excuses are they using in order to destroy these forests?
“The Forest Service argues that it must keep southeast Alaska’s loggers and sawmills in business until a replacement source of timber is ready: second-growth forests, now maturing on lands where virgin forests were clear-cut.” In other words, the Forest Service and timber industry are doing what the Forest Service and timber industry do, which is to deforest a region, and then when the region is deforested, use this prior deforestation as one of their many excuses for even more deforestation. The article cites the Tongass Forest supervisor, a more-or-less standard tool of the timber industry named Forrest Cole, as saying, “The industry here is quite small today, and it is kind of on the edge of existing or not. And if we lose it, this whole idea of a transition to a new young-growth industry will probably fail immediately.”
Never mind the endangered species and the natural communities who are “on the edge of existing or not.” They are never of primary importance to these people.
I want to point out a few things. The Forest Service and the timber industry have already deforested more than 700 square miles in the Tongass National Forest. These timber “sales” have been, as I alluded to, giveaways, with the Forest Service selling old growth trees for less than the price of a hamburger. No, I’m not making that up. These timber giveaways have not only devastated the region, but have cost US taxpayers over a billion dollars. Nearly all of these trees, and nearly all of these subsidies, have gone to two—count ’em, two—huge corporations. These two corporations conspired to drive countless small family handloggers out of business. These corporations have also, no surprise, been consistent polluters. Most of the trees have either been pulped (so, yes, members of this culture have been wiping their asses on toilet paper or looking up pizza delivery places in Yellow Pages made with old growth trees from this region) or sent unmilled to foreign (mainly Japanese) markets. In order to destroy these forests, the Forest Service has punched in more than 4,500 miles of roads. Of course, US taxpayers paid for those roads. And of course, the nonhumans who live in the area have paid with their lives for those roads. But none of that matters, really, to human supremacists. None of it ever matters to them. What matters to them is slavishly serving the technics, in this case getting out the cut.
I want to point out something else: 94 percent of the old growth on Prince of Wales Island, where this timber “sale” is planned, has already been cut. This “sale” would cut into those remaining margins.
And I want to point out something else: because of prior deforestation, the timber industry in that part of Alaska at this point only employs about 200 people.
Even excluding harm to the real world, the current subsidy amounts to about $130,000 per worker.
We’d all be better off if the US government just handed them $100,000 each and told them to stay home.
Or how’s this for an idea? Pay them to help the forest to heal. Or an even better idea: since they’ve already shown themselves willing to destroy the forest to make money—shown themselves willing to destroy forests at all—pay someone else, perhaps someone who loves forests, $100,000/year to actually help the forest to heal. I know plenty of people who could use the money, and who are hard workers. And most importantly, they actually love forests.
But that won’t work, since it would violate the first principle of both free market capitalism and of authoritarian technics, which is that destructive activities must have priority in receiving handouts.
Environmentalists are suing the Forest Service to stop the “sale.” One of their primary arguments is that the “sale” could drive the Alexander Archipelago wolf closer to extinction.
The New York Times article gives Forest Service Ranger and timber industry shill—but I guess that’s nearly always redundant, isn’t it?—Rachelle Huddleston-Lorton the last words on why the sales must go forward: “Without the mills, there’s no timber industry, and without the Forest Service’s second-growth sales, there are no mills. We’ve got to keep the mills alive.”127
•••
Yes, she actually said that. “Keep the mills alive.” “Alive.” Of course she did. Not wolves. Not forests. Not salmon. Not living beings. Not biomes. Mills.
Are we all starting to see how authoritarian technics control society?
•••
Recall Lewis Mumford’s words: “As with the earliest forms of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction, designed for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief by-product would be the mutilation or extermination of the human race” life on earth.
•••
Also today, I read an article on Truthout entitled, “Winged Warnings: Built for Survival, Birds in Trouble from Pole to Pole.” Some of the article contains important information about the collapse of the biosphere, but human supremacism can’t help but raise its narcissistic head, as the very first quote in the article reads, “If birds are having issues,
you have to think about whether humans are going to have issues too.” Later, a section of the article called “Proxies for People” states that “studies on how endocrine-disrupting chemicals affect birds is a main plank of future research that may also have implications for human health.”128
Or gosh, maybe if we really cared about human health—never mind the rest of the world—we’d disallow the manufacture of endocrine-disrupting chemicals. But that can never happen, because it would go against the authority and primacy of the technics over our lives.
Then I read another article today about how wildlife populations worldwide have collapsed by 52 percent in the past forty years. Of course this horrifies me. It horrifies me even more that this collapse has come on top of other collapses on top of other collapses on top of other collapses, which means current populations are the merest fractions of what they once were. The world used to be what is now unimaginably fecund. We are witnessing (and as a culture, causing; and as an environmental resistance, doing nowhere near enough to stop) pretty much the final despoliation of this once-vibrant planet. This horrifies me. It all evidently horrifies the journalist, but seemingly for a different reason. Once again, the very first quote used in the article is, “‘It’s the loss of the common species that will impact on people. Not so much the rarer creatures, because by the very nature of their rarity we’re not reliant on them in such an obvious way,’ said Dr. Nick Isaac, a macroecologist at the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Oxfordshire. He says that recent work he and colleagues have been doing suggests that Britain’s insects and other invertebrates are declining just as fast as vertebrates, with ‘serious consequences for humanity.’”129
The Myth of Human Supremacy Page 30