We
Are Sitting On A Volcano
By
Arthur Mitzman
CounterPunch
17 July, 2003
Visions
of the future today are more likely to be dystopian than utopian, closer
to the horrors of George Orwell's 1984 and of the films Soylent Green
and Clockwork Orange than to the benign nineteenth-century optimism
of Robert Owen's New View of Society or Charles Fourier's Nouveau Monde
Amoureux. Indeed, we live in dangerous times. Well before September
11, our world had become ecologically and socially so unpredictable
that a book titled Risk Society had been written to describe it. Since
then, there has been increasing awareness at the highest levels of society
of the dangers we live in. But it is doubtful that such awareness will
improve matters without a powerful impulse for change from below.
The author of Risk
Society, Ulrich Beck, has called the attack on the World Trade Center
"the Chernobyl of globalization," exposing "the false
promise of neoliberalism" just as the Ukrainian catastrophe of
1986 "undermined our faith in nuclear energy." Viewing the
shoddy privatized airline security as partly responsible for the suicide
bombings, Beck saw in the pictures of the World Trade Center inferno
"an as yet undecoded message: a state can neoliberalise itself
to death." He decried "the capitalist fundamentalists' unswerving
faith in the redeeming power of the market" as "a dangerous
illusion," and called for a reinvigoration of the state. "We
need," he wrote, "to combine economic integration with cosmopolitan
politics. Human dignity, cultural identity and otherness must be taken
more seriously in the future. Since September 11, the gulf between the
world of those who profit from globalization and the world of those
who feel threatened by it has been closed. Helping those who have been
excluded is no longer a humanitarian task. It is in the west's own interest:
the key to its security."
Note that Beck did
not consider terrorism to be the world's principal problem. Without
denying its significance, he realized, as did many other thinking people,
that the dimensions of the danger were being inflated by a U.S. government
eager, in September 2001, to rally an increasingly hostile public to
its support and to distract its citizens from the ecological and social
concerns underlying the growing protest movements of the previous two
years. As Paul Krugman has written, "at least as far as domestic
policy is concerned, the administration views terrorism as another useful
crisis." Beck understands that the enormous risks we face at the
beginning of the twenty-first century have more to do with the ideological
fundamentalism of neoliberal capitalism than with that of Islamic terror
networks. In fact, there is a considerably greater danger to the world
in general and to American formal democracy in particular of a prolonged
and unnecessary state of war between the West and Islam than of renewed
terrorism.
Nonetheless, despite
the Bush administration's evident desire to parlay Americans' fear of
new attacks into a decades-long "war on terrorism" and the
wish of its more hawkish members to expand the war beyond Iraq, the
chance is great that European doves and Washington realists will prevail,
and that such expansion will not occur. In that case we return to the
problems flowing from global capitalism itself. Indeed, just two months
after the attacks on New York and Washington, bipartisan support for
Bush's domestic program was vanishing, as congressional Democrats returned
to the offensive against the administration's handling of the economic
crisis. These problems are perhaps more serious than even Beck believes
them to be. For the ecological and social damage done to humankind by
the savage globalization of recent decades has long been noticed, and
had met with determined resistance well before the famous "battle
of Seattle." A glance at the record, however, shows that this resistance
has been of little avail.
In the autumn of
1998, "El Niño," a huge recurrent storm cycle whose
violence, scientists said, was exacerbated by environmental pollution,
tormented the earth's atmosphere, breeding storms and floods in Asia
and Latin America, leaving thousands of dead and millions of homeless
people in its wake. Less than two years later, scientists were appalled
to discover that global warming had melted a kilometer-wide gap in the
ice cap at the North Pole. Since this drastic worsening of our ecological
condition was known much earlier, the United States had by then already
agreed to the Kyoto protocol of 1997, which pledged each nation to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions by 7 percent in relation to their 1990 level,
an agreement which was revoked in 2001 by the accession to the U.S.
presidency of the world's most celebrated denier of man-made climate
change. Four months before that accession, however, on August 21, 2000,
the conservative Financial Times pointed out that, halfway through the
twenty-two-year period within which the nations of the world had agreed
to such limitations, the pace of industrial growth had outstripped environmental
measures to such a degree that "a 30 per cent cut would now be
needed to meet the commitment" in the United States, and a 14 percent
reduction in Europe. The FT's editorialist described the prospects for
cutting back greenhouse gases as "dismal," and warned that
"if the danger of global warming is to be confronted seriously,
sustained and probably painful measures will be needed over many decades."
