Questions and Answers

The name of this blog is inspired by Endgame by Derrick Jensen.

Often the premises of the media are shrouded in secrecy. We have to read between the lines to try to understand where the news writers stand, for example. This leads to the right being able to claim the media is left wing, and the left being able to claim the media is right wing. The obscurity of the premises that the media operates on results in this situation. A given media source will be written by a lot of people and so can easily be accused of a lot of different things. A person levelling such criticism is likely to focus on the aspects which support their case and ignore the aspects which don’t. Were the media to put their premises up front and be honest about them then this couldn’t happen. You could argue that given articles operated within different premises, or that many articles did and thus the media was lying about its premises, but you couldn’t make any claim you wanted to about them.

Because we don’t know their premises we don’t know what questions they are asking. Because we don’t know what questions they are asking we can’t know if the answers given to us within their content are actually of any use or not. The formulation of a question is very, very important, as anyone who has spent time on compiling a good questionnaire will tell you. Ask the wrong question, or even the right question in the wrong way, and you get a useless answer. Assume the answer and ask a question aimed at getting it and you might as well not have wasted your time. However, assuming the answer is what happens every single day in the media. Their premises are assumptions they don’t even admit to themselves. These assumptions lead them to answers which leads them to questions. A meaningless exercise.

The stealthy nature of the media’s premises leads to the general public having no idea that there is even a problem. They don’t understand the importance of questions. They belittle the role of stories and narrative. They fail to realise that every news item they absorb is based on assumptions, assumptions which they probably would agree with without understanding why (simple truth is they’ve absorbed the assumption from so many stories that they see it as ‘just the way things are’ and not as an assumption based on nothing more than other’s having made the same assumption).

This blog isn’t claiming to have the right answers and to have asked the right questions. It is simply an attempt to get people who read it to think in different ways, to ask questions about their assumptions. To motivate people to try to find out more. To compel people to find their own questions, their own answers. To help them to open their eyes to the scary reality of the world they live in and ask why, who, how. To get to the bottom of the mess so they at least understand what they are doing to the planet, to children in developing nations, to mother’s breast milk, to their own bodies. If they achieve that level of understanding and then continue to want to carry on with business as usual then they can (how could I stop them?), at least they’re armed with the understanding of what they are doing. They are informed.

Exponential Growth

I have previously echoed Richard Heinberg’s question, are we smarter than yeast? I’ve also previously written about the problems of endless growth within a finite system. However, these seem to be two of the least popular (according to my Dashboard blog stats) of my entries. I asked myself why and it seems obvious. They don’t have a happy chapter.

Unlike many dire predictions about the fate of all of us if we don’t change our ways, I don’t believe there is a way to continue ‘business as usual’ and save the planet. A lot of the time we are told that if we just recycle then we’ll be fine. If we reduce and recycle we’ll be fine. If we reduce, reuse and recycle then we’ll be fine. If we reduce, reuse, recycle and invest heavily in renewable energy then we’ll be fine. Business as usual, no worries. Go back to sleep, we’ve got this one sorted.

Recycling requires energy and many, many things cannot be recycled forever. They stop being able to be turned into new things. Even the best recycling in the world will still require influxes of new stuff, new metals, new raw materials. It also takes lots of energy. Machines wear out and will need replacing. Parts break. These are the constants of life. We might make all of the wind turbines, solar cells, tidal barrages, geothermal turbines we need tomorrow, but that wouldn’t be the end of our resource use. We’d need to replace them as they broke. Even if we could get into a steady state with all of the resources we use being reused until they can no longer be reused, we still need more stuff. Even in a non-stone-age, ’steady-state’ society, there will still be the need for more stuff to be dug out and used.

This is assuming that the people who are investing in these things, the governments that are pushing them, the companies profiting from them, are abandoning growth. They’re not, of course. We can recycle, because it creates jobs, but we must grow. We can reuse to a point, but we must buy new as well, we must grow. We can reduce packaging, but not consumption, we must grow. We can invest in renewables, because that creates some jobs, but we must grow. We will invest in nuclear, because that creates tonnes of jobs, and we must grow. The economy must grow, or it will die. The implication of that statement is that the economy is more deserving of life than wild nature, or humans. The economy is master and we are its slaves. We are well-kept slaves (in the UK, US and other ‘Western democracies’, at least), but we are slaves.

