Christmas morning 2020. I am listening to carols from King's College Cambridge, music that once inspired and meant so much to me. Sitting alone in my garden, reflecting on memories extending over three quarters of a century, I find little to celebrate on a day when the Christian myths should at least remind us of the importance of love, unity, and the human family.
Instead, I am dismayed by the deteriorating state of human affairs, the self-satisfied attitudes of political incumbents who, basking in pretentious plays of authority betray their ignorance, greedy capitalists who, taking us for fools, insist on trashing the planet as if it is their God-given right, and the billions of ordinary individuals in all parts of the world who suffer from the defects of a world-system each one of us helped create.
I am constantly urged to soften my dystopian views of human civilization so as to promote more optimistic views of the future, particularly those that are becoming possible within the context of technological positivism. Somehow, in spite of all the benefits we acquire from new discoveries, I cannot quite bring myself to compare survival in a sterile technocracy with what it means to be a creature on an amazing planet teeming with life and unconstrained novelty.
While I am not exactly tortured by despair, I believe it is foolish to use the term "hope" if we can not acknowledge the reality of the human condition. Yet that is precisely what we are doing. We do need hope in abundance. But only if that leads to different and informed action. Hope implanted in self-delusion is sheer folly.
We are not awake to our reality. Human consciousness is suspended in a state of semi-conscious denial. Above all else, the pervasive narratives are totally misleading.
Donald Trump, though clearly bigoted and a narcissist, is not the personification of evil the press would have us believe. Nor is the inauguration of Biden as President of the US about to usher in an era of peace, civility, and the renewal of American ideals. Indeed it is far more likely that US aggression will continue in the baiting of China, inciting civil war in Iran, and ramping up cold war hostilities against Russia - along with the persistence of massive social inequality, racism and divisions within the society.
The climate emergency will not be alleviated much by the US re-joining the Paris Agreement, nor by targets aimed at reducing carbon emissions by the year 2050. We do not have 30 years to keep average temperatures below 2° Celsius or atmospheric carbon dioxide below 350ppm.
Banks are unlikely to end their financing of the fossil fuel industry, even though these assets will be worthless quite soon. Manufacturers are not about to scale down their production because they comprehend the need for less consumption and growth. Neoliberal economists will not suddenly admit that trickle-down economics was at best a cruel joke, or that money has become the means to keep most of us in perpetual serfdom.
Those few companies that own the food chain will persist in selling industrial agriculture as the means to feed the world - poisoning the soils and the oceans for diminishing returns. Coal and gas will still be mined on the pretext these energy sources are essential to a high quality of life. Tech entrepreneurs will continue to frame machine intelligence as a panacea, ignoring new classes of complex problems we are unleashing, and will have to address at some stage.
These are all components of a world-system that feeds off an extractive narrative (worldview) for its motivation and legitimacy. It matters not whether you are a talented Hollywood actor trying to do some good in this world, a subsistence rice farmer in Vietnam, a member of the Chinese Politburo responsible for social surveillance, an investment banker on Wall Street, a factory worker in Johannesburg, a Palestinian mother fighting injustice on the West Bank, or a student activist protesting against the despotic edicts of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the all-consuming and predatory nature of this narrative means we are all in this together - a ship of fools heading towards unnavigable rapids, with a less than capable crew, where anyone with expertise has already been thrown overboard by those who own the ship, and whose entreaties are limited to the bellicose catch-cry: Keep Going!
With news that 36 people have been infected in Chile's military and research base in Antarctica comes the assurance that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can reach anywhere on the planet - and probably will. This simply confirms what we already know about the zoonotic transfer of diseases from animals to humans, that those in positions of authority have not yet had the courage to admit.
Successive waves of mutant strains of this virus will continue to infect humans indefinitely, even with extensive vaccination of the population. Unless we are content to continue disrupting social and commercial activities through spontaneous lockdowns, along with flustered reactions to a few small clusters of infections, while dealing with the mounting public health, domestic violence, civic unrest and economic burden of such strategies, we must learn how to live with this disease the best we can.