The same issue carried an article headlined "Chile Chokes on Its
Economic Growth."
Twenty one months
later, the United Nations World Food Programme warned that torrential
rain in Nicaragua, which left 1000 people homeless in Managua, heralded
the return of El Niño to the Western hemisphere in the second
half of 2002. At roughly the same time, meteorologists were establishing
an increase in Alaska's average temperature of seven degrees over the
previous three decades, and extreme heat, drought and high winds in
wooded areas of the West and Southwest United States were creating enormous
wildfires. Excoriating George W. Bush's indifference to global warming,
Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, exclaimed: "We're speeding
toward a wall and the president is not only refusing to step on the
brake, he's accelerating."
Meanwhile, we have
discovered another reason for choking. In the course of recent years,
one food scandal after another has rocked the European continent, most
of them the result of profit-oriented applications of industrial technologies
to agriculture. Europeans discovered that Mad Cow Disease, transmittable
to humans, resulted from feeding the carcasses of dead bovines to living
ones, so as to increase their weight and profitability -- practice long
widespread in the United States as well. Genetically modified foods
and beef with hormone additives, pushed by agro-industry as a panacea
for food shortages and blandly accepted in the United States, encountered
import prohibitions in environmentally aware European nations, which
consider genetically modified organisms an incalculable danger to all
forms of life.
Outside Europe,
from the summer of 1997 on, financial and equity markets crashed in
distant places, creating new hordes of paupers and unemployed among
those nations considered only a year earlier the "tigers"
of the world economy; three years later, recovery was still distant
in many Asian countries. The effects of these crashes were echoed in
Russia and South America, stimulating concern among Euro-American elites
that, despite the windfall profits of recent decades, their belief in
unregulated circulation of capital and commodities as the path to salubrious,
unceasing growth might be at least partly responsible for the economic
malaise. In Europe itself, starkly contrasting with such profits, unemployment
climbed above 10 percent, while real hourly wages in the United States
and Europe continued a decline that had begun around 1975, creating
an ever sharper division between rich and poor. At the moment I write
(June 2002), the United States seems to be dragging much of the world
into prolonged recession.
Whether or not the
economic malaise deepens, the ecological problem is bound to worsen.
And in either case, large numbers of wageworkers, small shopkeepers,
farmers, and unemployed will continue to be trapped in a downward trajectory
that engenders bitterness against the propertied minority receiving
unprecedented salaries and dividends. In Europe, the struggle against
this widening gulf between the wealth of the top and the insecurity
and misery of the rest has been going on since the mid-nineties. From
1995 on, in key nations of the European Union, "downsized"
employees, their income, status, and hopes diminished by corporations
competing for investments and by governments privatizing to cut budget
deficits, reacted angrily to being treated as industrial waste. Accused
(by establishment spokesmen) of an archaic, corporatist mentality, they
first demonstrated their militant opposition to privatizations and welfare
cuts during the French strikes of December 1995. Innovative, radically
democratic trade unions, supported by a revitalized Green movement and
by movements of artists and intellectuals recently organized to help
immigrants without papers and fellow citizens without jobs or homes,
parlayed popular hostility to proposed "reforms" of pensions
and social security into a month-long general strike of government workers,
a strike that paralyzed the Gaullist regime and led to its downfall
eighteen months later. That denouement paralleled the voting out of
office of governments committed to supporting conservative capitalism
in Germany, Italy, England, and Belgium. In the French-German heart
of the European Union, red-green coalitions were empowered by the electorate
to reduce unemployment by governmental stimulus of the economy, redistribute
wealth, and end the worst abuses of the environment.
Humankind thus,
tardily, appeared to react against environmental and economic disasters
triggered by the gospel of progress. Bringing them to an end, however,
was to be no simple matter, as the incapacity of the new regimes to
curb the fetishism of growth at any price, to lessen unemployment, and
to curtail neoliberal greed demonstrated. The fact that the social-democratic
regimes which took over the reins of power in a large part of Europe
were unable to break with the neoliberal policies of their predecessors
suggests that the swelling opposition to global capitalism needs to
discuss radically new perspectives, ones that the Left -- including
the Left which since the sixties has called itself "new" --
has been too timid or too trapped in traditional ideologies to formulate.
