Life After “Us”

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Crazy people have been predicting the “End of the World” ever since they invented crazy people. This puts modern doom-and-gloomers at a disadvantage, because we’ve all “been there/done that” with apocalyptic predictions and because our culture is replete with notions of a kind of divine continuity. Our best measure of what the future will bring is the past, right? Past is prologue. What has come before presages what is to come. The sun rose yesterday, it will rise tomorrow. All’s right with the world.

And the most salient argument of all: The world never ended before, when all those crazy folks throughout history predicted it would. So what makes you think it will end now?

Add to that the natural human tendency to ridicule radical notions. They made crazy fun of the Wright brothers and their wacky “aeroplane” – until it flew. Galileo went to jail for discovering that the earth revolves around the sun. And gleaned from a conversation in 1995: “The Internet will change the world? Ptah! It’s just like TV only less interesting.”

So something as biblical and monumental as the “End of the World”, frankly, just seems impossible. It’s just too much. It’s overkill. It’s cliched.

And it is impossible, at least in the near term.

But cataclysmic change – hoo boy, THAT’s not impossible. We have had ice ages, and continental drift, huge asteroid impacts, and massive worldwide extinctions, all throughout history.

But our entire civilization – from Assyria 4000 B.C. to U.S.A Today – has existed, in geological terms, within the wink of an eye. A mere tick of the clock. None of that super-cataclysmic stuff has happened in the last 6,000 years. Why? Chance. Odds. Luck. (However, we can be fairly certain there’s a big old asteroid out there with our name on it – just a matter of time.)

No world cataclysm has ever happened to us, the collective “us” of the modern era, the “us” that believes we embody the whole of man’s existence and represent the apex of evolution. So we think it never will.

We are wrong.

And the irony of our wrongness is rich, because this time we are creating the cataclysm and setting it off in slow motion. This allows many to deny it is even happening, like that famous frog in the stew pot. But the facts are undeniable – we are bringing about a new age of mass extinction, all on our own, through habitat destruction, over-fishing, monocultures (i.e. lots of corn/beans/rice/wheat and cows/pigs/chickens growing, not much else), genetic manipulation, basic air and water pollution, and now climate change brought about – this is a fact now, not a theory – by human industrial activity over the last century. And it’s all either steadily ongoing or, in the case of climate change, rapidly intensifying.

I remember reading several articles on climate change in the late 1990s. These were not in obscure science journals but in magazines like the Atlantic Monthly. Already, climate scientists had working models of the kinds of changes that were coming about – general warming of air temperatures; shifted seasons (early Spring, late Winter); melting glaciers, ice caps and permafrost; more frequent and more intense weather activity; increased droughts and flooding events.

I also remember talking to my college-educated colleagues about it, as I was quite alarmed at the prospect. But by way of reply I got mostly confused looks, like I was one of those guys with the two-foot beards holding the sign saying “The End is Near”.

After a few more attempts to talk with “business” people on the subject, I finally realized “Global Warming” (now termed Global Climate Change since warming is not the only feature) had gone instantly into the “taboo” category of topics to discuss in the workplace. It was not long before the battle lines were drawn and concern for the climate was relegated to the “environmental” crowd. (You know, the extremist hippies.) Pundits like George Will fought fiercely against the notion, repeatedly subjecting it to ridicule by comparing it to the media’s “Global Cooling” story of the 1970s (FYI – Global Cooling was never a scientifically accepted theory, it was a media event only, set in motion by a single crackpot who had no institutional backing or peer-reviewed evidence to support his unscientific theory).

Conservatives lined up on the “skeptics” side of the argument, but they were the only ones on that side. The entire scientific community had meanwhile reached consensus – climate change is real, it’s happening now, and it’s being caused by human activity.

But that revelation changed nothing, except to act as an accelerator for the right wing’s hostility toward science. As you now know, in the intervening years conservatives have developed a full-blown “conspiracy theory” that posits the scientific community is “in the pocket” of “liberal activists” who want to “destroy the economy”. So they are “making up” their thousands of scientific measurements, experiments, data, and peer-reviewed studies – they are “undermining their very profession” by “cynically promoting a leftist agenda by skewing the research”. I know, that’s a lot of scare quotes, but they have to be there since these notions are so incredible, implausible, etc. – and yet these are in essence the beliefs of Ted Cruz, currently within striking distance of the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.

So no, the world won’t end. But given our Congress and its head-in-the-sand attitude, not to mention all the growing economies who will want their own slice of the “technology/productivity pie” the West has enjoyed for 100 years, our civilization might very well end.

Civilizations come and go. Rome’s global empire lasted 1,500 years (counting Western and Eastern empires). Western Civilization, as we call it, has dominated the globe for only about 500 years, fueled by European colonialism and empire-building in the Renaissance and later eras. Rome was eventually brought down by its own internal chaos: in-fighting among its leaders and a pampered, clueless populace eventually led to a weakening of the borders of empire. Barbarians at the gate found a way in. Eventually the gates themselves were torn down.

