Religion and Eschatology in Politics – Page 3

The Hollow Earth: Neoliberalism’s Encounter with Covid-19 and the Uberization of Society

This essay begins with a long discussion of my old friend George and how I came to know the central anecdote in this story. If you want to skip ahead to the jeremiad about neoliberalism, just scroll down to section two.

George M Gibault (1949-2016)

My late friend George Gibault served as the BC Social Credit caucus Director of Research from 1975-1995. George was an eccentric polymath and one of the finest strategists the political right has ever had in BC. When not teaching himself different regional styles of banjo music or how to speak Latvian, he was involved in a long thought experiment about what kind of language super-intelligent space-faring dogs would speak. A Turkic language, he decided.

For obvious reasons, George and I became fast friends when Troy Lanigan, head of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, and I bumped into him en route to our lunch meeting to discuss how to keep the BC Electoral Change Coalition together in 1998. We became aware that Troy had paid our bill and left hours ago when the restaurant finally told us they were closing. Like what we call “cultural historians” in my line of work, George had an uncanny talent for seeing something universal, structural and profound in a society by examining the thinking of those at its periphery. For this reason, we both had a carefully curated set of illustrative anecdotes about our encounters with people more eccentric than ourselves, anecdotes that were not merely funny but either were, had been or would be illustrative of something pressing and profound in human society. This is the first (but will not be the last) of my posts whose foundation is a George Gibault story.

(It is also worth noting that this story also formed the foundation of a shockingly prescient role-playing game Philip Freeman and I ran in 2003-06, which predicted the burkini, ISIL, increasing rates of gender reassignment surgery, rolling coal and the globalization of OK! Magazine, among other things.)

George had many jobs in addition to his formal role in the Social Credit governments that ruled BC from 1975-91, as a strategist, administrator and policy wonk. But one of his most cherished was one of several he was forced to take on following the accession of Bill Vander Zalm to the premier’s chair. “The Zalm,” was a tad eccentric, himself, and liked to shoot from the hip policy- and strategy-wise; at one point, he took a three-month leave of absence from the premiership to star in the Sinterlkaas Fantasy, an CTV-Dutch co-production in which he played both Santa Claus and himself, set in Fantasy Gardens, the theme park he did not just run but resided in. So George appointed himself as the person who would take meetings on the premier’s behalf that might otherwise cause the premier to fly off on an unhelpful tangent.

One such meeting was with the leader of the Ontario Social Credit Party. The Social Credit movement had begun in Canada during the inter-war years as a conspiratorial and somewhat confused offshoot of William Jennings Bryan’s popular monetary reform movement in the US. The original Social Credit parties in Canada were explicitly anti-Semitic and believed that provincial governments printing as much of their own scrip as they wished would get Canada out from under the International Zionist Conspiracy that was controlling all governments through the monetary system.

In the 1940s and 50s, in BC and Alberta, Social Credit parties became big-tent anti-communist parties of liberals, Tories and populists whose purpose was to keep socialists, trade unionists and urban liberal cultural elites out of office. And to a lesser extent, the national Social Credit movement had followed suit, becoming a primarily anti-communist, anti-metric, anti-secularism organization where the anti-Semitism was kept to a dull roar.

The Hollow Earth

But by 1989, when the Ontario Socred leader arrived, the BC party was just two years away from electoral obliteration and Social Credit in the rest of Canada had died back to fringe status by the end of the 70s. George figured that the last thing his boss needed was a dose of anti-Semitic conspiracy thinking from some wingnut from Ontario. Besides, George, himself, was curious about what the guy had to say.

“The number one issue,” the guest from Ontario explained, “is Global Warming.”

“Really?” George replied. “Why?”

“We have to accelerate it.”

The reason, the man explained, was that the earth is hollow. The inside is a Dyson sphere with a tiny black sun in the very centre, providing a small amount of warmth. Over 90% of all of the Jews live inside the earth, which is made out of gold. They retain their dominance over the world economy by shipping the gold to their coreligionists on the surface through secret passages under the polar ice caps.

It was necessary to increase BC’s carbon order cialis australia After grabbing that authentication the drug starts working within half an hour of taking meal. This causes the veins of the penis to absorb a greater amount cialis overnight delivery http://www.heritageihc.com/buy5785.html of blood, upon which the muscles become more comprehensive. These combinations are purchase levitra http://www.heritageihc.com/visit then tested in clinical trials to see how effective they are. You’ll be able to attend the classes according to your time tadalafil super active and convenience. emissions, he explained, in order to melt the polar ice caps and reveal the secret passages. Then we could invade the centre of the earth and everyone would have all the gold they needed. This, then, would end world hunger.

I think George made the right move. The Zalm might have been convinced. Today, after all, he is campaigning against chemtrails.

For many years, I delivered this story with the “end world hunger” bit acting as a punchline, to explain to my economic history students some basic things about what currency reform can and cannot do.

But this vision has been haunting me of late. Because it describes the incipient class system that the Covid-19 global pandemic is producing, especially in jurisdictions run by “progressive,” technocratic neoliberal governments like BC’s. Depending on one’s class experiences of the pandemic in such places are radically different.

Members of the managerial class, comprising managers, college instructors, lawyers, government bureaucrats and other white collar workers have had their workplaces shut down under crowd-size rules. They have been ordered either to work from home or to go home and stay on a state-funded work furlough, and have been asked to leave their homes as infrequently as possible.

Importantly, almost no new managerial or instructional jobs are being created, while many are ceasing to exist. Were one to try to find work in such a sector, one’s job search would be fruitless.

But now, let us think about those who work with their hands, cashiers, construction workers, industrial workers, delivery drivers, taxi operators, etc. In BC, in the case of construction and industrial workers, not only have crowd size rules been suspended at their workplaces; their works has been declared an essential service. Building condos, building dams, digging pipelines are all areas of work where every safety rule to prevent the spread of Covid-19 has been turned into a non-binding guideline, and the government has promised that nobody will inspect work sites, to even check for guideline compliance.

Worse yet, such work has been declared an essential service, making it pretty much impossible for anyone to obtain the necessary layoff notice to receive government assistance. That means that industrial and construction workers are being compelled on pain of bankruptcy and future homelessness to keep going to work in unsafe places under unsafe conditions.

But the real story is delivery drivers, the only growth area of the economy with new jobs being advertised. There are longer shifts for cashiers now, too, with special hours for elderly people to shop with greater distancing, creating more cashier jobs in key sectors like groceries and liquor. If one is in the customer service of driving business, the number of people you encounter per day does not decline at all. And, in many cases may increase. Former delivery drivers and cashiers, even if their wages were high enough to qualify for government employment benefits in the first place, and even if Uber Eats, Doordash or Skip the Dishes paid into government insurance programs, still could not obtain unemployment benefits because it is clearly demonstrable that there are jobs available for them, in the only growth sector of the job market. There are no layoff notices in this world, just desperate people in financed cars hoping to make enough money to keep it on the road.

When Uber busted its way into BC, we only envisaged the Uberization of taxi service. Instead, we are seeing the Uberization of society itself.

Strip away the pseudoscience and anti-Semitism and we find the world of the Ontario Social Credit Party emerging organically out of the collision of neoliberalism and a protracted global pandemic.

There are those who work INSIDE, in a safe place, made out of money, dimly lit by a dark sun. And there are those who work OUTSIDE, in a dangerous, lethal place, paid minimum wage or less, compelled to work whether they wish to or not, serving the INSIDE people under the light of a large, bright sun.

The people on the inside are financially secure, paid primarily by the state at a liveable rate with mortgage payments deferred and other small perks. The people on the outside are financially and physically insecure, paid primarily by private sector businesses at poverty wages, supplemented by occasional tips from the inside people. They must work because no government help is coming to replace their wages, working, as they do, in “essential” industries that, in some cases, are even growing. Their rent is not suspended. While temporarily protected from eviction, those who get behind can be evicted the day the state of emergency ends and are still subject to collection agent harassment, wage garnishment and civil suits for unpaid bills.

And the worst thing is that, unlike old Socred thinking, this is not the result of a conspiracy. This is simply the consequence of neoliberal societies’ encounter with a biological virus, somehow mutating both the virus and the societies into something both more lethal and more unjust.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Geekery Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | April 1, 2020

Extinction Will Be Stopped by Conversion, Not By Raising Awareness

Back in June, I promised that I would write about the alternative to raising awareness, as a paradigm for understanding shifts in political allegiance, conversion. To get more fully into this piece, it is probably useful to review the one it follows.

Green Politics, Paradigm Shifts and Raising Awareness

A few years after I joined the Green Party, the second great upwelling of environmental concern in post-war North American society began. From 1988-92, there was a period of tremendous environmental concern and activism in Anglo American society, reaching its crescendo in the 1990 Earth Day celebrations and TV specials. During this time, Angus Reid conducted a poll asking Canadians if they would vote for a Green Party, if only one existed. We, in the Green Party of Canada, were confused and surprised. But 14% of Canadians appeared to tell Reid that they would be voting for us the first chance they got.

During that time, many new people joined the Greens and membership in environmental groups shot up higher and faster. But our election results did not reflect this. We got 1.4% in a 1988 byelection in BC, 2% in 1989 and our best result in any BC riding in the 1991 election was 4.4%. The federal party did even worse.

This did not dishearten the party’s base. And what I began to hear, with increasing frequency, was that there would be a massive, quantum, ten- or twenty-fold increase in our vote once the “paradigm shift” happened. While this was, to some degree, an appeal to the strong eschatological I have describe in Green politics on more than one occasion, I want, in this piece, to look seriously at the precise meaning of this term and how it presaged a catastrophically bad theory of social change that hobbles Green and green politics up to the present day.

The term “paradigm shift” was developed by historian of science Thomas Kuhn in his book the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His argument was that science takes sudden and massive leaps forward when a “paradigm shift” takes place. An example of this is the massive shift when the theory of a universe of planets encased in crystalline spheres, making circular orbits, governed by the will of God was replaced by free-floating planets, moving in elliptical orbits, governed by the invisible forces of gravitation. Kuhn argued that science makes these major leaps forward when the model that is being used to interpret and store information becomes weighed-down with too many exceptions, too many aberrations and it is easier to come up with a new system that explains these things than it is to continue modifying a system that has had to create too many special cases and exceptions to explain away observable data.