Coming after a century
of unheard-of violence and social transformation, the incapacity to
change free-market policies -- even of governments born of popular disgust
with neoliberalism -- has profound roots in the ideologies and mentalities
through which Western societies have conceptualized nature, progress,
and themselves since the Renaissance. Closely tied to such self-conceptualizations,
the problems of impending ecological catastrophe and social-economic
malaise loom before us as a double wall blocking the future, noxious
waste products of the unsustainable productivity created by instrumental
reason in the last century and a half.
Environmentally,
our spoliation of the earth's resources and our poisoning of air, earth,
and water may have led us to a point of no return. The results of a
social order founded on technological hubris and on individual and collective
avarice are already being felt: the steady destruction of the earth's
rain forests by huge lumber and agricultural combines, the acid rain
denuding woodlands throughout Europe, and the warming trend which, if
unreversed, will probably lead to the inundation of the earth's coastal
areas and the death or homelessness of hundreds of millions of people
by the middle of the present century. In the enormous land mass of the
former Soviet Union, nuclear and other varieties of pollution have diminished
life expectancy by ten years in the last generation, proof that the
state capitalist rape of nature can be as traumatic as the private capitalist
variety.
A recent quantitative
study of our relationship to our biological environment-the 2002 Living
Planet Report of the World Wildlife Fund-underscores our perilous condition.
The report states that a continuation of humankind's current pillaging
of the earth's natural resources will lead, by the year 2030, to an
unavoidable decline in human welfare, as measured by average life expectancy,
educational level, and world economic product. The report measures our
"ecological footprint" by calculating the land area required
to sustain consumption of the total human population at current levels.
This averages about 2.3 hectares for each of the six billion people
on the planet. The "biological capacity" of the earth, however-the
level of exploitation consistent with replenishment of resources-is
equal to just 1.9 hectares per person. Having passed the point of sustainable
use of resources in the 1980s, we now consume annually about 20 percent
more of the earth's biological capacity than we restore, and given current
trends we will be consuming about 50 percent more by the year 2050.
The report indicates that the ecological footprint is much deeper in
North America and Europe-9.6 and 5 hectares per person respectively-than
in Asia and Africa, where the use of resources is estimated at 1.4 hectares
per person.
Politically, the
danger of fueling a world economy on unsustainable energy resources
is perhaps more immediate than the ecological hazard. The more affluent
societies have enjoyed a free lunch until now on the basis of fossil
fuel supplies -- oil, gas, and coal -- which, apart from their destructive
effects on air, land, and water, will be largely exhausted before the
end of this century. In the case of oil, given the steady decline in
the discovery of new reserves, educated predictions are that output
will peak between 2004 and 2008, a peak that will be followed by declining
production and a rapid rise in the price of oil-based fuel; the latter
will drastically increase the cost of transporting persons and goods.
We have already seen the violent reactions from auto-addicted Europeans
and Americans to sudden increases in gas pump prices. The Report of
the National Energy Policy Development Group, signed by the American
vice-president and most of the cabinet in May 2001, blandly forecasted
an increase in U.S. energy needs of 32 percent in the next two decades.
While they indicated where they hoped to procure it (in part, the Caspian
Sea), the authors mentioned neither the probable rapid increase in the
price of oil nor the political turmoil this was likely to create toward
the end of George W. Bush's present term of office. But it is not unreasonable
to speculate that the military adventurism in central Asia and the Middle
East of an American government headed by oil barons may be motivated
by more than the hunt for an elusive gang of terrorists.
Socially and economically,
the global expansion of capitalist markets has been fueled by the development
of an information technology that makes most traditional production
jobs as well as many third sector employments obsolete. In the 1990s
neoliberal globalization combined with computerization led to two equally
dangerous phenomena. One was a runaway speculation in financial capital
and technology shares which, though slowing down for a presumed "soft
landing" in 2000, dangerously destabilized the world economy. Starting
with the summer of 1999, European commentators expressed repeated fears
of a world crash equivalent to that of 1929. The other was a redistribution
of world income in favor of the 20 percent of the world's population
which possessed either capital or the high-level education in the manipulation
of abstractions that is necessary for information technology. For the
majority of ordinary mortals, particularly in those large parts of our
planet where modernization and industrialization have replaced religious
notions of a hereafter with the tangible prospect of ever-increasing
material welfare, the recent downturn in expectations has had a serious
impact on self-esteem and identity. It has been hundreds of years since
an adult generation in the Euro-American heartland of "progress"
realistically expected a harder, instead of an easier, life for its
children.
