Robert Jensen : The Universe Is an Undifferentiated Whole

In his new "primer on critical thinking," Arguing for Our Lives, Robert Jensen "connects abstract ideas with the everyday political and spiritual struggles of ordinary people."

Arguing for our lives:
The universe is an undifferentiated whole

The knowledge we humans can acquire -- while impressive in what it allows us to build -- is not adequate to manage the complexity of the world.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / May 8, 2013

UT journalism professor, author, and political activist Robert Jensen will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, May 10, 2013, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live to the world. The show will be rebroadcast by WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, Sunday morning, May 5, at 10 a.m. (EDT), and the podcast will be posted at the Internet Archive.

[The following is adapted from the new book Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue from City Lights Books.]

“The universe is an undifferentiated whole. About that we can say nothing more.”

This catchy aphorism from political philosopher Bruce Wright may seem nonsensical at first glance, but is worth exploring in the service of deepening our intellectual humility. Facing multiple, cascading ecological crises, we humans need science more than ever -- and more than ever we need to understand the limits of science.

Like many, Wright -- a professor emeritus of political science from California State University, Fullerton -- is concerned about the unintended consequences of science and technology. When we started burning fossil fuels, for example, no one could have predicted global warming. If we try to “solve” the problem of global warming only through faith in increasingly complex technology, we should be prepared for new problems that typically come with such solutions.

The lesson is pretty clear: The knowledge we humans can acquire -- while impressive in what it allows us to build -- is not adequate to manage the complexity of the world. No matter how smart we are, our ignorance will always outstrip our knowledge, and so we routinely fail to anticipate or control the consequences of our science and technology.

Wright’s aphorism reinforces that point and takes it a step further: It’s not just that scientific analysis can’t tell us everything, but that the analytical process destroys the unity of what we are trying to study. When we analyze, the subject becomes an object, as we break it apart to allow us to poke and probe in the pursuit of that analysis.

To “differentiate,” in this context, means the act of perceiving and assigning distinctions within a system. Thinking of the universe as an undifferentiated whole recognizes its unity, providing a corrective to the method of modern science that breaks things down to manageable components that can be studied. That “reductionism” in science assumes that the behavior of a system can be understood most effectively by observing the behavior of its parts.

At first glance that may seem not only obvious but unavoidable. How else would we ever know anything? We can’t look out at the universe and somehow magically understand how things work -- we have to break it down into smaller parts.

Pond in the woods: Understanding the whole.

Imagine a pond in the woods. That ecosystem includes the air, water, and land -- the various inanimate objects such as rocks; the plants we see and their root structures underground; the animals and fish that are big enough for us to see and the many other micro-life forms we can’t observe with our eyes; and the weather.

No one person could walk into the scene and offer a detailed account of all that is happening in that ecosystem, let alone explain how it operates. Even a cursory description of the ecosystem requires knowledge of meteorology, botany, zoology, geology, chemistry, physics. To make sense of the complex relationships and interactions among all the players in that one small ecosystem, experts in those disciplines would observe, experiment, and explain their part of it.

Putting all that knowledge together, we can say some important things about the system, but we can’t claim to know how it really works. Not only is there is a unity to the ecosystem that we can’t understand, but our analytic approach destroys the unity we seek to understand.

Does that sound crazy? Consider two obvious limitations of our knowledge claims in science.

First, if we claim to understand the system through its component parts, we have to be able to identify all the relevant parts. How much do we know about the microscopic organisms and their role in that ecosystem? We know the things we have identified, using the tools we have at our disposal. But is that all there is to be identified, that which we can observe?

For all that scientists and farmers know about soil, for example, most of what happens in the soil is at the microscopic level and unknown to us. Second, while that pond ecosystem can be broken down into its component parts and studied, that study cannot include the dynamic interactions between all the parts, which are too complex to track. It’s not a failure of the method, but simply an unavoidable limitation.

In short, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and considerably more than the sum of the parts we can observe. The process of scientific analysis -- of studying the parts to try to understand the whole -- is powerful but limited. When we take what we’ve learned about the parts and construct a picture of the whole, we will miss the complex interactions between all those parts, which are crucial in creating the whole.

There’s nothing wrong with using methods that are limited -- any method we employ will be limited. Scientists struggling with these problems understand the vexing nature of “complex adaptive systems,” a term that recognizes we are dealing not with static parts but with dynamic networks of interactions and that the behavior of the entities will change based on experience.

But problems arise when people make claims to definitive knowledge and then intervene in the world based on those claims, often with unpleasant results. Unintended consequences do damage that often is beyond repair.

Wright’s aphorism suggests we should not only see a specific ecosystem as a whole, but regard the universe as a whole, as one big system of complex and dynamic interactions. While seemingly fanciful at that level, this idea has been widely discussed at the scale of the planet.

To say that Earth is an undifferentiated whole is to suggest that everything in our world -- organic and inorganic -- can be understood to form a single self-regulating complex adaptive system. This is the Gaia hypothesis formulated by the environmentalist James Lovelock: The Earth itself is a living thing. Whether or not one goes that far, it focuses our attention on the dynamic, complex, adaptive nature of our world.

Wright’s provocative claim -- “About this we can say nothing more” -- doesn’t mean that we can say nothing at all about the component parts, only that we can’t pretend to say more than we can really know about the whole. To describe a system as an undifferentiated whole is to mark its integrity as a whole, that must be understood on those terms.

Once we see the world as a living system, our attempt to know it through analysis of the parts is, by definition, always an incomplete project. We can’t really know the whole world; it exceeds our capacity.

That’s not an argument against science, but an argument for humility.

This article was also published at Rabble.ca.

[Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His latest books are Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue and We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Jay D. Jurie : Are We Colonized? A Response to Chris Hedges

Activist/journalist Chris Hedges speaks at Occupy Washington, DC, Freedom Plaza, Jan. 9, 2011. Photo by Scott Galindez / Occupy Washington, DC.
'Colonized by Corporations':
A Response to Chris Hedges

Hedges says that corporations play the same role in the U.S. today that British or French colonialism played in India or Indochina.

By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / May 18, 2012

According to Chris Hedges, we're no different than Third World inhabitants subjugated by foreign colonialism.

In one of his most recent columns ("Colonized by Corporations," Truthdig.com, May 14, 2012), Hedges relies on the book The Developing Nations by Robert E. Gamer, to tell us "we have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized."

This means, he goes on to say, that corporations play the same role in the U.S. today that British or French colonialism played in India or Indochina in the past. Part of how this works is through the construction of "patron-client" relations, whereby real power is concealed, and the oppressed deal only with client regimes who do the dirty work of the foreign oppressors.

This is among the latest in a series of books and essays Hedges has written about the economic and political crises affecting not only the U.S., but how these are related to crises on the global level, and how this contributes to the rise of resistance movements, such as Occupy here at home.

His column is produced regularly on Truthdig.com, and according to his biosketch on that site, he was a foreign correspondent for almost two decades in locales including Africa, the Balkans, Central America, and the Middle East.

He has worked for a variety of media sources, and as part of a New York Times team, once won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage on terrorism. He left the Times after being reprimanded for speaking out against the attack on Iraq launched by the George W. Bush regime.

Hedges has written for a number of publications, including The New York Review of Books and Adbusters. He holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from Colgate, a master's in divinity from Harvard, and speaks several languages, including Spanish and Arabic.

Over the past several years Hedges has become directly involved in the resistance he once wrote about, most specifically the Occupy movement that grew up around the U.S. in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street events this past September. He has been arrested at Occupy-related protests, including one on November 3, 2011, outside Goldman Sachs in New York City.

This past January, he was joined by several others in filing a federal lawsuit against the threats to civil liberties posed by the National Defense Authorization Act -- which resulted this week in a federal judge enjoining enforcement of the controversial provisions.

In a RawReplay interview with Muriel Kane at The Raw Story on September 25, 2011, Hedges described Occupy Wall Street as "Where the Hope of America Lies."

In this same interview, Hedges characterized the U.S. as in transition to a "neo-feudal corporate state, one in which there is a rapacious oligarchic class, a thin managerial elite, and two-thirds of this country live in conditions that increasingly push families to subsistence levels...[the corporate state] wants to reduce the working class to a status equivalent to serfdom."

Hedges has since expanded on that theme, including in this present column. He brings up the work of Frantz Fanon, who described Algeria under French colonialism. Changing the on-scene managers won't bring about any changes in the real situation, as colonial rule will continue regardless.

