By N. Anecone, 7/25/2010
Many are increasingly becoming aware that civilization has reached or is reaching a kind of tenuous maximum. Some thinkers even feel humanity might not last to the end of this century. History’s stream has reached the bottom of its incline, and now those living today and in the next few generations represent the last offshoots of the historical series as it dribbles to a stop. Everything is reaching, or worse violating, its reasonable maximum—debt, population, pollution, resource loss and destruction—all have tried or broken their sensible limits. The youngest alive today increasingly look like the damned, born into a world which is rapidly being demolished, which is losing its capacity to house human life.
The instinct for self-preservation has ironed into the psyche of mankind a dangerously limited conception of its meaning within nature. The instinct for power and capitalism somehow mutated together, twining symbiotically, initiating a severe disregard for the planet. Isolated blunders have multiplied upwards as industrial production forces systematic scavenging of the earth, as mountainous buildups of trash flush rivers and buries landscapes, and as oceans slick over with oils. This ruination of the ecosystem increases the probability of environmental implosion—that is, of global self-destruction. From outer space, civilization does not look like so many enormous stone and metal flowers rooting on the crust of the earth. It seems like a fatal and misdirected outgrowth, whose future is despoliation and ruin.
That at least is the pessimist’s premonition. History is traditionally conceived as a strictly human undertaking, the triumph of our conquest of the earth. History represents the ignition of the slow burning embers of consciousness, awakening in the beginning to an untrammeled world, and then the exploitation and scouring of that open expanse as humans multiplied and consolidated their mastery of the globe. Humans became capable of profound self-reflection in the process of their evolution. They materialized a mind which touted the power of art, literature, philosophy and science. The statistical nature of mankind’s successes and failures, births and deaths, wars and calms over history remade the earth’s surface and configured its future down the most probable course—the course of today. Now that course appears to be reaching a worrisome ceiling. The question looms: Where is history headed?
How to put a reasonable answer to this invincibly hard question? The question is too big for any single perspective to encompass. Logic, however, draws a circle around the whole of possibility: we know history can only mutate down a finite number of paths, so the state of history today represents a position placed at a fan of possible trajectories, one of which in all its convolution will be actualized. But this conception is linear, and gives little respect to the power of chaos. History is nothing but actions and reactions, which together in great numbers make chaos. Perhaps by weeding out the logic of capitalism, a fuller understanding of modernity’s pandemonium can be made.
What is notable about the past four hundred years was the ending of unexplored wildernesses and the finishing up of civilization’s territorial expansion. No more places were left unexplored; the human shadow had cast itself on practically every habitable piece of geography on earth. What remained were a collection of societies, many undergoing fast industrial transformations, which could only expand by building vertically, through technological development and economic entrenchment, or by pouring out horizontally, through the colonial occupation of less dominant, less militarized, less advanced societies. Business interests grew in Europe in the 1600s, which eventually gained so much influence they acted as partly autonomous entities separate from royalty and purely governmental bodies. These interests, such as the Dutch East India Company, precipitated many of the movements of young capitalism, and helped to reinforce the appealing notion of private ownership of properties.
One interpretation of capitalism is that it was the principal outcome of the end of the historically normal trend of territorial expansion. Over the whole of history the earth filled up with chiefdoms, then kingdoms, then empires and nations each trying to claim their prestige and fix their prosperity. Eventually by the 20th century the fact all of them tried to secure territory all at once produced a self-limiting mechanism over the entirety of the populated world. To expand any more militarily would require the industrial powers to reengage extreme violence using the overkill of modern weapons. In order for interests to accumulate wealth, it thus followed that the drive to prominence had to be controlled by the interests of finance consortiums in possession of capital instead of the more blunt means of pure conquest.
Currently, mankind’s historical project seems static though changes do take place in it. The totality of social relations has reached a kind of crude harmonization, with the laborers and capitalists, the trapped poor, the workers, the middle stratum and the exuberantly wealthy all combined in a stage of confrontation with the exhaustion of the ecosphere. Horizontal (that is, expansionistic,) growth is now impossible as it requires warfare between advanced nations with modern technologies that if used imply the absolute destruction of all participants. Only vertical growth, the growth of communications, financial associations of capital, and technological innovations defines the contemporary form of social relations on the broadest scale.
The United States of America, partly hubristic thanks to a succession of historical victories and partly faced with the disintegration of the project of globalization it helped to inspire, is imperialistically over-dispensed and rife with serious internal social contradictions. This prospect of destabilization in America is happening in coordination with the ascendancy of Chinese state-capitalism, with its doggedly inhumane treatment of workers and its enthusiasm to become the world’s superpower. In sum, all the relations of industry are troubled with the same universal dilemma: the catastrophic feedback loop by which you draw resources from the environment to build factories and refineries which obliterate the environment.
If this self-destructive tendency is to be understood, it must be simplified in these terms: The instinct to self-preservation as distorted by capitalism is not an instinct to safeguard the fundamental sources of survival. The instinct to feel satiation is not a productive act, but an act at the expense of some destruction elsewhere. Capitalism is, in a very clear sense, a hypertrophying of the instinct for self-preservation. It produces the rudiments of pleasure with pure disregard for the cost of waste. “Cure capitalism, “says the left, “and cure also the ultimate destruction of the race.” No, since capitalism is not a syndrome but a redirection of the instinct for self-preservation into a deluded state where consumers perpetuate the wealth of producers while satisfying themselves and the producers spoil the environment to satisfy the consumers.
If it is true what 19th century German philosophers said—that humanity exists in an absurd limbo between the avoidance of pain and the search of pleasure, the form of consumerist capitalism as it can be judged to exist today is the form of the idolization of pleasure and a complete banishment of the thought of pain (that is, of an entire fraction of subjective reality). In China, a capitalistic middle class is shaping. It too, one suspects, will take the cast of consumption, for the reason that pleasure becomes idolatrous in societies that misuse the instinct for self-preservation.
What will result, say, thirty years from now? One can only wonder. It’s natural to hold out optimism. Optimism here essentially comes down to the reworking of technologies so they no longer conflict with the survival of the ecosystem. Another hope is that international trade eliminates the viability of open warfare between the world’s great powers. Humanity as a whole could unify politically to reverse the increase in damage to the ecosphere, could disintegrate into primitive dystopianism, or could prevail by cultivating new lifestyles which do not ramp up entropy so rapidly. Whatever happens, it is clear that the earth is unified under the dominion of mankind. Our fate is paired with the fate of the earth.
