I think the system will collapse, but not through our agency.
Alexander Cockburn1
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.
Antonio Gramsci2
Fatalism Marxist style
If you don’t like any of this, but you know you can’t stop it, where does it leave you?
Paul Kingsnorth3
A bedeviling psychological problem ensues with the understanding that education is an assemblage among assemblages and is itself comprised of lesser assemblages (all the way down) at the same time it also exists as a mere component part of greater assemblages (all the way up).4 Let’s say, per impossibile, that one were to gain a complete understanding of all of the relevant assemblages and their interactions, becoming a veritable Laplacean demon of assemblages. Such omniscience would win one a complete mapping of assemblages. Who can guess what this cartographic competence would enable? Like the original Laplace’s demon, one could predict the future, for starters, charting the trajectory of assemblage interactions involved in, say, how the stock market will react to rumors of war or how schools will devolve as fossil fuels become scarcer. Whatever one wants to know: just map it and trace a certain future.
The motivational problem, though, is what Frederic Jameson calls a “winner loses logic,” where the theorist “wins” by constructing as total and air-tight a theory as possible.5 Yet by doing so he simultaneously “loses” in that the point of having such a complete theory is lost owing to the very fact that he has accounted for everything; that is, since all has been determined beforehand in the theoretical model, including all causal interactions, there remains no place for intervention because everything has already been accounted for. So why bother with the cartography in the first place? As Jameson explains, “Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.”6 If a particular assemblage, in this case the educational assemblage, seems so tightly locked into its surrounding network of assemblages and, even more, is wholly in the orbit of some gravitationally denser, solar assemblage such as “the economy/capitalism,” it would seem to lose any meaningful institutional autonomy. Its marionette status may explain a great deal (Jameson’s theorist winning) but at the expense of not being able to envision let alone act toward any way “out” (Jameson’s theorist losing).
If such a situation obtained, it would be rational for those on education’s “inside” to feel as if their efforts toward substantially moving education’s institutional assemblage in a chosen direction would be futile. Without movement from neighboring assemblages, which itself may not be possible without movement on the part of the ordering assemblage (ex hypothesi the economy/capitalism); things are just too hemmed in. Whatever the internal rearrangements, the borders are too well patrolled and the overall shape of the assemblage’s perimeter is too well maintained. This in my view is precisely the situation in which would-be education reformers and education activists find themselves. Their failure is fated: the gears and pulleys are simply arranged too tightly for any one of them to “give” without accommodating external movements. They are straight-jacketed and unable to escape, no matter how hard they struggle. So insofar as they are inside the assemblage they might as well relax. And try to find some other way.
When I say “relax,” I mean it and I mean something specific. I have no strategy (spoiler alert!) for slaying the capitalist dragon that time-honored narrative archetype has led us to expect as a rousing finale a la St. George and Bilbo Baggins: the plucky hero cleverly finding that one weakness in the monster’s underbelly. However tempting and psychically gratifying this reverie may be, one must refuse the story time impulse and its short-term aesthetic satisfactions. (Even as I write these words I can still feel the archetype’s ancestral pull: ‘maybe peak oil will do it, exposing unsustainable high net energy requirements as the beast’s soft underbelly, bringing it all down …and soon …Collapse! Apocalypse!’ Be still my heart…)7 History shows that this kind of utopian/dystopian impulse, which may be the same in this case, is to be distrusted. It is always a possibility, of course, and there is no argument against it as such, probability suggests one should move on. But to where?
Again, I have no general argument for ‘what we should do.’ That is too large a question for me here, one that may not even admit of an answer, as there is no guarantee that agency vis-à-vis the entire capitalist system will accomplish anything at all, or is even a relevant construct. What I do have is an argument for something not to do, at least perhaps to help better distribute activist energies where they might possibly be useful. Flying in the face of what most critics of whatever politics believe, and taking everything into consideration, it seems to me that, at least for those opposed to capitalism as inherently unjust and environmentally destructive, education activism does not matter and is a waste of time. As the critics’ knives sharpen, let me clarify at once exactly what I mean. I do not mean that education does not matter. (I have no doubt about this.) I do not mean that activism does not matter. (No doubt about this either). I mean specifically that, insofar as it aims at “social justice,” as most left visions of education activism do (and right visions too, the difference being in how social justice is conceived), education activism is not only: a) futile (the ‘does not matter’ part) but b) also misallocates attention and energy (the ‘waste of time’ part). We should not be fooled into thinking that reforming schools will generate serious social and political reforms. To the famous (in progressive education circles) old question asked by George S. Counts, “Dare the school build a new social order?” I answer, “no, it shouldn’t.”8 As I hope to have illustrated somewhat already, even with the little bit of relative autonomy they enjoy, the major educational institutions are far too constrained and are growing more so. At the level of individual instructors, “radicals” in academia achieve very little except for furthering their own careers (myself included) in a consumerist environment that rewards novelty, and educators market themselves accordingly for publication and tenure (where the latter still exists). It almost goes without saying that K-12 school teachers are yoked to an ever-more oppressive assessment-driven curriculum (and even pedagogy) just about everywhere in the industrialized world.
At best, what one develops by leaving the large scale institutions is developing one’s own little island of harmony, creating one’s own little “point of light,” to paraphrase George Bush I. And there are wonderful examples of this sort of thing that are more than mere objects of cynicism and should not be sneered at, though these off-the-reservation efforts are by definition a Pandora’s Box. For example, there is the growing legion of home schoolers - a million or two strong in the US - most but not all of whom are doing so for religious reasons. By definition, these situations are heterogeneous and so are hit-and-miss as far as their worthwhileness (from any perspective). There are also ongoing quasi-utopian educational communities that seem to cut against the grain of their surrounding culture, the child-centeredness and romanticism of Waldorf education supplying an example popular in some areas.9 There are even some inspiring anomalies that seem nicely integrated into their local social and environmental surroundings, like the famous Reggio Emilia schools in Italy.10 And many others.
A venerable example would be A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School in Suffolk (UK), now run by his daughter Zoe Redhead. Summerhill’s philosophy is to teach children to be free people - “where kids have freedom to be themselves” - to as large an extent as possible.11 Having visited there as an initial skeptic, I can say that Summerhill is an extremely charming place and one cannot help but root for its continuing survival against the government inspectors (a battle they seem to have won for the time being).12 However, these little utopian experiments have never proven to be scalable and so they remain, in effect, isolated outposts of privilege, often literally so (Summerhill, for example, is small and very expensive.) And there are of course elite schools of many types that are far out of reach financially to most, like the lavish private schools of the US East Coast. Though invaluable as examples of alternative possibilities, this grab bag of home schoolers, utopian “progressive” educational communities and elite prep schools, what these “alternatives” share in common is precisely that they are not real alternatives for the vast majority of the population. They have never proven scalable (and home schooling is not scalable by definition) and they are simply out of reach financially for almost everybody. As a matter of general education policy, what goes on in these isolated peaceable kingdoms is largely irrelevant.