The universe of Ptolemy and Copernicus gave way to the universe of Kepler, Galileo and Newton not because its model was conclusively disproved but because the new model was so much less cumbersome in its explanations and contained fewer special cases and exceptions, that the sheer weight of all the eccentrics and epicycles brought it down in favour of a system simpler to explain, that modeled far more – but not all – of the available data.

Greens believed that as more and more information about the harms of climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, etc. became available, human consciousness would undergo a “paradigm shift” that rejected liberal capitalist politics and economics in favour of a new, green model of politics and economics. The way forward, to political success, then, was clear: raise awareness. Circulate more and more information about the health impacts, ecological impacts, social impacts of the current social order and, upon reaching a certain threshold of information, society would undergo that paradigm shift.

This, of course, fitted well with the kinds of people most Greens were: people eager to be seen as the smartest, most informed person in the room, and eager to spread the information that made them so, to educate others.

As I have stated previously, the problems with this are obvious: one is that it assumes that people share the moral and ethical views of those raising the awareness, that society is united in a belief in utilitarian liberalism. It assumes that people prioritize future generations living as well or better than us, that they think extinction of species is bad, that they think poor people dying in extreme weather events is bad, that they wish to minimize human suffering. It also assumes that people will remain within the Enlightenment episteme and not choose an alternative theory of physical causation like sodomy causing hurricanes and gay marriage causing fire tornadoes.

But most importantly, it suggests that people have not already bought into the idea of enjoying their lives at the expense of others, be they one’s children, people in the Global South or other species. The SUV-driving World Bank economist who spent half the year in Sierra Leone implementing austerity programs and starving people to death with social program and food subsidy cuts was sure that the paradigm shift was coming any second, that he was a classic utilitarian, someone happily foregoing immediate gratification in the service of a greater good.

The idea of social change by paradigm shift is absurdly premised; first, it argues that moral, ethical and political choices function, for a society, the same way science does; second, it is premised on the idea that there is only one ideology in the world, utilitarianism and that everyone in the world is a utilitarian, someone who will maximize pleasure and minimize pain, personally, socially and ecologically. Paradigm shifters suffer from a catastrophic failure of imagination, first, in failing to imagine that not all people think the way they claim to think and, second, in failing to realize that they themselves do not think as they claim to. But rather than confronting this, they go forth and raise awareness.

The term “raising awareness” has problems beyond those identified by Doug Stanhope. The term, itself, appears to have arisen in the 1990s to replace the term “raising consciousness.” Whereas “raising awareness” refers simply to the idea of increasing the amount of information one’s interlocutor possesses, “raising consciousness” is about much more. Popularized by the Second Wave of the feminist movement, it was not just about giving women new information about their status in society; it was about offering an alternative theory of what it meant to be a person of worth as a woman, independent of patriarchy’s or an individual man’s evaluation of you.

Unlike raising awareness, raising consciousness was about providing women two things: new information about their status in the world and a new moral order within which to situate this information. Information about the gap between men’s and women’s wages is only significant if one decides that men’s and women’s work is equally valuable. Information about rates of unprosecuted domestic assault is only significant if one decides that it is wrong for men to beat their wives.

“Raising consciousness,” in turn, came out of a Marxist vocabulary. A key purpose of a communist party, according to canonical Marxism is to challenge “false consciousness” among the working class, beliefs like the idea that bosses are people more deserving of money than their workers, even if they work fewer hours and less hard, or the idea that people deserve family money they inherit from a rich relative. The problem has never been that people don’t know there is a massive wealth gap between rich and poor and that family wealth determines more of one’s economic fate than one’s own actions and choices; the problem has been a false consciousness that sees these things as fair.

The Nature of Conversion

When we look at the adversaries of progressives, we see social movements that are growing more powerful by the day. Neo-fascist movements, the Christian Right, Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu nationalists, etc. do not raise awareness, nor, indeed, do movements on the left that are not progressive i.e., movements that have abandoned coalitions with liberals and scorned accommodations with neoliberalism. Momentum and the movement behind Jeremy Corbyn, Our Revolution and the other movement groups behind Bernie Sanders, the student strikers for climate who stand behind Greta Thunberg, these groups are not raising awareness. These groups are seeking converts.

A conversion superficially resembles a paradigm shift in that it is a sudden realignment of one’s affiliations and consciousness but is, in more ways, opposite. When a person experiences conversion, the information they have does not change; what changes is the moral order in which they place that information. People do not join the Sanders movement because they have just received a new piece of information about the lack of healthcare for low-income Americans; they join because a fire has been kindled within them that suddenly makes poor people dying because they don’t have health insurance an evil they can no longer abide. People do not join Extinction Rebellion because they have just become aware that climate science is true after previously deeming it false; no, they join because they can no longer abide the scale of death, suffering and extinction our civilization is causing.

When we look at the Christian Bible and examine conversion stories, none of them are based on information. They are based on an encounter with another person or persons who have realigned their lives based on a new morality they have adopted.

We must remember that conversion is something far more natural to human beings than a paradigm shift. Many kids bully other kids in school. They do so because they enjoy the suffering of the kids they are bullying, until they don’t. Then, suddenly, they feel remorse, shame and realign their lives to behave in less hurtful ways. This is conversion. The information doesn’t change; morality changes.

Our adversaries understand this perfectly. They understand that people feel powerless, insignificant, dirty, That’s why; the patients are suggested to take this cialis sale find for more info now drug in the amount advised by the doctor. This has grown into increasing concern by in Athletic Physical Therapy researchers and endurance sports participants. levitra 20 mg It is highly suggested to avoid having intoxicants and over consumption of food while using this medicine. buy vardenafil levitra http://www.wouroud.com/blog.php Erectile dysfunction develops when there is less or no blood provision to the male viagra without prescription canada organ under the influence of this health problem from their male partner. morally compromised. They understand that the world is full of people who want to be good guys, heroes, people who want to turn their lives around with a new sense of purpose. And so, instead hurling information at them, information they usually already have, they sell moral realignment. They offer people a sense of renewal, purification and purpose.

Amazing Grace

At the beginning of the Enlightenment, we still understood the power of conversion. One of the most important and uplifting hymns of that era is Amazing Grace. The semi-apocryphal story of the hymn is that it was the story of a slaver, John Newton, delivering African slaves to the Americas, a slaver who had grown wealthy and powerful running his slave ships, delivering their human cargo. Then, one day, in the midst of a storm, on board his slave ship, God spoke to him and he realized the evil of what he had been doing:

Amazing Grace, How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me

I once was lost, but now am found

T’was blind but now I see

T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear

And Grace, my fears relieved

How precious did that grace appear

The hour I first believed

Through many dangers, toils and snares

We have already come.

T’was grace that brought us safe thus far

And grace will lead us home

Newton knew the same things about slavery after that moment as he did before. He had been “blind,” not to the conditions under which he captured his slaves or the conditions under which he kept them. He had been blind to the evil of these acts. The scales fell from his eyes and he had a new purpose, a new story of what his life meant.

Stories of conversion are tremendously compelling to people from all walks of life, a chance to press the reset button, annihilate one’s past mistakes and re-describe oneself as an agent for good.

So, why, then do progressives recoil from the idea of conversion as their mission, their political strategy? Some, as I said above, comes from a failure of imagination, an inability to understand that different people have different theories of good and bad or good and evil, other than utilitarianism. Such blindness is inculcated through concepts like “social justice,” the idea taught in the caring professions, like nursing and social work, that those who disagree with us simply do not believe in social justice i.e. utilitarianism, rather than recognizing that those who disagree with us have a different theory of what justice is and that everyone believes in a social justice.

But the other problem is this: shame. Progressives believe that shame is unnatural and unhealthy. It is not enough to be a good person now; one must always have been a good person. The idea that one’s life’s work is one of moral elevation of the self is an alien one. To have been a bad person in the past admits a kind of fallibility and saddles one with a guilt that progressives imagine to be unendurable. That is because, by and large, while being very well-intentioned, they exist in a culture that engenders a lack of character. I fall back on the brilliant words of the film the Big Kahuna to explain what I mean:

PHIL: The question is do you have any character at all? And if you want my honest opinion, Bob, you do not, for the simple reason that you don’t regret anything yet.

BOB: You’re saying I won’t have any character unless I do something I regret?

PHIL: No, Bob. I’m saying you’ve already done plenty of things to regret. You just don’t know what they are. It’s when you discover them, when you see the folly in something you’ve done and you wish that you had it to do over, but you know you can’t ’cause it’s too late. So you pick that thing up and you carry it with you to remind you that life goes on. The world will spin without you. You really don’t matter in the end. Then you will attain character. Because honesty will reach out from inside and tattoo itself all across your face.

Unacknowledged Shame Is Paralyzing Shame

I noticed this after the 2009 electoral reform referendum in BC. I was on a board of directors who made bad hiring decisions and bad strategy decisions that ensured the victory of the status quo. Had we made better decisions, individually and collectively, we would have offered British Columbians a campaign that made sense and deserved their vote. So, I issued a public apology for letting the movement down. No one else did. Everyone else blamed our adversaries for beating us, like that wasn’t their job. I recall after the 2015 election Ken Georgetti, former head of the BC Federation of Labour, write an Op/Ed piece stating that the NDP’s drop from first place to third was not the party’s fault or labour’s fault; their strategy was sound; it was the voters who were to blame for not finding it appealing.

In fact, progressives are awash in shame for their failure to avert the extinction event we are now facing. The shame they think they are avoiding has actually paralyzed them. And it is only by acknowledging that shame, by acknowledging one’s culpability, one’s past failures that one can begin anew and fight with the moral clarity necessary to challenge the global death cult that welcomes the extinction event. And that can only be accomplished through conversion, by acknowledging our shame, our loss, our failure and reorienting our morality through an act of contrition and humility and then calling upon others to do the same.

Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | December 9, 2019

The Pressing Relevance of JRR Tolkien in Our Times: Part 2: Why We Must Choose Hope Over Progress

Many people forget that the original ideology of progressivism and the original Progressive Party were created by US President Teddy Roosevelt as an explicitly white supremacist ideology. The idea was that human civilization was a number line, a one-dimensional graph along which every individual human and every group of humans progressed. As they moved forward through time, the fundamental principles of physical and social Darwinism called upon them to change and, as they met new challenges, they changed or died.

As individuals and societies moved along the line, they became more restrained, more polite, more literate, more intelligent and lighter-skinned. Every society that was not England, Germany or America was simply a point behind them on the number line of progress, when people were swarthier, dumber and less restrained.

Much as there has been a Herculean effort to remove progressivism from its white supremacist ancestry, it had remained wedded to it for an unexpected reason: it was a theory of easy and inexorable wins. The world was moving towards a predetermined goal; all one needed was to be on the right side and the engine of history would do the heavy lifting and arrive at the future society with which one had sensibly decided to align oneself. In this way, taking up the “white man’s burden” as Teddy Roosevelt believed Rudyard Kipling had asked him to do on behalf of the British Empire was not that hard a job. It was mostly about waiting to be proven right.

The idea that violent, exhausting, life-threatening struggle was the engine of history, be it the struggle conceived by Karl Marx or the divinely-ordained racial struggle conceived by John Brown and Nat Turner has always been anathema to those who believe in the Progress Myth. In other words, there is a strange and intimate dance between Progress and Whiteness.

In the mid-1980s, the colour line moved over me and, although I had been raised in a black family and remained surrounded by black relatives and mentors, I became white, not necessarily a permanent identity but one with which I have been saddled these past thirty-plus years.

As a consequence, I have an odd experience to talking to other white people about certain things. One that comes up with increasing frequency in debates about climate politics is this one: if you tell a white person that all signs point to our failing to arrest runaway feedback mechanisms in climate change, they will demand to know why you are telling them to give up. So often, when I tell white comrades that chances are that we have already passed the point of being able to arrest the omnicide, they will demand to know why I am telling them not to fight, why I am okay with them and their kids dying. The white co-optation of the Martin Luther King Jr’s paraphrasing of nineteenth-century abolitionist Theodore Parker that “the arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice,” has somehow been used to justify this theory that victory is easy and inevitable or not worth fighting for.

That is not to say that the people who would later become white have always had such a view. Both the Bronze Age Greeks and Norse believed that honour demanded one must fight with the expectation of victory, even though defeat was inevitable.

For good or ill, JRR Tolkien hated progress and progressives. And the theories of time and morality he puts forward in Lord of the Rings argue that the great Manichean struggles between good and evil are won by the opposite of progress, when it comes to fighting for a just future: hope.

In the family in which I grew up, the idea that one was fighting against white supremacy was completely disconnected from the certainty, probability or even possibility of victory. One was born into a Manichean struggle between good and evil that began before you were conceived and would continue long after your death. You fought against white supremacy because it was right, whether it was during a time you were winning, like the 1960s or when you were losing like the 1870s or today.

There was never any connection between one’s participation in the struggle one’s chance of success, especially in the immediate term. One was born into the struggle and stayed in the hassle one’s whole life. Some people, like me, or my great aunt Connie could “pass,” but abandoning the struggle was one of the most dishonourable things one could do.

Kamagra tablets have emerged as a challenging ED drug of levitra online no prescription generic origin. One approach can be changing the nutrition plan of the patient, which includes a gluten shop at store discount levitra free diet and elimination diet. 4. Using toilet stool is the only solution that can help in improving cialis on line the energy level to a great extent. This procedure is used to treat excessive wounds, burns and infections such as vitiligo. cialis usa online heritageihc.com That is why I was moved to tears when Barack Obama’s 2008 New Hampshire concession speech contained the words “we’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” It seemed that Obama was culturally translating between the African American idea of hope and the white idea of hope, the former being the internal strength to struggle against evil and the latter being a probabilistic assessment of the likelihood of triumphing over evil.

It brought me back to the other great cultural translation project of my childhood, Lord of the Rings, in which Tolkien reached back to Eddas and transmitted the Norse ideal that even though every rational oracular prediction said that the gods would lose the final battle and evil would triumph over good, the Aesir and Vanir fought on because somewhere in the distant future, beyond the final battle was a peaceful and just future called Gimli, that although they could not see how to get there and would never get there themselves, they fought for.

The central, the fundamental battle of the soul around which Lord of the Rings revolves is the contest between progress and hope. The two secondary villains of the novels are Saruman the Wizard and Denethor, the Steward of Gondor (Tolkien’s Byzantine Empire analogue). These men were the two most powerful in the known world. One was the greatest of the seven hypostatic istari, the god-men sent by the gods to aid the people in the confrontation against the greater evil, the minor god Sauron; the other was the ruler of the most powerful, prosperous kingdom.

Both men possess palantirs, oracular stones that permit them to see throughout space-time, and it is these stones that bewitch them and lead to their downfall and betrayal of the forces of good. Because Peter Jackson, maker of the LOTR films a generation ago appears not to have understood the central thematic element of the story he was telling, he depicts our secondary antagonists as being mind-controlled or bewitched by Sauron himself and falling under his sway. That is explicitly not what Tolkien sought to show or told his readers. Rather, by being directed to see the overwhelming odds stacked against them, the greatness of Sauron’s power, the vastness of his hosts, they lost hope.

Denethor’s response to the loss of hope is to fight halfheartedly and hopelessly, carrying out his duties as ruling steward but rejecting all strategems based on courage or hope. He does this until the apparent death of both of his sons, at which point, we orders a giant funeral pyre to be built and commits suicide, trying to take as much of his family and city with him. Until his suicide, Denethor is an incrementalist. He “knows” he faces defeat so he retreats as slowly as possible.

Saruman’s response to the loss of hope is to switch sides and attempt to carve out his own personal share of Sauron’s dominion by conquering first. He explains to his former allies that their “only hope” is to join with the forces of evil so that they might make their corner of it less evil. Saruman, too, is an incrementalist. Every mile of territory he conquers before Sauron does, is territory that will fall under his less-harsh yoke when the war is over. In this way, Saruman offers a better Middle Earth, “one practical step at a time.”

Gandalf, our istari hero, on the other hand, forms a small multi-racial fellowship of ordinary people who bet on a profoundly improbable strategy that has almost no chance of success; one member of the fellowship even betrays it when he is overwhelmed with hopelessness. But the fellowship does not draw hope by evaluating the probability of victory. Their hope is based on these aphorisms Gandalf quotes, “many are the strange chances of the world and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the wise falter… for even the wise cannot see all ends.”

In this way, hope comes not from the chances of a particular plan succeeding. It comes from the fact that human intelligence is fallible, that the universe is big and unpredictable and strange, that only God can see all ends. Hope comes from an acknowledgement of our smallness and fallibility not from our power and our knowledge. Denethor and Saruman believed they had seen and thought all possibilities; Gandalf had the humility to know that no one could. That does not mean averting one’s eyes from the facts before you, of the permafrost melt and the methane and sea ice feedback mechanisms, nor from the rising spectre of racist authoritarian movements everywhere. It still means using all that information to make judgements but to reject the hubris of Saruman and Denethor and recognize that, as one is not God, one cannot be all-knowing.

But for the fellowship to succeed, Saruman and Denethor first had to be defeated. And this is the reality the left faces today. There is a final battle we must soon join against the family annihilator patriarchs leading this global death cult but interposing themselves between us and them are the Sarumans and Denethors of the world, the Justin Trudeaus and John Horgans, the Pete Buttigiegs and Kamala Harrises of the world, those who hide an agenda of betrayal, capitulation and self-immolation behind a discourse of “progress,” “good first steps,” “pilot programs,” and “realism.” This is the politics of “incremental gains” which now means not even that but rather “flooring the gas over the cliff and then letting up.”

And the only way we can do that is by being fundamentally hopeful. That means finding and transmitting joy, camaraderie and certainty of the rightness of our struggle and not of our chances of victory.

Geekery Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | September 19, 2019

There Are No Climate Deniers, Only Climate Fundamentalists – Part One

For eight years, I have been writing about three things (1) the epistemological shift that is ending the Age of Reason and bringing us into the Age of Authenticity, (2) the question of the base unit, how it is that the Age of Reason, unlike other epistemes, saw the base unit of society as the individual person and not the patriarchal family unit, and how anti-Enlightenment forces are challenging that and (3) how the climate crisis is linked to fundamentalist religion, the authentic episteme and the base unit. Finally, I have also mused about how it is that (4) Anglo America has been the crucible of these things.

I am now prepared to tie these things together in… however many words this takes.

Essentially, this piece is about how no individual disbelieves the climate crisis but the discourse communities into which they stack themselves do. This is a means of embracing contradiction without experiencing cognitive dissonance by storing contradictory pieces of information in separate, non-overlapping locations. The means of doing this was pioneered not by climate arsonists but by fundamentalist religious movements, movements that, in the 1920s became tools of the petroleum industry.

It has long been understood that religious fundamentalism is the Janus face of the Enlightenment. The Age of Reason, like any other episteme, was so intellectually and socially hegemonic that it structured the beliefs both of supporters of the Enlightenment and those opposing it politically, culturally and intellectually. In essence, the belief that supernatural actions could not happen inside profane space-time was made universal. It provoked one of three reactions: (1) atheism – the belief that there had never been a god, angels, etc. and that the physical laws of the universe could explain all past, present and future events, (2) deism – the belief that God had once acted inside our universe but that this time had long ago passed and that now, we lived in a naturalistic system, (3) fundamentalism – the belief that even though it was clear that supernatural events did not take place that, to be an ethical person, one must “have faith” i.e. declare one’s belief in them.

While most Christian churches initially embraced deism, this position was an emotionally unsatisfying one. While deism was near-hegemonic in the nineteenth-century Christian world, the twentieth century is a story of its abandonment and the collapse of deistic churches, their members either becoming atheists or fundamentalists.