In the U.S., this means a vote for either Obama or Romney won't make any real difference, the "neo-feudal corporate state" will remain unaffected. This "patron-client" facade must be destroyed and "new mechanisms of governance" put in place.

Yet, according to Hedges, it's not the "serfs" who are the real threat to the colonial apparatus, it's the "declasse individuals," the professionals who are losing their foothold as the economy hollows out, or are denied advancement as the ranks of the managerial elite grow thinner.

It is when these elements join with the lower echelon and share their message with them, that the apparatus is threatened. Malcolm X understood these dynamics, which is why he was more of a direct threat to the system than Martin Luther King, Jr., who still worked within "patron-client" relations.

Eventually the corporate elite will become increasingly venal and corrupted. They will resort to violence to retain power, but will become increasingly unable to stabilize the situation. Violent revolutionary groups will arise to challenge the elite, as did the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement (AIM), and others in the 1960s, but they will hold back, rather than advance desirable social transformation.

This is obviously a slap at the "Black Bloc," a current tendency that Hedges identifies with the earlier groups.

Ultimately, the "neo-feudal corporate state" will collapse when it loses legitimacy among the last of those responsible for upholding it, when they defect, and when some cross over to the resistance.

Hedges advises people to go ahead and vote this coming November, but only for a third party candidate, as a way of registering protest, then get back into the streets where the real changes will take place.

In response to Hedges, it's true that "unequal exchange" produces certain conditions that are functionally the same in developed as in underdeveloped countries. It's also true that these conditions are in some respects becoming increasingly similar. Shanty towns under bridges in Miami look increasingly like favelas in Brazil. But there are some differences, and Hedges glosses over the processes by which these manifest.

Although Hedges makes passing reference to Karl Marx, he seems unfamiliar with either Marx, or more contemporary Marxist sources, such as Samir Amin, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Ellen Meiksins Wood, David Harvey, and others, who for quite some time have addressed the conditions he seeks to describe.

Much of what Hedges describes in some ways fits well with Negri and Hardt's "empire" theses, wherein they discuss the transnational character of the capitalist system, and how conditions from the developed countries are reproduced in underdeveloped countries.

It's unclear why Hedges doesn't employ such analysis. Maybe he's trying to be careful and not alienate a predominantly liberal audience, maybe he doesn't like or agree with this source material, or maybe he's not conversant with it, and I suspect the latter.

In this column he makes direct reference to Alexander Herzen, a Russian who exerted some influence on the subsequent revolution in that country. Like Herzen as an earlier expression of the change process, Hedges seems to be feeling his way along, his perspective seems to be evolving, and he wants others to join in the voyage of exploration.

Following Garner, Hedges contends disaffected groups don't attack the underlying sources of problems, instead they confront what some Marxists have termed as "compradors" or in other words, "intermediaries." In this regard, Hedges misapplies Fanon, who was addressing a context dominated by an actual colonial power, where the French had put into place, and actively propped up, indigenous elites.

Though there are some similarities, the U.S. is not occupied by a foreign power, as was Algeria. If Hedges were to make this case regarding the U.S. in relation to Iraq or Afghanistan, he'd be much more on target.

As it is, the comparison has limitations. It is easier for subject populations to associate corporate domination with foreign rule. No doubt, the Iraqi people associated Blackwater with the U.S. occupation. It's not quite the same, or as easy, for people in the U.S. to make that same association. Nor do they have to cut through two sets of "comprador classes" to get at the problem.

There are other issues as to the comparative composition of the class structures that have been oversimplified by Hedges, but they are beyond the scope of the present discussion.

In terms of minor critiques, it's not news, at least not to many Rag Blog readers, that the election of either Obama or Romney will not dislodge, or do anything meaningful about, the underlying domination of corporate power. Hedges is basically correct in his assessment of "declasse intellectuals," but again, that's not news. Any serious scholar of revolutionary process would point out the same.

Though Hedges is correct that Malcolm X was much more forthright, it's not certain that Martin Luther King, Jr., harbored any illusions about the nature of power in this country. His speech on Vietnam reflected comprehension of the dynamics that initiated the war as well as its likely domestic consequences.

Hedges' assessment of "radical violent groups," at least in the case of the Black Panthers and AIM, is not wholly on track. A more nuanced and sophisticated position is required, that takes into account the self-defensive nature of much of that history.

Finally, there are serious questions about the "futility of elections." Hedges performs a service by raising this issue, but falls short in terms of a comprehensive assessment. Yet again, we full well understand that whether Obama or Romney is elected, we will not see fundamental change.

But that's not the same as some who mistakenly argue that "there's no difference between the two," plus it leaves out other situations where there's more of a difference to be made: for instance, it's better to have Bernie Sanders in office than not.

We also should not throw out the possibility that serious change could result through the electoral process. This doesn't mean the sort of phony examples represented in countries like France, Spain, or Portugal, where "socialists" keep getting elected and no basic social change transpires.

As exemplified by Mitterand, when he was president of France, this could be called "SINO," or "socialism in name only." No difference should be expected from Francois Hollande, who was just elected in France. He might modify French participation in the Eurozone, but will do virtually nothing to replace capitalism.

In actuality, the main European parties who call themselves "socialist" should be known as "social democratic," which in modern parlance is what they are.

But we do have some better examples. There was Allende's Popular Unity government in Chile, and the reason it was overthrown was that the government was genuinely moving Chile to socialism. It actively sought to free itself from both colonial and corporate domination. Today, we have Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and his government is on the road to a similar underlying transformation. I

n other words, the prospect of an electoral transition to real social change shouldn't be tossed out, but it's an absolutely essential imperative that it be led by significant popular organizations and a vast grassroots movement, as in Chile, which must have the involvement of disaffected "declasse intellectuals," as in Venezuela.

There has to be a strong and well-organized movement "outside" the electoral arena, most especially if any "inside" strategy is to be effective.

As to whether people should vote for third parties in November, as Hedges proposes, while I personally believe there may be some significant incremental differences, plus strategic advantages, to be gained through the reelection of Obama, I remain agnostic on the question of how anyone should vote.

There are good and valid reasons not to vote for Obama, and I'm not going to castigate anyone who should decide instead to vote for a "protest candidate" to his left.

[Jay D. Jurie, a veteran of SDS at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is a resident of Sanford, Florida, where he teaches public administration and urban planning. Read more articles by Jay D. Jurie on The Rag Blog.]

Sources:
Though I was aware of Negri and Hardt's Empire, I thank Bruce Goldberg for bringing its importance to my attention. Any misinterpretation is my error, not theirs, or his.
Muriel Kane September 25, 2011 interview: www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/09/chris-hedges-occupy-wall-street-is-where-the-hope-of-america-lies /

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Richard Raznikov : The Privatization of Everything

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Gobbling up the Commons. Cartoon by Ahmed Abdallah / 3arabawy.
On the verge:
The privatization of everything

Does anyone have to ask what happens to law enforcement and the judicial system once the state agrees to keep private prisons at 90% of capacity?

By Richard Raznikov / The Rag Blog / March 1, 2012

No society can aspire to democracy unless it maintains an unbreakable connection between its politics and its police powers.

Once the populace has no political access to policy and enforcement, once those with coercive power over others are not directly accountable to the people’s representatives, you can kiss your ass goodbye.

We’re on the verge of it in America, 2012.

As David Foster Wallace remarked, the truth will set you free but not until it’s finished with you.

All across the western world, there is enormous pressure being brought to "privatize" everything. Where does this pressure come from? On whose behalf? What does it mean? What is the connection between the demands for "privatization" in Greece, as part of an "austerity package" initiated by the International Monetary Fund, with the "privatization" of prisons in Florida and other states of the U.S.? Is there one?

Let’s begin with this thought: as human cultures have evolved, there has been a general agreement that some things on the planet, such as water and air, belong to everyone. Democratization has extended these rights to include access to natural beauty and to the oceans.

With various forms of democracy, even including communism and socialism, have come the acceptance that matters of common concern, however approached or regulated, are integrally connected to the political system. That is a fundamental good, since without it there is no way for the people to exercise any real power over their political environment.

If one subscribes, therefore, to democracy, one also must take with it an inviolable connection between, for example, the building of roads, and politics. Otherwise, should roads be privately built, no one could pass without paying extortionate fees. Farmers could not get their crops to market. People could not travel or visit one another. And so forth.

Severing the connection between the public and the management of and control over public resources and operations thought to be of the commons, is dangerous. It would be hard to exaggerate just how dangerous.

