October 23, 2009

Global Warming

How does one live in a world gone mad?

By becoming a saint –

Listening empathically to the derailed thoughts of those

Who are committing the ultimate sin.¹

There is no other way.

For the reason which causes them to destroy Nature,

Is also the reason why they cannot stop their destruction,

Or even become conscious of it.

They are divorced from the organic context of their existence.

They were brought up to look at money, not life,

Offered toys as controllable substitutes for earthly reality.

They are either profit-making machines,

Or exploited, alienated wage-earning servants,

In either case, individualistic, self-centered and disaggregated,

Having lost long ago any capacity for moral outrage.

Those now living at the center of the Empire,

Are the descendants of more than ten generations

Who swam in the icy waters of life subjugated to profit.²

They cannot (may not) think outside the box of capitalism,³

Convinced that this barbarism is what modernity must look like,

Having forever eliminated ethics as a category of life.⁴

Footnotes

1. Sin: Sin is defined as the maiming, diminishing or killing of life. It is not possible to live without sinning, as the Catholic theory of “original sin” points out. Life eats life. However, global warming, which entails the destruction of the conditions of life on the planet, is the ultimate sin, in that it makes it impossible for life to thrive.

The higher the level of consciousness of the life which is killed, the greater the sin. Global warming threatens the conditions for the survival of civilization, and in this sense also, is the ultimate sin.

2. A brief History of Capitalism: Capitalism has its roots around 1150, in England, with the enclosure (with fences, ditches, hedges, or other barriers) of land formerly held in common. This privatization of common land greatly expanded after 1400, peaking around 1675, then diminishing to practically zero by 1845, when no more common land was left to be privatized. The enclosure movement provided capitalism with its two mainstays – land which could be used or sold for monetary profit, and labor (the previous, now dispossessed small farmers) having no choice but to work (obeying social power) for a wage, or join the swelling ranks of “the poor.”

Both land and labor were now categorized as “commodities,” and, provided that these two commodities were sufficiently cheap, the moneyed elite (investors) could accumulate a profit from their business – draw out more money than they put in. Laws made private property sacrosanct, taking priority over life and limb.

The Royal Society of London was founded in 1660, its primary focus being the advancement of technology as a way to increase profits. The Bank of England was created in 1694, establishing capitalism as an economic system on a large scale.

Since the more money one has, the greater the profit one can make, capitalism tends to a concentration of wealth, which is apparent today in the power of transnational corporations, and the international institutions which they control, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Hall 2009b, p. 88. Columbia Encyclopedia 2000. Hall 2008b, pp. 13 and 21. McMurtry 1998, summarized in Hall 2009a, p. 26. McMurtry 1999, summarized in Hall 2008a, pp. 7 and 11-12).

As is apparent from its roots, capitalism focuses on the ability of investors to make a profit. The focus of capitalism is money.

3. Rationality defined as Self-maximization: Capitalism defines rationality as self-maximization.

The idea of Adam Smith (1723-1790) that the self-maximizing pursuit of profit is the servant of the social good, is now an integral part of economic theory. The focus on the self is thought automatically to equilibrate supply and demand, maximize economic efficiency, and motivate producers to improve their products. The mind-set has become the established way of comprehending reality. Behavior which is not self-seeking is excluded a priori from economic models.

The principle has subsequently branched from market theory and practice, and found more general application, such as in the fields of social science and philosophy. The idea is that self-maximization is a universal principle of rationality. To be rational is to seek consistently to gain as much as possible for oneself. Any choice or any decision which is not “self-maximizing” is not rational, and automatically excluded from decision-making models, including those referring to justice and morality.

In A theory of justice (1968), American philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002), assumes as a given that rationality is self-maximization:

“I have assumed throughout that the persons in the original position [of seeking the general principles of social justice] are rational. In choosing between principles, each tries as best he can to advance his interests . . . It is rational for the parties to suppose that they do want a larger share . . . The concept of rationality [which] is invoked here . . . is the standard one familiar in social theory” (Rawls, quoted in McMurtry 1998, pp. 129 and 156, summarized in Hall 2009a, p. 22).