One must understand that fundamentalist belief is totally unlike the religious cognition of pre-Enlightenment people and peoples. One religious studies scholar explained it as fundamentalists holding tightly to their beliefs, whereas pre-Enlightenment Christians and Muslims were held by their beliefs. For pre-Enlightenment people, God, demons and angels were self-evident, observable phenomena. For fundamentalists, there is an equal certainty that these things cannot be observed and do not exist. But because they believe that such a belief would make them bad people, they solve this problem in two ways: textualization and socialization.

Textualization entails preferring a plain reading of canonical texts to one’s own cognition. When I say “canonical texts,” I refer to something far older than the Enlightenment; I mean the texts that a movement says its thinking is based on because that text is closer than other texts to the mind of God. But, until the rise of fundamentalism, nobody believed that the Vedas, Christian Bible, Jewish Bible, Koran, Analects or Tao Te Ching were written by God himself; the most extreme claim was that the Koran had been dictated by God, still allowing for human corruption, human error and the fact that God communicated at a bandwidth that exceeds human comprehension.

It is this last nigh-universal belief that structured how pre-modern people engaged with canonical texts or “scripture.” They believed that they had to be decoded, that their meanings were neither reliably obvious nor reliably literal. They invented disciplines for decoding scripture like typology, developed by the Stoic movement for the Iliad and Odyssey, practiced by Christians and Muslims for centuries thereafter on the Koran and Bible, or Cabalism, developed by Jews and practiced by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.
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In this way, pre-Enlightenment peoples understood interpretation by the human mind as necessary to unlock the meaning of scripture. Fundamentalism reversed this proposition. It argued that because one’s consciousness could not believe in the supernatural, its judgement must be suspended and substituted with the most literal-possible reading of sacred texts i.e. the one involving the least interpretation and cognition. Instead of the mind interpreting the book, the book corrected the errant mind. It is in this context that we must understand “scriptural inerrancy” to be a central proposition of fundamentalism. It is not merely the declaration that scripture is now the unmediated word of God, even when it itself declares otherwise; it is the declaration that the book is a better thinking machine than the mind, that while the mind can err, the canonical text cannot and therefore must be deferred-to.

This idea was pioneered first in the Muslim world, with the Wahabi movement, one which, like Christian fundamentalism, began in cities because that was where the Enlightenment episteme first gained hegemony.

Socialization is a process that I have only come to understand by observing people who claim to deny climate change in action. It is only by seeing how climate arsonists use scientific denial in the public square that I have come to see how fundamentalism produced a second refuge for supernatural belief.

In service of other points I have been making on this blog, I have been stressing the difference between subjective space and intersubjective space. Subjective space is what we think inside ourselves, the thoughts, feelings and ideas that exist silently in our heads, that we then express from time to time. Intersubjective space is culture; it is society; at the micro-level, it is conversation. It is where our identities live; it is where the value of a commodity lives in a capitalist society. Inter-subjective space is the intellectual and cultural air we breather, the water in our fish-tank.

When I argue with individual climate denialists on social media or in person and say “You are only pretending to believe that climate science is not real. You are feigning ignorance and stupidity. But you are not dumb. You know the truth,” the reaction is silence, retreat or concession. No individual climate denier appears able to withstand this unless supported by a larger audience. It is only when deniers know they are being observed by others of their community that they will drag out fake studies, bullshit links and mangled postmodernism. That is because while no individual climate denier believes in their pseudoscience, the intersubjective space in their communities does.

In this day and age, unlike a generation ago, there is never a moment when any climate science denier thinks that climate science is false. The only place where that belief exists is when two or more deniers have a conversation about its falsity. They experience a sense of social accord and support by expressing social agreement. This is what I mean by socialization: in a room of twenty climate science deniers, not one single individual disbelieves climate science. But the room, and every conversation in it does. This is why fundamentalists must pray together and out loud; only then, can the supernatural become real, not in their heads but in the social space between them.

This cognitive sleight of hand was not developed for climate denial. It was developed, naturally and unintentionally, by the fundamentalist movement in reaction to the Enlightenment. So that rooms full of non-believers could collectively believe in God, by substituting the judgement of the room, for their own, in the same way they substituted the judgement of the book for their own. It is just that some lucky and canny oil men bought a controlling interest in fundamentalism in the first half of the twentieth century, that turned it into their death cult’s most potent weapon.

Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | September 18, 2019

The Pressing Relevance of JRR Tolkien in Our Times: Part 1: Age of the Counterfeit

Before finally returning to my promised article on conversion, I feel I need to say more about how the corpus of writing on which I grew up, Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit and the Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth books, have provided me with unique moral and intellectual tools to approach the omnicide we now all face. It is not just that Lord of the Rings is about a world careening into an omnicide, the covering of the created world in an eternal darkness of tyranny and wastelands, fueled by war and wanton, gratuitous ecological destruction.

Before pressing on, as I have in my previous pieces about him, let us acknowledge that, even for his time, Tolkien was a racist, politically and socially conservative man. In many ways, his work demonstrates his greatness as a writer because its message and ideology are greater and more profound than the sum of his own views.

In my recent piece on the right-wing identity politics of intellect, I made some observations about the practice of trolling and the idea of “trolls.” In troll discourse, a person argues for a repugnant and/or stupid view and then one of two things happens: (a) the person browbeats their interlocutor, wasting hours of the person’s time and cannot be argued-down, at which point they declare victory or (b) the person concedes the argument and announces that they never believed the stupid views they espoused, that their interlocutor is the fool for having believed their views sincere.

The figure of the troll is, increasingly, the shape that individual members of the global omnicidal authoritarian death cult that currently runs the US, Hungary, Russia, Brazil and the Philippines, to name a few states, choose to take on when presenting themselves online.

Trolling, a decade ago, was not socially mainstream and tended to be practiced more by libertarian misanthropes than omnicidal death cultists. And the term arose from the geek culture-steeped world of 4Chan and the galaxy of locales on the internet frequented by manga-loving incels. Having been a part of geek culture since the age of nine, when my child psychiatrist prescribed the Basic D&D boxed set to me, I know it to be a rich and complex place with good and bad sides exerting both positive and negative influences on those of us within it. Few generalizations about geek culture apply to the whole space and, like all cultures and subcultures globally, it is turning darker as the sun sets on the Age of Reason.

Like most robust and vibrant subcultures, it has a large corpus of literature associated with it (including much but not all of the speculative fiction genre) and a set of canonical texts that help to structure how other texts are interpreted. JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings remains part of the canon, but something has changed about how it functions to structure the culture: over time, it has become Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of the text and not the text itself. More on that later.

We have to consider, then, that the meaning of the term “troll” in geek culture was substantially influenced by Tolkien’s description and understanding of his version of the monster of European folklore. In fact, we should pay special attention to the unique features that Tolkien (and only Tolkien, not even Tolkien via Jackson) attributed to trolls.

Like the main non-human villains in Middle Earth, orcs, trolls were created by Morgoth, the Lucifer figure, the original Enemy, during “the Great Darkness.” They were created as “counterfeits,” of ents, the “shepherds of the trees,” gigantic, benign intelligent humanoids made of wood. The trolls, on the other hand, while gigantic, were malign, unintelligent humanoids made of stone.

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Today, when we talk about counterfeit money or securities, we mean a copy of these things so exact, so precise, that it is indistinguishable from that thing. There is an original and the counterfeit is the most precise copy possible, designed to fool all but the most discerning. Such an idea did not exist in the Middle Ages because perfect copies were understood to be the thing; there was no distinction between copy and original if the copy were perfect. (Walter Benjamin’s work explaining this was rendered beautifully accessible in the 1979 classic Doctor Who serial City of Death by Douglas Adams.)

A counterfeit, in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, was something else altogether: it was an obvious distortion mocking the original; in a Christian cosmology, a counterfeit was Lucifer’s mockery of God’s creation. The closest concept to it that we have today are the inhabitants of DC Comics’ “bizarro” universe. Not only was a counterfeit a mockery; it was understood to be an uncanny, grotesque mockery. Some conquistadors who arrived in the New World believed that they had found a counterfeit hemisphere, where the largest city’s centre was not a basilica but a step pyramid where priests performed a human sacrifice every forty minutes. The armadillo was a strong piece of evidence for this theory: it was obviously a counterfeit turtle.

Because they are uncanny, grotesque and jarring, there is much power in the counterfeit. The orcs, Tolkien’s counterfeit elves, trolls, Tolkien’s counterfeit ents—they strike fear into their opponents’ hearts simply by being, by mocking and denigrating creation itself. They constitute an ontological attack on the cosmic order simply by having existed. That they might triumph over real elves and real ents is not just a bad tactical situation; it is a sign that the cosmic order, itself, is in retreat.

The global death cult we are fighting understands that. And, consequently, it is not just trolling us at the level of conversation but at the level of existence.

How better to describe Donald Trump than as a counterfeit president, Bizarro Eisenhower, a grotesque, senescent, foul-mouthed grifter and con man. But counterfeits are not just at the top; they are everywhere. We are attacked with counterfeit science taught by counterfeit professors. The power of a Jordan Peterson comes not from his resemblance to a professor but from his uncanny failure to resemble one. There is no effort by the right to fool us any longer. As a brilliant observer of the Kavanaugh hearings observed, “telling obvious lies is a sign of power.”

This is why men performing the machismo of the death cult, like Doug Ford or Maxime Bernier, focus their attacks on children, the disabled and women: they are not trying to intimidate us by being tough guys. They are trying to unsettle us by being counterfeit tough guys.

Without understanding the original meaning and power of the counterfeit, something Tolkien understood to be so great a threat that it could upend the cosmic order, we are at sea wondering why people seem to be buying into dishonour and dishonesty, shaming themselves with gullibility. But that is not what is happening for them; they have tapped into the unholy power of the counterfeit.

Canadian Politics Geekery Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite | September 15, 2019

Our Present Moment and the Pearl River Vision

In 2001, I decided to give progressive politics a try and for the next seventeen years, I subscribed to a utilitarian political project. By that, I mean that I stood behind organizations, electoral and non-electoral, that made sense in what is called the “hedonic calculus.” Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the authors of a particular theory of liberalism, argued that our choices should be based on choosing the course of action that causes the least harm and the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. So, I joined the NDP and worked to elect candidates who had a shot at winning with the policies that did the least harm and the most good.