The issue of privatization is maybe the most important public issue we’re facing in the U.S., and it’s causing terrible dislocation and political chaos in Europe, as well. You’re not going to see it on the news (sic). As with many things in America now, this is a story we’ll have to piece together on our own.

The Corrections Corporation of America, largest company operating private prisons, has written to 48 states offering to take over the running of prisons, provided that the states guarantee a 90 percent occupancy.

The systemic corruption this invites is breathtaking.

The care of inmates is of course a responsibility of the prison systems in the states and in the country as a whole for federal institutions. How we treat inmates, provision for their food and clothing, their recreation, their activities, their health, this is a matter of public policy. The state arrests, tries, and attains convictions; inmates have been sentenced to prison. The duration of the sentence is often impacted by the behavior of the prisoner.

It should be obvious that prison conditions are subject to politics; it is politics which passes the laws and operates the judicial system. How prisons are run is our public responsibility, and this is subject to our laws.

Prisons are not meant to be, nor should they be, profit-making enterprises. They have functions to fulfill. That’s not to say that budget matters are unimportant, only that they cannot be the sole criterion for proper operation.

Otherwise, inmates would be given no services at all. Rice is cheap; rancid meat is really cheap. There would be no point worrying about rehabilitation, which can be expensive. Nobody cares what happens when they get out. Gulags give you a profit margin that would impress even Wall Street.

Government is not supposed to be a profit-making enterprise. But any governmental function, once privatized, becomes exactly that. Does anyone have to ask what happens to law enforcement and the judicial system once the state agrees to keep private prisons at 90% of capacity?

How will the national parks be run when we privatize them, as some idiot politicians are advocating? What will the nation’s coastlines be like? Years ago, California voters approved the Coastal Initiative which protected it and secured public access; if and when that promise is broken, how long before only the wealthy can enjoy the beach?

On a lighter note, how about privatizing the military? It’s being done, you know. When Obama announced the "withdrawal" of U.S. troops from Iraq he’d promised only three years before, he didn’t bother to mention that remaining behind are an estimated 50,000 private troops, a private army serving the needs of the corporate mobsters who are figuring to loot what’s left.

Xe, nee Blackwater, is a private army the government contracts with to perform certain tasks, often unspecified, which it feels the regular army cannot perform. Its soldiers are paid much more than GIs, and the casualty rate is much higher. Xe works for the U.S. or for Halliburton or Bechtel or whomever hires it. It is, as we discovered when Blackwater mercenaries murdered Iraqi civilians for pure sport, exempt from U.S. law and the control of the American government which hired it.

When private armies can operate outside the political control of a country, there is no democracy, even in form. We all know what it is, don’t we?

Privatization of water, which I wrote about recently ("As Benign as Lucifer"), has enabled major corporations to destroy wide swaths of agriculture in India and elsewhere, causing widespread suicide as farmers by the tens of thousands have lost their land. Privatization of public services, public properties, public responsibilities, is a one-way ticket to hell.

The riots in Greece are about privatization. That is the agenda of the International Monetary Fund, the consortium of bankers who run a large part of the world and want more. Through the mechanism of manufactured debt, the bankers are able to extort whatever "austerity" measures they want. These involve a reduction in the wages of public employees, a reduction in social services for the poor, and the privatization of what is publicly owned.

If you think we’re not headed in that direction in the United States, you’re dreaming. That’s what the budget arguments are about now, and the talk of America’s "debt." To whom is that "debt" owed? Why, to the bankers, of course, the same people whose looting of the Treasury caused this crisis in the first place. Pretty neat, huh?

Having taken everything else, they are going after what’s left, and what’s left are the treasures of a nation, the wealth owned in common by its people.

We simply can’t let them get it.

[Rag Blog contributor Richard Raznikov is an attorney practicing in San Rafael, California. He blogs at News from a Parallel World. Find more articles by Richard Raznikov on The Rag Blog.]

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Danny Schechter : The War Between Property Rights and Human Rights

The Social Contract of Jean-Jacques Rosseau: giving a moral claim to property rights. Image from SCIFlo Public Health.
Remember Rousseau:
Property rights and
human rights are still at war

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / February 1, 2012

The conflict between property rights and human rights has entered a new chapter. It is a debate that goes back to the challenge by landowners and merchants behind the American Revolution’s war on British control over the colonial economy.

Only today, as those speaking in the name of the 99% challenge the super-wealthy of the 1% (actually the .001%) there is a new battleground in what’s known as the housing market with as many as 14 million Americans in or facing foreclosure.

The defense of property rights is the holy of the holies for the propertied classes with a whole industry set up to enforce their claims of ownership.

We have seen how this plays out with the courts, run by often bought off and complicit judges rubber-stamping claims by banks and realty interests even when laws are disregarded amidst fraudulent filings, biased contracts, and phony robot signings. They control the marshals who seize your property, and constantly denigrate the real victims as “irresponsible.”

It’s not surprising any more to read about banks foreclosing on properties they don’t even own.

Jean-Jacques Rosseau, who postulated the “social contract” that gives property rights a moral claim, would be turning in his grave if he knew of the many abuses that homeowners in the U.S. face daily.

According to one scholarly presentation I read,

In order to clearly present Rousseau's views on property in the Social Contract, we must first define what he means by property. Property according to Rousseau is that which is obtained legally thereby purporting legitimate claim to one's holdings. Now we must consider what gives an individual the right to openly claim ownership.

Rousseau points out that right does not equal might. In other words, having a right can never derive from force. A right must be given legitimately which means it is attached to moral and legal code. This makes it contractual whereby the rights of one are applied to the rights of all.

Once a right is established, it is beneficial and necessary for the individual to apply this right effectively for his best interests and those of the whole. This motivation is directed at the formation of community thereby creating a social contract between individuals that come together to act as a group.

Now a combination of rights is formed whereby each individual is protected by the whole group that stands together as a community. The concept is that man standing alone is more vulnerable than many men united each in defense of the other. This condition makes it impossible for one to hurt an individual without hurting the whole group or for one to hurt the group without affecting each individual.

There is now a social contract where individual rights are combined. In this case, it is in the best interest of the individual to give over his rights to the group since he has a more powerful protective base than standing alone.

And yet many of us today do “stand alone”: in the commercial marketplace where borrowers are seen as suckers by lenders and fraud is pervasive, abuse, lying, and theft is built into the equation.

Now President Obama says, four years after the markets melted down and the sub prime mortgages were exposed a sub-crime, he will crack down on these abuses.

Hallelujah.

It sounds good, and you want to believe, especially because Obama has tapped New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman who has rejected settling with some banks engaged in massive frauds because it’s a deceptive deal, as a top gun for the effort.

Now, the Justice Department has announced the details to the press, minus the official who will run the effort and who was “traveling” and couldn’t make the press conference.

(Lanny Breuer is his name, and before joining the department that calls itself Justice, he was working for a law firm representing big banks, perhaps not a topic he wanted to answer questions about.)

Attorney General Holder was there to reveal that there will be 55 people working on this full time, 30 attorneys and support people, and 10 FBI agents who first blew the whistle on “pervasive real estate fraud” back in 2004.

Yves Smith of NakedCapitalism.com,who follows details like this closely, was underwhelmed, writing:

During the Savings and Loan crisis, Bill Black reminds us that there were about a thousand FBI agents working on the various cases. That’s 100 times the number of people working on a scandal that is about 40 times larger and far more complex.

To put it another way, let’s say that this scandal cost the American public $5-7 trillion in lost home equity. That’s about $100 billion of lost home equity per person assigned to this task force. If someone stole $100 billion a corporation, like say, if somehow Apple’s entire cash hoard which is roughly that amount, suddenly disappeared, I’m guessing that the FBI would assign more than one person to the case.

Ok, these are tough times and the government is pressed and the President is running for reelection with his “bundlers” (i.e . the people who raise the big money) pressing the flesh on Wall Street to find more 1% donors. Will this fund raising effort stymie his hell-raising effort?

Stay tuned.

Adds Smith:

For the last eight weeks, nearly 200 federal examiners have labored inside some of the nation’s biggest banks to determine how those institutions would hold up if the recession deepened.

Yup, roughly four times as many people were assigned to conduct sham stress tests as are assigned to investigate the causes of the financial crisis and prosecute the people responsible. So we see that this is a not a serious deployment of government resources to unmask a complex economy-shaking financial scheme. It just isn’t.

No surprise there.

And, as for the causes of the financial crisis, remember the Commission that was created by Congress and that found the while disaster “avoidable.”

It offered plenty of analysis but quickly led to paralysis with partisan bickering fogging the issues and no agenda for change forthcoming.