So this leaves the vast majority to the tender mercies of public education. In the US this is where some 90% of children still attend, the bulk of the remaining 10% being enrolled in parochial or other larger systems that are, in the end, really not so different in their essentials from the public systems alongside which they operate. This means that nearly all schoolchildren, except for the happy few in their designer lifeboats, are fully subject to the larger forces I have been discussing throughout this book. No matter how groovy or “progressive” their teachers, their futures are still determined by the same iron realities that I have been discussing here: First, their future possibilities are subject to harsh logic dictated by the TRPF, which by now has become a kind of falling rate of learning. Second, the possibilities for expressing their own voice in their schools, while still real and valuable, is hanging by an increasingly thin thread. And third, their continuing on and attempting to beat the economic tide through higher education - and at least save themselves - is now caught in a future of relative joblessness (even for the moderately credentialed) with the added insult of crushing and increasingly unpayable debt. What are those involved in such dead-end institutions to do? The heroic gesture is pointless. And everyone seems stuck in place, strapped in and unable to leave even if they wanted to (in part because they are subject to the great lesson in labor discipline so helpfully provided during economic reces-sions/depressions, which is that one is lucky to have a job - any job). My suggestion is that a certain kind of pessimism is wholly rational in this situation; it is ethically warranted and even survival positive.
Consider the familiar school-prison analogy. Both are massive institutions involving scores of millions of individuals. The main employees are teachers and guards. I take it as obvious that prison guards are unlikely through their activism to do much to change the basic role and nature of US prisons (if they wanted to). They may improve their own working conditions (more power to them) and they may in an ancillary fashion help improve the general lot of prisoners with some humane reforms (more exercise time, say). Such efforts are nothing to sneer at. Yet it seems clear in this case that the prison guards are not going to alter the prison’s basic place, qua carceral assemblage, within the totality of social institutions that it serves. As prison guards, they are unlikely to obtain legal reforms to the criminal justice system that underwrites the prison’s basic metabolism. As prison guards, they are not going to get the drug laws changed. They are very unlikely to change gang culture, save families, alter racism and patriarchy or increase job opportunities. As prison guards, they are not really within social reach of the main and chronic factors that populate, structure and perpetuate the carceral system within which they function. Though for some reason we don’t when discussing education policy put them in the same category (perhaps partly because most educators would find the comparison unflattering), teachers and professors are, vis-à-vis their activist potentialities, in roughly the same position. (Please understand I am not claiming these are the same jobs and that they are comparable in all respects.) With respect to structural issues pertaining to social justice, the educators are functionally similar to the prison guards in that they are the rather hapless marionettes of the larger forces that by and large write their occupational script. As prison guards and as teachers, their movements are similarly restricted.
What I am not saying. I am not therefore saying that it is not worthwhile to be a prison guard or a teacher, that these are not potentially dignified vocations worthy of respect and remuneration. Neither am I saying that it does not matter whether individuals in these occupations are kind, conscientious and competent. Teachers can obviously make huge positive differences for their pupils, to the extent that we might even say they can achieve a kind of immortality.13 My argument for pessimism in formal education is not an argument for the cessation of teachers’ conscientiousness and caring. On the contrary. At the level of interpersonal ethics, it is optimal for individual young people to have wise and caring adults around them. Plus, it is independently valuable (I mean independent of economics and politics) to bring students into their cultural inheritance, turn them on to a particular subject, and help them develop communicative and other mental skills with a wide range of potential applications. These achievements are worthy of apolitical celebration whenever they occur. But it would be easier on everyone if we dropped the political shtick. Not to say, of course, that the politics is irrelevant. There are many examples of actually existing real change from which leftists can draw inspiration. Chávez’s Venezuela comes to mind.14 Yet such examples reinforce the present point, as it is quite obvious that the precondition for the substantive education reforms in a place like Venezuela is precisely the Bolivarian Revolution itself, as per my thesis; it is the revolution that is building the schools. Pace Counts, it does not seem to work the other way around. Is there an historical example of schools pushing real societal change from within?
Educators should however be as concerned - and as politically active - as anyone else. But at this point that political energy is best directed outside the education system; not inside toward education reforms that are supposedly going to make the prison, er, school, more tolerable, but outside the education assemblage in search of more promising activist sites. Even though the politics are a dead end, teaching is a worthwhile profession on its own terms and has nothing for which to apologize. The same might be said of nurses and physicians, social workers, psychologists, therapists, EMTs and many others in the so-called “helping” professions. (One cannot quite say the same about most lawyers and corporate types, as their fortunes are almost completely proportional to their ability to help elites rob labor and sequester capital.) My argument here is for a compartmentalized and political pessimism that is directed intra-institutionally. I am not arguing for a global pessimism or a wholesale abandonment of political activism in spaces outside doomed institutions, only that a targeted pessimism is more rational. In that vein, generally speaking, better an unofficial blog or an occupy protest than a speech at a faculty meeting or a petition to an administrator. Interestingly, this is wholly consistent with Kant’s original enlightenment-defining distinction between the “public” and “private” uses of reason, where the former denotes speaking in one’s universal capacity as a citizen, to the world, as it were, and the latter consists of the voice one adopts when one is constrained by the duties inhering in one’s job or office. In the “private” realm of one’s job, one does what one must; in the “public” realm of the citizen or, we might say, the activist, one does what one oneself thinks must be done. Exercising one’s public use of reason in Kant’s sense, which in the US still enjoys legal protections not guaranteed to the private use, may be the best posture for those employed within especially supine capital-subordinate institutions, such as schools and universities, whose character is, ex hypothesi, fated.
Note that I am not considering the “beautiful soul” approach of the quitter or the hermit. The heroic gesture is available only to a very and usually quite privileged few; curiously akin to the utopian miniaturist, it is not scalable. On the inside, you simply do your job, which you have to do because you need the income and you care about the people around you (and you care about yourself, like all sane people). In his research on dissidents in the former Soviet Union, anthropologist James Wertsch terms this attitude “internal emigration” and considers it “a form of resistance to a totalitarian state.”15 The wisdom of the ages counsels in such situations: just try your best to be kind and at least to not be an asshole. As philosopher William B. Irvine puts it, often “we must learn to adapt ourselves to the environment in which fate has placed us and do our best to love the people with whom fate has surrounded us.”16 One could dress that insight up with fine phrases from Aristotle about phronesis and “virtue” or perhaps Kantian moral imperatives toward human dignity and respect, but in the end the philosophically-pedigreed synonyms wouldn’t add a great deal; it’s just that simple and every decent person knows it.