In 2006, when Stephen Harper became Prime Minister, I joined the “cooperation movement” which argued in favour of a united front among New Democrats, Liberals and Greens to dislodge one of the few neoconservative regimes in the world. This movement made me an active member of LeadNow and an organizer for Nathan Cullen’s NDP leadership campaign to succeed Jack Layton. Even after I was barred by the party from running for it, I continued as an activist for the NDP and as part of a larger multi-partisan progressive movement for the better part of a decade.

But in 2018, this stopped working for me: the hedonic calculus of progressive politics failed. Back in the 1980s and 90s when I had rejected this calculus, I articulated its inherent problem: progressive politics articulates that which we can reasonably expect to be done, not what needs to be done. Every day that passes, the gap between these things widens. Now, in the second-biggest extinction event of the last four billion years, with human beings having killed half the life on the planet in my lifetime alone, what we can reasonably expect to be done is to kill the planet ten to fifteen years later than our current trajectory will kill it. It is little more than making sure that we pay ourselves $15/hour for murdering all creation rather than $11/hour.

But there is another reason I have abandoned progressive politics: as long as progressive politics constitutes the primary alternative to the new conservatism of accelerating global omnicide, that new conservatism will continue to make gains. Why? Because the politics of a Donald Trump, Doug Ford or Jason Kenney, which proposes to use an increasing portion of the state’s resources to burn fossil fuels faster and more needlessly, which proposes to actively attack knowledge, itself, is a more relatable politics than what progressives generally propose.

The new conservatism offers people two things progressives fail to: a sense of agency and a theory of blame. As I have stated before, voters do not and never have cast their votes in elections or joined citizens groups based on the pursuit of personal financial advantage. While people’s behaviour often resembles this to the untrained eye, movements that people generally support, electoral and otherwise, are movements that sell the most compelling theory of society’s moral order. Low-income conservative voters are not “voting against their interests” as constructed in theories of rational choice and financial advantage; they are voting for a moral order for society that makes the most sense and seems the most fair. People also look for heroes and villains in their stories and conservatism offers both—liberals, urban elites, atheists, trans people, gay and bisexual people, racialized people: they are to blame for our problems. People of faith, rich and poor, marching against sodomy and moral degeneration: they are the heroes.

The new conservatism also offers a compelling future state, one of unfettered financial and sexual freedom for financially solvent married men, close-knit communities bound by shared adherence to the local Abrahamic faith and the extirpation of society’s enemies, etc. This may be a bleak and unrealistic utopia but what, from the progressive side, is it up against?

The Pearl River Vision.

In the fall of 2018, I was asked to be a panelist at a day-long conference at the Surrey Guildford Sheraton, sponsored by Composite Public Affairs, the lobbying firm founded by former NDP cabinet minister Sue Hammell. The conference was worth every moment of my time because, prior to my panel, I got to watch something unfold that I realize I had never seen: the enthusiastic description of a Third Way future. Central to today’s progressive project is the defense of liberal and social democratic Third Way parties and yet, I realized, progressives actively try to avoid ever picturing the future that these parties imagine.

As I have written elsewhere, Third Way politics arose from social democratic parties redefining themselves to remain relevant in the post-Cold War world. With no external communist threat, the sole purpose of these parties is to enact policies that financial elites demand but that conventional free market parties are unable to deliver due to opposition by social movements and the general public. In this way, social democrats and liberals are permitted to enact some modest reforms in exchange for delivering on big ticket items that parties of the right could not deliver.
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The John Horgan government in British Columbia has held true to this form by gaining buy-in and demobilizing opposition to three necessarily interlinked energy projects in Northern BC: the over-budget and disaster-prone Site C dam which violates Treaty Eight, created to power the next project, the largest carbon-emissions source in BC history, a Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) plant in Kitimat to be supplied by five hundred new fracked wells per year in the Peace Region, and a pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory connecting these, that is currently disrupting trap lines and subject to civil disobedience. The previous neoliberal regime had been unable to push these through because of widespread public opposition to, among other things, the scale of the tax concessions Royal Dutch Shell, best-known for their stalwart support for South African apartheid and their genocide against the Ogoni people in Nigeria, had demanded. Horgan’s Third Way NDP regime was able to provide a billion dollars in subsidies and tax exemptions, including the carbon tax on emissions, and in addition to the existing $247 million annual subsidy to fracking operations in the Peace.

Uncharacteristically, because they were supposed to be speaking to an audience of lobbyists, fixers and corporate types, two of the panelists waxed enthusiastic about how this fit into a larger vision of British Columbia and, in particular, to Southwestern BC. They described how, with an LNG plant operating in Kitimat, it was just a matter of time before Squamish-Woodfibre LNG plant would come fruition, something naturally necessitating a massive fixed concrete link crossing Howe Sound, a ten-lane expressway connecting Squamish, Gibsons and West Vancouver. As their enthusiasm grew, this Third Way utopia began elaborating in what I might almost venture to call, as a scholar of religion, a collaborative theophany.

With Howe Sound paved, it would be only natural to have one or more even bigger expressways traversing the Salish Sea, making ferry traffic a thing of the past. Besides, they pointed out, the Salish Sea would be full of tankers from around the world, here for Alberta bitumen and BC natural gas. There was a model of this, one remarked: the Pearl River Delta in China, the megalopolis that has swallowed Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, among other cities, whose population now approaches sixty million people. This new metropolitan region would not just encompass Victoria, Nanaimo, Squamish and Gibsons; it would stretch east all the way to Hope and would comprise a population of at last ten million people, with enough transportation infrastructure to sustain not just rapid transit but private vehicles for anyone who could afford it and a robust ride-hailing culture providing round-the-clock service via Uber or Lyft.

What of the affordability crisis? Here, the panelists had some innovative thoughts, too. With more air travel in their Third Way utopia and, especially, more interurban helicopter travel, why should low-wage workers need to live in the megalopolis at all, especially those working with their hands? They spoke excitedly about how some BC construction firms were already showing the way, creating temporary company housing on construction sites, themselves. Such sites could function just like oil wells in the Peace, they reasoned. Workers could work two weeks on, two weeks off and spend their off-time with their friends and families in working class second-tier communities like Prince George, Kamloops or the city that pioneered so much of this, Fort MacMurray. This model, furthermore, could be expanded to anyone who worked with their hands. Were company barracks for baristas so far off, I wondered.

Because the Third Way offers only mitigation efforts, as opposed to a vision actually countering global trends of wealth concentration, proletarianization and environmental degredation, the question for progressives is not whether their politics will reach this destination but when.

While it is true that the new conservative future resembles that of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, the reality is that the progressive future is also one described in twentieth century dystopian fiction. William Gibson imagined “the Sprawl” a gigantic Atlantic Coast North American strip city from Boston to Atlanta. And the image that haunted me as I closed my eyes and tried to process what the panelists were saying came from the opening scenes of Blade Runner, a sweltering, grimy megalopolis, surrounded by a lifeless sea, battered by typhoons. I could even imagine arguing with my fellow Vancouverites in the decades to come about whether the city had always had levees and whether we had always had a typhoon season. That’s because, as Charlie Smith and others have suggested, there is a special kind of progressive climate nihilism, a mouthing of environmental platitudes nobody believes as the ribbon is cut on another highway expansion or petroleum development.

The primary difference between progressive politics and conservative politics is not, then, whether to embrace the extinction event but whether to pair that embrace with loud and cruel enthusiasm and brazen anti-science lies or whether to pair that embrace with a false sobriety, concern, mutterings about “pragmatism” and “balance,” and some carefully measured and well-timed crocodile tears. Ultimately, if one is leaning into a blizzard of death and destruction, it should surprise no one that the former is a more emotionally authentic, less cognitively dissonant experience and, hence, a more compelling one.

A left vision, one of heroism, shared sacrifice and, in the words of Tolkien “victory unlooked-for and sorrow long-foreseen” must move to the forefront. As Brian Fawcett reminds us, a life-affirming social movement must be able to remember its past and imagine a future. Imagining a possible future will require profound grieving and the confrontation of hard truths but these are necessary experiences to move past the covertly nihilistic and empty politics of progressivism.

BC Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | February 2, 2019

The Ailing Left and the Geopolitics of Cruelty

In the six years since I started this blog, I have tried to render upsetting social and political events in abstract terms and subject them to some level of analysis. Last year, for instance, I wrote a bit arguing that by showing that he was sexually violent and abusive to his daughter Donald Trump’s was successful in portraying himself as an omnipotent strongman figure to his base. I want to continue with that theme and unite it with some of my observations about the institutional failure of Canadian left politics at present.

But in doing so, I want to simplify things. My ability to wrap syllables and analysis around hard realities is sometimes useful. But sometimes it distances us too much from the horror we face and the simplicity of the problem before us. Great work has been done to re-legitimate the word “lie” after decades of obfuscating terms like “mis-statement,” “alternative facts” and “journalistic balance.” I would like us to do more with another necessary word: cruelty.

Simply put, our problem is that every day, more and more people in our societies embrace cruelty and other people’s suffering as a necessary moral good. And that, readers, is, in my estimation, evil.

The reason Americans have chosen a confessed rapist and proud child molester to lead the greatest empire the world has ever known is because the ascendant social and political movements, in state after state, around the world, are those that celebrate cruelty and the infliction of suffering on others.

There have been many devastating consequences of pragmatic socialists aligning with liberal utilitarians over the past half-century, from the Third Way (neoliberalism with a human face) to the conflation of socialist thought with a nebulous, incoherent progressivism, to the replacement of socialist internationalism with foreign policy Taoism. But perhaps the most devastating is this: people who have believed themselves to live in an unjust society, who feel the palpable injustice of neoliberalism with its bloodless technocracy, heritable privilege and collision course with the carbon cycle have been offered nothing by the left. No large-scale leftist political movement has stated with clarity “this social order is fundamentally unjust and must be replaced with a just one.”

Instead we, on the left have offered short-term tactical alliances, strategic retreats and technocratic fixes. We have been so focused on trying to save the vestiges of the twentieth-century Keynesian welfare state that we have become the defenders of the status quo, promising desperate people that, with us as junior partners, things will get worse slower.

