”It cannot be repeated too often: nothing is more fertile in marvels than the art of being free, but nothing is harder than freedom’s apprenticeship. The same is not true of despotism. Despotism often presents itself as the repairer of all the ills suffered, the support of just rights, defenders of the oppressed, and founder of order. People are lulled to sleep by the temporary prosperity it engenders, and when they do wake up, they are wretched. But Liberty is generally born in stormy weather, growing with difficulty amid civil discords, and only when it is already old does one see the blessings it has brought.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘Democracy In America’
I spoke to my son the other day, about the current state of his world. I say his world because I’m old, and this world is barely mine anymore, while he’s not yet middle-aged. He’ll be dealing with the consequences of a world I’ll sooner than later leave behind. I said to him that I thought these times were the worst I’ve ever seen. But then I think, ‘Is this true?’ Has my memory of the pain and the rage my generation lived through merely faded? Perhaps it’s just a shock that so much we fought for is being once again challenged. Perhaps, I’m like my father, who rarely told us stories of his days fighting the last Great War. The stories he told were often laced with humor and self-effacing jest. Perhaps those times I lived through have been so thoroughly buried in satire and revision that they’re barely real in my memory anymore. But I know they were real, and the challenges we faced were no less perilous, although we had less perception at the time of the stakes and dangers we faced.
These times are a shadow of what it must have felt like to be in London during the Blitz in World War Two. Every evening of every day the bombs rained down, some of them intercepted, but a good many getting through. At any time, you might be the next to get hit, and the quality of life you’ve taken for granted could be ended. If you don’t get hit, the next day you have to face going forth to survey the damage. Everywhere is pain and fear, deliberately and with malice, inflicted by one set of human beings against another.
I’ve been reading an analysis of the American character, Democracy In America, written early in the 19th century by a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville. Also, I’ve read accounts and biographies of the lives and struggles of the founders and leaders over these two and a half centuries of America’s existence. I’ve begun to realize that American democracy has always been a rather precarious proposition. It’s been challenged by this and that faction, and defended by those who are courageous and have been willing to stand up in its defense. My life, as was my father’s, was shaped by this battle. He fought against authoritarian dreamers who ruthlessly laid waste to a large part of the world. My cohorts and me, living under the constant threat of nuclear holocaust, stood up against morally corrupt administrations and our nation’s misguided imperialistic obsessions.
My son’s first encounter with political realities was the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He was 10 years old at the time. Since then, he’s been witness to a succession of futile conflicts, begun with great hubris and ending in humiliation and defeat. While these wars were fought, our nation had to face its limitations and question its priorities. At the same time as new freedoms emerged out of our ongoing self-examination, restraints against the power of unlimited wealth were being set aside. Along with the emergence of new forms of media that connected people across every boundary of culture distance, a reaction born out of economic stagnation and the failures of religion began to grow. A succession of demagogues, mostly concerned with the accumulation of power and wealth and the promotion of ideologies, began to thrive upon the inchoate frustrations of the populace. Democracy, as defined in our Constitution, was relegated as an afterthought.
Now we find ourselves in danger once again. Just as in all the wars and civil conflicts of the past, the power of factions has risen to challenge the rights of those who won’t consent to the rule of the minority. We are once again asked to question our basic commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion which, after all, is at the foundation of our democracy, the core principle which actually defines it.
In my short lifetime I’ve watched dozens of our greatest leaders assassinated, along with many who raised their voices, murdered or suppressed, sometimes by criminals, sometimes by police. I’ve watched the cities burn, and I’ve seen blood in the streets. Many have fallen, standing up to those who would be king. During these dark days of ignorance and cowardice in the world of Trump, there are increasing signs of courage and commitment to the principles that have led and defined us. Every day, the actions of this administration and its sycophants feel like a deliberately inflicted gut-punch. Nevertheless, I see everywhere signs of new life in a population resisting the temptation to surrender to collective despair.
As a nation, having been overnight overcome by its worst tendencies, we’re now seen by many in the rest of the world as an adversary. We aren’t used to being seen as the bad guy, the neighborhood bully, the untrustworthy tyrant, no different from any in a long parade of fallen empires. We’re forced as a nation to awaken from our complacent sleep and become aware of a stark dissonance between our elevated self-image and our present actions as seen by others. At the same time, there are many in this world who carry for us the hope and faith that we will rise once again to our better nature and promise.
(If you are not convinced that we are in a war for democracy, then you may be asleep at the wheel. If there is any doubt, I recommend you look up ‘Foreign Affairs’ on your favorite podcast app, or listen here to an interview with Fiona Hill. It gives the most comprehensive view into the present state of the world that I’ve heard anywhere. You may remember Fiona Hill from when she gave the clearest and most devastating testimony as a witness during the Trump impeachment inquiry. She’s one of our most accomplished diplomats.)
We aren’t helpless. All of what’s against us is part of what Naomi Klein calls ‘The Shock Doctrine’, and others call ‘Flooding The Zone’. The object is to bombard people with a sense of constant crisis, so that we become numbed, disoriented, confused and discouraged, and ultimately we loose focus and give in to despair.
A counter to this is embracing a wider vision, one that no longer perceives the world as if our particular national perspective is the only lens available. The world is changing rapidly and far too quickly for anyone to exert enduring dominance and control. We are watching the diminishing of outmoded institutions like the nation state and moving gradually (and painfully) toward a different alignment of the global order. Rather than hurling bombs and nukes back and forth, the economic and political universe, under the pressures of climate change and new technologies is rapidly reorganizing itself.
Resistance to the domination of any religion, ideology, or so-called ‘superpower’ is arising everywhere. In every nation and in every person, all of the old boundaries and alliances are being daily challenged.
We don’t have to be overwhelmed. The whole world is rapidly being forced awake. We must become attuned and direct our attention toward helpful and healing efforts going on in the world. Human beings are endlessly creative. Although we often struggle to open our vision to new worlds and a new order, we’ve never failed to see our way through.
