Scientific Progress Without Corresponding Moral and Political Progress
Recently I happened upon a remarkable passage written in the aftermath of the great rolling six-year slaughterhouse called World War II by the legendary British philosopher and freethinker Bertrand Russell. The passage appeared in a 1946 Russell essay titled “Ideas That Have Helped Mankind”:
“Hitherto, I have been considering the increased command over the forces of nature, which men have derived scientific knowledge, but this, although it is a pre-condition of many forms of progress, does not of itself ensure anything desirable. On the contrary, the present state of the world and the fear of atomic war show that scientific progress without corresponding moral and political progress may only increase the magnitude of the disaster that misdirected skill may bring about. In superstitious moments I am tempted to believe in the myth of the Tower of Babel, and suppose that in our own day, a similar but greater impiety is about to be visited by a more tragic and terrible punishment. Perhaps – so I sometimes allow myself to fancy – God does not intend us to understand the mechanism by which He regulates the material universe. Perhaps the nuclear physicists have come so near to the ultimate secrets that He thinks it time to bring their activities to a stop. And what simpler method could he devise than to let them carry their ingenuity to a point where they exterminate the human race. If I could think that deer and squirrels, nightingales and larks, would survive, I might view this catastrophe with some equanimity…But it is to be feared that the dreadful of the atomic bomb will destroy all forms of life equally, and that the earth will remain forever a dead clod senselessly whirling round a futile sun.”
As Russell’s great admirer Noam Chomsky has noted, it’s a miracle that we have escaped the nuclear Armageddon that haunted the British philosopher. We’ve had at least three close calls. The danger remains very much alive today, thanks in no small part to the United States’ reckless post-Cold War provocation of nuclear Russia and the Obama administration’s massive planned expansion of U.S. nuclear weapons system (more on that below).
The Gravity of the Situation
Reading the Russell passage quoted above the other day, I was reminded of a distant afternoon when I viewed some extraordinary pictures of our planet made available by NASA. Beamed down from climate-monitoring satellites orbiting Earth, these images demonstrated the deadly “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) that has resulted from “mankind’s” epic extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Heat-baked oceans, melting planetary ice cover, shrinking permafrost, dying coral reef, rising sea levels, fading boreal and rain forest – all this and more terrible to see was captured via state-of-the art satellite imagery. It was available to anyone with a PC and a decent Internet connection, thanks to humanity’s astonishing “command over the forces of nature.”
Yet while “mankind” is capable of such remarkable technical feats as NASA’s Earth imaging and digital transmission from space, it has shown itself so far morally and politically incapable of protecting livable ecology for humans and other sentient beings on “spaceship Earth” itself. The climate change that NASA monitors from far above is no small threat. The “biggest issue of our or any time” (left philosopher John Sanbonmatsu), it is a perfect example of “the magnitude of the disaster that misdirected skill may bring about” – a “catastrophe” that could “exterminate the human race” and “destroy all forms of life.” The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii recently reported that the global, fossil fuel-driven concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – the leading force behind recent climate change – has reached 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in recorded history. Levels that high have only been reached during the Pliocene era. According to Dr. Erika Podest, a leading carbon and water cycle research scientist, “This milestone is a wake-up call that our actions in response to climate change need to match the persistent rise in CO2. Climate change is a threat to life on Earth and we can no longer afford to be spectators.”
That might be putting things mildly. According to the Alaskan geophysicist John Davies, noting dramatic annual increases in carbon ppm during recent years: “The world is probably at the start of a runaway Greenhouse Event which will end most human life on Earth before 2040…The increasing Greenhouse Gas concentration, the gases which cause Global Warming, will very soon cause a rapid warming of the global climate and a chaotic climate… The immediate priority is to accept the gravity of the situation and that all nations and peoples will co-operate to solve the problem.”