As a result, we have stood back and given free rein to the worst forces in our societies to offer the only theory of fairness on offer. By submerging socialism in liberal utilitarian discourse, colloquially known as “progressivism,” we have quit the field. We have chosen not to offer any competition to those saying “everything is fucked. The world is just as unfair as you feel it is. We must take drastic action to change everything.” At the very moment when climate science tells us unambiguously that this is actually the only position an intellectually responsible person can take, we continue to offer incremental change that no one is looking for.
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So, who is saying that? Those speaking with the most clarity on this issue are American conservative evangelicals and Salafists. They have a simple message: God is trying to punish people. He is trying to scourge humanity and the institutions that comprise twentieth-century states are standing in the way. There are too many earthquake survivors, too many cancer survivors, too many people living through famines and droughts, too few homeless people freezing to death, too few asylum-seekers drowning on the high seas. The consequences of climate change have been effortlessly repurposed by these movements. Droughts, famines, floods and fires are God’s traditional tools for scourging the unjust and the just alike. And once again, government stands in the way, thwarting God’s judgement at every turn.

Day after day, I read well-intentioned but confused liberals and socialists on social media bewildered that Trump’s supporters are so foolish as to think that Obamacare’s repeal will make things better. Such a position arises from a failure of imagination about what “better” can mean, the inability to understand that the way its repeal will make things better will be by causing more people to die, people who should already be dead, were it not for the hubris of Barack Obama to try and interpose the state between God and his judgement.

Such a worldview is cruel. The theory of fairness that is on offer is that God is trying to punish us and we, arrogantly, are trying to dodge that punishment. But, at the same moment, it is altruistic. Many of the people fighting to repeal current US healthcare law or keep their town in the hands of ISIL or the Lord’s Resistance Army or Boko Haram are willing to sacrifice their own lives in the name of this monstrous theory of justice. People are willing to lay down their own lives to make sure that there is more suffering and death in the world, in accordance with God’s plan.

Not only does the contemporary mainstream left fail to validate the feelings of those who believe the world is fundamentally unfair and must be reordered to restore justice, it also rejects the efforts of people who wish to be heroes—valiant people who have that intuitive consciousness of the injustice of the present order. The world is, and always has been, full of people who are willing to put everything on the line to fight evil. There are incipient heroes in every family, in every neighbourhood, town and village. Many people have been surprised by the thousands who put their bodies on the line at Standing Rock last year, the thousands who faced off against the state in the streets in the early days of the Trump regime. Many people were stunned by the Syria-wide protests against a monstrous, homicidal regime following the bombing of Aleppo. I was not.

The problem is that the mainstream electoral left has a place for you if you can represent yourself as a victim, an aspiring technocrat or a classically liberal rational actor and benefit-maximizer, and, ideally all three, if you care to look at the BC NDP’s candidate selection procedures. But what about people who want to denounce injustice, call out evil for what it is, and march out into the streets to challenge it? The fascist movements around us are winning because they have a place for those people and we do not. The leftist mobilization we have seen in recent months has taken place in spite of the prevailing thinking of the left, not because of it.

Our present political moment arises from the fact that there is only one compelling narrative for vanquishing injustice that people are being offered. And it is the one that celebrates cruelty, that eggs on climate change, that revels in torture, that cheers “LET HIM DIE!!! LET HIM DIE!!!!” like that 2012 Republican primary debate audience when candidates were asked about the uninsured. In opposition to this, we offer an imagined past of tolerant twentieth-century welfare states, accommodation with global capital and the investor class, investor rights regimes like the EU and NAFTA, and small-scale technocratic change, provided the investor class gets its cut.

It is a testament to the fundamental decency of the human race that, in democracies around the world, a slim majority continues to reject the politics of cruelty and conservative religio-political eschatology. In the absence of a visionary left, that decency is all that is holding human civilization in place.

Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite | February 23, 2017

On Side for the Big Win

In 1996, there were a lot more passenger trains in this country. There were daily trips between Victoria and Courtenay and between North Vancouver and Prince George via 100 Mile House to name a few. But the evisceration of VIA Rail was just getting going with the Chrétien government’s third budget. It was hard to guess which train lines would vanish when, so my friend Oscar and I thought I had better take the train trip that had fascinated me the most: the Winnipeg-Churchill run through the entire breadth of Canada’s boreal forest and across the tree line. It was a great trip in which I watched Oscar swim in the Arctic Ocean and looked at amazing comic book-style ivory dioramas of Inuit legends; it’s one that I hope people can still make when another two thirds of VIA’s funding is cut by Harper in the next fiscal year.

But the thing I remember best about it was dropping in on my friend K at the 1996 Progressive Conservative Party convention in Winnipeg on the way. He and my other Tory friends had been crushed by the party’s annihilation in 1993 personally, financially, ideologically, you name it. But they were young and not prepared to give up. When I arrived, it was late on the Friday night and people were in high spirits. I began asking where K was and was directed to a ballroom on the top floor of the convention hotel, where he and New Brunswick Opposition leader Bernard Valcourt were in finalists in the convention’s “bungee running” competition.

As though re-enacting the entire post-Mulroney experience of the party in a single cathartic episode, K, former Special Assistant to the Speaker and Valcourt, disgraced former cabinet minister were tied to the wall on opposite sides of the room with long bungee cords and were competing to stretch their cords far enough, fast enough to reach the bottle of single malt scotch on top of a makeshift plinth in the centre of the room – but not so fast that the cord snapped them back to the wall. Auguring things to come, Valcourt got the bottle and shared a small amount of it with K before putting me in a celebratory introductory headlock and staggering downstairs.

Then I asked K how the convention had gone and he was ebullient. Having made Jean Charest party leader, he felt confident the Tories would (as they did) regain official party status in 1997 and believed that, with hard work, they could form the Official Opposition. (They failed to do that but did get a fifth of the popular vote, the second largest share in the election and more than half of the victorious Liberals’.) The reason he was confident, he explained, was that the convention comprised only two main groups of delegates: people who shared his clear-eyed vision of how the party could claw its way, incrementally, back to relevance and less clear-headed delegates who were “on side for the big win.”

The reason K felt confident in the party’s recovery was that, while forming a core of dedicated donors and volunteers, those On Side for the Big Win were not crafting election strategy. The term soon joined my vocabulary as a crucial descriptor for a certain kind of activist as I entered my second term as BC Green Party leader.

But by 1999, the term had taken on a less rosy complexion in our shared lexicon. K and his allies were fighting off a takeover attempt by David Orchard (something I’d advised Orchard to do over dinner in 1997 as a media stunt). Orchard’s supporters were utterly humourless and totally convinced that, upon their guru’s election as party leader, the Tories would surge into first place and form a majority government. I, meanwhile, was fighting off a leadership challenge by Adriane Carr who confidently proclaimed to anyone who would listen that once people saw her in the televised debate, she would become premier of BC.

Therefore one must viagra sales in australia keep alcohol at bay while using anti-impotence drugs. But most men are struggling to discuss it in front of any health professional, it is better free viagra no prescription to have the drug before an hour of intercourse. Regular pelvic examination with your cialis no prescription wouroud.com gynecologist helps you identify endometrial cancer and which creates further need for proper education on ICT. Your cosmetic surgeon will have prescribed a medicament that will the patient viagra genérico 25mg deal with the irritation. It was tough for K and me, in our respective parties, to challenge prescriptions of sudden, easy, total victory because so damned many people were On Side for the Big Win. Why, such people wanted to know, was I trying to build electoral alliances with labour and New Democrats? Why was I diverting energy from suburban ridings into a handful of city centre and hippie-filled wet belt rural seats? These kinds of compromises and sacrifices seemed insane to people who imagined total victory to be just around the corner.

But I want to suggest that this desperate conviction of total, imminent victory in the face of overwhelming evidence, like having less than 1000 members in your party and a budget of less than $70,000 per year, is not really optimism at all. It is actually the most pernicious manifestation of despair one can find.

Magical thinking – see my article on this elsewhere – emerges most often when people lose the ability to imagine an actual, real, plausible path to what they want and they retreat into a kind of conscious, dissociative fantasy life in which they replace real world improvement with an imaginary future in which they take refuge from the bleak realities that surround them.

Nobody has ever been more On Side for the Big Win than the Native Americans who joined the Ghost Dance movement of the prophet Wovoka who promised victory in battle through invincibility to bullets and European disease and divine assistance in a rectifying eschaton that would cleanse the Americas of colonists. The false, desperate confidence of those who rode into battle to die during the closing of the frontier in the 1880s was not actual hope – it was total and abject despair.

Today, many of us on the Civic Left are caught between two kinds of despair: a cynical and hopeless politics of brokerage and collaboration with corporate real estate elites on one hand and the politics of the Big Win on the other. To follow either path is to succumb to despair.

I – and a growing coalition of people I meet every day – can see a narrow, hard, steep path for this city’s left to recover, to stand against the escalating efforts to cleanse the city of all but the wealthiest among us. But we must keep our wits about us. We are not on an inexorable march to victory any more than we have been permanently defeated – there is hope but that hope is fragile, evidence-based and meriting careful analysis and clever strategy. But we must guard against that hope turning to desperation and ourselves, our friends and allies coming On Side for the Big Win.

Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | October 25, 2013

Odin’s Pep-talk

You may have got the sense recently that I disapprove of mixing of mythology and politics, especially eschatology and politics. Mythological ideas about the end of the world have not always made great contribution to political thought but that doesn’t mean they can never make positive contribution. So, for today’s, blog entry let me give you the pep-talk that, like me, is coming out of retirement. I used to give this talk back in the 90s when my friends and I were fighting against ozone depletion, climate change, mainstream politics, big corporations and the arrayed forces of capitalism. I like to think of this talk as something like Odin’s pep-talk.

Odin, for those of you who aren’t familiar with his work, was the All-Father, chief of the Norse gods, who presided in the halls of Valhalla amongst gods like Tyr, Thor, Loki, etc. Odin was a pretty worried guy because he was responsible for the other gods and for the world they protected. He and his comrades protected this world from the ice giants, fire giants and the other monsters, monsters who were always on the march.