John Holloway identifies these moments of decency, which become more difficult to enact as things grow grimmer, as a potential “dialectic of misfitting” that has the potential to enlarge, one by one, the “cracks” in the capitalist edifice.17 For him, resistance should be conceived as an “interstitial” process, whereby the small cracks we encounter in our everyday lives can be widened into fissures that can in turn be widened ultimately into real breaks: “Break it in as many ways as we can and try to expand and multiply the cracks and promote their confluence.”18 Holloway’s is an inspiring and optimistic vision. It gives people something to work toward and to place their small acts of kindness and decency into a larger revolutionary frame. It appealingly avoids grandiosity. And I think it is largely consistent with what I am suggesting here, with one important exception: I think his “crack capitalism” may underestimate the temporal urgency of the mutually exacerbating economic, climate and energy crises and the extent to which they may not be able to be “turned around.” There may not be time to work through all these cracks and the environmental damage may already be done. Holloway does clearly appreciate the larger point about contingency, though: “The old revolutionary certainty can no longer stand. There is no guarantee of a happy ending.”19 It is, I think, an unpopular thing to say but what is missing is that authentically pre-capitalist notion that will not quite concede the anarchist point that we can be the authors of everything we choose, that we noble human beings are sovereign over our own and each other’s lives. What is missing from even this most inspired activist vision is, in a word, fate.
Heraclitus20
It is a maxim, then, of conservation of energy, a “know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em” sensibility, with the added dimension that the implication that the notion that changing schools is the solution is misleading and therefore likely to be deleterious.21 Regarding political aspirations for keystone institutions like education (usually distinguishable from one’s personal everyday ethical conduct), my suggestion is that those positioned inside those institutions ought to fold ’em and direct their political energies outside those systems. Since these institutions are so tightly wired as to respond primarily from directives from the outside, one is best positioned on the outside, closer to the sources of the directives. Owing to its essential attachment to capitalist production, education institutions are on a very-short-to-nonexistent leash; there is almost no institutional autonomy, and more, no significant future prospects of achieving it (contra my own previous hopes).22 I make no claim here about the dependent status of every social institution, because there are still degrees of relative autonomy. This question must be decided ad hoc, based on the best judgment of those with the best information (including of course those actually working within) the institution in question. What can nurses achieve? Librarians? Sanitation workers? Police officers? Analyses of the prospects for movement within these particular arenas should constitute an urgent research priority. My suspicion is that the closer one gets to core productive and reproductive functions, those that a triage of capitalist production would assign a position of priority (e.g. energy, business and financial regulation, education, policing, taxation), the constituent institutions coalescing around those areas will be the hardest to move and will best be moved via outside leverage; in other words, it is largely beyond the capabilities of those on the inside. But these are empirical matters and as such they may yield surprising and counterintuitive results on a case-by-case basis. My only claim here is that education under advanced capitalism is too far gone, maybe not for little islands of “critical pedagogy” here and there, but for substantive and scalable resistance. As the ensemble of the examples discussed in this book indicate, things seem to be getting worse.
This picture admittedly implies a somewhat deterministic outlook, at least for certain institutions like education. And unfortunately, yes, that is the picture I’m advancing. Ex hypothesi the larger picture is that capitalism itself is fated to move in certain ways and by tight association, those institutions most tightly bolted into the sinking ship are going to go down with it - while conversely the ones that are less bolted in have a chance (though not a guarantee) of escaping. I am therefore arguing for a species of Marxist fatalism, though one that is not necessarily psychologically “depressing” in the sense that it necessarily leads to quietism, or in any way conflates with futilism, the idea that nothing we do matters. In connection with the false equation of fatalism and futilism, there are important historical lessons to keep in mind. Certain types of fatalistic outlooks demonstrably do not result in futilism, quietism, “giving up,” conventionalism - or anything like that. There have never been two more fatalistic worldviews than that of the Roman elite and the Calvinists (predestination).23 Yet, for their own internal reasons, there have also obviously never been two more activist worldviews than these as well. The assertion of any necessary link between fatalism and futilism is simply not tenable.
It is complicated, though, to grasp exactly what might be meant by “fatalism.” There is an almost infinite variety of positions available in this neck of the philosophical woods, as the discussion now skirts perilously close to the perennial - and 100% irresolvable - set of debates often to be found under the heading of “free will v. determinism.” This includes the contemporary rage for “compatibilism” (the more common philosophical view there is no conflict between the two) and “incompatibilism” (the more common popular view that free will and determinism do conflict). I will not be bogged down in this quagmire from which there really is no exit. Fortunately, the conception of fatalism that I mean to employ here circumnavigates most of the difficulties.
One last preliminary. There are different relevant senses to the terms “fate” and “fatalism.” The first and most archaic of these, and one I am not meaning to employ, has a more supernatural connotation and is most often employed against some sort of religious backdrop. So for example in the ancient Greek tradition, fate is an autonomous extraterrestrial force against which rebellion is impossible, even by the gods (usually). In the classical story, the fates, the Moirai, are typically conceived as autonomous personages: Clotho (who spins the thread), Lachesis (who measures it) and Atropos (who cuts it).
‘Three other women were also sitting on thrones which were evenly spaced around the spindle. They were the Fates, the daughters of Necessity, robed in white, with garlands on their heads; they were Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos, accompanying the Sirens’ song, with Lachesis singing of the past, Clotho of the present, and Atropos of the future.’24
Though de-personified, there is an ontologically allied conception in the Judeo-Christian tradition in certain understandings of divine providence and predestination, as discussed earlier, the latter’s Calvinist-Puritan form famously being the object of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.25 As with the Greeks, here there is a sense of fate (predestination) as occupying an altogether extra-human metaphysical plane; it is very much written into the fabric of the cosmos (literally for the Fates) and is in no way yielding to the sublunary machinations of ordinary human beings. Though influential and probably the most popular conception of fate, I must dismiss it on Occam’s razor grounds (i.e. theoretical parsimony), as it would seem to require an elaborate theological edifice for coherence.
Also avoiding the philosophers’ quagmire, I take no position on a contending conception sometimes called “hard determinism,” that is scientific-causal determinism, the assessment of which is beyond my scope. I will note, though, that this is perhaps the strongest of the determinisms. Neither am I tempted in this context by Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen’s interesting weak deterministic notion of the “imperatively inevitable,” which holds that where X and Y are the live options, and X is so morally repugnant or otherwise odious as to be morally unconscionable, then Y may be said to be inevitable.26 Regarding the alleged historical inevitability of socialism, a prime example of imperative inevitability is captured in Rosa Luxemburg’s famous disjunction “socialism or barbarism,” where the former is to be taken as inevitable because the alternative is so unthinkably unacceptable.27 One might even say that Marx utilizes this form of inevitability in the above-cited passages of the Manifesto where he states both that socialism is inevitable and that it could all end instead in the “ruin of the contending classes.” In the case of the former, he may be using “inevitability” in Cohen’s imperative sense. Whatever it is, and though appealing on its own terms, it seems to me that imperative inevitability is not really a conception of inevitability, as its disjunctive form logically implies; it seems more of a rhetorical device employed as emphasis rather than an actual commitment to inevitability or fate as those terms have been commonly understood.
So in what defensible sense might we understand an insti-tution’s trajectory to be fated? By way of answer, I appeal to another ancient conception of fate, though one not so old as the Moirai: what philosopher Robert C. Solomon terms “narrative necessity.”28 This conception finds antecedents in the Heraclitus fragment that reads “character is fate” and also the tragic plays of Sophocles and others.29 This kind of fatalism focuses on the significance of events rather than their causal provenance and it has the advantage that it “can be understood without acknowledging any mysterious agency.”30 In a sense bracketing the causal question, narrative necessity represents a recognition that objects and beings can have an inherent teleology, that is, they can be directed or oriented in a certain way that seals their fate. If it grows, an acorn will become an oak and not some other thing.