While this “mankind”-made atrocity is underway, NASA is set on July 4th (next Monday) to broadcast images from a stunning orbit of Jupiter. The magnificent Juno probe will have travelled more than a billion miles in outer space. If all goes well, it will help scientists understand how much hydrogen and water exists on the planet. It will permit scientists to gauge Jupiter’s magnetic field and gravitational pull and more. NASA will use “microwave detection capability which will be able to see beneath the clouds and sort of identify the composition of what lies beneath the clouds, spectrometers, a device which actually measure the gravitational pull from the planet itself on the spacecraft, and will be able to give scientists on the ground exactly how strong it is at any given point.” (The “Public” Broadcasting System’s science chief Miles O’Brien). Incredible. Talk about scientific progress!
Meanwhile, down here on Earth, nearly half the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day and the wealth of the poorest half fell by 41% between 2010 and 2015. Oxfam reports that the planet’s 62 richest billionaires possess as much wealth between them as the poorest half of the world’s population. (I am not making that horrifying fact up, fellow world-citizen: present-day global capitalist truth is often stranger than dystopian fiction).
Many of the technologies that are used to discover, extract, refine, and burn fossil fuels (chiefly coal, oil, and gas) are themselves quite spectacularly sophisticated and elaborate. They are monuments to humanity’s “command over the forces of nature.” Given what we have long known about the elementary science of the Greenhouse Effect and recent alarmingly accelerated (potentially now “runaway”) AGW trends, however, it is immoral for those means of extraction and production to be used any longer.
Beyond Humanity in General
For Russell in 1946, such contradictions spoke to the inherent moral duality of “man.” As Russell philosophized:
“Man, viewed morally. Is a strange amalgam of angel and devil. He can feel the splendor of the night, the delicate beauty of spring flowers, the tender emotion of parental love, and the intoxication of intellectual understanding. In moments of insight visions come to him of how life should be lived and how men should order their dealings one with another. Universal love is an emotion which many have felt and which many more could feel if the world makes it less difficult. This is one side of the picture. On the other side are cruelty, greed, indifference, and over-weening pride. Men, quite ordinary men, will compel children to look on while their mothers are raped. In pursuit of political aims men will submit their opponents to long years of unspeakable anguish. We know what the Nazis did to the Jews at Auschwitz. …”
Russell’s double-edged reflection resonates all too loudly seventy years later, God and/or History knows. Still, we should guard against the tendency to be over-ready to blame humanity (“mankind”) itself for problems that arise from historically specific forms of class rule and related ecological destruction that emerged in a relatively recent and small slice of the human record.
In recent years, scientists have advanced the notion a new geological epoch: “the Anthropocene.” Generally dated from the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the provocative term refers to an era in which humanity for the first time fundamentally altered Earth’s “natural” systems (for the worse, we might add). It’s a useful conceptual development in terms of countering who deny the existence of AGW and other human impacts on the environment. But, the environmental historian Jason Moore reminds us not to project the currently and historically recent age of capital onto the broad 100,000-year swath of human activity on and in nature. It is more appropriate, Moore argues with no small justice, to label humanity’s Earth-altering assault on livable ecology as “the Capitalocene.” As Moore told radio interviewer Sasha Lilley last year, “It was not humanity as a whole that created …large-scale industry and the massive textile factories of Manchester in the 19th century or Detroit in the last century or Shenzen today. It was capital.”
The really terrible ecological consequences have come to their terrible fruition in the late industrial era and particularly over the last half century. Still, as Moore notes, the decisive societal and institutional shift came with the rise of the modern profits system. It is only during a relatively brief period of history when capitalism has existed and ruled the world system (since 1600 or thereabouts by some academic calculations, earlier and later by others) that homo sapiens’ social organization developed the capacity and inner accumulation-/commodification-/“productivity”- mad compulsion to transform Earth’s natural systems (with profitability dependent upon on the relentless appropriation of “cheap nature”: cheap food, cheap energy, cheap raw materials and cheap human labor power, that is “cheap human nature”). The taproot of the ecological crisis lay in radical changes that capital’s manic and perverse pursuit of profit/surplus value imposed on “the web of life” (of which humanity is itself a leading part).
