Politics is the problem, not the solution: Politics, regardless of party or ideology, is part of the problem and can never be part of the solution. While it may be easier for the average person to live under the rule of a more humane parcel of rogues, at its heart politics is the primary guardian institution of modern civilization. The role of all politics is to ensure that power is managed, and power is always managed for the benefit of the holders of power.
The accepted wisdom of today's environmental reform movement is founded on
two core assumptions. The first is that most of the technical solutions we
need to address the world's various crises are available, or at least could be
swiftly developed by sufficiently intelligent, hard-working people. The
second assumption is that all that's lacking for a successful outcome is the
political will to put these technical solutions into effect.
Whether the discussion turns to replacing coal-fired power plants with wind
turbines and using electric cars instead of gas-driven SUVs, converting
industrial agricultural practices to organic permaculture, or reversing the
decline of ocean life though international regulations, it is an article of
faith in the reform movement that we know what we need to do and all that's
lacking is a sufficiently visionary leader to put more planet-friendly solutions
in place.
Both those assumptions ignore significant aspects of the situation — aspects
that must be addressed for the envisioned reforms to be successful. This
article examines those two assumptions with an eye to uncovering the confounding
issues.
The array of problems
As the following laundry list of negative trends clearly illustrates, the scale and diversity of the problems we face are significant.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is approaching 400 parts per million.
We are emitting carbon dioxide 10 times faster than one of the world's largest known volcanic eruptions (the Deccan Traps) that was implicated in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago.
World oil production is on a 4 year plateau despite prices that have quadrupled during that time.
In our oceans the coral reefs are dying, dead zones are expanding, and predatory fish species (the ones we eat) have declined by 90% in the last 50 years.
The biomass of prey fish in the Great Lakes has fallen by 92% since 2000.
The estimated extinction rate for plants and animals is at least 75 species per day.
The Great Pacific Garbage Dump is full of plastic. [More at Mindfully.org]
Over 75,000 square miles of arable land is lost each year to urbanization and desertification.
A billion people in over 110 countries are seriously affected by desertification.
Nearly a third of the world's cropland has been abandoned since WW II because of damage by intensive agriculture and erosion.
On the American Great Plains, half the topsoil has been lost in the last hundred years.
The Ogallala aquifer in the western United States is being drained up to 100 times faster than it is being refilled.
Indian farmers have drilled over 21 million water wells using oil-well technology. They take 200 billion cubic tonnes of water out of the earth each year for irrigation.
We have eaten more grain than we have grown in 7 of the last 8 years.
World carry-over grain stocks were 130 days of consumption in 1986 — today, it's only 53 days.
The global per capita grain supply has fallen from 340 kg in 1984 to 300 kg today.
The world price of fertilizer is rising exponentially.
The IPCC predicts that climate change will cut African food production in half by 2020.
The cost of food is skyrocketing world-wide. Some countries have responded by banning exports of wheat or rice.
We are in the beginning stages of a global financial crisis that could result in either a deflationary or hyper-inflationary depression lasting for a decade or more.
These sorts of problems are known as wicked
problems. That means they are messy, circular, aggressive
and interlinked, so that trying to solve one may worsen others. Each
problem shows a trend, and all the trends appear to be worsening
inexorably. In some cases the trends have been visible for centuries (for
example the loss of arable land and desertification), sometimes for decades (as
with the loss of aquatic biomass), and some like Peak Oil for a scant few
years. In all cases the global trends show no signs of reversing, however
much effort has been expended to alter their local or regional trajectories . As
their effects become more pronounced, it becomes easier to see their potential
to hit our globalized industrial civilization like a planet-sized version of
Hurricane Katrina.
As daunting as the individual problems are, the key to understanding the
importance of this list is recognizing the degree of the linkages between them.
In many cases, trying to solve one problem can inadvertently make others
worse. One prominent example is the attempt to address global warming
through the use of ethanol as a vehicle fuel. While there may have been
some merit to that primary intention, the secondary effects — increasing dead
zones in the oceans due to fertilizer runoff, and rising food prices due to the
use of food crops as fuel — eliminated the overall benefit of the effort, and
even created a net negative outcome.
Similar knock-on effects have occurred in in other areas. The attempt to
raise food production through irrigation and the use of petroleum-based
fertilizers has depleted water tables and reinforced a style of agriculture
based on a finite resource. The attempt to increase global living
standards (and thereby reduce population growth) by exporting production
facilities to regions with lower wage and environmental standards has backfired
by increasing levels of water, air and soil pollution — increases that have
been felt well beyond the boundaries of those regions. One dark quip that
addresses this sort of backfire is, "Around
every silver lining there is a cloud."
