[A version of this talk was delivered to
the Brisbane Social Forum, Australia, May 21, 2006]
The
most important words anyone said to me in the weeks immediately after
September 11, 2001, came from my friend James Koplin. While
acknowledging the significance of that day, he said, simply: “I was in a
profound state of grief about the world before 9/11, and nothing that
happened on that day has significantly changed what the world looks like
to me.”
Because Jim is a bit older and
considerably smarter than I, it took me some time to catch up to him,
but eventually I recognized his insight. He was warning me that even we
lefties -- trained to keep an eye on systems and structures of power
rather than obsessing about individual politicians and single events --
were missing the point if we accepted the conventional wisdom that 9/11
“changed everything,” as the saying went then. He was right, and today I
want to talk about four fundamentalisms loose in the world and the
long-term crisis to which they point.
Before we head there, a note on the short-term crisis: I have been
involved in U.S. organizing against the so-called “war on terror,” which
has provided cover for the attempts to expand and deepen U.S. control
over the strategically crucial resources of Central Asia and the Middle
East, part of a global strategy that the Bush administration openly
acknowledges is aimed at unchallengeable U.S. domination of the world.
For U.S. planners, that “world” includes not only the land and seas --
and, of course, the resources beneath them -- but space above as well.
It is our world to arrange and dispose of as they see fit, in support of
our “blessed lifestyle.” Other nations can have a place in that world as
long as they are willing to assume the role that the United States
determines appropriate. The vision of U.S. policymakers is of a world
very ordered, by them.
This description of U.S. policy is no caricature. Anyone who doubts my
summary can simply read the
National Security Strategy document released in 2002 and the
2006
update, and review
post-World War II U.S. history. Read and review, but only if
you don’t mind waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat of
fear. But as scary as these paranoid, power-mad policymakers’ delusions
may be, Jim was talking about a feeling beyond that fear -- a grief that
is much broader and goes much deeper.
Opposing the war-of-the-moment -- and going beyond that to challenge the
whole imperial project -- is important. But also important is the work
of thinking through the nature of the larger forces that leave us in
this grief-stricken position. We need to go beyond Bush. We should
recognize the seriousness of the threat that this particular gang of
thieves and thugs poses and resist their policies, but not mistake them
for the core of the problem.
FUNDAMENTALISMS
One way to come to terms with these forces is to understand the United
States as a society in the grip of four fundamentalisms. In ascending
order of threat, I identify these fundamentalisms as religious,
national, economic, and technological. All share some similar
characteristics, while each poses a particular threat to sustainable
democracy and sustainable life on the planet. Each needs separate
analysis and strategies for resistance.
Let’s start by defining fundamentalism. The term has a specific meaning
in Protestant history (an early 20th century movement to promote “The
Fundamentals”), but I want to use it in a more general fashion to
describe any intellectual/political/theological position that asserts an
absolute certainty in the truth and/or righteousness of a belief system.
Such fundamentalism leads to an inclination to want to marginalize, or
in some cases eliminate, alternative ways to understand and organize the
world. After all, what’s the point of engaging in honest dialogue with
those who believe in heretical systems that are so clearly wrong or even
evil? In this sense, fundamentalism is an extreme form of hubris, a
delusional overconfidence not only in one’s beliefs but in the ability
of humans to know much of anything definitively. In the way I use the
term, fundamentalism isn’t unique to religious people but is instead a
feature of a certain approach to the world, rooted in the mistaking of
very limited knowledge for wisdom.
The antidote to fundamentalism is humility -- recognition of just how
contingent our knowledge about the world is. We need to adopt what
sustainable agriculture researcher Wes Jackson calls “an
ignorance-based worldview,” an approach to world that
acknowledges that what we don’t know dwarfs what we do know about a
complex world. Acknowledging our basic ignorance does not mean we should
revel in stupidity, but rather should spur us to recognize that we have
an obligation to act intelligently on the basis not only of what we know
but what we don’t know. When properly understood, I think such humility
is implicit in traditional/indigenous systems and also the key lesson to
be taken from the Enlightenment and modern science (a contentious claim,
perhaps, given the way in which modern science tends to overreach). The
Enlightenment insight, however, is not that human reason can know
everything, but that we can give up attempts to know everything and be
satisfied with knowing what we can know. That is, we can be content in
making it up as we go along, cautiously. One of the tragedies of the
modern world is that too few have learned that lesson.