How about the threat of nuclear war, the specter that understandably haunted Russell in 1946, in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and before the great post-World War II “Golden Age” Western economic expansion brought the “Anthropocene” or “capitalocene” to full, ecology-altering fruition? It was not humanity as a whole that invented and constructed nuclear weapons, of course. It was not homo sapiens as such that created the two great World Wars (1914-1918 and 1939-45) and the Cold War (1945-1991) that gave rise to the nuclear arms race and industry. Those terrifying developments arose from the imperial ambitions of the modern capitalist European, United States, and Japanese ruling classes and the determination of the Western elite to contain and crush the Soviet Union’s experiment in development outside and against the world capitalist system. The Soviets had little choice but to develop nuclear weapons in the wake of Washington’s decision to use the atomic bomb in Japan. That epic war crime was committed largely as the first shot in the Cold War – as statement to Moscow in the wake of a global war Western planners directed largely against the Soviet Union.
No Soul
Lurking behind the exterminist absurdities of modern weapons production (nuclear and otherwise) is the specifically capitalist drive for investor profit. For capitalism, Russell’s tension between humanity’s “devil” and “angel” sides holds no interest. Smart and successful masters of the bottom line don’t fret over such philosophical matters, much less the common good. They go for high rates of return. As Ron Jacobs reminds us, “Neoliberal capitalism is, like all previous versions of capitalism…exists to feed its already bloated being and it has no soul. It exists outside of greed, because it is an amoral phenomenon….”
Justified in the name of the Cold War and the Cold War’s successor the permanent Global War “on” (of) Terror, cost-plus “defense” contracts provide guaranteed super-profits for top investors and managers at giant, well-heeled high-tech firms like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrup-Grumman, and Rockwell Collins. The simple drive to keep high taxpayer-funded profit rates rolling is a major force behind the endless wars Washington wages with what strikes many angry political commentators see as a reckless and feckless lack of strategy. As Andrew Cockburn recently noted, “the pundit outrage may be misplaced. Focusing on Washington rather than on distant war zones, it becomes clear that the military establishment does indeed have a strategy, a highly successful one, which is to protect and enhance its own prosperity…Given this focus, creating and maintaining an effective fighting force becomes a secondary consideration, reflecting a relative disinterest – remarkable to outsiders – in the actual business of war, as opposed to the business of raking in dollars for the Pentagon and its industrial and political partners.”
An expert investigator of the Pentagon system, Cockburn finds that that this soulless focus is the basic driving force behind U.S. President Barack Obama’s “massive nuclear build-up, routinely promoted under the comforting rubric of ‘modernization.’” The Obomber’s mad Strangelovian expansion includes “the planned “construction of a new fleet of nuclear submarines loaded with new intercontinental nuclear missiles…a new land-based intercontinental missile, a new strategic nuclear bomber, a new land-and-sea-based tactical nuclear fighter plane, a new long-range nuclear cruise missile, … at least three nuclear warheads that are essentially new designs, and new fuses for existing warheads. In addition, new nuclear command-and-control systems are under development for a fleet of satellites (costing up to $1 billion each) designed to make the business of fighting a nuclear war more practical and manageable.” So much for the Orwellian Obama’s public calls to tame the specter of nuclear war.
It’s all quite insane. Along with the ever-more grave climate threat, it’s part of why the editors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have been pushing its ominous Doomsday Clock back closer to midnight in recent, post-Cold War years.
When marshalled to the service of “mankind’s” capitalist class, fossil fuel “forces of nature” make the owners and top managers of Exxon-Mobil, British Petroleum et al, unimaginably rich and powerful. The fact that those Big Carbon masters are Greenhouse Gassing life to death on Earth – a crime that will make the Nazis look like minor league exterminists – is a reflection not of humanity’s “devil” side but of its potentially fatal captivity to the capitalist class its amoral/immoral profits system. Ecological survival – the very chance of a decent future – now depends on a deep and prolonged mass rebellion to end that captivity by any and all means necessary.