Like the 911 Commission report years earlier or the Warren Commission’s findings before that, it was read by many but believed by few.

Matt Stoller, a former aide to former Congressman Alan Grayson tries to unravel a massive contradiction that rises to the man at the top: "There are two underlying structural problems with the new(ish) Federal task force on financial fraud,” he writes.”

One, it is the policy of the administration to protect the banking system’s basic architecture, which means the compensation structure and the existing personnel who run these large institutions. Any real investigation into the financial collapse will inevitably lead to the collapse of this architecture.

Thus, any real investigation will be impeded when it begins to conflict the basic policy framework of the Obama administration. And this framework is set by Obama. It’s what he believes in. He made this clear in his first State of the Union, when he said a priority of the administration was to ensure that “the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money to lend even in more difficult times.”

Perhaps this is why so few bankers have spoken out loudly about this latest effort to target their financial frauds. They know it’s not serious and recognize that political business like the news business is now a branch of show business.

And John-Jacques Rousseau is not talking either He has been dead for hundreds of years along with his social contract.

[News Dissector Danny Schechter writes the News Dissector blog. His film Plunder and book, The Crime of Our Time,examined financial frauds. He wrote the introduction to the Cosimo Books edition of the Financial Inquiry Report and hosts News Dissector Radio on PRN.fm. Email Danny at dissector@mediachannel.org. Read more by Danny Schechter on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Ayn Rand and the Sophistry of the Libertarians

Art from Salon.
The sophistry of Ayn Rand libertarians

The profiteers, using libertarian justifications, help corporations dominate American life to satisfy their quest for greater profits.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / November 29, 2011

In 1964, I roomed with Wally. Wally had discovered Ayn Rand and talked frequently about rugged individualism -- his desire to be left alone by the state, by institutions, and by others to follow his own path. Wally thought no one should tell him what to do.

That entire semester, Wally probably missed 90% of his college classes. After all, he wanted his liberty. Needless to say, his grades suffered, but we had some fascinating discussions about philosophy and the socioeconomic condition of the U.S., a subject about which Wally took no responsibility. After all, each person is responsible for his or her own condition, created by his or her own choices.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it is echoed in the callousness of the current Republican presidential campaign, where Herman Cain states that if a person doesn’t have a job, it is that person’s fault; where Ron Paul suggests that if a person needs health care but has chosen not to purchase health insurance, then it is perfectly acceptable to let that person die.

Where all undocumented immigrants should be immediately shipped back to their country of origin, and electrified, military-guarded fences should be erected to assure that they cannot return; where the crowd applauds all of Gov. Perry’s executions, even if some of those executed were innocent; where waterboarding is torture that makes Republicans feel good (they like to call it “enhanced interrogation”); where gay servicemen are booed; and where “no work, no food” is an honored value.

It’s chilling: even George W. Bush claimed to have compassion, but Tea-party-leaning, Ayn Rand-spouting Libertarians have none.

Rooming with Wally was my introduction to libertarianism. If that had been the end of my study of libertarianism, I would have a more jaundiced view than I now have of the philosophical underpinnings of that philosophy.

Now, over 45 years later, libertarianism is widely discussed and mentioned in conversation. We have some politicians who claim to be Libertarians. Many freethinkers call themselves libertarians -- comedian Bill Maher, illusionist Penn Jillet, biologist P. Z. Myers, and others. I often agree with some libertarian ideas, but I’ve come to realize that there is a fatal flaw in Ayn Rand libertarian philosophy.

To say that someone is a libertarian is about as useful as saying that a person is religious. There may be as many varieties of libertarianism as there are religions in the U.S. Lately, though, many in the political class identify themselves as Any Rand libertarians, so I will focus on their brand of libertarianism.

After all, it is the kind extolled by Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and most of this year’s crop of Republican presidential hopefuls, though I don’t claim that any of them follow Ayn Rand’s philosophy (Objectivism) in any systematic way.

Ayn Rand extolled the virtues of individualism, sometimes called rugged individualism, as a lynchpin of her beliefs. Individualists are glorified as ambitious, fiercely independent people who succeed spectacularly in life solely because of their own actions, resources, intellects, and willpower.

In Ayn Rand’s world, the masses of people don’t fit this description. They are largely miserable souls who occasionally overcome their misery thanks to the exceptional abilities of a few individualists, who do great things because of their creativity and intellectual acumen.

If this is your view, your reality is not the same as mine. When I look at society in the U.S., I see opportunities for many people made possible by the collective actions of us all -- a system based on an implicit social contract that has created public education, infrastructure, modern utilities, water resources on which all life depends, organized social and economic systems that, however flawed, make possible success for the great masses of our people.

Rand’s idea that those who succeed do so because of their individualist qualities that make them some sort of supermen is a dishonest analysis of how our society works. One has to have blinders not to see the importance of the cooperative spirit that pervades America.

Most of our politicians don’t believe in the American government because they don’t believe in the basic tenets of our democracy; they don’t believe in the Constitution, and they don’t believe in the Declaration of Independence, both of which are imbued with a collective, cooperative spirit.

Based on their actions in the last 30 years, nearly all Republicans (as well as many, sometimes most, Democrats and some independents) don’t believe that government should have the purposes envisioned by our founders. The Declaration, for instance, provides as follows:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

For the most part, libertarians don’t like the fact that governments are created by people to secure for everyone the basic rights of equality and a multitude of other rights -- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- which were further explained and expanded in the Bill of Rights.

All of these ideas from the Declaration and Constitution create an implicit bargain -- a social contract -- among the American people. The essence of that social contract is that we will help one another by joining together to form a government that will serve the interests of us all.

But Ayn Rand and her current libertarian followers nowhere acknowledge the truth written by W. E. B DuBois 55 years ago: "We let men take wealth which is not theirs; if the seizure is ‘legal’ we call it high profits and the profiteers help decide what is legal." And that has been the failure of our republic for at least the last 30 years. The profiteers have been allowed to write or re-write the rules under which our political and economic system operates.

Governance, as the Occupy movement is arguing, is all about balancing the interests inherent in the social contract and the rights we have so that one group (the “profiteers”) cannot dominate another, a view anathema to the 1% and their defenders, who spend millions to make sure the rules favor them and not the 99%.

The profiteers, using libertarian justifications, help corporations dominate American life to satisfy their quest for greater profits; to enrich the wealthy further, insisting that people pull themselves up by their bootstraps (ignoring the fact that to do so literally means that you land on your backside when you try); to deny the basic need of all people for adequate food, housing, education, and medical care if they are unable to afford those things because they can’t find a job, are unable because of infirmity to hold a job, or are a child in need of nurture and care.

To pass laws like Medicare Part D in a way that enriches the pharmaceutical and insurance industries at the expense of the people and creates greater deficits; to let half the people and many corporations get away with contributing nothing to fund the federal government; to refuse to stabilize Social Security through two simple methods -- expand the payroll tax to all earned income, and recover through the tax system most Social Security benefits paid to the wealthy; and to fight wars that do little if anything to protect America, but everything to enrich defense contractors, funding these wars with borrowed money.

The signers of the Declaration believed that laws should be adopted that are “most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” This belief is virtual heresy to most Ayn Rand libertarians, who do not want laws that are for the public good. They want laws that benefit the corporations and the wealthy. They ignore the Constitution, which provides that one of the purposes of our form of government is to “promote the general Welfare.”

One of the most succinct statements in opposition to Ayn Rand’s philosophy came recently from Senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren at a house party in Massachusetts:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there -- good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea -- God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Warren’s message is one well-understood by the Occupy movement, whose members are driven by a profound commitment to democratic principles and to an economic system that will assure a decent life for all, rather than just the 1%.

Ayn Rand viewed the misery of many of the world’s people as a failure of their will. She would not acknowledge that our government, through opportunism, the taking of natural resources, militarism, and exploitation of the labor of third world people, made possible much of our prosperity.

Rand’s philosophy is grounded in selfishness and greed disguised as virtue. The needs of others, including those starving and homeless, are not worth her consideration. As far as Rand was concerned, these weak, defective people could just die.

I value individualism, but within certain boundaries. When I look at the world, I recognize that I have whatever success I have had not as some willful lone ranger operating on my own. I had friends, family, teachers, mentors, opponents, leaders, public servants, and countless others long forgotten who helped me become whatever I have become.

I have never seen anyone else whose life has been otherwise. It takes extreme myopia or mendacity not to see that rugged individualism is a figment of Ayn Rand’s imagination. Not only are her novels fictional, but her entire philosophy is based on a fiction, as well.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

Also see:

• "Considering the Philosophy of Ayn Rand" by Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / August 3, 2011.