Note that there is an element of contingency here that clearly distinguishes this kind of teleological necessity from the cosmic Moiric or Calvinist kind: the telos “oak” is to be understood as conditional, in this case contingent upon the presence of proper environmental conditions for growth. Given those conditions, though, the oak will, to paraphrase Nietzsche, become what it is.31 Applied to human beings this teleological conception typically becomes wrapped in narrative form because it reflects how, apart from some psychopathology, we tend to understand ourselves: as protagonists of our own story. What Solomon means to capture by narrative necessity is that, again bracketing the metaphysical question of causal antecedents (nature or nurture?), our internal makeup can be such that it can be said that, given normal environmental conditions, we are fated in a certain direction, to become some particular thing and not another thing.
There can be biological (e.g. gender), sociological (e.g. class) or characterological aspects to this “fating.” Say I’m a junkie who’s found himself perpetually fallen into the hopeless Sisyphean mania of “chasing the dragon” such that objective observers would say that that this is who I am at this point in my life: an addict headed toward oblivion. In such a sad situation, there comes a time when even the most sympathetic loved one must see the trajectory for what it is, that because of the present constitution of the addict (physiological, psychological, moral, whatever), the trajectory is bound to play out in a certain direction absent the intervention of outside and/or unforeseen forces. Note that this is neither a causal-scientific nor a Nostradamus-like prediction about a future state of affairs at time T: that, say, I will die by June of next year. It is rather an appreciation that the narrative that has evolved (with me as the junkie-protagonist) must resolve itself in a certain way that is not other ways (again, absent some unforeseen and/or outside force). As Solomon writes, “Fatalism is just concerned with the significance of the outcome rather than the causal path that brought it about.”32 As such, narrative fatalism is, I think, properly agnostic about the question of individual free will. In philosophical parlance, it is “compatibilist,” i.e. it is among the species of views wherein free will and determinism are thought compatible, in this case because narrative necessity can allow for the idea that our own character is “set” by choice or by necessity - or by some admixture of the two. The fatalist wants an explanation of the situation but not necessarily a causal account. What is significant is the distilling of meaning out of the sequence of events, “and that means fitting it into a narrative that makes sense of our lives.”33
This kind of thinking, I should note, is anathema to more individualist philosophies such as existentialism and libertarianism that labor under the conceit that there is always an element of “freedom” or choice even in the direst and seemingly most constrained of circumstances. For Sartre there is always the possibility of at least a brief moment of refusal where, to use his famous example, “the militant in the resistance who was caught and tortured” and could perhaps always have held out for just one more second.34 So the dragon-chasing junkie always has a choice to get high again, and there could in principle be a heroic refusal at every step of the way, even if it did mean death. This may be. Narrative fatalism, I think, deftly sidesteps this challenge because it has no need to deny that stories evolve, alter direction, throw up surprises and otherwise may change in ways that are presently unanticipated. It is more of a probabilistic notion, where one would recognize that, at the very least, there is always the possibility of incomplete information (maybe there was something “in” that junkie that nobody knew about). The Laplacean demon does not actually exist, after all, but not because of the existence of a supernatural “will” standing over and against the natural world outside of causation. Shopenhauer, arguing against a facile conception of free will and for a conception of “the innate character of the human being,” allows that, “every deed could be predicted with assurance, indeed, calculated, were it not that, in part, character is very difficult to discover, and in part, too, that the motive is often obscured and always exposed to the countering effects of other motives that lie solely in the person’s sphere of thought and are inaccessible to others.”35 He then adds that one must also consider as variables “external circumstances” and the person’s “apprehension of these, the accuracy of which depends on his understanding and its education.”36 However set is the “innateness,” of the character, then, there are bound to be external and internal factors capable of altering any course of direction. Yet at the same time the mere occurrence of such an alteration does not cast retrospective doubt on the “character is fate” thesis. Your fate sends you on your way, but how that way turns out depends in part on factors other than the fatedness itself.
One’s conception should not fall into the other extreme, though. The absence of omniscience does not entail that human self-understanding can surrender completely to chaos and surprise. While a person’s “understanding and its education” may supply wild card variables in this context, they also always provide to human experience a degree of the narrative order that preconditions the possibility of any self-awareness at all. A person experiencing sensory qualia as a purely random succession of mental states would not be an “I” in any recognizable sense; such an entity would be trapped in a whirring eternal “now,” with neither retrospective nor prospective capabilities, lacking a first-person sense of being a self who is moving through time. A total breakdown of narrative order is the very definition of madness. Even small and moderate breakdowns can be psychologically extremely wrenching, shocks to the system from which it may take a lifetime to recover. So the narrative order we project onto ourselves and the world simply cannot wholly disintegrate into hyper-fluidity while still retaining functionality, that is, life. While alteration is always possible, at the same time we are narratively restorative and reparative creatures; a change in the narrative is always possible, but for this to happen the extant narrative must somehow actually - not hypothetically - change into the next extant narrative. And when it comes to the structuring narratives that order our lives generally, it can take a great deal to turn the ship around. It seems almost impossible for adults. Even with children, the shaping of a master narrative requires sustained education, the very area that, ex hypothesi, seems so tightly determined by systemic imperatives. It is no accident that control of primary education is always an essential goal for every political regime, everywhere. While there are predictable patterns, exactly how an individual responds to upbringing has never fully been answered by anyone. We are very little farther in answering this question than was Plato’s Socrates over two millennia ago, whose conclusion in the dialogue Meno about the teachability of virtue, is merely that “it appears to be present in those of us who may possess it as a gift from the gods.”37
So does that mean one gives up on the project of narrative alteration at both individual and communal levels? Or, we might say, the project of education itself? Not quite.
I have argued that, due to its identifiable internal tendencies, eliminationist capitalism can be described as having a certain character in the requisite narrative sense. As per Heraclitus, this character can thus be said to be dispositive for its systemic trajectory, in a word, its fate. The timing is likely impossible to predict, but the telos of this apparatus arcs toward the elimination of most human beings as superfluous (their disposability resolved through warehousing or, in the worst case, the war and genocide of “human smoke”38 ) and the destruction of the environment. It is in a morbid “race” between these two interrelated phenomena for which gets there first. We are locked into these internal and external dynamics. No one - left, right or center - has presented any plausible picture for how to defuse this bomb-laden capitalist suicide vest. In the ancient narrative sense of fatalism, I believe, our demise is fated and our doom sealed. That is the “end” in “endgame.”