“In the coming decades,” the retired physician Ellen Isaacs writes in the latest issue of Z Magazine, “life as we know it may well be destroyed by climate disaster or widening war between the superpowers, so long as capitalists remain in power anywhere in the world. We have no choice but to overthrow this system and put the world’s workers in charge…We must build a society based on equality, sharing, and production for need rather than profit.” Indeed, it’s eco-socialism or mere barbarism if we’re lucky. “The uncomfortable truth,” Istvan Meszaros rightly argued 15 years ago, “is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself.” The project of building a united, militant, revolutionary, organized, durable, environmentalist, powerful, antimilitarist, and global Left is now an urgent life or death matter for many of us and for future generations.
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13 Comments
Perhaps Paul Street should try to imagine the evolution of human society without energy, fossil fuels, without the industrial revolution—without Capitalism. How could it have come about? It seems that Bertrand Russell understood the defects of humankind, living in a kind of original sin. Yet, expressing how human society can change the path it is heading towards is a useful exercise. Plaudits to Street on that. Clearly, (revolutionary) change has happened, and it does not always have to be harmful. Circumstances often cause it to happen.
I lived in the so-called second and then third world for some 15 years, and while I am now in the U.S., I returned recently for several weeks to the “third world.” (These are meaningless and demeaning terms in many ways, but we understand something of what they mean.)
Living once again in 100 degree heat minus an escape into air conditioning, fighting with street traffic that was a continuous, dangerous, packed course, being with people, most of whom live the most precarious existence, and so on, have finally left me too damn often weeping and trying to hide it.
What life will be in the future for the comfortable classes in the so-called first-world, is already a reality for most of the people on earth. How for them (us) to realize what this means is a difficult barrier to overcome. This is why so many well-intentioned people can see theoretically the need for revolution, but fear what it will mean so much that they actually do not take needed action.
True Michael. For what it’s worth I have never travelled, like most people in the world! But the question remains. What action and how.
Single issue, not a problem. Higher wages, not a problem. Get that school crossing for the kids, not a problem. Sexism, racism, there are groups and org’s to join. Independent unions. Get out on the streets to fight the United Patriots Front and neo-nazis, not a problem.
Changing the world, seriously, massive problem. Huge problem. To what and how?
I am tired from working, and reading people who call themselves activists and organisers, have bee. For years, with massive connections and access to media etc., saying stuff like Paul does at the end of his essay, the only really meaningful part of the essay, the rest is old news, and me feeling like I have to walk out into the street and magically organise, or know what to do, where to go, what to say, how to do it. Shit.
I have no clues. I haven’t even travelled. Can’t afford it.
I would be fine with a Celebrity Occupation but let’s not pretend this is the revolution. Anyone else remember when the Yippies descended on the Pentagon and tried to levitate it? Great moment of Spectacle but just a Moment.
So in every community there are people who want to break free from the fossil fuel economy, right? They might not be eco-socialists, but they hear that doomsday clock ticking and want to do “something”. This is where you insert yourself and your articulate critique, say” “fellow earthlings, we got a HUGE problem.” And despite what Robert claims below, you can use a little abstraction, a few symbols, and they will still understand. Just don’t be condescending. So yeah, go to the meeting, take on some tasks, build some trust and go fuck shit up. Easy peasy.
Na, I’m not being suckered by all this. It ain’t easy peasy and never has been. What’s easy is to say what Street said in that last sentence and then to yell, “right on man.”
Like how long have we got left? From an earlier Street essay it was, what, 9 years or so? Klein’s figures? Fifteeen? Twenty? Fifty? Now he’s yelling for unified action? What, it’s different now because “we” know better or something? Where was or has been this unified action before, this counter hegemonic ideological force, that could have arisen fifty years ago? No, let’s leave it till now.
No, it’s easy peasy to write shit like what I’m doing now, and it may even be essy to get a few souls together to funk shit up, even go a while, play some drums, but what Street is saying is what I say every fucking day quietly to myself or yelling it in frustration at friends, so it ain’t no great revelation, it’s just fucking obvious and easy peasy to say.