Odin is sometimes depicted as a huge, authoritative, worried man seated at a banquet table not touching his food. He is worried because, according to the Norse, it was prophesied at the beginning of time that the world would end in the battle of Ragnarök, between the gods and the beasts. According to the prophecy, the gods will lose the final battle: Loki, the traitor to the gods and leader of the giants, father of some of the monsters, will lead the giants to the Bifröst Bridge. There, he will slay Heimdallr, guardian of the bridge, charged since the beginning with preventing the giants from crossing it and entering Asgard, land of the gods.

Asgard needed to be guarded, not just to protect the gods and their hall, Valhalla but to protect a chain created to restrain Loki’s most monstrous offspring, Fenris the Wolf. But according to the prophecy, not only would Heimdall’s death allow the giants to storm across the bridge and plunder Valhalla; it would allow Loki to untether the wolf, who would swallow the sun and bring all creation to an end. While Christian eschatology guarantees ultimate victory for the forces of life, light and goodness, the eschatology of the Norse guaranteed that one day, the sun would be swallowed, the gods would be vanquished and the world with them.

Because of Odin’ knowledge of the prophecy, he is shown as a valiant yet worried man with a raven on each shoulder, and his constantly vigilant single eye, the other sacrificed to obtain wisdom. This wisdom, I would like to suggest, did not imbue Odin with fatalism but instead with a sense of vigilance and urgency. Odin leaves his food uneaten and mead un-drunk, not because he is paralyzed by his knowledge but because it forces him to constantly plot his next move. The certainty of Ragnarök placed one clear moral imperative before him: if the world was going to end inevitably, his job was not to save it but to keep it ending for as long as possible.
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Every day the world does not end and people can drink, dance and have children, Odin wins; the gods win; creation wins. And this, I believe, is the mission of those fighting for social and environmental justice today: to keep the world ending as long as we can, to fight back every day, to buy the world another day, another hour, another second. When the ravens fly into Valhalla and tell us where the giants are today, that is where we have to go. Because every battle we pitch between them and the Bifröst Bridge buys the world and its people more time.

I find something exhilarating and empowering about that. Maybe we will buy very little time in the next battle but I am convinced that that the act of struggling against the forces of capitalism always makes a difference, always adds another unexpected or unwanted delay on Loki’s march to the bridge and gives dozens, hundreds or even billions of people a little extra time. If you really believe that life is sacred, that life is the most precious thing, you know what a few more seconds of life are worth. Maybe you will get hurt fighting the giants every chance you get; sometimes we will be too tired to fight; and that is okay. My point is simply that this struggle and the continuity of life are one in the same. The sun rises because Fenris has not swallowed it; and that is because we keep fighting the giants.

Unfortunately, thanks to the legacy Plato, Descartes and other philosophers who emphasize ideas of perfection and eternity, we have got this crazy idea that unless a victory is final and total, it is not a victory. In other words, any actual victory that takes place in the real world doesn’t count. And so we are cast into despair by the inevitably imperfect nature of our next victory. This is a way of thinking a way of living that disempowers us. There is no final, total victory. The earth is running out of steam; the sun is running out of steam; we are only going to be around for so long, anyway. But every second that we extend life on this planet matters.

Now is not the time to lose heart. Now that the northern polar ice cap has vanished, the giants can pretty much see the bridge from where they are. So let’s sharpen our swords and ride out from Valhalla over the bridge to meet the giants once again. At least, that’s how I like to think about, to quote Ken Kesey, getting back in the hassle.

Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | October 7, 2012

What If We’re Too Prepared For the End of the World?

Or, “the Avalanche Has Begun and We Are the Stones”

People talk a lot about the unprecedented nature of the current environmental crisis, or as Gro Harlem Brundtland termed it in her world-changing Our Common Future in 1987, “interlocking crises.” But this assumes that the main way we are experiencing declining biodiversity, increasing environmental toxicity, a changing atmosphere, rising radioactivity and the other major ecological problems of our day is through a direct, physical relationship to those events.

The reality is that we, and other species whose primary activity is hanging out with each other, experience almost all events, even the most significant in our lives, in a socially-mediated fashion. Our main experience of the declining capacity of planetary life support systems is the collective responses, reactions and understandings of the people around us.

That’s one of the many reasons human beings, and especially those situated in Christian and post-Christian societies, are having a lot of trouble dealing with the actual ecological crisis that is unfolding. The year it was written and nearly every year since, the Book of Revelation has appeared to describe the events unfolding on the day it is being read. War? Check. Strife? Check. Hunger (actually better translated as wage and price manipulations by elites)? Check. Death? Must be just around the corner. And it’s not just the horsemen; there’s the succession of empires leading to some kind of crescendo of global imperialism.

The genius of Revelation and, I think, the reason for its persistent resistance to highly rational arguments for its de-canonization in the fourth century, and in every major review of the Bible’s contents since, is that it just seems so up-to-the-minute relevant even to non-Christians. While both Martin Luther and Jean Calvin originally argued for its removal from the Bible along with the rest of the Apocrypha, its irresistible power in the present ultimately scuttled those plans. It was simply too expedient to go along with the throngs of Protestant revolutionary volunteers who were already convinced of the Reformers’ ultimate position: that the Pope, himself, was the Antichrist, the main character introduced in Revelation.

For nearly two millennia, Christians have been expecting a world-ending cataclysm that includes, among other things, destabilization of the climate, befouling of the land and seas, accompanied by big explosions any day now. The problem isn’t so much that the human race is taking the most important exam of its career and it hasn’t studied; it’s that we have been studying for this exam every day but based on a really out-of-date copy of Cole’s Notes.

Before I get to the implications of being over- not under-prepared for climate change, ozone depletion, nuclear containment breaches, oil spills and the like, I need to square away some messy terminology. People often refer to the events in Revelation as the “apocalypse.” Actually, “apocalypse” is a literary genre from ancient and medieval times; it refers to a piece of writing in which the narrator is lifted up above the world and shown the whole structure of space-time by a god or other powerful entity. The “apocalypse” or revelation of Saint John the Divine refers not to the events narrated but to the way in which they are narrated. The events themselves would have been understood at the time as the eschaton, a Greek work meaning an end-times reckoning, of which only the adjectival form has survived in English (eschatological).

Unfortunately, nearly two thousand years of preparation of the Christian eschaton has caused us to entertain a number of ideas about the interlocking crises we currently face that actually serve us worse even than uncomprehending shock and confusion.

1. The elect will be spared: Today, there is a popular illusion that if one makes the correct consumer choices within the matrix of present-day First World capitalism, one can live sustainably. This is, of course, nonsense. We live in such an energy-intensive society that any participation in the systems that transport people, goods and information guarantees a high impact on the biosphere. Furthermore, the extent to which one alters consumer choices to reduce one’s environmental impact typically produces a proportional reduction in one’s efficacy as an activist for systemic change. The more “sustainably” one lives, the more time and money go into food and household maintenance, the harder it is to move both oneself and cargo from one location to another, etc.

Why, then, is a slight, meaningless reduction in one’s ecological footprint within a massively over-consuming, over-polluting society so important to environmentalists, given the terrible cost to the movement’s efficacy incurred by making these sacrifices? I would like to suggest that much of this is bound up in our vision of the eschaton. In the reckoning at the end of the world, those who are spared will be those who have lived their lives according to the ethical precepts of the virtuous minority. For when the time comes to enter into the New Jerusalem, “people will bring into it the glory and honour of the nations. But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” (Revelation 21:26-27)

Furthermore, “the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign for ever and ever.” (Revelation 22:3-5) In other words, virtuous conduct in the present is what will determine who governs the society to which the eschaton will give rise. Those who lived in an ecologically moral way shall be the new rulers. In other words, the act of witnessing and the act of opting out are understood to confer on those engaged therein an exemption from the coming reckoning; they are the 144,000 who will march into the Kingdom of Heaven intact.

On the other hand, bad people who use their mainstream political connections and wealth to fly around the world in gas-guzzling planes and rely on rare earth technologies to communicate are hypocrites by virtue of choosing efficacy over irrelevance.

2. The eschaton will be physically fair: Related to the previous idea, and brilliantly dramatized in the climate change disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, the physically destructive forces of climate change punish people based on a hierarchy of virtue, like the monsters in teen slasher movies who take out victims based on their relative promiscuity.

The back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s and its descendants today are best situated in the venerable tradition of Saint Antony, considered by some to be the founder of Christian monasticism. While the rhetoric of physical distance and self-sufficiency often power this very fossil fuel-intensive lifestyle, I would suggest that the reason not just the geography of Antony’s movement but its aesthetic of coarse, modest garments and long beards continue into the present day is because what members are attempting to do through isolation and distinctive appearance is to mark themselves as exempt from the scourging of the eschaton.

Like the Israelites who marked their doors with the blood of slaughtered sheep or the Millerites in the white robes on the day of the Great Disappointment (see my strategic voting article), today’s elect engage in practices of geographic and social isolation that seem far more interested in marking themselves as exempt from the terrible consequences of ecological collapse but are dressed-up as practices of self-sufficiency.

And this is why there is often a hard-to-disguise glee on the faces of people warning of the ecological eschaton; they are experiencing a strange internal sense of security, of invulnerability. Although they know better, because they are often highly educated in the physical and social sciences, when they warn you of the impending calamity, they experience an irrational reassurance that the very act of warning will protect them from the coming scourge that will exalt the elect and punish the wicked. That’s why my activist friend Ira can never stop himself from smiling when he announces the next timetable for the total social and environmental collapse of our civilization. He knows that the scourging forces of nature will be focused on the most iniquitous and not on himself and, furthermore, that they will, independent of human action, be agents of the changes he favours.

It is for this reason that peak oil has had such a seductive conceptual hold over environmentalists. If we can rely on the eschaton, itself, to reward to elect and punish the iniquitous, to establish the social order of the future, we can expect that fossil fuels will run out, that uranium-235 will run out, while the water collected by microhydro systems will remain intact and the sun absorbed by solar collectors will remain just as abundant. It would simply be unfair for there to be ever-increasing fossil fuel and fissionable material availability, while destabilizing weather systems wreak havoc with microhydro and solar energy systems. Indeed, it will be those who have profited most from our current regime of ecological destruction who will be best-resourced to survive any disaster coming our way.