I’m sorry it is bad news. The good news, though, is that there is no reason to receive this news with the mentality of the written-into-the-fabric-of-the-cosmos conception of fate. The Moirai are wonderful characters but they do not, as suggested earlier, really help to make the case for fate as an external, autonomous force over and against us and inaccessible on some separate metaphysical plane. As per Heraclitus, character is fate, though. And the narrative conception leaves room for the possibility that the fate-trajectory could be altered. Against the odds, there could be an intervention in which the heroin junkie detoxes and heals. Ex hypothesi it may not be because of his own exertion of will, but for any number of external reasons: the heroin supply is eradicated, he is whisked off against his will to a detox center, there was something about his internal makeup not previously apparent that impelled him, an asteroid hits the planet and along with much else destroys the heroin, and so on. In short, something unexpected could happen through internal or external circumstances that could alter the fated trajectory.
So external to the assemblage, whether that assemblage is an individual human being or a vastly-scaled social, cultural and economic apparatus, there could be a relevant chance occurrence and/or and external environmental change significant enough to change our fate. This may sound a bit like the forlorn Heideggerian cry that “only a god can save us now.”39 Not really, though. It is actually the template for the well-established biological model of how organisms change, for life itself: natural selection through random mutation. Organisms survive to reproduce by achieving a threshold level of adaptation to their environment, that is, one that allows for their reproduction. Through random mutation during DNA replication, the resultant mutated organism may alter its adaptive and hence reproductive success (“success” defined as continuance, “failure” as discontinuance). The internal nature of the offspring is thus altered in a way that may, in conjunction with their environment, in turn alter the creature’s trajectory, its fate. So character is fate, yes, but not for that reason set in the sense of causal outcome.
This I believe is roughly the situation in which we find ourselves with respect to neoliberal eliminationism. It has an identifiable character that includes central institutions such as politics, law, trade, finance, the military, health care, entertainment etc. and, of course, education. If the Marx-Minsky-environmentalist et al. picture is correct, this system we have created continues to grow along a fated trajectory that ends with human and environmental elimination. But there is no way to know with certainty whether or not these processes will run to completion. Right now it looks like they might. But: a) there might be random occurrences that are currently impossible to foresee and b) external environmental factors might conspire to knock the neoliberal endgame off its trajectory or stop it in its tracks. These two possibilities do not require mystery, theology or “spirituality,” for they are the same possibilities to which any organism is subject as it survives and replicates. Though not exactly a matter of our own personal volition, this means that there always remains a measure of Hope: the only creature Pandora, the first woman on earth, was able to keep when all the others flew from her jar.
But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men. Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds. But the rest, countless plagues, wander amongst men; for earth is full of evils and the sea is full. Of themselves diseases come upon men continually by day and by night, bringing mischief to mortals silently; for wise Zeus took away speech from them. So is there no way to escape the will of Zeus.40
Even though we cannot escape Zeus’s will, we still may have Hope. This may not be much but it is something. In any event it is what we have.
While unforeseen random occurrences are by definition impossible to guess at, the category of eventuality that involves an “external environmental factor” allows for some speculation. As I have hinted, the leading candidate seems to me to be resource depletion, specifically regarding the fossil fuels without which our modern industrial economy could not survive in its present form: mainly oil, natural gas and coal (electricity). While there is uncertainty regarding the timing of so-called “peak oil,” i.e. the point of maximum available oil, after which the finite resource can only grow scarcer, many analysts believe we already have or are soon to reach it.41 Whatever the precise timing, though, the level of our dependency on this uncompromisingly finite set of resources is truly astonishing. There is a good argument to be made that we have largely in effect burned through a fossil fuel bonanza, an energy windfall beyond anything human beings have ever experienced, all in the last few centuries.
Worse, all of our major social systems depend upon its continued abundance. As financial and energy analyst Chris Martenson explains:
On the faulty assumption that fossil fuels will always be a resource we could draw upon, we fashioned economic, monetary, and other assorted belief systems based on permanent abundance, plus a species population on track to number around 9 billion souls by 2050.
There are two numbers to keep firmly in mind. The first is 22, and the other is 10. In the past 22 years, half of all of the oil ever burned has been burned. Such is the nature of exponentially increasing demand. And the oil burned in the last 22 years was the easy and cheap stuff discovered 30 to 40 years ago. Which brings us to the number 10.
In every calorie of food that comes to your table are hidden 10 calories of fossil fuels, making modern agriculture and food delivery the first type in history that consumes more energy than it delivers. Someday fossil fuels will be all gone. That day may be far off in the future, but preparing for that day could (and one could argue should) easily require every bit of time we have.42
Martenson then goes on to predict that
the underlying rates of depletion will continue to fight the recent production gains in the US and elsewhere in the world until they soon come to a standstill, eventually swamping even heroic efforts. Steadily rising energy costs and decreasing net energy yields will simply not be able to fund the future economic growth and consumptive lifestyles that developed nations are depending on (and that developing nations are aspiring to).43
The synergy of scarcer oil and economic downturn (in my view powered primarily by the TRPF and in Martenson’s view by rising net energy costs, i.e. the difference between the costs of extraction/production of the extracted energy and its value), has the potential to create an extreme amount of volatility in the world system generally. It may already have.
A recent snapshot from austerity-starved Greece illustrates how this economic-energy crisis dynamic can feed off of one another in devastating ways. In the winter of 2013, Greek forests were becoming denuded of trees because of illegal logging. The cause? Cash-strapped citizens were violating environmental laws and chopping down trees for fuel to heat their homes. Many of them can no longer afford their power bills. A Greek mother, Sofia, explains, “’At first we were shocked and disappointed that we had to do this,’” Sofia says, “’We’ve gone back 30 or 40 years with this. It’s not war - or rather it is, but an economic war. We hope it’ll last only one or two years because we have children, we have a future. We can’t live like this, for God’s sake.’”44 Because of all the burning a wood smoke haze has descended on cities like Athens and Thessaloniki, choking and afflicting citizens with toxicity. “‘The atmosphere has never been worse,’” said Marianna Filipopoulou, a social-anthropologist who has lived in Athens for four years. “‘It’s getting more and more difficult to breathe. Even our eyes hurt because of the smog.’ She said the blame lies, not with families, but with their deplorable circumstances: ‘There is no other way given the scarcity of money.’”45 Atlantic reporter Derek Thompson summarizes: “It is the smog of austerity. Greece is literally breathing in the fumes of its recession.”46 In terms of economic eliminationism, Greece is our canary in an all-too real coal mine and the current experience of the thoughtless and cruel austerity being imposed upon them offers a glimpse at what may soon be coming elsewhere (along with the above 50% youth unemployment rate mentioned in Chapter 4). When basic costs of living such as energy or food (as in Egypt prior to the 2011Tahrir Square uprisings) things can quickly spiral out of control and anything might happen politically. Not all of it is good, witness the post-austerity rise of Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party (now at a record 10% public support), distressingly reminiscent of how in the 1920s an austerity-plagued Germany gave birth to Hitler and the Nazis.