As Derrick Jensen says, what we need are stories. Stories to tell our children, to warn them and educate them. Stories which will warn of the dangers of taking a steady state system and building from it a system based on growth. The stories will need to be better than just telling them they can’t do it, or appealing to the dictates of some deity or other. There will need to be a web of interconnected, self-supporting stories, a culture, which makes the thought of starting a growth based economy repugnant, insane. These stories will need to be supported by stories about the wonder of nature, its beauty and value. They will need to tell of the death of nature, massive, massive death, horrible death which a machine based on growth causes to priceless nature. They will have to make clear that the death causers also die from the very machine they use to cause the death. In short, they will have to be the exact opposite of the stories we now tell, of infinite growth being logical, necessary and good. They will also need to form the backbone of every culture in the world.

Every culture in the world will need the same core cultural stories because if any one decides that growth is okay, or good, then every other will fall before them. A growth based culture isn’t better because it wins cultural battles, it’s just more violent, more efficient at casting people onto the fire to fuel it. Its greed leads to its hegemony. Winning doesn’t make it right, it makes it repugnant.

Hobo Stripper

I would like to take a moment to point everyone to a fantastic blog, called Hobo Stripper. One of my favourite posts is For the Love of Salmon, an excellent story about Hobo Stripper’s day with Rich Dicks who only like a little bit of the fish, and throw the rest away. Very thought-provoking and wonderful, highlighting the way the police and other authorities are just there to normalise and support the violence which goes down the hierarchy and supress and destroy any question that this is the way things should be. In accordance with Premise Four:

Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims. — Derrick Jensen, Endgame.

I love reading the stories by Hobo Stripper. She has a refreshing view of the world, especially her job. She writes facinating, detailed and useful things, as well as things which are just wonderful, like the salmon story^[1].

The way Hobo Stripper lives is an amazing example of how to live as a non-civilised person while using the master’s tools against him. She keeps herself safe while doing one of the most fundamental of all capitalist endeavours – selling a service, which costs her very little, to people who are willing to pay a premium for it. Best of all? She calls a spade a spade. She doesn’t mince around the edges, if there is a person being violent, stupid, whatever, she tells it as it is.

All in all, I would advise people to go over to her blog and take a look around. Her posts are clearly marked so it’s not hard to see when a post has content you might not appreciate, such as her vibrator posts. However, I like reading all of the posts she makes since each one has in it the core of her personality, and that is the thing I like most of all.

==
[1] I am not using the word story to belittle or diminish her writing. Stories are the most important part of life. Our entire society, civilisation as we know it, is built on stories which are told and re-told, enacted and re-enacted, all the time and in many different ways. Stories have power and we need different stories, such as those by Hobo Stripper, if we are to break the hold of civilisation’s stories.

Premise #1

As previously mentioned in this blog, Derrick Jensen starts his book, Endgame, with twenty premises. Most activists can get on board with most of them. The problem many of them have is with premise one. The first and most important one.

Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization. — Derrick Jensen, Endgame Vol. 1 + 2

Most of the arguments against this premise center on things like “how can you know?” “how can you predict the future?” etc.

The crux of the problem is in the definition of civilisation that Jensen uses. Jensen defines civilisation thus:

“A way of life characterised by the growth of cities” — Derrick Jensen

As Jensen points out in this short clip, this definition is perfectly reasonable and can be easily defended.

Because it’s begging to be asked from that definition, how does he define cities? Well, like this:

“A collection of people living in numbers large enough to require the import of resources.” — Derrick Jensen

So, if one accepts the definitions as laid out by Jensen, one must logically accept premise one. If civilisations and cities are linked and if cities are characterised by population densities in areas unsuitable for that density of population then civilisation can never be sustainable and therefore premise one holds.

If, as I have read and heard suggested over and over, you change the population density of cities so that they can be supported locally and not require the import of resources, you are not left with cities. You are left with camps or villages. Therefore you no longer have a civilisation, you have a tribe or a community.

If you question the definition then you can have grounds to question the premise, but the problem then becomes: Since the word civilisation is so closely linked with cities, how can you define it in such a way as to not link it to the existence cities?

I personally like Jensen’s definition of civilisation and city. However, I do recognise that his definition of civilisation and city necessarily lead to premise one, but I can’t think of a better, clearer, more accurate definition for either.

Premises

The secret to good informative writing, whether it is in the field of journalism or in the field of academia, is to slip your premises by people. If you can get them to ignore the premises on which you build your argument then you can get them to agree with you without knowing why. Eventually they will hold your point of view without any reason other than that you have told them to. It is endemic within the news reporting mass media to do this. We are so often told that “the bad news is that the economy isn’t growing and we need to take action”. We listen, we accept. We don’t ask the obvious questions about the underlying premises. Such as:

• Why is it bad that the economy is chewing up less stuff?
• Do we want an economy which is, year on year, growing and chewing up more stuff? Can that really be considered a good thing?
• Who is ‘we’?
• Why should ‘we’ take any action at all? Since this action is invariably giving large sums of money to people who earnt large sums of money while they exploited and destroyed, can’t we just let the situation sort itself out? Don’t we hold to the delusion that this is a free market?

