My diaries are often dark and foreboding, mapping the elements of impending ecosystem and economic collapse, in the hope that they can help inform the prioritization of policy attitudes within the DK community.
Oh, and also in the hope that by venting my dark spleen, I might live a little lighter. I'm in my third year of daily quips trying to humor the horror of environmental collapse -- and it's dark in there.
Given the darkness, I was a little surprised when WarrenS asked me to adapt a diary for the ECSTASY series. The goals of the series are to find hope, not despair; personal enrichment, not a bunker mentality in the face of ecosystem or economic chaos.
As a fundamental optimist (in spite of being battered by facts and trends into a becoming a worried pragmatist), I decided to take his challenge.
The "full Godwin" of the title refers to a giant metaphor of an expedient complicity of convenience, which I'll spin out in some detail.
Godwin's law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."
It's often used, in this venue, as a shorthand for "your arguments have become so weak that you have to invoke a false Nazi comparison." (And if you don't believe me, you're a fascist.)
I recently found myself thinking deeply about the 1932-1945 period in Germany, because of the novel I was reading, The Kindly Ones, the somewhat controversial faux-memoir of a Nazi middle-bureaucracy functionary during that period.
The first-person narrator is Max Aue, who falls into a mid-level paper-pusher job in the SS, and gradually rises through the ranks of the National Socialists. He has escaped prosecution and is writing at the end of his life about how it was, back then.
He asserts that he has no regrets, no confessions to make, just observances of how seemingly banal, trivial, bureaucratic, day-to-day decisions can (and will) lead to a societal reality that is impossible to break, and must simply be lived within.
It's an astonishing novel about passive, expedient complicity, and the horrors that it can produce.
Listen: I've visited Auschwitz/Birkenau twice, first with my wife in the early 90s, and ten years later with my 14-year-old daughter. There is nothing I've ever seen that filled me with such disgust, rage, and grief. Former barracks now contain ten-foot-high mounds of pants, of shirts, of eyeglasses collected from the prisoners before they were gassed -- and these were collected at the very very end of the war. Thousands more mounds had already been distributed "to the war effort."
Huge piles of jumbled, battered suitcases, with their owners' names painted on the sides, each with a story it could tell.
It was the mountain of hair, the auburn ponytails, the dark braids, each from a woman who had braided it not long before being gassed -- that set me to full-out bawling.
What evil must it take to do that, I wondered. To mechanize death so effectively and efficiently. How could this go on? How could they have let it happen?
I'm the product of my culture, so of course my understanding about the Nazis came from the side of the victors (thank goodness). I learned that the Nazis were evil from the war movies I watched growing up, from the documentaries, and of course, from Hogan's Heroes.
So I'd never really tried to put it together from the other side: how a rational, cultured, civilized society could go down a path of such evil.
Well, this novel helped me think about it anew.
The German people weren't evil, of course -- just complicit. They had been convinced of, and accepted, a Weltanshauung, a world view, which made the Holocaust not only possible, but almost inevitable.
That "world view" was not a simple one, and I'm not going to try to do an exegesis on its many elements, but it had to do with pride and certainty, with economic expansion, and with a belief in natural hierarchy. Mundane, no?
But if, for example, one holds the mundane belief that there are races, and that there are hierarchies of value to those races, then many inevitabilities derive from that belief.
If the "Aryans" have a manifest destiny, then it makes all sorts of sense to expand into Poland and Czechoslovakia, and to initiate the path to empire, to Reich.
It wasn't the Aryans that created the incredible depression of the 30s, the world view said, it was the parasites on their society -- the gypsies, the disabled, the moneylenders, the corrupt, the criminal -- that was undermining the (natural) Reich.
The result of that hierarchical thinking: find a way to remove the parasites from an otherwise healthy society, one way or another.
It's got a simplicity that is politically (and economically) appealing. And if a society's media is supporting that Weltanshauung, then it's not only likely, but almost inevitable, that certain actions will result.
If you're alive, you have to eat. If you're in a society, you have to make a living to survive. In the mid-1930s, after a deep depresion, the German economy was rolling again. The Nazi programs had brought them out of their depression, and they were riding high. A hundred thousand upper-middle-class careers were entwined with the worldview.
By the time they were justifying the invasion of Poland and Czechoslovakia as "taking back what we lost," the Germans were convinced of their rightness.
And then, once war became all-consuming, any doubt expressed was treason, and the only way to maintain a career was to operate within the war economy -- and thereby support the war philosophy.
The only reasonable way to support your family was to support the Weltanshauung, which kept it strong.