Fundamentalists, no matter what the specific belief system, believe in
their ability to know a lot. That is why it can be so easy for
fundamentalists to move from one totalizing belief system to another.
For example, I have a faculty colleague who shifted from being a
dogmatic communist to a dogmatic right-wing evangelical Christian. When
people hear of his conversion they often express amazement, though to me
it always seemed easy to understand -- he went from one fundamentalism
to another. What matters is not so much the content but the shape of the
belief system. Such systems should worry us.
That said, not all fundamentalisms pose the same danger to democracy and
sustainability. So, let’s go through the four I have identified:
religious, national, economic, and technological.
RELIGION AND NATION
The fundamentalism that attracts the most attention is religious. In the
United States, the predominant form is Christian. Elsewhere in the
world, Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu fundamentalisms are attractive to some
significant portion of populations, either spread across a diaspora or
concentrated in one region, or both. Given all the attention focused on
religious fundamentalism, I’ll assume everyone has at least a passing
acquaintance with the phenomenon and is aware of its threats.
But religious fundamentalism is not necessarily the most serious
fundamentalist threat loose in the world today. Certainly much evil has
been done in the world in the name of religion, especially the
fundamentalist varieties, and we can expect more in the future. But,
moving up the list, we also can see clearly the problems posed by
national fundamentalism.
Nationalism poses a threat everywhere but should especially concern us
in the United States, where the capacity for destruction in the hands of
the most powerful state in the history of the world is exacerbated by a
pathological hyper-patriotism that tends to suppress internal criticism
and leave many unable to hear critique from outside. In other writing
(Chapter 3 of Citizens of the Empire) I have outlined in some
detail an argument that patriotism is intellectually and morally
bankrupt. Here, let me simply point out that because a nation-state is
an abstraction (lines on a map, not a naturally occurring object),
assertions of patriotism (defined as love of or loyalty to a
nation-state) raise a simple question: To what we are pledging our love
and loyalty? How is that abstraction made real? I conclude that all the
possible answers are indefensible and that instead of pledging
allegiance to a nation, we should acknowledge and celebrate our
connections to real people in our lives while also declaring a
commitment to universal principles, but reject offering commitment to
arbitrary political units that in the modern era have been the vehicle
for such barbarism and brutality.
That critique applies across the board, but because of our power and
peculiar history, a rejection of national fundamentalism is most crucial
in the United States. The dominant conception of that history is
captured in the phrase “the city upon a hill,” the notion that the
United States came into the world as the first democracy, a beacon to
the world. In addition to setting the example, as soon as it had the
capacity to project its power around the world, the United States
claimed to be the vehicle for bringing democracy to that world. These
are particularly odd claims for a nation that owes its very existence to
one of the most successful genocides in recorded history, the
near-complete extermination of indigenous peoples to secure the land and
resource base for the United States. Odder still when one looks at the
U.S. practice of African slavery that propelled the United States into
the industrial world, and considers the enduring apartheid system --
once formal and now informal -- that arose from it. And
odd-to-the-point-of-bizarre in the context of imperial America’s
behavior in the world since it emerged as the lone superpower and made
central to its foreign policy in the post-WWII era attacks on any
challenge in the Third World to U.S. dominance.
While all the empires that have committed great crimes -- the British,
French, Belgians, Japanese, Russians and then the Soviets -- have
justified their exploitation of others by the alleged benefits it
brought to the people being exploited, there is no power so convinced of
its own benevolence as the United States. The culture is delusional in
its commitment to this mythology, which is why today one can find on the
other side of the world peasant farmers with no formal education who
understand better the nature of U.S. power than many faculty members at
elite U.S. universities. This national fundamentalism rooted in the
assumption of the benevolence of U.S. foreign and military policy works
to trump critical inquiry. As long as a significant component of the
U.S. public -- and virtually the entire elite -- accept this national
fundamentalism, the world is at risk.
ECONOMICS
Economic fundamentalism, synonymous these days with market
fundamentalism, presents another grave threat. After fall of the Soviet
system, the naturalness of capitalism is now taken to be beyond
question. The dominant assumption about corporate capitalism in the
United States is not simply that it is the best among competing economic
systems, but that it is the only sane and rational way to organize an
economy in the contemporary world.