We are no longer isolated. No one is. The world is one interwoven economic organism. Like the Internet, a vast and excellent living protoplasm, woven in networks, designed to reorganize and reroute itself around anything that blocks its way, anything that wounds or damages. Designed to defy apocalypse and to survive.
It has started. We’ve been attacked from within. Blood will be shed. Blood must be shed. That’s the price…the sacrifice. It will be the young on the streets and the old in their homes. The center will not hold, because we all dwell in the periphery. A new center will arise in each of us. The center and the whole will be the same.
‘Essential’, ‘Unforgettable’, ‘Body Horror Classic’, ‘Feminist Cult Classic’, ‘Dark Comedy’, are some of the quotes being thrown around about ‘The Substance’, a new film by Coralie Fargeat, starring Demi Moore. The best description I’ve seen is the line in the teaser from New York Magazine, “An enraged scream in cinematic form”. Having been released during the season of America’s self immolating election, ‘The Substance’ is a testament to society’s desire to go backwards into thin fantasy worlds created to protect us from looking at ourselves.
The film is relentless and brutal and without compromise. Many viewers may be repulsed, or even traumatized, although I question if anything on the screen matches the daily horror displayed on the evening news. The film juxtaposes the sleazy spectacle of Donald Trump style beauty pageants with explosions of rage that reminded me of the movie ‘Carrie’, as well as the tortured physical metaphors often portrayed in the films of David Cronenberg.
Blending horror and comedy in a surrealistic mix of ‘pumped up’ visual extremes we see in television commercials and popular magazines, ‘The Substance’ pushes up against cinema’s most powerful operatic limits. The intent is to forcibly shock the viewer awake. Its images are grotesque and direct, and anyone not altered in their presence is either unconscious or braindead.
In the face of extremes of hate and violence pushed by those who wish to rule and profit, the floodgates of truly political art have opened in the mainstream. Films like ‘Barbie’, ‘Women Talking’ and ‘Poor Things’ speak directly to the atrocities of female oppression. ‘The Substance’ is one of those, and it isn’t trying to be reasonable or gentle in a world where the spectacle of politics has taken us to the edges of absolute chaos.
During the drawn out, horrifying and over-the top final cataclysm in ‘The Substance’ there’s a close up shot of a terrified little girl covered in blood. She’s been dressed up to echo the exotic sexual fantasies paraded before her on the stage, and her face displays the full horror children witness everyday in a world trapped in its fantasies and dominated by its own irrational fears.
I could only be somewhat amused at U. S. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s performance addressing students and the press at Columbia University, telling them to stop their nonsense and get back to classes. Behind him stood a grinning Elise Stefanik, joining in the act, both performing for stock footage to be used in the upcoming fall campaigns.
It struck me that a major lesson to be taken in a week of escalating campus demonstrations across the world, was the apparent inability of generations in power to learn from history or to avoid repeating the same tactical errors again and again.
For me the events are somewhat nostalgic.
I recall an evening in 1970 when a large part of the student body at Case Western Reserve University gathered in the student union cafeteria to debate a response to the newly launched expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. The meeting was part of an escalation of activity centered that had been building on campuses for many months after events at New York’s Columbia University in March and April of 1968. Partly In response to the war and touched off by resistance to plans for the university to build a segregated gym on the fringes of Harlem, students and ‘outside agitators’ occupied buildings, debated one another, conducted ‘teach-in’ activities and generally obstructed normal college business. Eventually Columbia administrators called in the NYPD, who proceeded to brutally attack the demonstrators, injuring many and arresting over 700 participants. The consequence was an expansion of actions in solidarity driven by organized coordination on campuses all across the country. (Governor Abbot and DeSantis take note)
Listening to the rising militancy of rhetoric in that student union meeting it became obvious to my friend Robert and I that impending action was in he works, and Impatient with all of the talking we headed over to the ROTC building which had emerged as the likely target. Being the first to arrive at the location we took positions seated on both sides of the steps leading to the front doors. Just then a closeted group of middle aged men in suits looking somewhat bewildered and uncertain, apparently summoned from their evening cocktails, approached from across the plaza. Foremost in the group was the University president. He cautiously approached the two of us sitting like quiet Buddha’s on the steps and asked who we were. In a moment of smart ass mutual inspiration we both replied that we were ‘gargoyles’. The president gazed at us blankly for a moment, then turned back to the little group, leading them away into the night. A moment later the large group of students arrived from the irmeeting, marched up to the front door and proceeded to occupy the building for the next few days.
The student movement in those days was responding to an unpopular war and a rising awareness of racial injustice, but it was more than that. We were addressing fundamental questions about the relevance and responsibilities of our educational institutions in addressing inequities in the larger world. In virtually every classroom deep questions were being asked challenging the growing dissonance in times of accelerating change, between what and how we were being taught, and how it related to the outside world. The challenges were made using every conceivable form, from classroom debate to teach-ins and street theater, to poetry and artwork, to obstruction of business as usual. Outside of campus social activism began to explode in the streets. Inmates were taking over the asylums. Before the tide had receded and things returned to a new normal, many changes were made, and in spite of the forces of reaction the social movements of those decades laid foundations for the movements and counter movements we are seeing today.
Societies thrive and advance to the degree that they respond to ever new realities of the present. Intelligent leaders and pioneers must be encouraged to think and to continually question the status quo. Universities are designed to be laboratories for discourse and discussion. Students are ideally trained to be more than receptacles for predigested opinions and established ideologies. The young see the world with fresh eyes that are less tolerant of dogma and hypocrisy, and more willing to take risks and learn from their mistakes. Inexperience and ignorance are to be overcome, but they are not a crime.
When faced with the spectacle of injustice the young are more outspoken and generally feel they have less to loose. Back in the day, when president Richard Nixon held up the ‘silent majority’ of middle America as his standard for patriotism, angry college students were portrayed as irresponsible and out of touch, or else as naive victims of shadowy bands of outside agitators and ‘far left’ college elites. It appears that nothing much has changed in the rhetoric of reaction since those times.