In terms of my present argument, all this illustrates how environmental wild cards can enter into the economic crisis equation in devastating ways, especially if we include the gravest long-term threats such as climate change, ocean acidification and resource depletion. This is certainly not “good news” and in no way do I mention this unholy mutualism as something for which oppositional forces should cheer and await gleefully. These conjoined phenomena represent misery full stop and are not good for anybody, certainly not in the short-term (which many may not live beyond). At the same time, such developments introduce vast new layers of complexity and, it is to be assumed, contingency into the future trajectory and overall sustainability of capitalism as currently constituted. This is not the same as a revolutionary cadre taking power into their own hands and seizing, by an act of collective will, the reins of power. It is not directly volitional in that manner. Rather, it represents an eventuality for which to prepare to the extent possible. It is like the situation in which a blizzard is bearing down on one’s house. It makes no sense directly to oppose the blizzard in the sense of trying to prevent it from occurring or divert its course; this would be a foolish waste of time with a high opportunity cost regarding precious advance preparation time. The storm will come and it is much more productive to accept the fact and prepare accordingly. Fuel. Flashlights. Candles. Snow equipment. Whatever might be needed. In a way, those preparing in such a scenario could be criticized as being “pessimistic” because they are passively accepting the coming of the blizzard. The response can only be that if this is pessimism, an informed pessimism vis-à-vis that which cannot be changed is rational.
Compartmentalized pessimism and negative visualization
We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die… Mortal you have been born, to mortals you have given birth…
Reckon on everything, expect everything.
Seneca47
I am defending a compartmentalized pessimism regarding the prospects for altering the school system in our society and the present time in the direction of anything resembling social justice. I say “compartmentalized” because the pessimism is to be targeted toward social assemblages whose processes are so dependent on machinations in the underlying economy that those assemblages are unlikely really to move on their own. Our education system may change substantially, and there may be a dusting of oppositional grit in the gears, but the gears will end up turning as directed by the needs - or perceived short-term needs - of the owners of capital. All the while occupants of those systems, because they have lives to lead and mouths to feed, must “keep calm and carry on” and make the best of things for basic humane and ethical reasons obtaining in their immediate lifeworld. One cannot be indifferent to one’s immediate environment but at the same time it is not advisable to delude oneself about how “radical” one’s professional practice can actually be. You’re not a hero. You have dirty hands. Get over it.
Part of the “getting over it” is, I think, allowing the pessimism to spill over a bit more generally. There is a bracing narrative that runs as a persistent undercurrent in Western intellectual history. (It is one of the main currents in Eastern traditions such as Buddhism and Taoism.) This undercurrent rejects what Richard Rorty calls the “metaphysical comfort” of imagining the world to be fundamentally benevolent, especially where the conviction of benevolence is bound up with a self-congratulatory anthropocentrism, the idea that human beings are the center of it all, whether it be as creatures in God’s image, whom he has “chosen,” at the top of a scala naturae, perfectible, blessedly rational and autonomous, or whatever “uniquely human” attribute it is imagined has been bestowed. This tradition has serious doubts about our alleged nobility, and even our uniqueness, and tends to counsel a certain rapprochement with reality - not a quietism or a disinclination to act in the world, but a certain acceptance of what we undergo and, as much as they are graspable by finite beings, of nature and the cosmos themselves.
A short list of those associated with this under-tradition might include Heraclitus, Socrates (arguably as distinct from Plato on this point), Sophocles, Lucretius, the Stoics, Shakespeare (in places), Spinoza, Nietzsche and many among today’s struc-turalists and “object-oriented” philosophers - to name but a few. To risk a dangerously imprudent generalization, there is a strong sense, at least much of the time, from these thinkers and traditions, that human beings are not the Lords of Being, commanding all we survey. It is recognized that we are far more subject to forces beyond our grasp and unamenable to our provincial purposes than we are truly in control of anything. There is also no particular reason to hope for a metaphysical restitution or compensation in the form of Heaven, Justice or a Happily Ever After. The thought is that it would be best to mature beyond the infantile position of expecting the universe to cater to our desires and conform to our projections, no matter what our yearning or strategies of propitiation.
As time ultimately grinds all of our efforts to dust, perhaps the best we can do is try to see ourselves within the frame of some larger point of view, a narrative in which by definition we do not play a starring role. We can, for example, learn to view things as in some important sense rational and necessary - which is not the same as “accepting” an unjust status quo. This is what Spinoza means by viewing the world sub specie aeternitatis (literally “under the aspect of eternity,”) taking the really long view; finding consolation, not in our power and grandiosity but, along with Lucretius, in our very smallness against an infinitely larger backdrop, miraculous in that it affords us even partial access: “This dread, these shadows of mind, must thus be swept away/Not by rays of the sun nor by the brilliant beams of day,/But by observing Nature and her laws.”48 Within this under-tradition, an attitude of inquisitive humility premises all else.
This attitude I think is often missing from a left opposition that is constantly trying to motivate, to convince itself that, really, “another world is possible” and that “the people, united, can never be defeated,” and so on. This sloganeering is understandable. But perhaps, when “another world” recedes from grasp and “the people” are in fact defeated, the cheerleading becomes counter-productive to the point that it can sow the seeds of self-hatred. One of the key psychological elements of capitalism’s great nefarious genius is to cause individuals to internalize their failures and to refuse to see their own problems with, say, debt or joblessness as part of a larger pattern afflicting countless others alongside them. The anti-capitalist left sometimes offers its own mirror image of this cruel psychology, this bright-siding, by proffering that the revolution would come about if only you were sufficiently radical, more devoted, or harder-working. (Or the green variants: you didn’t sufficiently reduce your carbon footprint, off-grid homestead or “uncivilize” with enough vigor, etc.) Yet maybe there are certain areas where it’s just not going to happen and the general run of life and surviving its periodic crises - family, health, money - is all one can do. Should one really be ashamed of this, that one didn’t make it to the last rally? Used some fossil fuel? Took a nap? The bleak asceticism implicit in these admonitions seems every bit as unforgiving as it was for the medieval self-flagellators and horse shirt wearers. Maybe we activity addicts need a little of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, the one made programmatic by Alcoholics Anonymous, at least the part reading “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”49 They have become cliché, but these lines still strike me as containing a very worthy aspiration, one of those many bits of wisdom floating around that “everybody knows” but is very hard actually to put into practice.
For the putting into practice it is helpful to turn to Stoicism and in particular the Roman Stoic Seneca (4 BC-65AD). Seneca was a Renaissance Man avant la lettre: philosopher, proto-psychologist, financier, playwright, Hall of Fame belle-lettrist, political advisor (unfortunately to Nero, who eventually murdered him), among other things. He is best known for his essays and letters that might best be described as “practical ethical advice” as they explore every day experiences such as anger, jealousy, money, anxiety, health, fear of death, disaster preparation, mercy, and grief - to name but a few - from the point of view of Stoicism. Though no stranger to university syllabi, Seneca has been underrated for the past few generations. But a recent wave of interest in Stoicism has revived interest in his writings along with the rest of the Stoics. Aided by a group of capable popular authors, Stoicism now seems well-restored to one of its rightful places: into the world of affairs among practical people rather than sequestered in libraries as the exclusive possession of a few academics.50 This popular Stoic revival is also interesting for what it may imply: a kind of premonition of the need to cope with structural decay and degeneration. This is consistent with the fact that Stoicism has also long appealed existentially to those engaged in dangerous occupations such as soldiers, police and fire fighters. These are individuals for whom a disaster-like situation might loom around any corner in the course of their duties. As US Army Major Thomas Jarrett, former Green Beret and practitioner of Stoicism, advises, “’Soldiers need a philosophy that enables them to suffer, and not even to see it as suffering, but instead as a form of service …If your philosophy doesn’t work in the most dire circumstances, then abandon it now, because it’s a Starbucks philosophy.’”51 One wonders, alongside the current popular fascination with apocalypticism - including the rage for zombies and such - a spike in interest in a proven disaster-ready worldview arises as yet another intimation of, if not the future itself, but a cultural preoccupation with the conceivability of what I have been calling eliminationism. Like other coping mechanisms, the appeal of Stoicism may be a symptom.
