Fiddling while the world teeters on the brink

Aug 26, 2024
A globe puzzle and white chess pieces isolated on a black background - the power of unity concept

We need a no-holds-barred attack on corporate power to meet global threats.

Humanity cannot — now — avoid troubled and turbulent times. Extreme events will powerfully influence the course ahead, the shape of things to come after the turmoil. They could help or hinder: provide the moral force for urgent action, or preoccupy us with crisis management.

Writers like Rebecca Solnit have described the revelatory, and potentially revolutionary, nature of disasters. Not only can they bring out the best in us, and connect and empower us, but they also lay bare the social conditions and choices that often cause or contribute to disasters, delivering a societal shock that makes change possible. But will disasters, piling one upon another, do this?

The next 20 years will settle this issue (if it isn’t settled already). We will know by then the extent to which we are locked into global crises, and if so, what we can do to minimise their impacts and to shape the world that lies on the far side. We may no longer be able to get out of the mess we’re creating for ourselves, but we can get through it. There is still plenty to dream of, and to strive for.

I made these comments in a 2012 essay, Whatever happened to Western civilisation?, published in The Futurist, the magazine of the US-based World Future Society. The essay was itself a reflection on a 1993 essay, The West’s deepening cultural crisis.

Well, we haven’t had to wait 20 years to see the choice we have made between deep, systemic change and the management of specific calamities. As I feared, governments have become shockingly irrelevant in failing to match their responses to the magnitude of the challenges facing us (what I call a scale anomaly or discrepancy). This is despite the growing evidence and the insistent warnings by experts that we risk societal and civilisational collapse – even that collapse has already begun. They have, instead, become ever more preoccupied with trying to deal with a growing cascade of natural, social and political upheavals, many arising from global threats such as climate change.

This situation has made me reconsider what we should do about our predicament. One theme of my work has been culture and its neglect in thinking about global threats and risks. Cultures define and describe how we see the world and our place in it – and so how we live and behave. In a sense cultures “permit”, and so limit, what we can do.

We need to remake Western culture if we are to meet the challenges confronting us. The magnitude of this transformation is akin to that from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, from the medieval mind to the modern mind. We face another rupture or discontinuity in our view of ourselves, in what it is to be human, that will change profoundly how we live.

However, I now accept that window has closed. The shift in political consciousness to focus on dealing with specific disasters and calamities – fires, floods, wars, economic upheavals – means there is no longer scope for a deep dialogue about cultural transformation. We need a new emphasis.

I feel the same way about the recommendations of the recent roundtable report, “A world call to action”, by the Club of Rome and the Council for the Human Future. I agree with its summation that, “Humanity is facing its greatest emergency, a crisis consisting of many, interlinked, catastrophic risks”; that, “The crisis is already here, and will get worse”; that “Together, these risks endanger our ability to maintain a civilisation, possibly even to survive as a species”.

The report’s recommendations include a World Plan of Action, a UN People’s Assembly, an Earth System Council, an Earth System Treaty, and an Alliance of Partners for the Planet, People and Peace.

However, one of the roundtable participants seems to repudiate its aim, saying: “Calling for action to prevent collapse requires ignoring or downplaying the last eight years of data, which indicate modern societies worldwide are already at various stages of fracture and there is a momentum in their trajectories.”

The times now demand a much sharper, simpler, more radical focus: an all-out revolt against the power of corporations. I have no doubt that many activists already see themselves doing this. But it is not the way debate and action are framed in mainstream politics, the media or science. This new awareness has the advantages that it is already in public consciousness and the structures and procedures of action already exist; they just need to be massively scaled up.

The evidence that fossil-fuel companies have been working behind the scenes to delay the transition to renewable energy, including spreading false stories about electric vehicles, is just the latest example of the relentless and ruthless efforts of industry after industry to defend themselves against evidence of harm by sowing scientific doubt about the evidence, buying influence, and shifting blame. They use the tactics and strategies developed by tobacco companies in countering smoking restrictions.

The fossil-fuel industry has been doing this for decades in denying human-caused climate change. The arms industry, through the military-industrial complex, promotes and profits hugely from war, including in Ukraine and Gaza. On a matter I don’t fully understand, the banks (whose practices caused the Global Financial Crisis, but which escaped penalty) are contributing to what one banking expert has described as a “ticking time bomb” or “casino” based on financial derivatives valued as high as several quadrillion (1,000 trillion) dollars. This far exceeds global GDP, which was about US$100 trillion in 2022. Investor Warren Buffet famously labelled derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction”.

More broadly, a massive and growing media-marketing complex culturally “manufactures” modern, high-consumption lifestyles, which are inimical to the environment and to human health and well-being. Increasingly the mainstream media have become agents of propaganda for failed government and unhealthy, unsustainable lifestyles.

We must use every (non-violent) means — legislation, legal action, protest, civil disobedience, public humiliation — to reduce, even eliminate, the political power of corporations, especially the huge global corporations, which wield so much sway over democracy, government and our lives, and so often act against our common interests.

Some of their actions should be considered crimes against humanity, in that the term has been used to condemn acts that ‘shock the conscience of mankind’. These acts include human-made environmental disasters, with the intention either to register moral outrage, or to suggest that they be recognised formally as legal offences.

The link between my interest in culture and corporate malfeasance is through ideology. Culture has been said to exert a pervasive, but diffuse, influence on actions, providing the underlying assumptions of an entire way of life. In unsettled times, cultural change can become focused into an ideological contest, in which ideologies exert a powerful, clearly articulated, but more restricted, basis for social action. Today we are dealing, in the West, with the dominant influence of neo-liberalism (a variation of capitalism), which has captured Government in the interests of those with money and power.

From the 1970s onward, we have declared each decade to be a decade of reckoning for Earth’s environment, a time when humankind must deal decisively with growing global crises. And as each decade passed without the necessary action, we deferred the reckoning to the next decade. Climate change became a focal issue, scientifically and politically. Now, it is the 2020s that we claim to be the last chance to avert catastrophic consequences. We are in the sixth decade of “the reckoning”.

And yet, hope remains, unreasonable, hanging by a thread.

 

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A critique of ‘a world call to action’ on the multiple crises now enfolding humanity

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