When viewed from this perspective it becomes obvious that dealing with the
panoply of problems besetting our world involves considerably more than just
knocking them down one at a time. If we don't apply holistic, system-level
thinking to the converging crisis, our well-meaning efforts stand an excellent
chance of making the overall situation worse.
I have concluded that it is a mistake to think of "solving" these
problems in any global or final sense. Some of them may be improved
regionally, especially if they are not in local conflict with other competing
problems. The logical corollary is that there will be other regions where
those same problems cannot be solved, due different local circumstances.
The big question, however, concerns those problems that are not contained, that
do not respect national or regional boundaries. Global warming and the
death of ocean biomes affect us all, and failures to address these problems in
any region can make the situation worse for everyone. In these cases, it's
obvious that a collective global response is called for — a response that
brings together the political, economic, industrial and opinion-making
institutions of our world. If these institutions acted together they might
have a chance of implementing the deep and wide-ranging changes the situation
calls for.
Unfortunately, until now we have seen precious little evidence of such a
collective response. For example, we have repeatedly seen climate
change conferences break down or issue watered-down statements that fail to
address the scale of the accelerating crisis. While individuals, citizens'
groups and even some governments are obviously aware of the urgency, collective
action repeatedly fails to gain the required global traction.
This state of affairs is no accident.
This is not because of some dark and sinister cabal or conspiracy to hold back
change in the name of personal profit, though there probably are some instances
of that. The real reasons are at once more banal and more worrisome than
the Bilderberg
watchers assume. In the next section I will examine the structural reasons
for this sorry situation.
Politics, the high art of civilization
In order to understand the role that politics plays in our collective failure to address the predicament described above, we need to examine the nature of modern civilization.
Now, when I use the term "modern
civilization" I’m not just talking about the growth of industrialism over the last two hundred years. I’m not even talking about the growth of Western culture over the last two thousand years. What we usually think of as
“modern civilization” is the development, refinement and culmination of cultural changes that began ten thousand years ago.
In turn, in order to understand modern civilization, we need to look even farther back, at how humans lived before we became "modern and civilized" and what happened to push our species across that threshold.
Human beings have been around in one form or another for two and a half million years, first as homo habilis, then as homo erectus, and finally as homo sapiens. For virtually all of those 2.5 million years, we lived in harmony with our environment. While it may not always have been a comfortable life (how could it have been, without color cable television or cars?), we were nonetheless perfectly adapted to our habitat. This statement is supported by two facts: over most of that period our presence caused little or no damage to the planetary biosphere; and during that time the human population was essentially stable, growing to only
5 million or so in two and a half million years, for a net addition of a scant two people per year.
Recently there have been some remarkable
discoveries about the quality of life in the times before modern
civilization. We have always known that society back then consisted of hunter-gatherers,
organized as tribes. The classical impression was that the lives of these
savages were, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, "solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short". Recent investigations have shown that in fact
hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed a remarkable quality of life characterized by
low levels of effort, plenty of leisure time, good nutrition, low levels of
disease, egalitarianism, very low levels of suicide, homicide and warfare, a
high degree of personal autonomy and close-knit communities. In the words
of Marshall
Sahlins, hunter-gatherers were "the original affluent
society." In one of our more damaging semantic restatements we have
defined "subsistence" living as bad and "sustainable" living
as good — even though in the context of a hunter-gatherer society, they mean
exactly the same thing.
So here we have a species that was exquisitely adapted to its environment,
living an affluent yet sustainable life, treading lightly on the earth, never
outgrowing or overrunning its habitat, at least in terms of the species as a
whole. We lived in this harmony with our world for two and a half million
years, or 99.6% of the time we have been on the planet. Then suddenly, in
the last ten thousand years — a mere 0.4% eye blink of time — our population
increased over 1000 times, we decimated the earth's stocks of non-renewable
resources, we cut down over 90% of the planet's forests, we fished her oceans to
the edge of extinction, and we live in a near-constant state of conflict with
each other. In this grievously short time we have brought about all the
wicked problems listed above. Pardon my French, but what the hell
happened?
In a word, it was agriculture.
About 10,000 years ago humanity developed organized, settled agriculture.
Over the next couple of thousand years our predominant social model changed from
hunter-gatherers to cultivators. We settled down (as one has to, to raise
crops), and started to form larger social structures — villages, towns and
cities. Nobody is precisely sure why we developed agriculture, when our
previous ways of life had been perfectly satisfactory for millions of
years. It may have been precipitated by climate changes, or growing
populations in some areas, or it may have been just one of those things.
There is no doubt that the threshold of radical human change is clearly
demarcated by fields of grain.
Hierarchy
The shift to settled cultivation entrained a host of other changes. Our
diet was dramatically impoverished. Levels of chronic disease and
malnutrition increased. Levels of social violence escalated.