More explicitly along these lines, one powerful technique is what philosopher of Stoicism William B. Irvine terms “negative visualization,” which he considers to be “the single most valuable technique in the Stoic’s psychological tool kit.”52 Along with other notable Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, Seneca offers a deceptively simple bit of advice about, in effect, the need to stop and smell the roses. As with most of the practical advice from Stoicism, there is nothing esoteric here; it has the ring of good common sense. It is not an observation, frankly, that would be of huge conceptual interest as the object of an academic treatise. Where it becomes interesting is if you actually try to experience it: you, yourself, in the first person and not as an object of disinterested academic curiosity, analogous to the experiential difference between perusing an actuarial mortality table and being told by your doctor that you have six months to live. A lived appreciation of this distinction is, in fact, the gateway into the proper application of negative visualization for Seneca.
One of the biggest obstacles preventing the experience is that, somewhat like the teenager’s notorious and often tragically false sense of his own immortality, the false comfort we provide ourselves that all of those bad things happening are “out there” in some separate realm from the one we inhabit (perhaps that of “TV news” or “the internet”). We “know” intellectually that this is not the case, yet we do not typically take such matters to heart because we are in the stance of consuming yet another information product in an endless stream of the same. (At the same time, this distancing is often sanity-preserving and not altogether unwelcome. Consider the philosopher Simone Weil, who was so sensitive to distant others that upon hearing the news of a famine in China, she broke down weeping. One wonders: is this touching - or crazy?53 ) Post-tragedy, how many times have we heard the interviewee say, as if on cue, “I never thought something like this could happen around here.” Well now he knows. Seneca writes: “‘I did not think it would happen.’ Is there anything you think will not happen, when you know that it can happen, and your own eyes show it has happened already to many?”54 What is false here is the deliberate psychological insulation, from the Stoic point of view, the childish insistence that denies, to quote a favorite line of Seneca’s, “Whatever fate one man can strike can come to all of us alike.”55 “There but for the grace of God go I,” as the expression goes.
So the first step is stripping away one’s false existential sense of invulnerability. Toward that end, Stoic negative visualization counsels that one should conduct for oneself an admittedly morbid-sounding personal slideshow of worst-case scenarios. These can help make even more present to our minds the radical contingency of our lives, and indeed all lives. One should, for instance, imagine what one loves the most and imagine its removal. It could be one’s child. (In fact, one of Seneca’s most celebrated letters, from which I have been quoting, is his “Consolation to Marcia” upon the untimely death of her son.) The idea is that the more one considers such “unthinkable” eventualities: 1) One will be better able to bear it should the unthinkable occur. “The man who has anticipated the coming of troubles takes away their power when they arrive.”56 And 2) the more one will appreciate, say, one’s daughter, and not take her for granted. “Seize the pleasures your children bring, let them in turn take enjoyment in you, and drink the cup of happiness dry without delay: you have been given no promise about tonight - I have granted too long an adjournment - no promise about this very hour.”57
Seneca does not hold that one should not grieve or suffer the expected emotions. This would be unrealistic. He does think, however, if one has steeled oneself beforehand through steady mental practice, this will lessen the shock and, above all, the sense that some cosmic injustice has been done to you and yours. This is because there is no cosmic justice. It would be idiotic to blame the earthquake for its ravages, to be angry at it the same way one would be righteously indignant at a marauding neighbor who did the same damage. There is the famous story of the Persian Emperor Xerxes, on his way to Greece, ordering the waters of the Hellespont lashed 300 times because they “disobeyed” his will by “refusing” to calm for his army’s crossing. Quite ludicrously un-Stoic. It goes back to the initial existential point of understanding that events are not really happening to you in the sense that you are the star of the cosmic drama - notwithstanding our perhaps natural biases toward ourselves. The earthquake and the Hellespont waters and the death of one’s loved one just happened; they just are; they did not happen to you. Besides, with the loved one, if one had all along taken the Stoic advice to “drink the cup of happiness dry,” then one would have had that many fewer regrets, that many fewer of those things that one should have done, should have said etc., such regrets constituting our truest haunting and restless ghosts. So, really, for Seneca, these memento mori have little to do with the dour and doleful; they are rather exhortations to live life more fully. This, I think, is part of what Nietzsche’s Zarathustra meant when he spoke of the need, despite omnipresent suffering and misery, for a “Holy yes-saying.”58
That is not all. It is necessary to go beyond Seneca on this point, though in a way that is true to his spirit. Negative visualization’s potentially salutary effects are not to be confined to specific difficulties such as grief, but we are urged by Seneca to “apply this picture to your entrance into the whole of life.”59 Extrapolating from this dictum of expansion, it seems to me that there is little reason to hold that the contemplation of worst case scenarios needs to be confined to an individual’s personal experiences. It stands to reason that the same logic and therefore the same benefits could be expected to apply from adopting this Stoic technique to collective experience as well, as group preparation for larger-scale and more widely-shared difficulties that might plausibly be imagined. Irvine notes that one traditional but sometimes under-appreciated function of the custom of saying grace at mealtime (I might add from my own experience the annual recitation of the Passover Haggadah in Judaism) is that it provides just such a shared appreciation of the contingency of what is. This is essentially what one is doing when one gives “thanks” for the food, the company, one’s freedom etc., as doing so implies that things could well have been otherwise - actually, in the case of the Passover Seder, have been otherwise in the group’s shared history. “Said with these thoughts in mind, grace has the ability to transform an ordinary meal into a celebration.”60
It is warranted, I believe, to extend the idea still further. Our culture proselytizes against the lived consideration of finitude and mortality in myriad ways. Our popular culture, geared toward the rapid turnover of commodities and their planned obsolescence, tends to worship the “new new” thing and in so doing builds in a biased fascination toward youth. Due to a variety of factors including, surely, the ideals of nuclear family life and the economics of health care, we increasingly sequester elderly in assisted living and other retirement “communities,” decreasing intergenerational contact and by extension the old style of encounter with the death of elders that tended to take place in the home amidst the everyday multigenerational closeness of family life. Contrary to all of human history save the last few generations, it seems increasingly proper to us that death should take place in a medical facility as an individual affair and is something from which to shield the children. Our largely unquestioned narratives of progress and confidence in techno-fixes tend also to place at a distance any serious consideration of the finitude and limitations of our culture at large. Such talk sounds whiny and defeatist, constitutive of that insufficiently bright-sided “positive” outlook, a character deficiency to be remedied by the prescription of psychoactive mood-altering drugs. As with the actuarial tables, everyone “knows” about death etc. but again it is that difference, long highlighted by thinkers such as Sartre and Heidegger, between knowing it as a factoid versus as an actual (shared) experience. Witness the strong tendency when informed of someone’s illness to want to “medicalize” the discussion and thereby place matters at a psychologically safer remove. This seems natural to us. What else is one to talk about? Fate? The point of it all? The worthwhileness of the deceased - and survivors’ - lives? Who needs that at a time of emotional crisis? As “natural” as all of this seems, however, as per the above, the Stoic position would be that this distancing stance is unhealthy not just for individuals but, by extension, whole societies.