3. The New Jerusalem will be eternal: The peoples of the Ancient Mediterranean, Near East and Mesoamerica are sometimes thought to have had an eschatological theory of time. But Hesiod and the author of the Annals of Cuauhtitlan saw a succession of ages stretching forward through time, each ending in disaster. The Golden Age might end in a world-destroying disaster but it was to be followed by the Silver Age; the fourth sun might set but the fifth sun would rise. What makes Christian history so distinctive is that this is the last round of musical chairs, that however we the elect are socially organized at the eschaton will become the ultimate social order of the human race.

This means, effectively, that the way in which the elect currently live or aspire to live will be the eternal social order that will be installed by the eschaton and never fall. When we look at the bizarre and highly inefficient social and organizational forms of movements like Occupy or the intentional communities that still dot rural British Columbia take on, these are not forms that arise out of a plan to efficiently organize projects of witnessing or dissent. They are forms that arise out of an attempt to imagine the terminal human social order. The fascistic substratum of what appear to be innocuous social experiments is a function of their participants imagining that how they are living is how all people should and will be made to live for the rest of time.

Correctly rejecting “sustainable development” as proposed by the Brundtland Commission for its plan to save the planet by increasing human impact on the biosphere more than tenfold, environmentalists hit upon a term that expresses this theory perfectly, “sustainability.” A policy or practice is sustainable if it can be started now and continue until the earth ceases to support life .While the idea of not making resources in the present unavailable to future generations is a compelling one, trying to simultaneously answer the questions, “how should we live now?” and “how shall people live for all eternity?” produces crazy answers. Alloyed with Gandhian, “we must become the change we seek” rhetoric, this way of thinking becomes not merely absurdly totalitarian, in that people acting are understood to be deciding how all people shall live for the rest of time, it makes environmentalists intrinsically hostile to transition strategies.
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One of the most penetrating ecological thinkers of the early 1990s, David Lewis (no relation to the NDP dynasts) labeled this kind of thinking as “embrymoronic.” His political opponents in the Green Party were fond of stating that the party itself was not so much a tool for bringing about systemic change as an embryo of future society itself. Instead of its organizational features being evaluated based on their conventional efficacy, they were based on their aesthetic resemblance to the terminal social order of the human race that will be practiced in the New Jerusalem.

4. We know all about the New Jerusalem: “It has a great, high wall with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and on the gates are inscribed the names of the twelve tribes of the Israelites; on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates. And the wall of the city has twelve foundations, and on them are the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb …The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its width; and he measured the city with his rod, fifteen hundred miles; its length and width and height are equal. He also measured its wall, one hundred and forty-four cubits by human measurement, which the angel was using. The wall is built of jasper, while the city is pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city are adorned with every jewel; the first was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth cornelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, the twelfth amethyst. And the twelve gates are twelve pearls, each of the gates is a single pearl, and the street of the city is pure gold, transparent as glass.” (Revelation 21:12-21)

Related to the eternity of the New Jerusalem is its specific knowability. If we know the precise geometry of the New Jerusalem, the position of God’s throne, the materials of which it will be fashioned, its duration and population, there is little left to discover about it. Furthermore, one of its properties is that it is specifically measurable and describable in the terms of the society of the present day.

Russian Marxists, also steeped in a secularized reading of the Christian eschaton, struggled with this question in the early days of the Soviet Union. Fortunately, Eastern Orthodoxy was much more strongly infused with doctrines of the unknowability of God, descending from the influential theology of the Pseudodionysus, at least permitting people to consider that the New Jerusalem might be so different from the sinful world of the present that those of us implicated therein would be unable to fully envision it. So it was that prior to Stalin’s seizure of power, Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat did not claim to be able to fully know what communism would be. For Stalin, on the other hand, and for the Christian West, the terminal dispensation of human history was knowable down to the last detail.

The doctrine of the knowability of the New Jerusalem further reinforces the idea that a local Occupy camp is not so much a witness against capitalism as the socio-economic order that will replace it. Worse yet, it spawns absurd utopian social theories like bioregionalism which design and purport to tell us what a sustainable/eternal society will look like, not just with respect to human geography and infrastructure but in terms of culture and religion.

The desire to refute liberal technocratic dismissals of radical social change feeds into this kind of false omniscience too. The absurd claim that one cannot witness against a thing unless one has designed its replacement is bait to which environmentalists rise all too often.

With the notable exception of Lewis, most environmental thinkers are cowed by this nonsense into one of two equally unrealistic camps: (a) a sustainable society isn’t that different from ours: everyone will ride their bike to solar-powered bullet trains where they video-conference on their IPhones on their way to work or (b) a sustainable society is radically different: we’ll spend our days making art, raising crops and going to interminable unanimity-driven meetings where everybody’s input will be valued and respected.

This kind of thinking doesn’t just produce bad political tactics; it minimizes how hostile to the created world capitalism is and how deeply implicated we are in the system of relationships it entails. Why should people this deeply enmeshed in the society of the present possess the capacity to imagine a society sufficiently different to offer hope for arresting human-caused omnicide?

5. The eschaton be sudden and total: Despite the eloquence of Paul Ehrlich’s metaphor of the boiling frog, the environmental crisis remains, in most people’s thinking, something that has not yet started or, even if it has started, something that will build to a crescendo of massive dislocation and chaos.

But let us consider the much more frightening possibility, that the systems by which global capitalism perpetuates itself are strong enough not just to continue functioning but to create the perception of a stable social order. Often, the most radical reformulations of an ideology or way of life are presented either as continuity with the past or as the restoration of a prior social order, cloaking their unprecedented character. It is in this way that the Roman Catholic Church could transform itself in less than two centuries from the elite gay dating scene of the West and the world’s largest abortion provider into not just an intractable foe of homosexuality and abortion but into an organization that has always been so.

In this way, we may be continuing to anticipate the imminent eschaton even when there are only a few thousand of us living in subterranean caverns, eating vat-grown meat. Habituated, as we are, to biodiversity declining every year, carbon levels and radioactivity rising, we assume that we are situated in the lead-up to the eschaton and not already in the thing itself. This is why witnessing against the interlocking crises is conflated with warning of an impending future disaster when, to paraphrase Babylon 5, the avalanche has already begun – and we are the stones.

6. The eschaton will happen to us: In Revelation, the eschaton is punishment for human iniquity. Thus, while human actions cause the poisoning of the seas, they do so at a remove. It is not us poisoning the seas but rather us behaving so badly that the seas are poisoned as a consequence of the universe’s abhorrence for misbehaviour.

Like stones falling down a mountainside, announcing that an avalanche is coming, we are unable to understand that we, ourselves, are the avalanche. The ecological catastrophe is not some future reaction, avenging, justifying by the biosphere to the damage we are doing to it. We, ourselves, are the catastrophe. Ecological collapse is not a future event in which we will get our comeuppance for our bad behaviour; it is the bad behaviour itself.

Belief in a half-personified avenging Mother Earth who will chastise and scourge us when we have gone too far is a fairy tale the human race, the world’s first self-conscious natural disaster, tells itself. Desperate to be punished for our own misbehaviour, we keep acting out in the irrational hope that dad, or God, will come home and finally sort things out.

In this way, the eschaton is mistakenly understood by environmentalists as the brutal force that will arrest human iniquity. Somehow, things will get so polluted, so toxic, so lethal, so lifeless that the very processes by which we are destroying the world will be arrested. But this is a fairy tale. The worse things get, as material desperation re-enters the equation, the more temptation there will be to double-down on cheap, polluting energy, dangerous or untested chemicals and ecologically destructive military technologies. Unlike the Christian eschaton, we are not bit players in the battle between God and Satan to be judged and scourged. Like it or not, we are both Christ and Antichrist, the scourge of the world.

Of course, the biggest problem with the heritage of the Christian eschaton is not its pernicious impact on the environmental movement but on those who hear its warnings. Over the past four score generations, we have learned how to react to the madmen on the street corner or behind the pulpit who proclaim, “repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Despite their penetrating social criticism and moral indignation at the evils and hypocrisies of their age, we have learned to take this sort of thing with a grain of salt not because the prophets are wrong but because they are a constant.

The fact that the befouling of the seas and skies is now backed by peer reviewed science is merely incidental, just another of the myriad absurdities of our age. The fact that today’s doomsday cults’ claims about the environment of the near future have finally met the evidentiary standards of the Age of Reason is unexceptional when we remember that such claims, made by other heralds of the eschaton in ages past, were also validated by the epistemologies of their day. The Franciscan mendicants who believed they lived in the end times were among the world’s great scholars in their day and also had the ear of the princes and emperors. And they were just another movement in more than a thousand years of social movements explaining that human iniquity was going to cause a civilization-ending disaster.

Were it not for centuries of habit, we might take seriously the physically unprecedented events of our day and the dire warnings associated with them. But after claiming that Justinian’s corruption and marital infidelity and Arthur’s philandering produced the Darkening of the Sun in 538 and the associated wasteland and making similar claims in every major climate episode since, it seems to our ears, as though the prophets of doom are crying wolf. We didn’t cause the Darkening of the Sun; we didn’t cause the Medieval Warm Period; we didn’t cause the Little Ice Age; why would we have caused the current climate episode? Over the centuries, we have built up an incredible arsenal of emotional equipment to reassure ourselves that what is happening is not caused by us and will stop on its own, and these reactions have been right more often than not.

The David Suzukis of the world fit into the well-established role in the Christian West: the prophet of doom, preaching repentance. They are, at once, honoured as speakers of truth and recognized as part of the background noise of a stable society, utterly domesticated into the social order of their day. Suzuki’s journey from doomsday prophet to lightbulb selling mascot situates him in the grand tradition of Saint Francis of Assisi. And sadly, it situates his message there too, a stern warning to be honoured and heeded, but not too seriously. After all, the eschaton has been impending for two thousand years.

Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | August 3, 2012

Religion and Eschatology in Politics - 3. page
Religious ideas about the end of the world and other issues keep messing with our thinking.