These worsening,
seemingly insoluble, ecological and social problems result from the
persistence of institutions and ideologies that have become totally
inadequate to our situation. I am convinced that if we cannot question,
or at least consider modifying, these institutions and ideologies, we
are going to vanish like sparrows flying into a jetliner. It is, in
other words, imperative that we step back and take a longer perspective
on the course of human history as well as on the resources for changing
that course. More than the post-September 11 threats of war and terrorism,
the crises of environmental decay and economic malaise that I shall
discuss in this book cast a shadow on the future of humanity, leading
many of us into an unreal kind of living for the moment, an almost psychotic
egoism. How we arrived at this dark passage and how we might get beyond
it are the themes of this book.
While I am aware
that we are in desperate straits and am apprehensive about the future,
I nonetheless am convinced that the most powerful "realism"
today is the utopian imagination. The forces we have created and that
currently shape our thinking about the future have a contradictory character.
When applied in appropriate dosage they can cure rather than kill. Think
of the mix of social and individual forces at work in the creation of
modern society. Historians, anthropologists, and sociologists understand
the dependence of healthy individuality on strong social settings that
encourage it, as evidenced in the first flowering of classical culture
in the Greek polis, or in its later blooming in the Italian Renaissance.
In the modern world, the hypertrophy of individualism unleashed by ideologies
that have abandoned the social nexus has produced anomic criminality
as well as the avarice and financial power of the superwealthy, but
in a more humane social context, modern individualism could also find
expression in the sonnets of Shakespeare, the operas of Mozart, the
novels of Zola, and the art of Picasso. Similarly, the social impulse
is maleficent only when it loses sight of individual needs. If it has
led to the creation of totalitarian empires, bureaucratic tyrannies,
the techno-corporate monstrosities of contemporary capitalism, and the
opposed terrorisms of Western and Eastern fundamentalisms, it has also
powered revolutions demanding social justice for oppressed masses. At
a more local scale, social bonding may have created lynch mobs and pogroms,
but it also nurtured neighborhood friendships, romantic love, idealistic
brother bands in art and politics, and communal self-help.
The Western cultural
tradition has for nearly three millennia evoked these opposed potentialities
-- the dark sides of human existence as well as the cures for present
and future ills -- in the figure of the Greek god Prometheus. The importance
of the myth of Prometheus has increased rather than decreased in the
modern era, epitomizing the innovative economic and social force of
modernity expressed by most ideologies of the last two centuries. Other
myths, sometimes competing with and sometimes supplementing the Promethean
one, have of course also served as seedbeds of modern ideologies. Individuals
and groups in contemporary society continue to believe in the salvationist
myth of Christ. Others revere the devotion to aesthetic perfection associated
with the myths of Orpheus and Apollo, or the demonic productivity of
Faust or the intoxicated descent into instinctual life associated with
Dionysos. Insofar as the Promethean ethos is a myth of heroic creation
and sacrifice, however, I believe it has been the principal inspiration
of the continual transformations of our world, the dominant myth of
the modern age. In Freudian terms, it has defined the principal link
between rational ego, moral will, and instinctual impulse in our world,
for the better in the democratic revolutions to which we are the heirs,
for the worse in the catastrophic scenarios to which uncontrolled nationalism
and industrialism, by-products of those revolutions, led in the twentieth
century. The complexities of the Promethean tradition are the complexities
of the contemporary world; the faces of modern Prometheanism are as
multiple and contradictory as those of modernity itself.
This book, in contrast
to the prevailing interpretation of Prometheanism, has as its point
of departure a vision of the Titan God that may nurture hope rather
than terror of the future.
Arthur Mitzman is
emeritus professor of modern history at the University of Amsterdam.
This essay is the introduction to Professor Mitzman's excellent new
book, Prometheus
Revisited: The Quest for Global Justice in the 21st Century. JSC/AC]His
previous books include The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of
Max Weber and Michelet, Historian: Rebirth and Romanticism in Nineteenth-Century
France. He can be reached at:[email protected]