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Robert Jensen : Angus Wright and the 'Fire Next Time'

Angus Wright. Screen grab from Vimeo.
The fire next time is now:
Environmental historian Angus Wright’s
call for a planetary patriotism

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / November 9, 2011

Angus Wright has a way of saying things we may not want to hear in a way that’s hard to ignore.

An example: During a meeting of environmentalists about shaping the public conversation on our most pressing ecological crises, folks were wrestling with how to present an honest analysis in accessible language -- how to talk about the bad news and the need for radical responses, without turning people off. During the discussion about the effects of climate change, Wright offered a simple suggestion for a slogan: “No more water, the fire next time.”

Those words from a black spiritual, made famous by James Baldwin’s borrowing for his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, are usually invoked metaphorically. Wright was suggesting that we might want to consider the phrase literally. After a summer of drought and forest fires in Texas where I live, Wright’s comment reminded me that climate disruption isn’t part of some science-fiction future, but is unfolding around us in ways that are both complex and hard to predict, but devastatingly simple: We’re in deep trouble, ecologically and culturally, as we try to face up to unprecedented planetary problems in a society in denial.

Wright is one of our most astute observers of these troubles. His willingness to face these issues, and his ability to grasp the interplay of complex systems, is no surprise to readers of his book The Death of Ramon Gonzalez: The Modern Agricultural Dilemma, first published in 1990 and revised for a 2005 edition. Looking at one region in Mexico, Wright explains how political and economic power, combined with the arrogance of experts who believe they have all the answers, have radically changed people, communities, and land -- mostly for the worse.

Though Wright speaks bluntly about these grim realities, he hasn’t given up trying to change the trajectory of a society that so often denies or minimizes the threat. A retired professor of environmental studies at California State University, Sacramento, Wright is the chair of the board of The Land Institute, which is committed to the research and organizing necessary for a truly sustainable agriculture. His writing also focuses on those issues -- he is co-author of To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement in the Struggle for a New Brazil (with Wendy Wolford) and Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation, and Food Sovereignty (with Ivette Perfecto and John Vandermeer).

Because Wright has a knack for presenting complex ideas in plain language, I asked him to respond to some crucial questions about how to understand our predicament and options. Can we face reality honestly without feeling overwhelmed? Wright suggests we can.

The 2011 Texas drought. Image from tamu.edu.
Robert Jensen: Your invocation of “the fire next time,” with its Biblical roots, suggests a moral warning and the potential catastrophe if we are not up to the moral task. Before we get to questions of politics and science, what do you think is the right moral framework for understanding the ecological crises?

Angus Wright: There certainly is a moral question, but I think we in the environmental movement have wasted a lot of time dealing with it at the wrong level. I get frustrated with the deep tendency of so many Americans to be more worried about the task of saving their souls rather than solving the problem. I am not as interested in the purity of intention or personal practice as I am concerned about correctly identifying the nature of problems and getting to work in an organized way to solve them.

The emphasis, for example, on whether individuals are hypocritical when their personal consumption is out of sync with their political/ecological views has been a diversion. It undermines effective organization and helps to maintain the myth that it is personal rather than collective action that really matters.

When we think we are saving ourselves, we tend to become self-righteous in ways that separate us from the other people we need to work with in order to effect societal change. The important moral question is social, not individual. How do we collectively figure out ways to live that don’t require that we destroy the planet’s capacity to sustain life?


What are the two or three most important things we need to understand about humans, psychologically and politically, if we are to avoid that destruction?

Humans are capable of immense creativity and sacrifice, which has been demonstrated in crisis situations such as wars, famines, migrations, and in the building and defense of homes and communities. In my work, I have been frequently reminded of the incredible sacrifices Mexican immigrants make to earn a little money to send back to their families over years, sacrifices that have both an individual and a community aspect.

Many of us know how hard and how creatively our parents and ancestors worked to provide us with the lives we now take for granted. Of course, such effort can have negative as well as positive aspects -- for example, the creation of the majority European culture of the Americas at the expense of Native Americans and Africans. People are also capable of stunning complacency, greed, and divisiveness.

The secret we seek is what inspires humans to act positively and creatively in the face of huge challenges. As humanity faces the environmental crisis, this is its greatest challenge: How do we elicit the kind of collective and individual action and creativity that will be needed? I think previous experience implies that it cannot be fear alone, nor opportunity alone, nor persuasion alone, nor organization alone, but a blend of these elements, with much else.

We have been able to lump these things together successfully in the past in something called patriotism -- a powerful force for good and ill -- and now we need something like a planetary patriotism. But no planetary patriotism can be built without acknowledging and dealing with the major things that divide us as well as the challenge that must unite us. Putting on a happy face won’t cut it.


If we have a considerable body of knowledge concerning the seriousness of the ecological crises and we have the capacity to respond to threats, what are the key impediments to change? Is the problem in the political leadership of recent decades? The economic system? Something we can’t yet identify?

One problem is an economic system that impels each company within it to pursue growth -- each company must seek new investment funds by demonstrating greater growth potential than its competitors. Another problem is a political system that is so heavily corrupted by corporate cash, exacerbated by the absurd legal fiction that a corporation is a person with constitutional rights to free speech. Without those problems, we could have the kind of largely publicly funded campaigns adopted by other countries.

I also think that for all its virtues, the constitutional checks and balances built into our system have brought us to gridlock -- we really might want to consider the advantages of a parliamentary system in which the executive branch is headed by the leader of the majority party, as in England and many other parliamentary democracies.

We have to be enlightened enough to take aggressive and expensive actions primarily for the benefit of our children and grandchildren. While individuals and families have been able to do this throughout history, it has proven very difficult for whole societies to do so. All these barriers are so daunting that we become overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it all. Here we face fundamental philosophical and psychological problems at both the individual and collective levels.

Wind farm. Photo from oz_britta's photostream / Flickr.
You said the solutions aren’t going to be individual. But how do you evaluate the efforts of people who focus on their everyday lives? That can range from being diligent about recycling, to buying “green,” to biking to work, to planting a vegetable garden. If we don’t naively believe those things can solve all our problems, are they worth doing?

Our most important problems can only be solved by collective action -- new policies and laws taken by government. That requires that we act, above all, as citizens. I have watched over the past 40 years as nearly every important institution in our society has gradually shifted to encouraging us to see ourselves as individuals and consumers as opposed to group participants and citizens. We are all aware of this in advertising, but it has also become a powerful trend in education and in government itself.

We are encouraged to believe that we can bring the changes we need by exercising our “consumer vote” in the marketplace more effectively than by exercising our citizenship -- not just in voting, but also in public debate, in participating in political parties, in the exercise of our professional judgment, in educating our children, in participation in labor unions and professional associations, in speaking out in our communities.

Our “vote” through marketplace purchases can only bring about very limited change, and by thinking of ourselves more as consumers than as citizens we diminish our very dignity as human beings. We become a mouth that eats rather than a voice that speaks.

That said, I am all for making the changes at the individual level that can help to create a culture of frugality, help us realize that we don’t really need the great quantity of junk our civilization produces, help us understand that we can make major social changes while actually improving our lives. Most of us want sociability and conviviality more than we want consumer goods. We can set a good example for others by showing that we can live more happily by consuming less. All of this can also help us live within a discipline of conscious choice rather than of allowing advertising to manipulate us.


In my experience, academics tend to focus on narrow questions they think they can answer. You seem to gravitate toward big questions that defy definitive conclusions. I wonder if that’s because of your training and teaching -- you’re a historian who taught environmental studies. We might say that the object of your inquiry has been everything that happened before today, and the interconnectedness of everything happening today. What lessons have you learned about intellectual life from your career?

When Wes Jackson (president of The Land Institute) recruited me to help him create an environmental studies program at Cal State-Sacramento, I was the all-purpose humanities and social science person in a small core faculty. I learned all I could from Wes about biology and genetics, and from other colleagues about oil and mineral depletion, nuclear power, city and regional planning, environmental law. It was a wonderful kind of second graduate school experience that lasted through an entire career.

I had always been attracted academically to what might be called the “pan-disciplines” such as geography, anthropology, and history, disciplines that can reasonably take on almost any topic in human affairs. Salina, our small Kansas city, was known nationally for having one of the best public libraries of its size, and I spent a lot of time camped out in its stacks.