It created a framework of it-must-be-so, of organizations and commissions and businesses and offices and departments, each with territory to protect, and a mission to further the cause. The Weltanshauung produced a set of legal government policies that were intrinsically self-justifying, and a set of business rules that were self-rational. The bureaucracy then mobilized to manifest and profit from the policies implicit in their laws and rules.
ECSTASY?
What does this have to do with ECSTASY? Bear with me a little longer.
We are currently living with a Weltanshauung of our own, and the parallels seem to me somewhat chilling, if instructive.
Our own Weltanshauung, the one we don't even see because we've grown up within it, is that of natural hierarchy, economic expansion, and pride and certainty. Mundane, no?
Our world view holds that humans, being more clever than the rest of nature, are superior, and therefore have a manifest right to dominate the world. It holds that economic growth is the natural, inevitable consequence of human endeavor. And it holds that the world exists for us to consume.
Our world view holds that the rules of nature don't apply to us, because we are so darned clever.
And this leads each of us to thoughtless complicity in a crime against both nature and humanity.
On the macro scale, society is constructed with offices and bureaucracies and business rules that are built around that Weltanshauung. Without economic expansion, how would the stock market function? Without continuing consumption, how can the economy grow?
Our advertising touts the delights of this and that product, because the economy is predicated on consumption; our bureaucracies support consumption industries, because the economy requires it. Our politicians promote economic growth, because that's how they get elected and stay elected, and how we avoid economic malaise.
On the micro scale, we accept convenience as a proxy for efficiency. We laugh about being "shopaholics," and chat about how long our commute is. We believe that when we throw something away, it disappears.
We produce spreadsheets of household and business budgets which have no cost column for the underlying damage implicit in the figures. These budgets do not factor in the CO2 produced to ship that avocado or winter tomato from Argentina; we do not factor in the future costs of existing overfishing habits; do not factor in the longterm costs of plastics, or pesticides, herbicides, endocrine disruptors, heavy metals, ocean acidification, or any of the million small cuts that current human society is slicing into the fabric of our interrelated ecosystems.
After all, why should they be factored in? Our worldview holds that nature will be infinitely resilient, and that we'll figure something clever out, if there's any serious problem.
Besides, if we somehow included those costs, the economy would suffer on the macro and the micro scale. Egads!
Worst of all, we'd be confronting the implications of our worldview. That would be like the Germans passing around Abu Ghraib-like pictures of what evolved into death camps, and acknowledging their expedient, convenient complicity in supporting it, both personally and politically.
Egads.
Building the Resistance
Burke said "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
I would add a paraphrase of Derrick Jensen: If we recognize evil, it is our responsibility to act.
To do something to resist. Resistance can range from passive to active; from the personal to the political.
The first step is to recognize evil, then understand it, and then act with light.
I am now questioning every bit of plastic in my life, as a way to understand. I do this because of the continent-sized gyres of plastic slurry we find in the ocean, and because plastic is chock-full of poisons and problems, and never biodegrades.
I am systematically shifting myself away from single-use plastic. Coffee covers are for losers. I'll skip cream rather than use those silly one-use half-n-halfs. I wash and reuse plastic bags when appropriate. I of course recycle.
And each act of resistance is a nanovictory.
I've also been questioning larger priorities. Trying to live as if the Greatest Depression had already come: my family and I are growing as much of our own food as we can, and buying as locally as we can. I telecommute whenever possible, and have been systematically decreasing what we "throw away," and on and on. Each is a nanovictory.
I spend hours trying to repair things that break, rather than discarding and buying that thing anew.
I do this because every bit of energy burned, every bit of extra CO2 added to the atmosphere, is accelerating us toward tipping points of environmental holocaust.
So every time I repair something -- darn a sock, re-solder that computer speaker wire, sew a tear, find a work-around -- it's a nanovictory for the Resistance.
Enough nanovictories can win battles, and winning enough battles can win a war.
We are at war with a Weltanshauung for Weltmort: a worldview for world death.
We are at war with our own society, and at war with the Weltanshauung of the profit motive of a consumption-based economy.
If we recognize the evil, we have a responsibility to become partisans in that war. Part of the Resistance.
Not with guns or explosives, of course. But with knowledge and perspective.
We must build our societal understanding of what we're doing to ourselves. Build our personal recognition of the elements comprising the evil that we are committing to our ecosystems and to our future. And then share that understanding with others, and take action.
We must build the Resistance personally, and through networks like Transition Towns, like 350.org, like Daily Kos, like your Facebook friends, like your neighborhood.
We must build resistance with our economic choices, and with our voices, and with our votes.
But most of all, each of us must learn to think outside the Weltanshauung, to get beyond the expedient complicity of convenience.
We all need to talk with each other, sing with each other, dance with each other, to derail these trains that are carrying us to our own environmental holocaust.
I'm a member of the Joyful Resistance.
You?