In capitalism, (1) property, including capital assets, is owned and
controlled by private persons; (2) people sell their labor for money
wages, and (3) goods and services are allocated by markets. In
contemporary market fundamentalism, also referred to as neoliberalism,
it’s assumed that most extensive use of markets possible will unleash
maximal competition, resulting in the greatest good -- and all this is
inherently just, no matter what the results. The reigning ideology of
so-called “free trade” seeks to impose this neoliberalism everywhere on
the globe. In this fundamentalism, it is an article of faith that the
“invisible hand” of the market always provides the preferred result, no
matter how awful the consequences may be for real people.
A corresponding tenet of the market fundamentalist view is that the
government should not interfere in any of this; the appropriate role of
government, we are told, is to stay out of the economy. This is probably
the most ridiculous aspect of the ideology, for the obvious reason that
it is the government that establishes the rules for the system
(currency, contract law, etc.) and decides whether the wealth
accumulated under previous sets of rules should be allowed to remain in
the hands of those who accumulated it (typically in ways immoral,
illegal, or both; we should recall the quip that behind every great
fortune is a great crime) or be redistributed. To argue that government
should stay out of the economy merely obscures the obvious fact that
without the government -- that is, without rules established through
some kind of collective action -- there would be no economy. The
government can’t stay out because it’s in from the ground floor, and
assertions that government intervention into markets is inherently
illegitimate are just silly.
Adding to the absurdity of all this is the hypocrisy of the market
fundamentalists, who are quick to call on government to bail them out
when things go sour (in recent U.S history, the savings-and-loan and
auto industries are the most outrageous examples). And then there's the
reality of how some government programs -- most notably the military and
space departments -- act as conduits for the transfer of public money to
private corporations under the guise of “national defense” and the
“exploration of space.” And then there’s the problem of market failure
-- the inability of private markets to provide some goods or provide
other goods at the most desirable levels -- of which economists are well
aware.
In other words, economic fundamentalism -- the worship of markets
combined with steadfast denial about how the system actually operates --
leads to a world in which not only are facts irrelevant to the debate,
but people learn to ignore their own experience.
On the facts: There is a widening gap between rich and poor, both
worldwide and within most nations. According to U.N. statistics, about a
quarter of the world’s population lives on less than $1 a day and nearly
half live on less than $2. The 2005 U.N. Report on the World Social
Situation, aptly titled “The
Inequality Predicament,” stresses:
“Ignoring inequality in the pursuit of development is perilous. Focusing
exclusively on economic growth and income generation as a development
strategy is ineffective, as it leads to the accumulation of wealth by a
few and deepens the poverty of many; such an approach does not
acknowledge the intergenerational transmission of poverty.”
That’s where the data lead. But I want to highlight the power of this
fundamentalism by reminding us of a common acronym: TGIF. Everyone in
the United States knows what that means: “Thank God it’s Friday.” The
majority of Americans don’t just know what TGIF stands for; they feel it
in their bones. That’s a way of saying that a majority of Americans do
work they generally do not like and do not believe is really worth
doing. That’s a way of saying that we have an economy in which most
people spend at least a third of their lives doing things they don’t
want to do and don’t believe are valuable. We are told this is a way of
organizing an economy that is natural.
TECHNOLOGY
Religious, national, and economic fundamentalisms are dangerous. They
are systems of thought -- or, more accurately, systems of non-thought;
as Wes Jackson puts it, “fundamentalism
takes over where thought leaves off” -- that are at the core of
much of the organized violence in the world today. They are systems that
are deployed to constrain real freedom and justify illegitimate
authority. But it may turn out that those fundamentalisms are child’s
play compared with U.S. society’s technological fundamentalism.
Most concisely defined, technological fundamentalism is the assumption
that the increasing use of increasingly more sophisticated high-energy,
advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused
by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be
remedied by more technology. Those who question such declarations are
often said to be “anti-technology,” which is a meaningless insult. All
human beings use technology of some kind, whether it’s stone tools or
computers. An anti-fundamentalist position is not that all technology is
bad, but that the introduction of new technology should be evaluated on
the basis of its effects -- predictable and unpredictable -- on human
communities and the non-human world, with an understanding of the limits
of our knowledge.
Our experience with unintended consequences is fairly clear. For
example, there’s the case of automobiles and the burning of petroleum in
internal-combustion engines, which gave us the interstate highway system
and contributes to global warming. We haven’t quite figured out how to
cope with these problems, and in retrospect it might have been wise to
go slower in the development of a transportation system based on the car
and think through the consequences.