However, the most significant change was the introduction of hierarchies that
had not previously existed in our social systems.
Why the development of agriculture resulted in the simultaneous appearance of
social hierarchies is still a matter of debate. My opinion is that it
happened because the risk to farming communities from crop failures was very
high. If the crops failed, these communities contained too many people to
survive on local foraging or hunting — both because population densities were
so high and because the habitat destruction caused by farming had reduced the
amount of local wild food. There was also no way to bring in food from
some other unaffected region. Therefore the risk of crop failures had to
be mitigated. This mitigation involved many activities. For example,
local hunting kept larger crop-eating pests at bay, irrigation helped in times
of drought, and shamanic intercession took care of storms and blights.
Each of these activities of hunter, irrigation engineer and shaman was highly
specialized in comparison to the more generic farming skills required for
planting and harvesting. Such specialization conferred power on the
holders of those skills. This was especially true in the case of shamans,
whose power could not be entirely learned, but was said to emanate come from a
mysterious connection with the supernatural. Their attempt to exercise
control over nature gave the shamans the real ability to exercise control over
other people however ("Obey me or the gods will frown on us, and the crop
failure will be your fault!"), and
the first systematic hierarchies were born.
Surplus
The other significant change introduced by organized agriculture was the
psychological effect of reliable surpluses of food. While the previous two
and a half million years of our existence had been shaped by sustainable
subsistence, agriculture introduced the possibility of producing more food than
we needed, letting us distribute the required amount to the members of the
community and store the excess.
Centralizing the production of food and managing its distribution reinforced the
development of hierarchies. Since some of the food was needed by people
who had no direct hand in producing it (such as weavers, shamans and granary
guards), some means had to be found of giving them equitable access to it.
This meant coming up with a way of defining relative values for different kinds
of work, and establishing a medium of exchange. In one stroke the concepts
of money and wages appeared, resulting in a further transfer of power to those
who established the value of work and controlled the money supply (and
indirectly the access to food).
As important as that development was, there was yet another fundamental cultural
change brought about by the simple existence of a food surplus. For the
previous two and a half million years, human wants had been satisfied by the
concept of "enough". People worked until they had enough, then
they stopped. Now there was almost always "more than
enough". The perception that there was more than enough food caused a
radical change in how we looked at the world.
Food surpluses and the development of a medium of exchange made trade for
non-food goods possible. The continued trade of ongoing food surpluses enabled a
continuous growth in the material comfort of peoples' lives. It did not
take long for people to become accustomed to this new state of affairs. As
memories of the past faded over just a few generations, the new conditions of
growing abundance were rapidly accepted as the "natural" order of
things.
Modern Civilization
We now have the two critical preconditions for "modern
civilization". The first is the belief that a continuous growth in
material prosperity is the natural order of the human universe. The second
is the belief that a power hierarchy is essential for the smooth functioning of
the system.
As always happens with hierarchies, power flows uphill. Along with it go
the perquisites of power, the most important being the right to higher levels of
material abundance than those lower in the pecking order. In order to
ensure that this comfortable situation is maintained, part of the accumulated
social power is used to protect the situation. This is done by strongly
defending the two fundamental preconditions: the idea that both material growth
and the need for hierarchy are natural, essential and unquestionable.
Indeed, the status quo is best served if the rest of the community sees this
situation as simply part of the matrix of the universe, the only possible way
life could work, and that any suggestions to the contrary are the result of
either some nefarious agenda or outright insanity.
Guardian Institutions
Over the centuries an interlocking system of guardian institutions has grown up to protect and defend the two key ideas of growth and hierarchy.
Our economic and financial institutions cooperate with business and industry to set the value of work and control the money supply (thereby controlling access to food). In this role it doesn't make any difference whether an economy is capitalist, socialist or communist. The core belief it guards is always the same one.
Our educational institutions teach successive generations how the system works, giving them the tools to integrate into it and manipulate it at the same time as training them to see this as the only possible way the world could work.
Our communications media reinforce this message by enlisting people in the growth paradigm. They do this both though overt messages like advertising and covert messages embedded in the story lines of entertainment.
Our religious institutions (as distinct from the religions they purport to enshrine) are primarily normative social structures. Many incorporate an overt message that one should be content with things as they are. There are often injunctions against questioning authority, as all authority is seen to devolve from the supernatural — just as it did for the shamans of the early agricultural era.
Our legal institutions enforce the norms of hierarchy in ways too numerous to count. These range from the protection of privilege (one law for the rich, one for the poor) to the preferential defense of property rights over human rights.