Come on all you people who call yourselves activists and organisers with your head and feet in the shit and your workingclass solidarity or affinities, with your intelligence, knowledge, good hearts and copy of Kapital in your pocket, show me how. Teach me fucking how. I’ll be at work earning my pissy wage six days a week, living my precarious existence, carrying my daily fear and anxiety around waiting for your call. And don’t fucking tell me I should do it, because I already told you, I don’t fucking know how.
No, it isn’t easy peasy. History has already fucking proved that. So stop stating the bleeding obvious Paul.
The conclusion:
“The project of building a united, militant, revolutionary, organized, durable, environmentalist, powerful, anti-militarist, and global Left is now an urgent life or death matter for many of us and for future generations.”
Exactly right Paul. On with the project of uniting the different goals and groups so that coalescing through unity, magnifies power through numbers.
“It was not humanity as a whole that created …large-scale industry and the massive textile factories of Manchester in the 19th century or Detroit in the last century or Shenzen today. It was capital.”
Total nonsense. “Capital” is a scare word for money, which is just paper. Humans give it value. Don’t blame abstract notions (“capital”, “capitalism”) for human actions. Surely it was humans, not IBM or the Nazi party as entities, that ran Auschwitz?
Human beings take all these actions and diverting blame to abstractions is a means of evading our collective responsibility. Perhaps the so-called left would be able to appeal to Trump supporters if leftists spoke English and avoided referring to irrelevant abstractions.
“The project of building a united, militant, revolutionary, organized, durable, environmentalist, powerful, antimilitarist, and global Left is now an urgent life or death matter for many of us and for future generations.”
How?
James,
The most famous leftists must get off their asses and organize an occupation of Capitol Hill in Washington. I’m referring to Chomsky, Hedges, West, Klein, Smiley, Sanders, Stein, Sawant, and others. I believe a massive occupation of the Hill would cause an international actual revolution.
Tyler
I understand where you are coming from. The question remains, how? So many writers are described as whatever and ACTIVIST or ORGANISER. I am an ordinary person who has never organised anything in my life, yet am told, by many “leftists” to go out and organise. Organise what, where, how, who?
IOPS was created to help get people to organise and failed. P4SP is up and running and will probably end up in the same place as IOPS. The Next System Project is trying to organise shit around vision in order to coordinate strategy. Where’s Occupy now? Where’s Nuit Debout now? What of Sanders? What of all the other groups I know nothing of?
Writers like Street constantly state what is needed over and over, yet rarely point to explicit initiatives, orgs, visions, or actual strategies that might help ordinary people with direction. All I get is some sort of eco-socialism is needed. Ok, what is that? How? When?
Occupying capitol hill might work but what is the vision behind it? Where is the shared program, strategy, that could lead to that vision? Are the working classes on board? Would all those attending be unified, even if losely, moving in the same direction?
Transformative “spontaneous ” uprisings or movements may cause all kinds of disruption and elite scrambling for a while, but then what? How does it solidify into a solidaritous movement that can counter with real force the Big Daddy White Geezer Hegemonic Power Grid?
I like your idealism and positivity and that you kick all these well known left spokespeople up the arse, but the question remains,
HOW?
James, I think it would be a good idea to contact Arun Gupta, who has shown interest in occupying Washington. He likely has connections to famous leftists. I know Chris Hedges would be amenable to this idea. He has been calling for revolution for years. Chris is close friends with Cornel West, the most famous revolutionary of our time. I think the occupation should begin as soon as possible.
Well tell me Tyler, what or who is Hedges waiting for? Huh? Someone else? Or is he spending most of his time writing his new book because that’s what HE does.
Ring him, and tell him to get off his arse and pull revolutionary strings. I have nowhere near his attention grabbing abilities and I have to do my pissy shit six days a week in order to get by.
It does appear that Hedges is waiting for someone else to organize it. I’ll try to contact him.