Or how about CFCs and the ozone hole? Chlorofluorocarbons have a variety
of industrial, commercial, and household applications, including in air
conditioning. They were thought to be a miracle chemical when introduced
in the 1930s -- non-toxic, non-flammable, and non-reactive with other
chemical compounds. But in the 1980s, researchers began to understand
that while CFCs are stable in the troposphere, when they move to the
stratosphere and are broken down by strong ultraviolet light they
release chlorine atoms that deplete the ozone layer. This unintended
effect deflated the exuberance a bit. Depletion of the ozone layer means
that more UV radiation reaches the Earth’s surface, and overexposure to
UV radiation is a cause of skin cancer, cataracts, and immune
suppression.
But, the technological fundamentalists might argue, we got a handle on
that one and banned CFCs, and now the ozone hole is closing. True
enough, but what lessons have been learned? Society didn’t react to the
news about CFCs by thinking about ways to step back from a world that
has become dependent on air conditioning, but instead looked for
replacements to keep the air conditioning running. So, the reasonable
question is: When will the unintended effects of the CFC replacements
become visible? If not the ozone hole, what’s next? There’s no way to
predict, but it seems reasonable to ask the question and sensible to
assume the worst.
This technological fundamentalism makes it clear why Jackson’s call for
an ignorance-based worldview is so important. If we were to step back
and confront honestly the technologies we have unleashed -- out of that
hubris, believing our knowledge is adequate to control the consequences
of our science and technology -- I doubt any of us would ever get a good
night’s sleep. We humans have been overdriving our intellectual
headlights for some time, most dramatically in the second half of the
20th century. Most obviously, there are two places we have gone, with
reckless abandon, where we had no business going -- into the atom and
into the cell.
On the former: The deeper we break into the energy package, the greater
the risks we take. Building fires with sticks gathered from around the
camp is relatively easy to manage, but breaking into increasingly
earlier material of the universe -- such as fossil fuels and,
eventually, heavy metal uranium -- is quite a different project, more
complex and far beyond our capacity to control. Likewise, manipulating
plants through selective breeding is local and manageable, whereas
breaking into the workings of the gene -- the foundational material of
life -- takes us to places we have no way to understand.
We live now in the uncomfortable position of realizing we have moved too
far and too fast, outstripping our capacity to manage safely the world
we have created. The answer is not some naïve return to a romanticized
past, but a recognition of what we have created and a systematic
evaluation of how to step back from our most dangerous missteps.
REDEFINING A GOOD LIFE
Central to that project is realizing that we have to learn to live with
less, which we can accomplish only when we recognize that living with
less is crucial not only to ecological survival but long-term human
fulfillment. People in the United States live with an abundance of most
everything -- except meaning. The people who have the most in material
terms seem to spend the most time in therapy, searching for answers to
their own alienation. This “blessed lifestyle” -- a term Bush’s
spokesman used in 2000 to describe the president’s view of U.S.
affluence -- perhaps is more accurately also seen as a curse.
Let’s return to CFCs and air-conditioning. To someone who lives in
Texas, with its miserable heat half the year, it’s reasonable to ask: If
not air-conditioning, then what? One possible reasonable response is, of
course, to vacate Texas, a strategy I ponder often. More realistic: The
“cracker house,” a term from Florida and Georgia to describe houses
built before air-conditioning that utilize shade, cross-ventilation, and
various building techniques to create a livable space even in the summer
in the deep South. Of course, even with all that, there are times when
it’s hot in a cracker house -- so hot that one doesn’t want to do much
of anything but drink iced tea and sit on the porch. That raises a
question: What’s so bad about sitting on the porch drinking iced tea
instead of sitting inside in an air-conditioned house?
A world that steps back from high-energy/high-technology answers to all
questions will no doubt be a harder world in some ways. But the way
people cope without such “solutions” can help create and solidify human
bonds. In this sense, the high-energy/high-technology world often
contributes to impoverished relationships and the destruction of
longstanding cultural practices and the information those practices
carry. So, stepping back from this fundamentalism is not simply
sacrifice but an exchange of a certain kind of comfort and easy
amusement for a different set of rewards.