The Mike Johnsons and Elise Stefaniks will always find hooks and divisions upon which to hang their campaigns based on fear and self righteousness. In the sixties the paranoid establishment along with the media exploited tactical squabbles between black and white protestors in order to divide them and pacify dissent. Today the tactic is to label any objections to Israeli military excess and apartheid policies as ‘antisemitic’, even while campus protestors include Jews, Muslims, Christians and people simply appalled at the horrific images seen everyday in the media. In some cases the diversity of participants’ backgrounds and opinions have led to heated disagreement and sharp debate. Irresponsible actors on all sides have at times resorted to harassment and even occasional violence. Some students and teachers have felt alienated and fearful. Never missing an opportunity to fan the passions of a moment, politicians and instigators portray every unfortunate incident as the norm. In fact, the preponderance of violence in nearly every instance has been perpetrated by the forces of law and order.
The gap in life experience between generations raised in the last half of the 20th century and those now coming of age in the 21st is almost unbridgeable. The decades that followed the last World War were characterized by an almost constant state of expansion and innovation. America stood at the center of a global project to build the new world order. Whatever flaws existed in America’s self image were covered over by almost continual economic growth and innovation, low unemployment, low inflation, huge stock dividends and an overlay of conspicuous consumption.
The new century brought an unrelenting succession of national traumas. It began with the dot-com crash and recession in 2001, closely followed by the attack on the World Trade Center. Then followed two decades of war in the Middle East and Afghanistan, a housing crash and the Great Recession of 2007-2009. After brief respite of hope and civility in the Obama years came the daily nightmare of the most ethically challenged presidency in United States history. All of this was interrupted by the worldwide COVID pandemic along with the rapid proliferation of disastrous consequences in the wake of climate change. Finally the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war in Israel have brought about the most destabilizing global situations since the Cold War.
My generation was the first raised on television and under the threat of nuclear holocaust. Almost from birth we were exposed to images of war and mayhem in foreign lands running counter to the idealization of America’s self-image. The moral pontification propagated in our churches and schools and in the mainstream media became increasingly detached from the reality of people’s lives. We were told that all of the ‘bad’ people and situations were somewhere else. By the time we arrived at college our view of American exceptionalism had changed dramatically from that of our parents. They’d suffered through the horrors and triumphs of a World War, in which the very foundations of democracy had been nearly defeated by the forces of totalitarianism. We were summoned instead to serve and support a futile war against a small foreign nation while watching on our daily screens our cities catching fire, our most admired leaders being assassinated, and our sons and brothers killed in the jungles and brutalized on the streets. We questioned, and then we rebelled.
Not only is the current cohort of college age students much more diverse than it was in the sixties, it’s a generation that’s experienced first hand the cracks in the foundations of the American dream widening almost beyond repair. Our established institutions appear to languish in denial. Justice has been challenged and has failed repeatedly. The truth is continually subverted by lies and fantasies. Freedoms that have been won through centuries of struggle are being discarded while the very survival of civilization is threatened by changes in the weather. Our political institutions appear inadequate or unwilling to address these situations in any meaningful way.
The campus movements of the sixties culminated in the execution of four students by the Ohio National Guard in May of 1970. Although this event didn’t stop the inevitable momentum toward change, it made us take a hard look at the consequences of poking the beast head-on. These days, when I hear the rhetoric of people like Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton and the words and actions of leaders like Greg Abbot and Ron DeSantis I wonder whether their ultimate goal is to provoke violence and fear in order to justify the suppression of all alternative points of view. Are they pushing for another Kent State massacre? Do they imagine that this strategy will work any better than it ever has? I guess if your ‘go to’ strategy is _God, Guns and Trump,_ there isn’t much of an alternaive.
I question whether these purveyors of fantasies of the past can presume to know, evaluate, or judge the motives of young people, whose entire living experience has born witness to the breakdown of those very illusions?
These students are the future, and the future will not be denied. Like we who grew up in the fifties and sixties, they see much more clearly how the world has changed than their parents who cling to the status quo. Ultimately, the young will prevail because they must. Like every human generation they have to grapple with the world as it is, and not as we wish it to be.
The catalyst for the current uprising on campuses is a costly war between nations and peoples who’ve made a long series of unfortunate political and strategic decisions that have lead into a death spiral of almost imprenetable anguish. Both sides in this war have dehumanized their opponents in order to justify horrific violence and the daily spectacle of unchecked slaughter. Both sides are committing violence against the rest of humanity, as the constant stream of images are in fact its extension. In such an ongoing ‘all or nothing’ conflict neither side will achieve the final resolution it desires, while each player appears willing to pull the entire world into the struggle.
Perhaps we can understand motivations on both sides of the war. Both see this as an existential struggle deeply rooted in generations of displacenent, appropriation and vengeance. But more than understanding is required to bring about a pause in the conflict. Concerned nations need to intercede forcefully to bring the violence to a halt. The Land of Palestine has long been a regional proxy for the very powers that both persecuted Jews and colonized the people of the Middle East and Africa, and for the forces that have risen in resistance to empire. All nations in the region and beyond share responsibility for the repercussions. America, as Israel’s ‘unconditional’ ally, has the biggest role to play.
Until the violence stops the protests will not stop, and attacking the institutions of higher education, firing college presidents or advocating military or police interference will most likely backfire. If conservatives have their way this internal conflict could escalate, and increasingly authoritarian measures could fuel even more destructive cycles of resistance and repression. History repeats, but it never goes backwards. The young, who grow frustrated with the refusal of governments to deal realistically with their concerns, will eventually inherit the earth and all of the powers that play upon it.
It was the eve of my 20th birthday. After the occupation we wandered back to the campus radio station, where Robert conducted a late night show playing eclectic music and recordings and where we had access to the Associated Press teletype and got the latest news of the day as it was being generated.
That evening a brand new album by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young had just arrived, and we ended up playing the first song.’Carry On’ repeatedly, all through the night.