Eradication of this and similar viruses is not impossible. But only if we are prepared to change the relationship we have with other animal species and nature - and that means changing the story of Homo sapiens. In terms of diseases like COVID-19 that will require bringing deforestation and the destruction of animal habitats to a halt, restoring large expanses of cultivated land to their former state through regenerative farming, re-wilding the wilderness, providing people with food without the widespread use of chemicals and animal-intensive modes of agriculture, while adopting a primarily plant-based diet. Of course these initiatives would not be a bad thing to do even without COVID-19 as an additional incentive.
Other existential emergencies facing us will demand a similar shift in narrative and a subsequent change in behaviours. But society as a whole does not yet comprehend that to be the case. We still believe we can go about our lives in much the same way as before - tweaking our principles grudgingly and ever so slightly to deploy incremental change, hoarding wealth, despoiling the natural environment, and ignoring the plight of those who are less fortunate, or killing them if they take exception to what we say.
Galileo was imprisoned for life. His heresy was to ignore dogma and rely on empirical evidence. We have empirical evidence that the human family is in an existential crisis of its own making. The civilization we created is collapsing, propelled by nuclear-armed nations inching steadily towards direct confrontation, governments becoming more inclined to apply totalitarian force, and ordinary citizens encumbered by leaders who are the least of us intellectually and morally.
Those who have become obscenely wealthy or influential in this world-system will not stop doing what they have always done. Part of a powerful elite, they have no intention of diverting from their current course. Democracy is just a toy steering wheel, offered to us now and again so that we can pretend to be driving in a different direction. Even direct revolutionary action is not feasible if we remain in thrall to fairytale promises embedded within the current worldview and consent to the status quo so effectively promulgated by highly manipulative marketing and state propaganda.
There appears to be only one feasible exit strategy available. A mass awakening to our real plight could result in a collective leap of consciousness on a scale that will allow us to reimagine our relationship with each other and with our environment.
But herein lies a paradox. We cannot change the pervasive consumer-based narrative without a mass societal uprising. That cannot occur without finding new ways to undermine the propaganda machine intentionally established to prevent such an uprising from occurring. The propaganda apparatus will not be dismantled without a mass-scale challenge to the conventional wisdom that informs the world-system, and from which we derive our individual and collective raison-d-etre. New thinking from within alternative ontological frameworks is disavowed. That means conventional wisdom cannot be challenged. But we can only change the pervasive consumer-based narrative by undermining the propaganda machine....
In other words we are trapped in a cognitive and emotional cycle of desire and consumption, in which the only way out of our predicament is to let go of the egocentric materialism we thought to be enduring in order to embrace a very different evolutionary path instead. We can evolve or die.
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.
For our world, more of the same is untenable. It amounts to flirting with extinction. The belief we can continue to stimulate still further our insatiable materialistic desires, prosecute imperial wars and capitalist expansionism without reprisals of any kind, while relying on fossil fuels and abject subservience to unchecked corporate power to lead us into a more prosperous future, is simply delusional.
The truth is that humanity's present trajectory will probably result in massive societal breakdowns, economic misery, the continued loss of species, and irreversible ecological collapse.
The more viable path, and what needs to become our shared intention, is abundantly clear. We must work towards a fair, open and transparent society, where "we the people" reclaim control over our lives, work in partnership (rather than against) nature, install governance systems that benefit everyone, democratize work and community endeavours, decentralize information, and curb the corporate stranglehold on political and economic power.
That will not be easy. Global heating, and everything that flows from a changing climate, is now unavoidable. Perhaps we can slow it down if we act now. But we are powerless to stop it. All we can do is adapt. Modern political systems are immensely brittle, while geopolitical tensions are a chafing wound on human discord. Corruption is ingrained at every level of society. Deception and misinformation are pervasive. Hostility towards democracy is growing, and science is denounced as little more than a point of view.
Meanwhile the decades-long neoliberal assault on the arts, investigative journalism, education, pluralism, and critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and ignored.
In this environment, immersed under layers of disinformation and without any dissenting voices to offer viable alternatives, the general public could simply become seduced by hope and a passion for optimism at the expense of truth. If we cannot focus human ingenuity on the things that matter in order to institute 2nd order structural change, this delusion will destroy our civilization.