In one of the interminably recycled conversational conceits online, two interlocutors might say the following:
“If we just quit eating meat, that will contribute substantially to reducing greenhouse emissions.”
“Is that our only choice? Grazing ruminants are part of a healthy ecosystem. We can have meat, but less, and only meat that has been ecologically raised.”
This is just one of the kinds of ‘conversations’ that led me to abandon Facebook recently. Not abandon really—I still check in as a silent lurker for a strictly limited time and see what my far-flung family are up to. I refuse to stay on for more than a few minutes; I refuse to click the little thumbs and hearts and hugs and hates emojis; I refuse to respond with annoyed, congratulatory, or approving comments. I refuse to compulsively re-post everything I feel is ‘important’ to the same (often quite wonderful) people again and again.
I’ve come to realize that Facebook (and Twitter and all those other OCD “platforms”) were, for me, like alcohol and porn and cigarettes in my younger days, an addiction. Addictions begin as a fast and easy way to make oneself feel differently. At first, it’s like ahhh, what a relief! Then it becomes a habit that forecloses other perhaps more salutary habits. Then they become one’s Pazuzu—a demonic possessor compelling one to engage in the obsessive-compulsive cycle even when the cycle, instead of feeling like ahhh, makes one feel lonely, trapped, ashamed, and powerless.
But I’ve driven into a side road.
Returning to the mini-debate about meat where I began, that particular phenomenon is an aspect of para-social media that drove me away because it constantly threatened to suck me back into a pernicious liberal habit-of-thought which was magnified by the experience of the pandemic: the universalist fallacy.
It’s not the “meat issue” on the table here, but the first person plural. When my wife and I discuss a road trip or household finances, the ‘we’ that pops up involves two people who live in the same house and share a good deal of the same history-writ-small. When I worked on a mayoral campaign with others, the ‘we’ involved a very limited number of people who share very little history apart from living in the same place and being subject to the same local government, and ‘we’ were a temporary formation which was organized around a common task, and when the election was over (‘we’ lost by just over a hundred votes, ugh!), the ‘we’ dissolved back into other more permanent associations. When I meet a stranger who is a fellow fisherman at the dock and we start to discuss the weather, as in “we may get a storm tomorrow,” the ‘we’ is two people peacefully and pleasantly acknowledging one another’s existence out of common decency and a shared interest in being outwitted by fish. These are all more or less embodied we’s which are contextualized.
Liberal habits-of-thought are part and parcel of liberal-ism—by which I mean a philosophical framework that gestated about 500 years ago, which includes both ‘conservatism’ and ‘liberalism’ as discussed in the current vernacular. Liberalism, whether conservative liberalism or liberal liberalism, despises context, because it makes mincemeat of its baseline fallacies—rights, equality, liberty, and something called ‘the individual’—the latter being a fully formed adult human with no historically situated duties or obligations and no childhood, and who has the magical ability to exist apart from all other humans except during economic transactions. A person, in other words, with no context. This person is not an individual, who would necessarily have a context, but The Individual, who is exactly like every other person, who is likewise acontextual.
This is so utterly fallacious that, to sustain this idiocy, ‘we’ require a vast and cancerous apparatus of coercion and control to enforce the illusion. Until recently, the way this was sustained was to subtract women from the aggregated Individual to maintain the messy physical reality above which men (and by this I mean well-off men) could play around in this we-dream world.
Eventually, of course, exploitable peripheries became The Woman of the world, and ‘developed’ core-nation affluent women—with an assist from technology extracted from the peripheries—won the opportunity to become honorary men in the dream world of abstract individuals.
This might seem another side road, but it’s not. The ‘principles’ of liberalism in philosophy and law rest on a foundational assumption that these ‘principles’ apply to all people at all times in all places, equally. These ‘principles’ are universal. That’s why we have to bomb the daylights out of backward peoples to make them see liberal ‘reason.’
Anatole France acerbically remarked: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
Equality, yay.
A. J. Liebling wrote, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
Rights, yay.
My liberty depends on a firearm that can launch lethal little missiles which can pass through walls and vegetation, ricochet, and fall into the hands of children or suicidal people.
Liberty, yay.
Liberalism, as practiced now, is technocratic in its management. The ‘approved solution’ for any problem is policy, policies enacted in law and enforced/administered by technology-dependent bureaucrats. Setting aside the fact that lawmaking and policy enforcement have been largely insulated from popular pressures (and funded by a ruling business class), this idea that all solutions are policy-based (and implicitly universal), the prevailing fantasy of progress (teleological improvement) entails the co-fantasy of generalized imposition. In its most grotesque version, we have public discourse like:
“If we just quit eating meat, that will contribute substantially to reducing greenhouse emissions.”
“Is that our only choice? Grazing ruminants are part of a healthy ecosystem. We can have meat, but less, and only meat that has been ecologically raised.”