Donald Trump himself, a man whose rise to power may or may not have been aided by machines, is often included in this digital phantasm, one more emergent property of the network’s dazzling complexity. He is a politician, it is often said, who understands, or at least intuits, more thoroughly than anyone how to manipulate a system that runs on empty signifiers – a system that has become so unhinged from semantic meaning, so thoroughly reduced to syntax, that one can simply throw a bunch of meaningless phrases – what the journalist Masha Gessen calls “word piles” – into the ether and divert the narrative away from its original source. Robert A. Burton, a prominent neurologist, argued that Trump is so good at understanding algorithms because he himself is an algorithm. In a 2017 op-ed for The New York Times Burton claimed that the president made sense once you stopped viewing him as a human being and began to see him as “a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine. Like deep learning systems, was working blindly through trial and error, keeping a record of what moves worked in the past and using them to optimize his strategy, much like AlphaGo, the AI system that swept the Go championship in Seoul. The reason that we found him so baffling was that we continually tried to anthropomorphize him, attributing intention and ideology to his decisions, as though they stemmed from a coherent agenda. AI systems are so wildly successful because they aren’t burdened with any of these rational or moral concerns – they don’t have to think about what is socially acceptable or take into account downstream consequences. They have one goal – winning – and this rigorous single-minded interest is consistently updated through positive feedback. Burton’s advice to historians and policy wonks was to regard Trump as a black box. “As there are no lines of reasoning driving the network’s actions,” he wrote, “it is not possible to reverse engineer the network to reveal the ‘why’ of any decision.
In the afternoons, following a day grappling with my high school insecurities, I’d stroll down the street from school to visit my friend Bill Halas at his home. Sometimes I’d bike over there in the evenings. Bill’s mother accepted me as an addition to a household that once included a husband and five older siblings. She and Bill, the latecomer, were both avid cooks and gardeners and active readers, sharing sophisticated tastes in music and art. Bill’s father passed away when he was very young, and when I met him his older siblings had long departed the household. Having an extraordinarily precocious and active mind his life had taken a rather solitary trajectory, his mother being the most reliable companion and sometimes his intellectual adversary. My own teenaged life was made unusual by the experience of being recruited for a special government program that took poor kids with high IQ’s out of their normal milieu and sent them to spend the summer living on college campuses. Our friendship flourished. Together we navigated the complexities of a rapidly changing world in the late 60’s, our bond growing from a shared sense of alienation and a drive for mutual discovery.
We met amidst a shifting cultural landscape with war, race riots, and assassinations unfolding in real time on our television screens. Popular culture was shifting radically from the segregated milieu of radio and the movies. Grasping for alternatives, we immersed ourselves in diverse music genres, from jazz to classical to experimental, and engaged in earnest discussions on philosophy and politics. We wandered the city smoking cigarettes rolled with pipe tobacco. We agreed and disagreed on everything. Sometimes we took his mother’s little Honda on road trips across the northern Ohio countryside, making up poetry inspired by highway signs (‘Pass With Care’).
I was the idealist and Bill was the purist, who took everything down to its roots. When I first met him he was experimenting with hydroponics. When he became interested in weaving he built his own loom and wove his own cloth and made his own hats. When he took up photography he began by studying its history, then building his own pinhole camera. Finally, he took up his brother’s old Nikon and developed the photos in his dad’s basement darkroom. My own nature was less grounded, tending toward the pursuit of imaginative utopian speculation and obscure strains of idealistic thinking. I felt compelled to understand the whole of everything, and very path I took led me down side roads, making it difficult to pursue a single course or become a model student.
Bill’s political awareness was way ahead of my own. He travelled to Chicago with his brother in 1968 to demonstrate at the Democratic convention and brought back photos and first hand accounts from the fringes of the police riot that we’d all watched on television. Later in our high school career we conspired with like minded friends to create an alternative journal that we mimeographed at the local anti-war office. We passed out leaflets and marched in circles chanting slogans in downtown Cleveland and attended meetings of a small radical organization led by a retired teacher and veteran of the Lincoln Brigade who fought in the Spanish Civil War.
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Our friendship endured beyond high school as we pursued separate paths in college, delving into alternative communities and exploring the back-to-the-land movement. Bill’s quest for self-sufficiency and my search for spiritual revelation led us on distinct journeys. During those years in the early seventies everything everywhere was in flux and was being questioned, and for both of us the quest took us out of the proscribed path of college and career.
After we’d both left school we got together for a road trip east, tracking down old classmates and exploring alternative possibilities. We proceeded to Boston, where we met a friend of Bill on a sidewalk near Harvard Square. A large expansive figure closely resembling the British actor Peter Ustinov (with a beard), he sold carnations on the street, playing a concertina and disarming prospective customers with a performance that came right out of magical fairytales. We spent that evening at his lodgings in the attic of an unheated and condemned three story house in Roxbury. The next morning we crawled out of our sleeping bags to get breakfast at a nearby cafe. Our appetite for squalor satiated, we made our way out of the city and headed back to the Midwest.
Eventually, after making a long pilgrimage to the West I moved to Denver. Occasionally, while visiting my family back east I’d get together with Bill and he’d demonstrate for me whatever new endeavor had absorbed his interest. Over time these became increasingly esoteric even for my taste, involving dowsing and ley lines evidence for antedeluvian alien carvings left behind in rocks and boulders. He poured over old maps illustrating the mysterious energetic pathways determining the placing of streets and structures in small towns all over Ohio.
Our contacts dwindled over the years, and the last I heard from Bill was through letters filled with further interpretations of ancient artifacts and faces found in the rocks. I’d heard he was in contact with the Edgar Cayce people in Virginia and intended to build his own private settlement on a plot of land that his brother owned in Vermont. After at a year of hearing nothing I found out from his mother that he’d fallen out of communication with everyone. In a last message to his older brother, Bill had mentioned spotting a brown bear on the plot of land. After months of trying to track down his whereabouts the family concluded that he’d disappeared without a trace. For the sake of closure they accepted that he’d probably been eaten by the bear.