The reason I like Derrick Jensen’s book, Endgame, so much is because he places the premises he is working from, the things he is taking for granted, right at the start of the book. The rest of the book goes on to explain, expand and highlight what he means, but the premises which need arguing are right at the start. They’re not hidden. You don’t need to read between the lines to find the assumptions on which the writing is based, the writer has given you his assumptions up front. It’s an honest form of writing which I can fully appreciate.

As such, as I have pointed out in a previous post, I subscribe to the Jensen premises. All 20 of them. I can’t actually find anything I could argue against. They are all very sound. I know they’re not very optimistic. Guess what? Our position is not an optimistic position. Peak oil is coming soon, if it’s not already past. Global catastrophic climate change is coming soon. Our government is hell-bent on building nuclear reactors so we can continue business as normal. Population overshoot is continuing and there are no signs that anyone is actually going to do anything to prevent it from continuing. Religious dogma is once again gaining in prominence.

As such, I would like to lay out some personal assumptions alongside Derrick’s 20:

• There needs to be a commitment, by all developed nations, to reduce their populations dramatically. The developing nations probably should too, but since one person in the US uses more stuff than 70 people in most developing nations, we can start on the easy ones.
• Developing nations need to be discouraged from developing, while developed nations need to make it their goal to become less developed. The Earth hasn’t the resources for us all to live like Americans do. It doesn’t have enough resources for Americans to live like Americans do.
• We are screwed because of Premis Six, the system will not change itself. This is a fact. Those in power enjoy the fruits of the system. Those without power have been brainwashed into believing that hard work will enable them to enjoy the fruits of the system. No one within the system has any impetus to change it before the cracks break it for them. Once the system is broken we will not have the collective ability we currently have and the crash will be handled in local areas as best as those local areas can handle them.

These are probably not up to the standard of analytical observation which Jensen is able to do, but they are a start.

The Premise

Broadly speaking I subscribe to Derrick Jensen’s 20 premises as laid out in his two volume book, Endgame.

The premises in order can be found here.

A somewhat naieve, and perfectly ‘normal’, commentary can be found here.

Why is this a normal and naieve commentary? Basically it does what so many people do when confronted by the fact that a system which is designed to grow (cultures based on agriculture, or ‘civilisation’) isn’t sustainable. It says “you can’t prove that” and “we could transform this system into a sustainable one”.

Economic models such as we use need growth. Without growth our version of economics, the civilised person’s economics, fails. This has been true ever since we developed the concept to describe what was happening within our agricultural societies. A system that needs growth isn’t sustainable.

If you read Endgame, which I highly recommend you do, he lays out a very workable definition of civilisation. Jensen defines civilisation as “a way of life characterised by the growth of cities.”^[1] As he points out, civilisation is often directly linked to the appearence of cities. With this definition and with the subsequent definition of cities, it is impossible to argue that civilisation is redeemable. If you change the fundamental nature of either cities (impossible realistically at current densities, thus impossible without making them not be cities as we would have any chance of recognising) then civilisation might be redeemable, but by changing the nature of what a city is you stop it being a city and thus you’re no longer in a civilisation. You might be in a tribe or a small community, but you aren’t in a civilisation.

The end may not come in my life time. I think it will. However, this is an area I would love to be wrong about. I think what Ran Prieur says in this short clip is actually spot on. As a blob of people, we like disaster movies because they give us the escapism that we would do something if there was a massive disaster and our way of life were threatened. The truth is that we will sit in our air-conditioned, centrally-heated houses complaining about the cost of petrol^[2] or gas^[3] and demanding that the very ‘free market’ system we were lauding just a mere month or so ago should not charge us what it can for goods we have to buy^[4]. If we wanted to control the cost of petrol, gas, whatever, we should have kept nationalised industries in those areas. We didn’t. We invited the devil of free market economics to supper and got pissed that he actually burnt us. I’m not suggesting that we re-nationalise those industries (well, I wouldn’t ‘nationalise’ them so much as ‘localise’ them), but I am questioning the sense of giving those areas to private, profit seeking companies and then being shocked and dismayed when those same companies turn out to be seeking profit for private individuals rather than the good of the community.

==
[1] http://www.kewego.co.uk/video/iLyROoafYKjY.html
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7527679.stm
[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7533389.stm
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7534421.stm