Articulating this is important in a world in which people have come to
believe the good life is synonymous with consumption and the ability to
acquire increasingly sophisticated technology. To miss the way in which
turning from the high-energy/high-technology can improve our lives,
then, supports the techno-fundamentalists, such as this writer in the
Wired magazine:
“Green-minded activists failed to move the broader public not because
they were wrong about the problems, but because the solutions they
offered were unappealing to most people. They called for tightening
belts and curbing appetites, turning down the thermostat and living
lower on the food chain. They rejected technology, business, and
prosperity in favor of returning to a simpler way of life. No wonder the
movement got so little traction. Asking people in the world’s
wealthiest, most advanced societies to turn their backs on the very
forces that drove such abundance is naïve at best.”
Naïve, perhaps, but not as naïve as the belief that unsustainable
systems can be sustained indefinitely. With that writer’s limited vision
-- which is what passes for vision in this culture -- it’s not
surprising that
he advocates economic and technological fundamentalist
solutions:
With climate change hard upon us, a new
green movement is taking shape, one that embraces environmentalism’s
concerns but rejects its worn-out answers. Technology can be a font of
endlessly creative solutions. Business can be a vehicle for change.
Prosperity can help us build the kind of world we want. Scientific
exploration, innovative design, and cultural evolution are the most
powerful tools we have. Entrepreneurial zeal and market forces, guided
by sustainable policies, can propel the world into a bright green
future.
In other words: Let’s ignore our
experience and throw the dice. Let’s take naiveté to new heights. Let’s
forget all we should have learned.
WHAT’S NEXT?
So far, it appears my criticism has been of the fundamentalist versions
of religion, nation, capitalism, and high-technology. But the problem
goes deeper than the most exaggerated versions of these systems. If
there is to be a livable future, religion as we know it, the
nation-state, capitalism, and what we think of as advanced technology
will have to give way to new ways of understanding the world and
organizing ourselves. We still have to find ways to struggle with the
mystery of the world through ritual and art; organize ourselves
politically; produce and distribute goods and services; and create the
tools we need to do all these things. But the existing systems have
proven inadequate to the task. On each front, we need major conceptual
revolutions.
I don’t pretend to have answers, nor should anyone else. We are at the
beginning of a long process of redefining what it means to be human in
relation to others and to the non-human world. We are still formulating
questions. Some find this a depressing situation, but we could just as
well see it as a time that opens incredible opportunities for
creativity. To live in unsettled times -- especially times in which it’s
not difficult to imagine life as we know it becoming increasingly
untenable -- is both frightening and exhilarating. In that sense, my
friend’s acknowledgement of profound grief need not scare us but instead
can be a place from which we see clearly and gather the strength to move
forward.
What is that path? Tracking the four fundamentalisms, we can see some
turns we need to make.
Technologically: We need to stop talking about progress in terms that
reflexively glorify faster and more powerful devices, and instead adopt
a standard for judging progress based on the real effects on humans and
the wider world of which we are a part.
Economically: We need to stop talking about growth in terms of more
production and adopt a standard for economic growth and development
based on meeting human needs.
Nationally: We need to stop talking about national security and the
national interest -- code words for serving the goals of the powerful --
and focus on people’s interests in being secure in the basics: food,
shelter, education, and communal solidarity.
Religiously: We need to stop trying to pin down God. We can understand
God as simply the name we give to that which is beyond our ability to
understand, and recognize that the attempt to create rules for how to
know God is always a failed project.
I want to end by reinforcing the ultimate importance of that
recognition: Most of the world is complex beyond our ability to
comprehend. It’s not that there’s nothing we can know through our
rational faculties, but that it’s essential we recognize the limits of
those faculties. We need to reject the fundamentalist streak in all of
us, religious or secular, whatever our political affiliation.
We need to stop mistaking cleverness for wisdom. We need to embrace our
limits -- our ignorance -- in the hopes that we can stop being so
stupid.
When we do that we are coming to terms with the kind of animals we are,
in all our glory and all our limitations. That embrace of our
limitations is an embrace of a larger world of which we are a part, more
glorious than most of us ever experience.
When we do that -- if we can find our way clear to do that -- I think we
make possible love in this world. Not an idealized love, but a real love
that recognizes the joy that is possible and the grief that is
inevitable.
It is my dream to live in that world, to live in that love.
There is much work to be done if we want that world. There is enormous
struggle that can’t be avoided. When we allow ourselves to face it, we
will realize that ahead of us there is suffering beyond description, as
well as potential for transcending that suffering.
There is grief and joy.
And there is nothing to do but face it.
Robert Jensen is a journalism
professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the
Third Coast
Activist Resource Center. He is the author of The Heart of
Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the
Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights
Books). He can be reached at:
rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.