I don’t know what really happened to Bill Halas. All I’m sure of is that
All I know is that we shared a moment in time, embarking on uncompromising journeys, determined to face the mysteries of the world, whether in the rocks, the forest, or the primal currents beneath.”
I was recently sent the recent Peter Zeihan book, The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning: Mapping The Collapse Of Globalization. Upon reading it I feel compelled to offer my critique. Aside from the rather dismissive and generally smart-ass style with which the author delivers his doom prophecies, the book is very informative in terms of outlining the complex systems and their interrelationships that currently run the world, and it offers valuable pointers toward highlighting the system’s strengths and weaknesses. At the same time it’s a vivid illustration of the trap of over reliance on statistical data when addressing complex systems. I’ve rarely encountered an argument that rests on so many facts that work against the very case that the book is making. Not only is it full of contradictory and sometimes questionable assumptions, the data that backs the world view the author delivers could equally support the likelihood of continued globalization as it can for its dissolution.
The fulcrum of Ziehan’s argument hangs on two assumptions:
1.) Aging populations and declining birth rates will result in a worldwide demographic collapse that will upset the patterns of production, distribution and consumption that fueled the economic boom times since World War Two.
A 1968 best seller by Paul and Anne Ehrlich,The Population Bomb delivered, in a similarly apocalyptic tone, a revival of the 18th century theory by Thomas Malthus, that the growth of population with the rise of prosperity, particularly among the poor, would inevitably exceed humanity’s ability to grow enough food. While Zeihan’s argument runs exactly in the opposite direction, both prognostications rely on a set of ever-shifting statistics to make their case.1 Food production since the time of Malthus has continually outpaced the growth of population. Problems with global starvation and famine are due less to population increase than to the unplanned consequences of war and the inequitable distribution.
Over the course of my many decades of living on the planet under the constant threat of extinction, I’ve been presented with so many predictions of impending catastrophe that I’ve lost count. From the Rapture to nuclear war to DDT and Y2K and global anarchy, the predictable constant is that in times of anxiety and change these prognostications sell books and provide rich fodder for talk radio. Attempts to reduce enormously complex systems to fit into the terms of one or two basic assumptions invariably fail to meet anyone’s predictive timescales. Demographics are one single factor among countless others that can affect outcomes, leaving aside our ever shifting politics and human resourcefullness, our ever advancing technologies affecting the ways we live and work and talk to one another, and our dawning collective awareness of the effects of climate change, to name a few.
2.) Zeihan’s second assumption is that the American Empire will simply give up on the world ‘Order’ that it has helped establish and maintain since the World Wars. Apparently America will simply conclude that it’s simply too much trouble and expense to continue enforcing the peace and we’ll withdraw into our geopolitical fortress. After all, we’re geographically in a position to grow our own food and make our own shit and let the rest of the world go to hell. Aside from espousing an incredibly arrogant, if not popular view of American exceptionalism, the very fact that our economic prosperity has been fostered by our multicultural ties and the intricate trade and military relationships we’ve constructed over these many decades makes it extremely unlikely that we will or can turn away. Even if we attempted such a thing, undoubtedly other entities or alliances would take our place, and we’d be shuffled a little lower in the deck of international authority.
Which brings us to China2. Having read and listened to a number of accounts from inside China. (I highly recommend the ‘Drum Tower’ podcast from ‘The Economist’ magazine for a more down to earth view of Chinese politics and culture.3) Zeihan spares no opportunity to dump on China, leaving an impression that its the very model of his overall thesis that most of the rest of the world is doomed in economic terms, while the USA and North America will pull through rather nicely. In reality, for anyone that takes a closer look through the paranoid cloud of American propaganda, it appears that China’s problems, both economic and demographic, are practically a mirror image of similar problems being felt in both America and Europe. In many cases the realities in China (the biggest crisis right now is too few opportunities for young people – not too many) are largely distinguished by the fact that, unlike the USA they are actually able to quickly respond in dealing with them. China ain’t going anywhere, and neither is America, or Europe, except perhaps in the fevered ‘click bait’ imagination of people like Zeihan. These major blocks of world power are so inextricably interdependent that the likelihood of any of them being left behind in the foreseeable future is vanishingly small.
For several years I was on the mailing list of ‘STRATFOR’, the organization that Peter Zeihan once worked for. Like Zeihan they have a world view that sticks closely to the ‘geography is fate’ interpretation of world history promoted by conservative scholars like the very prolific Robert Johnson (‘Modern Times’, ‘The Birth Of The Modern’, and histories of America, the Jews, Christianity, Ireland, plus biographies of Churchill, Jesus, Darwin, George Washington and others – a few of which I’ve read and been impressed by.). I agree that, so far, global history has been largely determined by access to the oceans. From the conquest of the great ‘pirate’ empires of the 15th – 16th centuries right up to the rise of ‘globalization’, this view has been accurate. However, we are all now swimming in a different ocean, one that’s linked by the instantaneous communication and management of economics and resources through the ubiquitous ocean of digital media. This is now where business is driven, wars are made, alliances are formed and broken.
I remember Stratfor’s frequent skepticism that Europe could ever manage to hold together. Virtually none of their predictions have held true over the years. The recent Soviet invasion has catalyzed an opposite movement toward increased solidarity rather than further fragmentation. America, meanwhile, is showing increasing signs of weakness as it breaks into regional conflicts and rising paranoia. It has made it almost impossible for the nation to deal substantially with basic problems like poverty, endemic racism and rising political violence. Meanwhile China not only holds together, it exerts increasing global influence as it steps into the weakening breach of American influence in Africa, South America and the Middle East.
Every nation is an ongoing experiment in how to manage growth and change in an increasingly complex web of global relations. Not one gots it completely right or completely wrong, and every error is an opportunity to learn. Peter Zeihan grossly underestimates, in my opinion, the capabilities, creativity and ingenuity of people in general, especially anyone who isn’t living in North America. Unfortunately, in much of his writing I hear echoes of the Trump crowd, mindlessly shouting USA!!!USA!!!USA!!!