But climate change is not at all political, except in that the fact of its existence is currently influenced – in America at least – by one’s political party affiliation (a condition that will change soon, but not soon enough). It’s also not part of some human narrative – climate change is not a “story” someone is telling about humanity, not one of many possible futures described by our competing religions or nativistic cosmogonies. No, it’s just science. It’s just happening because that’s what chemical reactions do – they just happen. The world will not end. The apocalypse will not happen. But the world’s habitable surface will change dramatically, affecting every living creature on it, in ways we can’t predict, ways we don’t yet understand.

The world will continue, but civilization will likely be rocked, and again the irony is thick. Because whoever is left will miss our fossil-fueled civilization once the flood waters pour into the coastal cities (where 90% of the people live today). But the world, whose progress is measured in epochs – not election cycles – will live on, and will not care that our new reality is harsh. Because nature favors no particular species. Just ask the dinosaurs.

Life will continue, probably it will flourish as human activity – which tends to crowd out nature – recedes. Humanity will continue also, in some fashion, just as it must have struggled and endured during the last major ice age some 10,000 years ago. Long before that last big freeze, humans had migrated across the land bridge that is now the Bering Strait and settled in northern North America. During the ice age, humans would have migrated south from northern locations (Mexico, say, on this side) and north from southern locations to escape the encroaching glaciers. This time, at some point in the next century, I suppose our descendants will migrate away from the coasts, toward more stable and temperate climates in the continental interiors of northern and southern latitudes. But of course it’s impossible to know if things will be any better there.

Our near future won’t be as simple – or as impossible – as the end of all things. Life will continue, and certainly the world will continue. But we – actually our grandchildren – will have to kiss the Escalade, DirectTV and those Friday afternoon McDoubles goodbye. It will indeed be a brave new world, and the people in it – those struggling to eke out an existence in a harsh and unpredictable climate marked by droughts, floods, and cataclysmic storms – I wonder what they’ll think of us. Will they marvel at the former “greatness” that humans were capable of? Will they strike out in their boats and visit the flooded coastal cities, telling their children that the skyscrapers poking through the waves once held thousands of busy people, that the submerged streets once hummed with thousands of automobiles? Will they share memories of polar bears and penguins, of snowball fights and sleigh rides and the beauty of a white Christmas?

Or will they have nothing but contempt for their greedy, short-sighted ancestors? If they instead curse our names for watching the world slowly transform into a wild new place when we knew we could stop it – can we blame them?

Tuesday Eve…

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Well, here we are, on the cusp of Super Tuesday and anyone’s game. The stalwarts of the GOP are hoping for a Trompe-l’œil, as in an invisible Trump who disappears after securing the nomination. I have my doubts. I believe the man may cinch it tomorrow, and I’m here on record saying so. I’m not glad of it, by no means, but the trajectory of the man – through the fractured body of the party – is unmistakable.

But what of liberals? I do think that Hillary will secure the nomination tomorrow, in spirit if not in outright delegate counts. A good showing will be enough, absent a rout, to demoralize the messianic wing of the party. I don’t celebrate this prediction, I merely validate it with my experience. Perhaps Bernie is what we need, but I do believe it will be another cycle or two before the electorate evolves to that. I do.

Feel the Crisis

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I keep reading, keep learning more and more about the dynamics of the current crisis in the Democratic party. It’s interesting, because we know the GOP has been in crisis for some time, as perhaps best evidenced by the Tea Party insurgency and the ideological chaos it has created over the last several years.

Democrats did not have to be in crisis – it seems very likely that without Bernie Sanders, Hillary would have had a pleasant walk to the nomination. Instead, Bernie’s “insurgent” campaign has quickly transformed the party into a party in crisis, just like the GOP. Bernie’s success has derailed the now-quaint notion that in November a bickering, leaderless, fractured GOP would easily hand the White House to Democrats, happily unified and ideologically pragmatic under Hillary. Obama’s late surge of progressive and foreign policy productivity (with the glaring exception of Syria) appeared to set the stage nicely for a smooth Obama-Clinton transition, one that might “calm the waters” that were full of the chop produced by so many flailing, desperate conservatives trying to explain away the president’s victories on such issues as marriage equality, health care, and Iran – all on the watch of a GOP Congress.