My parents -- intensely intellectual people who were too poor to go to college -- assumed that any reasonable and moral person would be interested in nearly everything, and they hadn’t been beaten into submission by professors to think differently. They were good models who were eager for knowledge of all kinds. They were looking for clear words and straightforward thinking, and they assumed that good thinking led to social responsibility and political action, to which they were dedicated.


Thinking about that need for clarity, one last question. As an environmentalist, you can’t ignore the stark reality of the data about our ecological crises. As a historian, you can’t ignore the record of human successes and failures. When you weigh all that up, what advice do you have for how we should face the future? Many people find it hard to face the changes that are likely coming, which I once heard you describe as “dramatic and potentially highly unpleasant.” Are we facing “the fire next time”? Is there a way out of the trap we’ve set for ourselves?

I don’t know if there is a way out, but we have to try. My own expectations are pessimistic because I don’t see enough people having sufficient awareness, understanding, and determination to bring about the major changes we need.

And of course, contradicting what I just said, we don’t really have to try. We only really have to try if we want to maintain our self-respect. If we want to stumble forward drunk while whistling in the dark, we could choose that. I maintain a certain faith that many people are going to make the right choices, and we can hope that is enough. I think Gramsci had it right when he said that he lived with “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” And you have to take that seriously from a guy who wrote while in prison for his political beliefs.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics -- and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His books include All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Robert Jensen : Nature Bats Last

"Celebrating Global Warming." Art quilt by Laura Wasilowski / PAQA.
Nature bats last:
Notes on revolution and resistance,
revelation and redemption

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2011

[An edited version of this essay was presented as a talk to the Veterans for Peace conference in Portland, Oregon, on August 4, 2011.]

My title is ambitious and ambiguous: revolution and resistance (which tend to be associated with left politics), revelation and redemption (typically associated with right-wing religion), all framed by a warning about ecological collapse. My goal is to connect these concepts to support an argument for a radical political theology -- let me add to the ambiguity here -- that can help us claim our power at the moment when we are more powerless than ever, and identify the sources of hope when there is no hope.

First, I realize that the term “radical political theology” may be annoying. Some people will dislike “radical” and prefer a more pragmatic approach. Others will argue that theology shouldn’t be political. Still others will want nothing to do with theology of any kind. At various times in my life, I would have offered all of those objections. Today, I think a politics without a theology is dangerous, a theology without a politics is irrelevant, and radical is realistic.

By politics, I don’t mean we need to pretend to have worked out a traditional political program that will lead us to the land of milk and honey; instead, I’m merely suggesting that we always foreground the basic struggle for power in whatever work we do at whatever level. By theology, I don’t mean that we need to believe in supernatural forces that will lead us to a land of milk and honey; instead, I’m merely pointing out that we all construct a worldview that is not reducible to evidence and logic.

In politics and theology, it’s important to be clear about what we know, and even more important to recognize what we don’t know, what we can’t know, what is instinct and emotion.

And all this needs to be radical -- not in the self-indulgent “more radical than thou” style that crops up now and then on the left -- but rather in the sense of an unflinching honesty about that unjust and unsustainable nature of the systems in which we live. Whatever pragmatic steps we may decide to take in the world, they should be based on radical analysis if they are to be realistic.


Revolution

I’m not interested in speculating about future revolutions, I don’t take seriously anyone who predicts a coming revolution in the United States, and I doubt that the traditional concept of a revolution is even relevant today -- the dramatic changes that lie ahead likely won’t arrive that way. Rather than dream of revolutions to come, it’s more productive to think about the revolutions that brought us to this moment.

Ask an audience to name the three most important revolutions in human history, and the most common answers are the American, French, and Russian. But to understand our current situation, the better answer is the agricultural, industrial, and delusional revolutions. While those national revolutions had dramatic effects, not only on those nations but on the course of the history of the past two centuries, these other revolutions not only reshaped the lives of every human but remade the world in ways that may spell the end of human history as we know it. The agricultural, industrial, and delusional revolutions were -- to use a current political cliché -- real game-changers.

The agricultural revolution started about 10,000 years ago when a gathering-hunting species discovered how to cultivate plants for food and domesticate animals. Two crucial things resulted, one political and one ecological. Politically, the ability to stockpile food made possible concentrations of power and resulting hierarchies that were foreign to band-level gathering-hunting societies, which were highly egalitarian and based on cooperation.

This is not to say that humans were not capable of doing bad things to each other prior to agriculture, but only that large-scale institutionalized oppression has its roots in agriculture. We need not romanticize pre-agricultural life but simply recognize that it was organized in far more egalitarian fashion than what we call “civilization.”

Ecologically, the invention of agriculture kicked off an intensive human assault on natural systems. While gathering-hunting humans were capable of damaging a local ecosystem in limited ways, the large-scale destruction we cope with today has its origins in agriculture, in the way humans started exhausting the energy-rich carbon of the planet, first in soil.

Human agricultural practices have varied over time and place but have never been sustainable over the long term. There are better and worse farming practices, but soil erosion has been a consistent feature of agriculture, which makes it the first step in the entrenchment of an unsustainable human economy based on extraction.

We are trained to think that advances in technology constitute progress, but the post-World War II “advances” in oil-based industrial agriculture have accelerated the ecological destruction. Soil from large monoculture fields drenched in petrochemicals not only continues to erode but also threatens groundwater supplies and contributes to dead zones in oceans.

While it’s true that this industrial agriculture has produced tremendous yield increases during the last century, no one has come up with a sustainable system for perpetuating that kind of agricultural productivity. Those high yields mask what Wes Jackson has called “the failure of success”: Production remains high while the health of the soil continues to decline dramatically.[1]

That kind of “success” guarantees the inevitable collapse of the system. We have less soil that is more degraded, with no technological substitute for healthy soil; we are exhausting and contaminating groundwater; and we are dependent on an agriculture tied to a fuel source that is running out.

That industrialization of agriculture was made possible, of course, by the larger industrial revolution that began in the last half of the 18th century in Great Britain, which intensified the magnitude of the human assault on ecosystems and humans assaults on each other.

This revolution unleashed the concentrated energy of coal, oil, and natural gas to run the new steam engine and machines in textile manufacturing that dramatically increased productivity. That energy -- harnessed by the predatory capitalist economic system that was beginning to dominate the planet -- not only eventually transformed all manufacturing, transportation, and communication, but disrupted social relations.

People were pushed off the land, out of communities, and into cities that grew rapidly, often without planning. Traditional ways of knowing and living were destroyed, by force or by the allure of affluence. World population soared from about 1 billion in 1800 to the current 7 billion, far beyond the long-term carrying capacity of the planet.

This move from a sun-powered and muscle-based world to a fossil fuel-powered and machine-based world has produced unparalleled material comfort for some. Whatever one thinks of the effect of such levels of comfort on human well-being -- in my view, the effect has been mixed at best[2] -- the processes that produce the comfort are destroying the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain human life as we know it into the future, and in the present those comforts are not distributed in a fashion that is consistent with any meaningful conception of justice.

In short, our world is unsustainable and unjust -- the way we live is in direct conflict with common sense and the ethical principles on which we claim to base our lives. How is that possible? Enter the third revolution.

The delusional revolution is my term for the development of sophisticated propaganda techniques in the 20th century (especially a highly emotive, image-based advertising/marketing system) that have produced in the bulk of the population (especially in First World societies) a distinctly delusional state of being.

Although any person or group can employ these techniques, wealthy individuals and corporations -- and their representatives in government -- take advantage of their disproportionate share of resources to flood the culture with their stories that reinforce their dominance. Journalism and education, idealized as spaces for rationally based truth-telling, sometimes provide a counter to those propaganda systems, but just as often are co-opted by the powerful forces behind them.

Perhaps the most stunning example of this is that during the 2000s, as the evidence for human-caused climate disruption became more compelling, the percentage of the population that rejects that science increased.

Why would people who, in most every other aspect of life accept without question the results of peer-reviewed science, reject the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists in this case? Some have theological reasons, and for others perhaps it is simply easier to disbelieve than to face the implications. But it’s clear that the well-funded media campaigns using these propaganda techniques to create doubt have been effective.[3]

Even those of us who try to resist it often can’t help but be drawn into parts of the delusion; it’s difficult to keep track of, let alone understand, all of the fronts on which we are facing serious challenges to a just and sustainable future.

As a culture, these delusions leave us acting as if unsustainable systems can be sustained simply because we want them to be. Much of the culture’s story-telling -- particularly that which comes through almost all of the mass media -- remains committed to maintaining this delusional state. In such a culture, it becomes hard to extract oneself from that story.

