The unthinkable has to be thought.
That's exactly it. I like this discussion. It's fascinating how the ideas spring up like mushrooms. I especially like Oliver's call for all the approaches that people might be experimenting with - aesthetic, philosophical, activist, computational, whatever angle is calling you. Things are falling apart. It's a time when you can have new ideas - you can become something different. An animal, maybe.
Eric, I'm with you, it's possible to work on two levels at once, radical transformation AND a more beneficial social order. This means facing up to some extreme contradictions. In the US, we just looked straight down the barrel of a coup. There's no way to love it. There's a sense across the left that some kind of workable order has to be restored - people are going hungry in the richest country on earth - but at the same time, the incoming Biden government has "restoration" written all over it. Maybe not in the worst way, but the best way is still terrible, whether it's patching up the international alliance system or the domestic airline/oil/agribusiness complex, real-estate speculation, education fraud, etc etc etc. We're faced with a huge hangover of the same old garbage, but we can no longer preach revolution and chaos because it plays into the hands of a literally murderous right. So what to do? How do counter-systemic movements take on the role of loyal opposition? It's a total contradiction. It's unthinkable. It has to be done.
Let me take that just a little further.
At the deepest level, and in the direction that Oliver's going, what I see emerging in the Americas is a terrestrial cosmology. This is the opposite of a Cartesian mathematical universe oriented toward spatial infinity. It's got everything to do with Gaia theory and the circular causality of cybernetics (especially the Bateson variety) but don't fool yourself with such concepts, because people don't experience it that way. They experience it as listening to the voices and following the actions of indigenous people. They/we experience it as an overwhelming sense of vulnerability and a need for mutual aid, more true to the present than any theory could be. Like any religious or messianic dimension, this terrestrial cosmology has nothing to do with the state. It's about water. It's about heartbeat. It's about murder. It's about responding to the threat of violence through the exposure of your own fragile flesh. People can see society going down - and they can feel the Holocene ending, whether they use fancy words or not. The principles of the commons are based on those feelings. So is the solidarity of the excluded. These telluric movements are going to grow, that's a good thing. But green nationalism and ecofascism, those things will grow too. Can you be messianic and practical all at once? I think you have to be. The time demands it.
Andreas wants to know, are the trees and the whales really going to speak in their own voice? Do trees have standing in the courts? The short answer is obviously no. People speak for them, that's what every case of the rights of nature and river personhood has already recorded (you know there have been a number of those, right Andreas?). But the long answer is different. Protesters start to surround the courthouses, like stands of trees, and with stands of trees, if there are any. A new sense of what's right and wrong, what's bearable and unbearable, puts down roots and shoots up shoots, and people get shot by the cops and others go off listening to the voices of the whales and society changes, right down to the laws and the computer codes and even the sense of property ownership, which is the bedrock of capitalism. Root breaks stone. The commons is a crack in possessive individualism. A hugely popular novel, The Overstory, is about exactly that. Messianic ideas emerge out of disaster. Well, we're in a disaster now. It means the stars fall to earth, it's raining asteroids. That's how stuff changes.
It's gonna go fast y'all, so get ready. I use geoengineering as a proxy for everything coming down the pipe that's currently unthinkable. It's scandalous because it's all too real, and all too close, tomorrow. A 2C temperature rise is incredibly destructive, and geoengineering is relatively cheap: you can be sure some state or even non-state actor will try it. Wake up my friends, that 2C world is already baked in, so think it for a change! An eco-state is an opportunity to do the unthinkable, before somebody else does it to you. And it's also a time to stop the worst, to stop the nightmare stuff that's totally predictable already. Sean has given a good rundown of a lot of it, already happening for the most part. Exactly because of cosmology and messianic vision, I stand against the idea of giving up government, instrumental rationality and distributive justice. Nihilism is bullshit. People want a world for those they love. I think of that other unforgettable novel, The Parable of the Sower, where white suburban radicals called the Paints take some kind of pyrodrug and burn neighborhoods just to party all night long. Breakdown is happening, you don't have to hasten it. The question is really, which kind of geoengineering do you want, which kind of state do you want, which kind of transformation can we pull out of the breakdown.
Messianism and reformism coexist, it's like anarchism and communism - or civil society and state. Two different things. Two coexisting beings. There is no culture if you can't think opposites at once. Felix is exactly right when he says that capitalism can't still be capitalism if it can't treat nature as an externality. The Green New Deal is a state capitalist program, and it's the most subversive thing in Western history. I support it on both sides of the fence. Either trees have standing, or we all find out what it's like to be felled. That's disaster - stars in your face.
seriously deliriously, Brian
In the longer run, it's hard to imagine how capitalism can still be
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