Our political institutions sit at the tip of the pyramid. Political institutions encode, enshrine and manage the application of social power. Politics is the institution that legitimizes all the others. Because of its unique ability to make laws and its access to the legalized violence that defends those laws, politics is the fullest expression of the power hierarchy of modern civilization.
At the base of the hierarchy, supporting it all, are an ever-diminishing
number of farmers who apply ever-increasing amounts of knowledge, technology and
petroleum to ensure an ever-expanding supply of food. Because at the core
it is their food that makes the whole edifice possible.
So where does that put us in relation to the array of wicked problems we
listed at the beginning? Simply put, every one of these problems is the
result of unbridled growth. They are the logical results of the continual
exercise of the first precondition of modern civilization, the drummer we have
been marching to for ten thousand years since the invention of agriculture.
Why politics is the problem, not the solution
In light of this analysis it should be obvious why we are repeatedly failing
to address any of these wicked problems. The only permanent
"solution" to any of them is the secession of growth. That idea
is anathema to our guardian institutions. And as the occupants of the pinnacle
of power, our politicians have every reason to derail efforts in that direction,
no matter how small.
Politics, regardless of party or ideology, is part of the problem and can never
be part of the solution. While it may be easier for the average person to live
under the rule of a more humane parcel of rogues, at its heart politics is
the primary guardian institution of modern civilization. The role of all
politics is to ensure that power is managed, and power is always managed for the
benefit of the holders of power. It doesn't matter whether the power managers
are Democrats, Republicans, Tories, Grits, Social Democrats, Communists or a
military junta. They all fulfill the same role in service of the same
beneficiaries.
In order to fulfill that role they unite with the other guardian institutions —
the economic, industrial, legal. religious, educational and communications
organizations. Together these institutions create, maintain and guard a noetic
milieu (a globalized intuitive, non-rational consciousness) in which any values
that challenge the two fundamental preconditions to modern civilization are seen
as incomprehensible, self-evidently absurd, dangerous or even insane. Since the
primary value system these guardians protect is the paradigm of continuous
material growth, the most dangerous of all radical ideas are any proposals to
limit, halt or reverse that growth.
Conclusion
The influences of our guardian institutions are firmly embedded in our global
culture. They have such power and such general support at all levels of
society that it is ultimately fruitless to try and remove them from power by
either direct or indirect confrontation. The penalties for trying this are
severe and ruthlessly applied.
In light of this, is there any hope for a return to a sustainable, egalitarian,
interconnected, considerate and just civilization? I strongly believe that
there is, but getting there will be neither sure nor easy.
The institutions that stand between us and such a future are trapped by their
dependence on the very paradigm they are sworn to protect. They defend the
belief that permanent material growth is natural, possible and inevitable.
While they defend that belief with laws, guns and television, ultimately their
power comes from people who accept that premise. If people stop believing
that such growth is possible the institutions' power declines, no matter how
many defense mechanisms they engage. If growth falters, the people lose
faith and the institutions crack and crumble.
Look back at the list of problems that led off the article. Every
single one of them is the result of our growth encountering limits.
While we may be able to figure out ways to temporarily circumvent some of these
limits, the pattern is now clear. The growth of modern civilization is
slowing down, and is even showing evidence of coming to a halt. For a
guardian institution that depends on growth for its very survival, this is like
a diagnosis of terminal cancer.
What that means is that these institutions will inevitably start losing their
monolithic top-down power. This dis-integration will leave "cracks in
the sidewalk of civilization". And just as grass grows through cracks
in real concrete, small communities and individuals will start to appear through
the metaphorical concrete of our industrial civilization.
No one can predict when, where or how the dis-integration will appear. It
will take different forms in different places. The response of the
guardians will probably be violently draconian in most cases. But there are
places where communities have already formed in anticipation of such an
opportunity. Like "Gaia's
antibodies" they will work to heal the wounds, widen the
cracks, and let the sunshine and fresh air revitalize the hidden earth. As
the seed stock of the next phase of civilization they will spread their values
on the wind.
The next cycle of human experience on this planet will be very different from
any that has gone before. We will have fewer resources, but more
knowledge. We will have to deal with toxic landscapes, a warming climate,
shifting rainfall patterns and the emergence of new diseases. To balance
that we will have better communications and longer memories than any
civilization that has gone before us. We will not fall back into the stone
age, but neither will we motor off happily into the sunset in our electric
cars. There will be hardship and misery, but there will also be joy —
the joy that comes from looking forward, from participating in our communities,
from the love of those around us. Above all, there will be the future.
Acknowledgments
I'm indebted to the writing of Daniel Quinn and John Zerzan, as well as to Riane Eisler for her book "The Chalice and the Blade". I'd also like to acknowledge the philosophy of Anarcho-Primitivism for its critique of civilization (though perhaps not for its suggested solutions).
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