Singer/songwriter Greg Brown captures the trajectory of this delusional revolution when he speculates that one day, “There’ll be one corporation selling one little box/it’ll do what you want and tell you what you want and cost whatever you got.”[4]

In summary: The agricultural revolution set us on a road to destruction. The industrial revolution ramped up our speed. The delusional revolution has prevented us from coming to terms with the reality of where we are and where we are heading.

Art and resistance: Mural on the Palestine Wall. Image from Tidings.

Resistance

Even if a revolutionary program is not viable at the moment, strategies and tactics for resistance are crucial. To acknowledge that the social, economic, and political systems that have produced this death spiral can’t be overthrown from the revolutionary playbooks of the past does not mean there are no ways to affirm life.

We face planetary problems that seem to defy solutions, but the U.S. empire and predatory corporate capitalism remain immediate threats and should be resisted. An honest, radical assessment of our situation doesn’t mean giving up, but it requires us to be tough-minded. We need to understand which resistance strategies and tactics are likely to be most productive at this moment in history.

To advance that discussion, let’s think back to February 15, 2003. Many of us on that Saturday participated in actions in opposition to the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was an exhilarating day, the largest coordinated political protest in the history of the world.

At least 10 million people participated across the globe, with a clear message for U.S. policymakers: The invasion being planned is illegal and immoral, and we reject not only this war but your right to use violence to achieve your political and economic goals. I was the emcee of the event in Austin, and I remember being amazed at the thousands who gathered at the Texas Capitol, stretching back so far that our loudspeakers couldn’t reach the entire crowd.

We had a compelling message, rooted in international law, political principles, and moral values. We had huge numbers of people. We had an international presence. And none of it mattered; the war came.

Why could U.S. policymakers ignore us without consequence? First, those elites knew that a large segment of the public either actively supported the war or would passively support almost any war that was out of sight/out of mind. Second, they knew that when that day of protest was over, most of the people in the streets would go home, satisfied with their public statement and unlikely to go beyond that polite expression of dissent.

Political movements are most potent when people are willing to take risks; without a large number of such people, the powerful know they can wait out protests.

For most people, attending an anti-war rally posed no risk. Immigrants and people in targeted groups (Arabs, South Asians, Muslims) had reason to feel threatened, but people who look like me -- with only rare exceptions -- don’t face serious repression in the United States today for engaging in peaceful political activity, though that can change quickly.

What were most of us willing to do beyond attending a rally in opposition to a war being planned? A month later, when the war came, we got a partial answer. The crowd for the standing call to come to the Capitol when the bombs fell was at best one-fourth of the pre-war rally. Most of the people who came on February 15 weren’t willing to come out in public once the nation was at war; even that trivial a risk was too much.

I could be cocky and say that in 2003 I was willing to risk my job, my physical safety, even my life to stop the war. It might be true; I certainly felt the urgency of the moment. But the question is moot, because at that time there was no strategy for taking such risks. These decisions about risk are made by individuals but in the context of options developed collectively, and the movement I was part of had not discussed such options.

So, when certain resistance tactics don’t work as part of a strategy that’s not clearly articulated, it’s time to rethink. I have no grand strategy to offer, and I am skeptical about anyone who claims they have worked out such a strategy. But I am reasonably confident that this is not a mass-movement moment, not a time in which large numbers of Americans are likely to engage in political activity that challenges basic systems of power and wealth.

I believe we are in a period in which the most important work is creating the organizations and networks that will be important in the future, when the political conditions change, for better or worse. Whatever is coming, we need sharper analysis, stronger vehicles for action, and more resilient connections among people. In short, this is a cadre-building moment.

Although for some people the phrase “cadre-building” may invoke the worst of the left’s revolutionary dogmatism, I have something different in mind. For me, “cadre” doesn’t mean “vanguard” or “self-appointed bearers of truth.” It signals commitment, but with an openness to rethinking theory and practice.

I see this kind of organizing in some groups in Austin, TX, where I live. Not surprisingly, they are groups led by younger people who are drawing on longstanding radical ideas, updating as needed to fit a changing world. These organizers don’t have all the answers, and I don’t agree with some of the answers they do have, but I am drawn to them because they recognize the need to dig in.


Revelation

Most discussions of revelation and apocalypse in contemporary America focus on the Book of Revelation, also known as The Apocalypse of John, the final book of the Christian New Testament. The two terms are synonymous in their original meaning -- “revelation” from Latin and “apocalypse” from Greek both mean a lifting of the veil, a disclosure of something hidden from most people, a coming to clarity. What is the nature of this unveiling today? What is being revealed to us?

A reactionary end-times theology turns that particular book of the Bible into the handbook for a death cult, fantasizing about an easy way out. That isn’t the direction I will be heading. Rather than thinking of revelation as divine delivery of a clear message about some fantastic future above, we can think of it as a process that requires tremendous effort on our part about our very real struggles on this planet.

That notion of revelation doesn’t offer a one-way ticket to a better place, but reminds us that there are no tickets available to any other place; we humans live and die on this planet, and we have a lot of work to do if, as a species, we want to keep living.

That process begins with an honest analysis of where we stand. There is a growing realization that we have disrupted natural forces in ways we cannot control and do not fully understand. We need not adopt an end-times theology to recognize that on our current trajectory, there will come a point when the ecosphere cannot sustain human life as we know it.

As Bill McKibben puts it, “The world hasn’t ended, but the world as we know it has -- even if we don’t quite know it yet.”[5]

McKibben, the first popular writer to alert the world to the threat of climate change, argues that humans have so dramatically changed the planet’s ecosystems that we should rename the Earth, call it Eaarth:

The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. The stability that produced that civilization has vanished; epic changes have begun. We may, with commitment and luck, yet be able to maintain a planet that will sustain some kind of civilization, but it won’t be the same planet, and hence it won’t be the same civilization. The earth that we knew -- the only earth that we ever knew -- is gone.[6]

If McKibben is accurate -- and I think the evidence clearly supports his assessment -- then we can’t pretend all that’s needed is tinkering with existing systems to fix a few environmental problems; massive changes in how we live are required, what McKibben characterizes as a new kind of civilization.

No matter where any one of us sits in the social and economic hierarchies, there is no escape from the dislocations of such changes. Money and power might insulate some from the most wrenching consequences of these shifts, but there is no escape. We do not live in stable societies and no longer live on a stable planet. We may feel safe and secure in specific places at specific times, but it’s hard to believe in any safety and security in a collective sense.

This is a revelation not of a coming rapture but of a deepening rupture. The end times are not coming, they are unfolding now.

Bill McKibben. Image from The Boston Globe.

Redemption

Just as revelation can be about more than explosions during the end times, redemption can be understood as about more than a savior’s blood washing away our sin. In a world in which so many decent people have been psychologically and theologically abused by being called “sinner” by jealous and judgmental scolds, sin and redemption are tricky terms.

But we shouldn’t give up on the concept of sin, for we are in fact all sinners -- we all do things that fall short of the principles on which we claim to base our lives. Everyone I know has at some point lied to avoid accountability, failed to offer help to someone in need, taken more than their fair share.

Given that we all sin, we all should seek redemption, understood as the struggle to come back into right relation with those we have injured. If we are to live up to our own moral standards, we must deepen our understanding of sin and its causes so that we can understand the path to redemption.

For Christians, sin traditionally has been marked as original and individual -- we are born with it, and we can deal with it through an individual profession of faith. In some sense, of course, sin is obviously original. At some point in our lives we all do things that violate our own principles, which suggests the capacity to do nasty things is a part of normal human psychology.

Equally obvious is that even though we live interdependently and our actions are conditioned by how we are socialized, we are distinct moral agents and we make choices. Responsibility for those choices must in part be ours as individuals.

But an individual focus isn’t going to solve our most pressing problems, which is why it is crucial to focus on the sins we commit that are created, not original, and solutions that are collective, not individual.

These sins, which do much greater damage, are the result of -- we might say, created by -- political, economic, and social systems. Those systems create war and poverty, discrimination and oppression, not simply through the freely chosen actions of individuals but because of the nature of these systems of empire and capitalism, rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy. Humans’ ordinary capacity to sin is intensified, reaching a different order of magnitude, and responsibility for the resulting sins is shared.

There is a politics to sin, and therefore there has to be a politics to redemption. That desire to return to right relation with others in our personal lives is not enough; collectively we have to struggle for the same thing, which requires us to always be working to dismantle those hierarchical systems that define our lives.