The pretense that there is a generalizable humanity that can and should be subjected to a common menu of policies. And so the we-dream is altogether decontextualized. It never works, it can never work, but it provides a grand rationalization for liberal authoritarianism, and more recently, for a relentlessly surveilled society.
The psychological correspondent of this authoritarianism is (in highfalutin medical jargon) control freakery.
One person — one 7.8 billionth of the “we” in question — adopts the role of global monarch or deity in the theater of his or her own mind and discusses magical “choices” that will rehabilitate the imaginary regent’s imaginary notion of this infinitely complex and broken world.
The precondition of this kind of control freakery is that old standby, fear.
Fear engenders denial . . . and violence.
The pandemic was not the source of our fear, Trump’s proto-fascist surge (or its correlatives around the world) was not the source of the fear (though his election was produced by fear), the 2008 financial meltdown was not the source of the fear . . . though all these things enhanced a generalizing sense, especially among the retainer class—who simultaneously know and deny their consummate dependency on what they believe is ‘a system’ and yet cannot control. (Trump’s main voter bloc weren’t country hicks like me, they were terrified, dependent, white suburbanites and exurbanites.) The crisis that sent us down the neoliberal path, which brought us to where we are today, really began in the early 1980s, when Keynesianism began to fail the growth-test that was built into the liberal order and its myth of teleological progress (which always had a retail tag).
Neoliberal globalization is collapsing into techno-feudalism right before out eyes. Techno-feudalism’s own lifespan will soon be curtailed by the refusal of physical laws and material conditions to move out of its way. As I write this, one nuclear-armed power is playing chicken with another. How is anyone not afraid?
Social orders have come and gone in the past, and catastrophes have come and gone, but what many of us intuit is that this is different, because one failing system of financial abstraction, unmoored from the material world insignificant ways, is governing the entire world in a way that could disrupt climate stability and destroy baseline biodiversity for centuries. Those damn material substrates again!
Hell yes, I want control! I’m fucking terrified! The best alternative to total control, it sometimes seems, is to withdraw into the virtual world constructed for me by my techno-feudal masters, where I can debate my universal solutions against others’ universal solutions, or fight about pronouns, or compare consumer choices, and we can all la-ti-da down the virtual yellow brick road.
My liberal-habits-of-thought tell me the only ‘solutions’ (presupposing there are such things) are the imperial we-dreams that homogenize all of humanity into an undifferentiated mass to be shaped by imaginary social engineers, whether left or right. The greatest critics of liberalism, followers of Marx (as I was for some time), have proven incapable of escaping the universalist fallacy.
The we-dream is inescapable because it’s a question-beggar. Our conclusion that we need a we-dream is already smuggled into our universalist premises. Chicken, egg, chicken, egg . . . you’re still dealing with chickens.
We are, in cleaving to this fallacy, denying the glaringly obvious (but too scary to acknowledge) fact that — in the real world — our most pressing and often horrifying problems are the excrescence of an encompassing reality which is simultaneously too complex to fully apprehend, only ever partially describable, and utterly inaccessible to generalized solutions. Who wants to admit this? Who want to be (gasp) a . . . doomer?
With climate collapse — combined in the real world with international rivalries, nuclear weapons, climate and war refugees, a capitalist epoch in stage-four metastasis, and generalized social inertia — there will be no quick and painless termination of suffering, no decisive global apocalyptic moment, and no solutions.
We have already passed the point of no return. Mathematicians may be able to invent scenarios where this is no longer true, but on the ground—or should I say “innumerable grounds”—this is simply not feasible, given 194 national polities, power struggles and personalities within those polities, and all the other stuff that is inflected in the infinitely complex and evolving Real that we’re trying so desperately to deny. You can theoretically stand a pencil on its point. Now try to do it.
That’s not despair talking. I’m Catholic, and we believe despair is a terrible sin. This is just as close as possible to a realistic account that I can give right now. We also (should) have an issue with lying to make problems fit ‘solutions.’
I have bad news. The big solutions are past. It’s all damage control and bricolage now. We don’t need Marx; we need De Certeau.
The most important thing people can do — which many will not — is learn to dance with a different, more unpredictable, and often dangerous world. The world won’t be destroyed (unless the worse methane predictions come true); but over a painful and often seemingly slow period of time, our children and grandchildren will face a future headed toward something like Haiti writ large — failing grids, failing polities, and ecological devastation, in which we all try to find new footholds, and only then as a multitude of we’s. Therein are the ‘choices’ of the future, everyday choices that technocrats and academics cannot encompass with their decontextualizing categories.
We can’t ‘see’ the future.
I’ll close with a remark from the renegade priest, Ivan Illich.
“To hell with the future. It’s a man eating idol.”
What we have now, small as it may seem, is love and improvisation.