The proposition that America will withdraw from the world in some form of neo-isolationism is one that nearly every fact and trend sighted in Zeihan’s book actually makes less, rather than more likely. His theory of collapse, requires a kind of bunker mentality in which every nation stands essentially on its own and only the strongest will thrive or even survive.
History doesn’t tend to move backwards, and the sort of decivilization that Zeihan predicts, in a world as interdependent as the world he describes, no nation, especially one as central to the function of the whole intricate mechanism as the United States, can afford to go its separate way. America’s economy, as much as China’s or England’s or Argentina’s or the Philippines’ or Russia’s, is a ‘global’ economy. Oceans and hemispheres that once divided the world into separate kingdoms and empires are no longer effective barriers against the changes that affect us all.
No one can deny that there will be profound disruptions that will reshape the political, military and economic landscapes in the coming decades. To anyone paying attention, it’s evident that our modes of consumption and governance will be forced to adapt and evolve in ways that we only dimly imagine. We will face wars, famine, pandemics, climate events, natural disasters and shortages of things we’ve taken for granted. Every political entity will be confronted with its own contradictions. In the long run the question is whether these changes and challenges drive us, as global citizens, further apart or force us to recognize our absolute interdependence. Zeihan’s book assumes the former. I don’t necessarily disagree with his statement, “Shortage forces people – forces countries – to look after their own needs.” I would add that history also shows that in the face of shortages and disasters people, and perhaps nations, also awaken to their common needs.
(I have to add that Zeihan’s understanding of global agriculture is particularly weak. Statements like “You can have organic farming or environmentally friendly foods. You cannot have both”, are simply absurd. It’s been demonstrated again and again, in China and America and all over the globe, that the per hectare production of food grown using intensive sustainable methods on smaller scale farms generally exceeds that of the industrialized monoculture farming promoted worldwide and dominated by corporate culture, while leading to much less long term environmental devastation.)
The kind of hair-on-fire apocalyptic messaging delivered by Zeihan and others certainly sells books. Apocalyptic visions have aleways had an appeal in the popular imagination, and are guaranteed to gather attention from Joe Rogan audiences, talk radio hosts, and down various YouTube rabbit holes. The ‘paranoid style of American politics’ 4 has always had particular appeal in uncertain times, when folks are stirred up by the direction things are going.
As for American exceptionalism, that’s so much a refrain in Peter Zeihan’s view of the world, I’m reminded of the Sergio Leone quote:
“I began to understand that ‘America’ in reality belonged to the whole world and not just to Americans. The idea of America had already been invented by the philosophers, the vagabonds, the dispersed of this earth, long before the Spanish ships got there. Those whom we call Americans have only rented it for a time. If they behave badly, we can discover another ‘America’. The contract can be canceled at any time.”
I just imbibed two healthy pints of Scotch Ale, a small handful of psychedelic mushrooms and a chunk of potent marijuana brownie…while printing 32 greeting cards so that I can replenish my rack at the grocery store and contribute to my gasoline fund for future trips into the present.
I’m hoping that some combination of the above will somehow blast me out of a sense of helplessness in the face of all the craziness and suffering, although I know it’s not really my responsibility and that I’ve done my part to advance this whole contraption…
I’ve been watching VICE NEWS documentaries looking into the darkest corners of the world, watching ‘Severance’ and ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’, reading a Jonathan Franzen novel about a Christian youth group and reliving so many moments in the deep past in order to write about them, and writing about them, and wondering if this voluntary isolation from all the world matters anything at all.
For a child a backyard can be the wilderness, or the ocean or an island of mystery. For a young person on foot or on a bicycle the city is almost infinite. For a grownup with a car the city is an endless maze of turns and corners, backstreets and cul de sacs and the lifeless arteries of freeways and bypasses. For those whose life is made mostly of flyovers the city is a patch on the landscape, part of a network of patches connecting airports and terminals and waiting areas.
At each level details are missed or lost.
The child never tires of the cracks in paving stones or the creatures found among the grasses. The mysterious realm outside of safe boundaries is overcome by imagination without limits. A porch becomes a spaceship or the ramparts of a castle. Every angle and corner is explored repeatedly and new wonders are constantly revealed.
The world beyond fences and borders opens to foreign lands and neighborhoods and secret haunts beside creeks and rivers and under bridges. In every direction the familiar gives way to novel possibilities and pathways. There are people and places that reveal themselves like secrets and anyone who dares can find the hidden spaces populated by teenagers and wanderers and sometimes the homeless poor.
Cars take us far away into foreign places while detaching us from what we know or what we can really call home. We are caught up in the proscribed flow of traffic designed to conduct us past the details of place and time. We become tourists or commuters, always just passing through to arrive somewhere other than where we are. We begin to live in bubbles and we call this freedom.
Those who flyover begin to look elsewhere for a sense of being unconfined. Living in prisons of wealth or notoriety we dream of another existence outside or beyond the worlds we know. We dream of space colonies and going to Mars and look upon the earth as a place to transcend or to escape. We look at situations as confrontations or problems to be solved and tend to forget about both the earth and the oceans as places in which to thrive or to simply be.
Meanwhile the waters rise.
Jeff Bezos sees the salvation of the earth in building vast cities in an environment entirely hostile to all biological life. I understand both the impulse and the fascination. I’ve been addicted to dramas about outer space since I was a small boy. I consider myself somewhat of a ‘trekkie’ for whom science fiction is one of my favorite literary genres. Perhaps this is because of the metaphorical value it offers in representing our moral quandaries against the frontier background of an imaginary universe. Maybe it’s merely an offshoot of the magical thinking that filled my adolescent fantasies.
The myth of the frontier we are told, is a necessary creation of the human urge for freedom and novelty. Ironically, the realities of survival in outer space run absolutely counter to all but a momentary sense of real freedom. Whether we journey in a small capsule or a giant artificial metropolis we will find ourselves confined within a tin can in an airless void bombarded by deadly radiation. The rules of existence are many times more restrictive than anything we face on the surface of our own planet. Even if we find other worlds ‘out there’ that are compatible with some form of life the odds are extremely thin that it would be compatible with our own. Ironically, my favorite novel by my favorite writer of ‘hard’ science fiction, ‘Aurora’ by Kim Stanley Robinson, offers a sobering argument questioning the likely success of such an endeavor.