In Morals by agreement (1986), Canadian-American philosopher David Gauthier (1932-), also assumes that rationality is “maximizing the interests of the self,” and goes on to apply it to morality. Morality tempers self-maximization with cooperation for common goals – no matter the nature of these common goals (McMurtry 1998, summarized in Hall 2009a, p. 22. McMurtry 1999, summarized in Hall 2008a, p. 34).

People are transformed into self-maximizing calculators, seeking the most for themselves, independently of all other considerations – a homogenous mass of greedy atoms, all with the same goal, operating mechanically within a social machine.

That rationality could mean anything other than consistently seeking more for oneself, is no longer a thought that seriously occurs to the market-acculturated mind-set, whether in social and political theory or even moral philosophy.

But the assumption is counter-intuitive. Rationality is precisely thinking beyond one’s own self-seeking, and count others’ interests as important as one’s own. Reason uses non-partiality as its starting point, and consistency as its means. Rationality is the opposite of what the market “program of values” prescribes. To consider rationality to be greed pursued with mechanical consistency, is testimony to the imprisonment of thought within the market dogma (McMurtry 1998, summarized in Hall 2009a, p. 22).

4. Ethics as a Category of Life: Jurgen Habermas (1929-) criticizes the excessive instrumentalism (doing whatever is necessary to attain given ends) of modern industrial societies.

In “Technology and Science as Ideology” (1970), Habermas shows how the emergence of the Keynesian welfare state was a turning point. In The general theory of employment, interest, and money (1936), John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) proposed to alleviate the severe unemployment problem associated with the Great Depression, by means of a government program of spending on public works. The proposal was a technological solution to what was, in fact, a political problem – unemployment and lack of purchasing power by the population at large.

Since then, modern industrial societies have reduced politics to the search for technical solutions to non-political problems – such as, for instance, economic growth.

Technology is ideological to the extent that political issues are treated as technical ones. More precisely, technology is ideological when its instrumental rationality colonizes the sphere of politics (Habermas 1970. Fisher 2007, p. 7. Columbia Encyclopedia 2000).

Technocratic consciousness de-politicizes the mass of the population:

“Technocratic consciousness reflects not the sundering of an ethical situation, but the repression of ‘ethics’ as a category of life.” (Habermas 1970, quoted in Travis 2008, pp. 97-98).

References

Columbia Encyclopedia. 2000. 6^th Edition. New York, N.Y.: Columbia University/Gale Group.

Fisher, Eran. 2007. “‘Upgrading’ Market Legitimation – revisiting Habermas’ ‘Technology as Ideology’ in neo-liberal Times.”

http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_2/fisher.html Accessed October 25, 2009.

Habermas, Jurgen. 1970. “Technology and Science as Ideology.” In Toward a rational society—student protest, science and politics. J. Shapiro, translator. Boston, MA: Beacon.

Hall, Francoise,

2008a. “The Market Paradigm and the Destruction of Life.” October 21 (96 pages, unpublished).

2008b. “Capitalism – the Poverty-culprit and the Eco-culprit.” December 30 (67 pages, unpublished).

2009a. “The Ethics of global Capitalism.” May 4 (76 pages, unpublished).

2009b. “Global Warming – pre-Copenhagen.” June 21 (108 pages, unpublished).

McMurtry, John.

1998. Unequal freedoms – the global market as an ethical system. Toronto, ON, Canada: Garamond.

Summarized in Francoise Hall, 2009a. “The Ethics of global Capitalism.” May 4 (76 pages, unpublished).

1999. The cancer stage of capitalism. Sterling, VA: Pluto.

Summarized in Francoise Hall, 2008a. “The Market Paradigm and the Destruction of Life.” October 21 (97 pages, unpublished).

Travis, David. 2008. “Sustainable Capitalism?” Link – International Journal of Socialist Renewal. September 9. Reproduced in Ian Angus, Editor, The global fight for climate justice – anti-capitalist responses to global warming and environmental destruction (2009). London: Resistance Books.

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