Within hierarchy, right relation is impossible; assertions of dominance and concentrations of power create domination and abuses of power. That includes the most abusive of all hierarchies: The human claim to a right to dominate everything else. Our most important struggle for redemption concerns our most profound sin: Our willingness to destroy the larger living world of which we are a part.

The first step in redemption is to not turn away from that lifting of the veil, to face honestly what we have done, to contest the culture’s delusions wherever possible. Then we can face what we must do to enhance justice and build sustainable living arrangements.

What does this kind of redemption look like in practice? I think we should proceed along two basic tracks. First, we should commit some of our energy to the familiar movements that focus on the question of justice in this world, such as anti-war struggles. We redeem ourselves -- especially those of us with privilege that is rooted in that injustice -- through that commitment to fighting empire, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

But I also think there is important work to be done in experiments to prepare for what will come in this new future we can’t yet describe in detail. Whatever the limits of our predictive capacity, we can be pretty sure we will need ways of organizing ourselves to help us live in a world with less energy and fewer material goods.

We have to all develop the skills needed for that world (such as gardening with fewer inputs, food preparation and storage, and basic tinkering), and we will need to recover a deep sense of community that has disappeared from many of our lives. McKibben puts this in terms of a new scale for our work:

The project we’re now undertaking -- maintenance, graceful decline, hunkering down, holding on against the storm -- requires a different scale. Instead of continents and vast nations, we need to think about states, about town, about neighborhoods, about blocks... We need to scale back, to go to ground. We need to take what wealth we have left and figure out how we’re going to use it, not to spin the wheel one more time but to slow the wheel down... We need, as it were, to trade in the big house for something that suits our circumstances on this new Eaarth. We need to feel our vulnerability.”[7]

Nature bats last

The phrase “nature bats last” circulates these days among people who have their eye on the multiple, cascading ecological crises. The metaphor reminds us that nature is the home team and has the final word. We humans may be particularly impressed with our own achievements -- all of the spectacular home runs we have hit with science and technology -- but when those achievements are at odds with how nature operates, then nature is going to bring in the ultimate designated hitter and knock the human race out of the ballpark.

OK, let’s not try to stretch this too far -- no single metaphor can work at every level needed. The point is simple: We are not as powerful as the forces that govern that larger living world.

The metaphor offers one other crucial lesson, in this case because of its limitations. When we say “nature bats last,” it implies we are one team and nature is on another, as if it were possible for us to compete with nature. But we are, of course, simply part of nature, one species in an indescribably diverse living world. To imagine ourselves as competing with nature would be like our lungs competing with our heart -- either those organs work together, or an individual human dies.

Unfortunately, the architects of modern science didn’t see the world that way. One of the most often-quoted, Francis Bacon, believed that modern science and technology “have the power to conquer and subdue [nature], to shake her to her foundations.” Rene Descartes, another of these founding fathers, believed humans could achieve the knowledge and develop the means to know:

the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we might also apply them in the same way to all the uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.

These thinkers also contributed to our understanding of the workings and power of the natural world. But this language of domination -- to conquer and subdue, becoming lords and possessors -- is the language not of a baseball game but of war, which brings us to the relevance of this to Veterans for Peace. VFP members have seen through and gone beyond the egotistical rhetoric of our national fundamentalism -- with all its fraudulent claims about “fighting for freedom” -- to reject the U.S. wars of empire and stake out an audacious goal: “To abolish war as an instrument of national policy.”

We also need to see beyond the egotistical rhetoric of our technological fundamentalism -- the claims that infinitely clever humans will solve all problems with gadgets -- and stake out an even more audacious goal: To end the human war on the rest of living world.

3-D concept art by Alex Broeckel, Germany / CoolVibe.

Life is hard

If all this seems too much to ask of ourselves, that’s because it is. We live in a time when we must face honestly the whole truth, but to do that is too much to bear. We struggle to claim our power at the moment when we are more powerless than ever, and find hope where there is no hope.

On power: Those of us in dissident movements understand we face difficult odds, fighting entrenched forces of the state and corporation. We know the keys to prevailing: Fight organized money with organized people; compromise to build a power base but never abandon core principles; find ways to delegitimize authority; raise the social costs for elites to pursue unjust policies; hang in for the long haul. Those organizing basics don’t change, though the application of them must constantly adapt to changes in the structure of power. But the ecological crises change things in the big picture.

First, we should not assume the long haul is as long as we’ve always imagined. No one can predict the rate of collapse if we stay on this trajectory, and we don’t know if we can change the trajectory.

There is much we don’t know, but everything I see suggests that the world in which we will pursue political goals will change dramatically in the next decade or two, almost certainly for the worse. Organizing has to adapt not only to changes in societies but to these fundamental changes in the ecosphere. We are organizing in a period of contraction, not expansion.

Second, we can’t be satisfied with contesting imperialism in the nation-state and the concentration of wealth in corporate capitalism, but also must change the human relationship to the living world.

Dissident movements have an advantage, given that a larger percentage of people involved in left/radical politics have less of a commitment to maintaining the dominant culture’s delusions. Radicals don’t have the wealth and power that can appear to insulate us from collapse, which means we have more room to think about what living arrangements are consistent with reality. Elites, who typically mistake temporary domination for real power, have a harder time recognizing that humans are powerless in the face of the forces we have been trying to conquer and subdue.

In the end, we can never be the lords and possessors of something larger and more enduring in time. Many traditions recognize this basic reality: We don’t own the earth, the earth owns us. Our power comes in recognizing our powerlessness and adapting to the world as it is, not the world as we imagine it to be.

How does this approach give people hope? It doesn’t, and it shouldn’t, because hope is not something you give to people. The political organizers on the liberal/left who are always touting a new way to restore the American Dream are peddlers of false hope, offering allegedly exciting opportunities to allegedly new movements that are stuck in the same old failed ideology of the dominant culture, steadfastly ignoring the depth and scope of the ecological crises.

Real hope comes with abandoning the false prophets and moving on to accomplish something. Authentic hope comes when we honestly confront our condition and dig in to create new, or revive old, forms of community. Hope comes from proving to ourselves that we are competent to manage our own lives. Hope doesn’t fall from the sky but rather is built from the ground up.

That hope doesn’t ask for guarantees that our movements will prevail. That hope doesn’t require us to pretend we know whether the human experiment will go on forever. That hope comes from the understanding that while we did not choose to live in a desecrated world, such is the world into which we were born.

All we can do is act out of respect for ourselves, for each other, and for nature, in the hope that we can restore the sacredness of the individual, the human community in which individuals find meaning, and the living world of which human communities are a part.

Organizers have long said that the key to successful organizing is making it easy for people to do the right thing. Today, our task is to be honest about how difficult it is to do the right thing. Anyone who thinks it can be easy to do the right thing is part of the delusional culture. Rather than delude ourselves, let’s face the truth and recognize the difficulty of the path that lies ahead.

Other social movements have prevailed in the face of great difficulty, but no social movement has had to face this simple but profound reality: We have to become the first species on the planet to practice restraint in the scramble for energy-rich carbon. All life on this planet is based on that scramble, but if we continue on the path unchecked the planet will be incapable of sustaining human life as we know it.

That is a brand new organizing challenge. In facing it, we need to leave the platitudes at home.

The radical political theology I believe we need for this moment in history would acknowledge, rather than try to mask, our confusion and uncertainty. We know we are in deep trouble; beyond that, it’s guesswork. Facing that takes a new kind of courage.

We usually think of courage as rooted in clarity and certainty -- we act with courage when we are sure of what we know. Today, the courage we need must be rooted in the limits of what we can know and trust in something beyond human knowledge. In many times and places, that something has gone by the name “God.”

Religious fundamentalism offers a God who will protect us if we follow orders. Technological fundamentalism gives us the illusion that we are God and can arrange the world as we like it. A radical political theology leaves behind fear-based protection rackets and arrogance-driven control fantasies.

The God for our journey is neither above us nor inside us but around us, a reminder of the sacredness of the living world of which we are a part. That God shares the anxiety and anguish of life in a desecrated world. With such a God we can be at peace with our powerlessness and alive in hope. With such a God, we can live in peace.

References:

[1] Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), chapter 2. Many of my points in this talk were greatly influence by the work of Jackson and The Land Institute, http://www.landinstitute.org.

[2] Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

[3] Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).

[4] Greg Brown, “Where Is Maria?” from the CD “Further In,” Red House Records, 1996.

[5] Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010), p. 2.

[6] McKibben, Eaarth, p. 25.

[7] McKibben, Eaarth, p. 123.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics -- and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His books include All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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