On a side note, it is equally fascinating to contemplate the nature of the nation’s “crisis” – the belief among so many that we are “on the brink” of some national calamity, that we need to take drastic measures to right this faltering ship of state. On the conservative side, it is hardly surprising that they are whipping up a useful panic. It is paramount they convince their voters of the veracity of two ideas: one, that the near-collapse of the U.S. economy in 2009 was unrelated to the Republican president who had been in charge the previous seven years; and two, that as bad as our Great Recession and failed Iraq war decade was, things are “even worse” after seven years of Obama. Combine this with the Sanders campaign’s dire warnings of an amoral oligarchy dominating the political system like old-school Robber Barons, and what you get is a general message from both national parties to their respective constituencies: America as we know it is on the brink of destruction!

Sanders supporters, of course, believe this crisis in the Democratic party is necessary, a good thing, in the same manner that Trump’s supporters see his candidacy as necessary to clean out the Washington cesspool. (By the way, have you ever noticed that “cleaning out the Washington cesspool” is pretty much the promise of every would-be politician going back to Reagan? And yet its stink has only gained in potency.) “We are tired of waiting,” they say, for someone to drive a stake through the heart of Wall Street. And that’s certainly understandable after the debacle of 2008, which revealed in stark detail the “real two Americas” – not conservatives versus liberals, not red states versus blue states. No, the real battle is billionaires versus everyone else, and the billionaires are not just winning. They control the rules of the game – and the umpires – to ensure they will win every time.

Thus what might have been — the Democratic campaign story of calm, cool, rational pragmatism and a smooth transition of power competing with the GOP campaign story of chaos, belligerance, intraparty warfare and populist hysteria. But that’s all over. Now, it’s two identical stories of populist hysteria (acute ideologies aside), both pregnant with the exciting promise of tearing down a “captive” American political structure so it can be “built back up again” in the image of “the people.” Leading the great purge will be the Messiah of one’s choice, either Trump or Sanders (or Cruz if you’re a “political Christian” – a handy new term I just came across).

This dynamic creates a kind of “we don’t care” equivalency among the party’s new “leaders” who, as it happens, do not belong to, or even like, the parties they nominally lead. Trump disses Republicans (and everyone else) as stupid and incompetent, Sanders thumbs his nose at the Democratic “establishment” and party luminaries. Their followers and surrogates do the same. Each candidate’s acolytes are helping them destroy from within the parties they have commandeered, the parties to which they have hitched their timely ideological wagons. They destroy their parties knowingly, with those on the right believing the GOP leadership has “betrayed” them, and those on the left feeling they are in a no-win shell game with a “billionaire class” that easily controls a co-opted Democratic party “establishment”.

I will not say that it would be “better” to have kept it simple with Hillary, especially since that ship has sailed. I do believe it would have been easier, an uncluttered path to a White House that could, at least – perhaps – temporarily forestall the Koch revolution (now ongoing at your local state legislature and governor’s office, which are most likely under GOP control). At least, the Koch’s version of revolution could probably be held off for a few more years – until the Kochs can count 34 GOP state legislatures and call a constitutional Convention of the States (they now have 31).

But the loudest voices on the left are saying that mere “protection” for progressive priorities and the slow, incremental gains the Obama administration achieved – and for which Hillary is the party’s chosen standard bearer – these gains are simply not enough. Too little, too late, and too tainted with establishment fingerprints. Besides, polls tell them they are going to win everything with Bernie – so why compromise on ideals? It’s understandable.

For both Democrats and Republicans (whatever these labels now mean), it’s “Revolution” or nothing. So I guess we may well see what a revolution looks like up close and personal. If history is any guide, it won’t be pretty. And history also instructs that no matter what the revolution itself looks like, its aftermath will look like all the revolutions: consolidation of power among those who took the reins of power, eventually putting “the people” right back where they started – trying to extract “public service” from entrenched political bosses whose chief priority is to preserve their hard-won place at the top of the heap.

 

Mad Men Made Sane

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I like TV shows, but I only watch a few of the modern ones – I might like some others, but who has the time to wade through all the crap?

One show I like is Mad Men. But I might like it for different reasons than most people. Some people like the period clothes, some have a crush on Don Draper or Betty or big Joan, some think it’s great storytelling (it’s not great, but it’s good). On the other side, I’ve heard it called a soap opera, I’ve heard it called misogynist and racist and depressing. Maybe. The reason I like it is that it’s an excellent dramatic portrayal of a society confronting the nihilism of the modern world. The 1960’s ad business milieu seems the perfect environment in which to experience that confrontation firsthand.

The cover of the April 8, 1966 edition of Time magazine asked the question “Is God Dead?” I believe Mad Men is one dramatist’s answer. And it’s not “yes” or “no”.

In the world of Don Draper, there’s no right, no wrong, only what “is”. There’s no saving grace, and nobody – and everybody – gets what they “deserve”. It’s a world untethered from any higher authority or over-arching moral code.