True, the endless mysteries of the universe are irresistible to our insatiable curiosity and I look eagerly forward to their continued exploration and unraveling. However, the idea that we can save or preserve our species’ existence by launching a significant bulk of our population into outer space appears to me increasingly absurd.
Even in terms of mysteries, not to mention frontiers, we live on a planet that’s more than 3/4 covered in water, and we know less about the depths of the oceans than we do about other planets in our solar system. Yet, water is not only the element that makes our carbon based life possible, it’s teeming with the material that makes it sustainable. Our rapidly rising crises of global warming, population density and urban decay are most profoundly influenced by conditions in the oceanic environment. The oceans, congruent with a thin layer of atmosphere, not only generate and regulate global climate conditions, but are the essential medium for the rise and spread of our civilization. It’s the impending rise of sea level that may be responsible for our eminent decline.
Given this rise, which we apparently have little collective will to do anything about, many of the world’s coastal urban areas and a not a few nations and principalities will be underwater by the end of the century. The rise in global temperature has already lead to long term drought, increasingly devastating weather and extreme weather events. The collapse of whole agricultural systems leads to the migration of populations and the civil unrest and wars that result. We are now forced to look toward shorter term and perhaps less visionary solutions than building inhabitable colonies in outer space.
Closer at hand, requiring less expenditure of energy and investment and more attainable with our present levels of technology are solutions that take advantage of the very environmental circumstances in which we are enmeshed. We can build cities on the seas.
While Bezos, Branson and Musk compete to leave the earth completely and Zuckerberg urges us to leave our bodies, current pioneers in the field of cohabitation with the seas are citizens of Africa, Japan, the Netherlands, and Kuwait. The Africans see the promise of the oceans, the Japanese are simply running out of room, the Dutch live in a nation below sea level and the Arabs have an excess of wealth to invest in massive engineering projects to extend their real estate to incorporate ocean, marsh and desert. These are just a few examples of the imagination going into claiming the ocean for future real estate. Similar and diverse projects like this are being proposed or built in many other places.
The problem is that many of these habitats are being built for the very rich as suburbs on the sea, with high end shopping malls, vacation villas and places where the winners in capitalism’s lottery can park their yachts. So far the largest man made presence in the ocean is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. What needs to be conceived, designed and built should house, clothe and feed many of those displaced by the widening deserts, increasing floods and the resulting migrations and wars over shrinking territory. It’s precisely the widening divide between rich and poor that’s the corrosive leading to society’s unrest and failure.
The oceans are both the source of our lives and the life of our civilizations, and is the one resource that can never be fully subjugated or tamed. Desperate and afraid of what we’ve done to our earth we turn our wealth toward the heavens and are apparently willing to risk everything to escape our collective fate. We spend centuries hunting the keys to the mystery of life and death only to find that the mystery will never surrender to our terms and every attempt to transcend it leads us closer to our inevitable demise. Many of us feel helpless, so we build walls against the rising tides.
To those who wish to escape, I wish them well. Perhaps when they’ve travelled far enough they’ll find and bring back elements that can help us to thrive. To survive they’ll have to carry with them fragments of our living earth, the water and plants and air. Perhaps they will someday return with other treasures. In the process of their cold journeys maybe they’ll uncover secrets that will help us all to live. Will they ever find another place that feels like home? Not likely.
So flee you brave and wealthy men. You’ll remember us and the blue earth, and when you are drawn to return by the ocean’s breath perhaps you’ll be able to teach us the value and necessity of preserving our home. When William Shatner, one of the early captains of our imaginations, returned from his brief journey (via Bezos’ Blue Origin) beyond imagination and into the edges of the real void his tear filled comment was, “This is life and that’s death.”
Decades ago in the late sixties the Italian architect Paolo Soleri proposed the construction of aquatic cities, both free floating and adjacent to continental coasts. His designs are essentially modular in both vertical and horizontal directions. Starting from a central core that incorporates basic living, manufacturing and food production facilities, these cities would grow outward organically in concentric rings around a common core, to incorporate expanding populations and ever evolving priorities.
From his book on urban theory and design,
‘Arcology: The City In The Image Of Man’
”Life came out of the sea when the time was ripe for a next step toward complexity. Then the ecological flood came to cleanse the earth and let the “elected” few re-engage in the homogenesis of the earth. The biological flood invested in the human species is now edging man toward the same seas that eons ago saw the exodus of some of his creatures.”
”Ecologically the seas behave as a many layered medium. One could almost say that the earth has one layer of ecologies and the seas have a whole thickness of ecologies wrapped one around the other. It could also be observed that it is the element itself, water, that makes the biological “thickness” of the seas possible and that it is also the cause of their great homogeneity, stability, balance and diffusion. These elements of relative homogeneity, stability, balance and diffusion are the characteristics that, combined with fluidity, make sea arcology relevant.”
Once I lived on a beach along the west coast of Florida. There was a house, like a shack that had survived hurricanes and floods and now stood alone amid the retirement cabanas and motels. I would sit out on the porch in the shade under a billowing parachute awning and look out at the Gulf that every day showed a different color and mood, sometimes restless, sometimes calm, the warm ocean currents bringing close to shore the food for seagulls and pelicans. Sometimes I would wade out among the waves and look out over a seemingly endless expanse of water and sky, feeling humbled before the face of the deep.
Now I walk beneath the desert sun and think about the ocean. It’s as if it calls me back across these millions of years and many thousand generations. The desert plants echo the shapes of coral and anemone, and I reflect upon the life we lived before learning to scratch out our lives across the land. Now the land needs to heal and we need to relearn the lessons of the sea, of change, and of a life that’s forever born out of water.
It’s like a fire came through here,
even though everything is concrete and asphalt.
Whatever it was, it reduced everything to one or two rooms,
concealed behind masks, wearing protective clothing like prison uniforms.