In an early episode, Don Draper in his fine suit is denigrated by the beatnik friends of his mistress as they sit around her apartment smoking weed. They are dissing establishment ad man Don for being part of the “big lie”, which implies the beatniks are above all of that, on some higher and better plane. Don answers them with: “I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie, there is no system.” After a thoughtful pause he delivers the coup de grace:

“The universe is indifferent.”

Don’s shot across the bow of pious morality is a warning to the self-righteous that their reality is not the only possible reality, their good is not the only good. There are other, competing realities, and the people who believe them are just as convinced of their veracity as anyone else (for example, just watch the monotheists and atheists go at it). More important to me, it’s a warning to people raised on traditional “good versus evil” narratives that those, too, are only stories. Reality is something else – reality is what really happens in the world.

Reality should be self-evident, but it’s not, which is the root of our problem. We have a whole collection of phrases expressing the wish to get to what is real beneath what we perceive: “The real deal”, or crazy Ayn Rand’s “A is A”, or hippies with “the nitty gritty,” or old school “brass tacks”, or the “nuts and bolts” of a situation.

One of the greatest minds of the 20th century, the English novelist Iris Murdoch, wrote a novel called Under the Net, which includes this statement:

“All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.”

In other words, we impose a “net” of cultural belief systems and traditions on the reality of our sensory perceptions (a baby bird falls from its nest and dies – what does it mean?). Call them religions, superstitions, social mores, gender roles, philosophies, whatever. Our philosophical “net” of order, which we apply to the surface of our chaotic everyday reality, causes us to think that by extension there is some even grander system that is somehow manipulating these various smaller outcomes, both happy and sad, toward revelation of some great universal TRUTH, which we will someday know if we only persist in our struggle in “good faith.” The peace of God, someone said, surpasses all understanding. But even though we never really can, Murdoch expresses the belief that we should always try, as much as possible, to discern what’s “under the net” rather than just be content to perceive reality “through” the organizing net(work) of our preconceptions.

There’s nothing particularly new about this idea, I know. The poet William Blake wrote, long ago, “I must create my own system…or be enslav’d by another man’s.” It’s always been a favorite line of mine, since I first read it. Blake knew all our systems are invented and ephemeral. As a poet and outlaw, why imprison yourself in some banker’s or vicar’s construct of reality? No – better to live your own reality, however terrifying it may be.

I haven’t seen the last season of Mad Men yet, so I don’t know if Draper gets the “comeuppance” many are waiting for – whether he wins or loses in the end. This was supposedly a big cultural deal. Some see him as a total rat – after all he’s a liar, a fake, a cheater and a bully. They have anticipated his downfall and would cheer his ultimate failure as a sort of moral justice. Others see him as a victim of circumstances, still others see him as the kind of “real man” who’s fallen out of fashion in post-Alan Alda America.

To me, it doesn’t matter what happens to Don Draper. If he wins, it’s because a complex set of circumstances, only some of which he controls, have resulted in him winning. If he loses – same reason. In Don’s world, it’s all a crap shoot. If we feel frustrated by that, I think it’s because of our steady diet of happy endings, of stories large and small that almost always “reward” faith and hope while almost always “punishing” immorality or cynicism. Writers know that’s what we like. But it’s not real.

We can hold out for a just and fair future society, but it is not very likely to arrive on its own or be ushered in by ancient philosophers we’ve since deified. We must choose to build it ourselves. The past is the best predictor of what the future will bring – in short, continued moral ambiguity and human frailty hobbling our worldly systems, and zero direction from above (if there is an above) to get us on the better path. We must choose to see the right path with our human, open eyes. As the oft-repeated quote, attributed to Ghandi,  goes, “We must be the change we want to see in the world.”

While its stories can veer into melodrama, Mad Men depicts a society grappling with this reluctantly reached philosophical conclusion, and all its attendant modern anxiety and frustration, with aplomb.

Weak Midwest Tea

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Nebraska’s Tea Party Congressional representation demonstrated impressive lock-step talking point delivery following the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding Obamacare subsidies. Each expressed heartfelt disappointment that this “terribly flawed” law will stand. Each promised to abolish the ACA and put in its place “patient-centered” health care solutions.

But there are two problems with such statements. First, the law, by every available measure, is working exactly as planned in helping millions of Americans obtain health care coverage that was previously out of reach. Even in states like Nebraska, where our “leaders” have shunned the law’s benefits on ideological grounds, it is working to improve the lives of tens of thousands. Meanwhile nationally, overall health care costs are falling, deficits are shrinking, markets are soaring, and the jobless rate is at 5.5%.

Second, if one were gullible enough to support repeal of Obamacare based on this empty rhetoric, keep in mind a vague promise is not an “alternative.” Repeal would not result in a “patient-centered” plan from Republicans, because no such plan exists.

I get that Tea Party libertarians desperately want the president’s greatest legislative achievement to fail. But wanting something is not the same as having it.