My friends were made crazy, and so was I,
burrowing into ourselves, creatures I no longer recognize.
We are like the abandoned buildings of bankrupt businesses,
withdrawing behind curtains, looking outside and seeing only a strange desert.
The only time I’m not alone is when I leave this empty city, traveling in landscapes, listening to the words coming out of speakers in my metal travel pod.
These voices are my new friends, reliable, regular,
opinionated but never threatened, storytellers.
As I drive among these hills, under the sky,
they comfort me, never judging and never giving advice.
There is always sunlight here,
and these places on the road are never empty.
There is nothing I can do for anyone.
Revelations
Living through the plague and having cancer at the same time is sort of like entering a mysterious room where all the doors and windows are locked, then finding at the back of the room a strange door. Behind that door is another room, smaller, with fewer doors and windows. You get used to the fact that there are at least two exits between you and anything resembling the world outside.
My body started mysteriously falling apart just before Covid descended. It began with my hands and wrists, and gradually it spread to my whole being, until I could barely stand without reaching desperately for breath.
I had ways been proud of my youthful appearance, my enduring health and stamina and ability to heal quickly those rare times I was injured or sick. When people told me they couldn’t believe I was as old as my age I’d tell them smugly, almost arrogantly, that it ran in my family. Perhaps I thought I’d never truly get old, or even die. At seventy most people saw me as fifty, and until this turning I’d mostly felt the way I looked.
In those first months, just when I’d passed the age of seventy, I assumed that the vicissitudes of age had finally caught up with me. The work I’d done for a living had taken its deep toll on my body. My shoulders were a tight mess, the tips of my fingers had grown numb with the effects of carpel tunnel, and when I took out my bike for the first time in the Spring I had trouble lifting my leg high enough to mount. My plans for the future, the paying off of debt and for another sort of life were all in serious question. Suddenly the question of mortality descended like a mysterious spirit taking possession of my bones.
One day early on in the pandemic, before things became really dire and after the panic closed down most of the tourist businesses and bars I took a walk into the center of my city to find a public mailbox and to appreciate the beauty of an early spring day in Santa Fe. The streets were mostly quiet, except for occasional cruisers in huge pickup trucks and a flotilla of motorcycles that wove themselves in circles around the Plaza. A few couples and isolated characters wandered like me, past closed galleries and restaurants, museums and churches, appreciating outside of our dwellings the blossoming trees and an opportunity to briefly breath without our masks and appreciate their scents in the open air. As I walked I listened to podcasts of Zen talks from Mount Tremper in New York while contemplating my own conflicts and contradictions in regards to the present and the future.
Although the final diagnoses wasn’t yet in I could see that the world around me was in straights that reflected my own distress. All that was familiar had changed.
It took months to find answers, the search delayed by the plague, as alarms were sounded and offices for inquiry and treatment were closed down. At long last I was diagnosed with cancer and by that time my hands were severely crippled and I was no longer able to work. As the plague spread its shadow across the land I was, like most of us, forced to retreat into my own private wilderness.
Meanwhile, as we careened toward an election and a clash of alternate realities, the deeper shadows of collective victimization had become the undercurrent of an American culture overcome by grievance fed by media madmen. America was sicker than I was. The creeping diseases that we’d been feeding for decades had broken fully to the surface and the future filled with hope had been replaced with a question of survival. Most of us prayed that whatever was overcoming us would just end, but it had become harder to see the future beyond the violence, the isolation and the plague.
My birthdate is the same as Thomas Jefferson’s, April 13th. From what I’ve read, I can personally relate to his personality of restless passions and contradictions. Particularly familiar to me is a sense that my vision far exceeds my own grasp. Jefferson was a privileged and prosperous inheritor of great wealth in an economy based on slavery. As an obsessive tabulator of facts and figures and an elevated member of a race and culture that considered itself inherently superior to all others, his restless mind wouldn’t allow him to reside in any fixed station. His thoughts propelled him toward an ideal world – nonexistent in his time, where every human being had – by virtue of being, inherent and inalienable rights. His was a world where the term ‘human being’ hadn’t yet reached an equitable definition. I live in a different world, where the notion that the welfare of one is inseparable from the welfare of the whole is contradicted daily. As a nation we worship the pursuit of personal wealth as the perfect embodiment of pure ego and self interest, substantially devoid of considerations that transcend the possession of individual power and the illusion of control. We have, in fact, managed to turn every ideal taught in our various catechisms of church and school entirely on their head.
Now, one year since the plague jumped us I’m looking at a civilization that is slowly coming apart. Although the traffic is once again flowing as people strive to maintain some kind of life as usual, there are more closed and abandoned businesses, empty real estate and a pervasive feeling of alienation and wistful uncertainty. Friendships have become more distant and physical contact still mostly a wishful dream. The brief month-long sigh that so many of us felt after the election is replaced already by the anger and dread and fallout promoted leading up to it. Even if the Covid shadow passes us by we’ll still be left with the deeper shadows of racism, bigotry and general thuggery at the heart of the long American nightmare. The monster has been unleashed and is tearing out our heart. The next two years will most likely resemble the past five years. We are in parallel acts of slowly dying and transforming as a culture and the serpent is not about to let us off the cross.
When I look in the mirror I see an emaciated old man, someone who has aged ten years in one. There are red rings around my eyes, my teeth and gums are hurting, I look like a starving inmate. At the same time the doctors tell me that my numbers are improving. My stamina is up. My hands are still crippled but may be slowly getting better month by month. I still can’t walk very far and I can’t get on my bicycle. Soon I’ll be seeking another place to live, and it may be somewhere out on the road.
We are told as Americans that there’s a light at the end of this tunnel, that our numbers are improving. I’m not sure what the numbers mean anymore. I’ve been on the list for a vaccination for several months but haven’t been given a date. That all appears distant and unreal, more than two exit doors and a couple of hallways away. Whenever I hear the phrase ‘back to normal’ it evokes a feeling of mass delusion. Life is something that passes quickly, day by day.
Arclist 