For one thing, as Freud emphasized, thanatotic matters come back upon us long-term as a “return of the repressed” in various subconscious ways, from probably harmless recurrent tropes in popular culture like the horror and apocalyptic genres, to more troubling phenomena such as our denial of the gory details of our military adventures, environmental devastation, and catastrophic for-profit health care system (in the US especially), where the repressed return as blowback, at which point it is too late to do anything. We are ostriches, not only unable to act in anticipation of long-term difficulties (remembering from earlier chapters that this is Grantham’s Achilles heel of capitalism), but actively shielding ourselves from them. This is simply irrational, like the person with white coat anxiety who puts off doctor’s visits for fear of what she might hear and thereby missing out on an early diagnosis of an ailment that would have been treatable if caught in time. If only she had had a slight bit of the Stoic hypochondria of negative visualization, she could have been saved.
Similarly, when considering the largest threats we face, including TRPF-induced eliminationism, climate change and resource depletion, it seems advisable to adopt whatever pedagogies may be available to engage in a bit of salutary culture-wide negative visualization. As indicated earlier, we already do this, I think, at the subconscious level of the consumption of personal entertainments, as when we flip on the TV zombie drama The Walking Dead or curl up with World War Z or any of the many other options of this ilk.
It is not so great a step to interrogate the widespread interest in these themes more frontally, appreciating from a new angle Lucretius’s prescience:
So who are you to balk
And whine at death? You’re almost dead in life, although you walk And breathe. You fritter away most of your time asleep. You snore With your eyes open; you never leave off dreaming, and a score
Of empty nightmares fills your mind and shakes it to the core.
Often, addled and dizzy, you don’t even know what’s wrong -
You find yourself besieged at every turn by a whole throng
Of cares, and drift on shifting currents of uncertainty61
A serious communal examination of the “empty nightmares” of such as zombies (the “dead in life”) might just help decrease their hold on us in the manner of cognitive behavior therapy or psychoanalysis.
A contemporary pedagogical agenda could arise from these old Stoic ruins. It would have to do with the possibility of forcing ourselves to confront the fact that our status on this planet is contingent - a fact greatly exacerbated by our own actions - and appreciate the corollary to this hard truth that we are not the lords of being who enjoy the special favor of a Metaphysical Guarantor. Yet, as The Dark Mountain Project’s “post-environmentalist” Manifesto observes,
Today, humanity is up to its neck in denial about what it has built, what it has become - and what it is in for. Ecological and economic collapse unfold before us and, if we acknowledge them at all, we act as if this were a temporary problem, a technical glitch. Centuries of hubris block our ears like wax plugs; we cannot hear the message which reality is screaming at us. For all our doubts and discontents, we are still wired to an idea of history in which the future will be an upgraded version of the present. The assumption remains that things must continue in their current direction: the sense of crisis only smudges the meaning of that ‘must’. No longer a natural inevitability, it becomes an urgent necessity: we must find a way to go on having supermarkets and superhighways. We cannot contemplate the alternative.62
Hence the acute need for Stoic visualization, by which we might grapple with “the alternative” and thereby illuminate whatever possibilities may exist for ourselves, without assuming that everything will always stay the same. Toward this end, one might imagine a pedagogy of counterfactuals here, where learners of any age might be led to experience and reflect upon situations highlighting questions of “what would life be like were it not for X?” We already do this in various ways. A well-known maudlin version of such a counterfactual pedagogy is famously depicted in the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life, where George Bailey is led to see what life would have been like without him. On a more manageable and “safer” pedagogical scale, it is common for schools to ask students to unplug their electronics (including mobiles!) for a time or write an essay on what they learned when the power went out after a storm for a couple of days. Or what it might like to be blind or otherwise physically disabled.
There are plenty of available examples. My family and I learned quite a bit once when on our farm the old well (our only one) caved in and we were without water for a couple of weeks. I highly recommend running water deprivation for anyone desiring a radical alteration of life caused by the removal of something previously taken for granted. We learned, quite experientially, how preoccupying water has been for human beings in history, and for many in the developing world today without proper access to it (over 2 billion people according to the World Health Organization).63 In the spirit of the old truism that the burned hand teaches best, I would submit that these are lessons that are best learned - really only learned - upon the platform provided by experience. In order to be effective, then, a counterfactual pedagogy of negative visualization would be most effective as an opportunistic effort that builds upon peoples’ actual experiences of coping with whatever it is that has been lost, the most traumatic of these things being, usually, those that are most vital and therefore taken for granted (like food, water, health and energy). It is not by accident that so many of Seneca’s Stoic writings are written to individuals as “consolations” for them as they attempt to cope with something traumatic like the death of a child. These are not detached speculations.
I would stress that a pedagogy of loss such as this is not just the famous Heideggerian point from Being and Time about tools and how as “ready-to-hand” they only stand out to us as objects when they break down. Matters can go much deeper than that if we allow them to, if we allow them to illuminate our darkened landscape more fully.
In my well collapse experience, certainly the easy flow of water to which I’d been accustomed my entire life (in cities and suburbs) caused the entire phenomenon of groundwater to become an immediate and obsessive direct object of concern: literally a case of noticing for the first time the ground beneath one’s feet. It was an inherently unlimited experience, though. I suppose it could have been possible to dig the new well and feel so traumatized that I didn’t want ever to have to think about water again. But really, learning about the process had a way of leading to other things, a powerful spillover effect, if you will. I started having to consider the catchment basin for where to put the new well, worry about pesticides and other contaminants that might soak into the ground within the relevant circumference of the well site, because of those potential contaminants consider our farming, animal husbandry (we have horses and chickens) and septic methods, not to mention potentially urgent issues concerning natural gas fracking (we live in fracking-mad Pennsylvania) and on and on. The event also offered a kind of first-person entrée into history, as we very dramatically appreciated for the first time why the original builders hundreds of years ago would have placed the house near a stream (even at the risk of rising spring floods) and, thank Zeus, the little spring house the old-timers had built nearby - neglected and covered over with weeds until we discovered how much we needed it for almost everything (several gallons to: cook and clean up dishes, flush toilets, water the animals (lots!) and a million other little things needing water that one doesn’t normally notice. For example, we learned very well an age-old fundamental truth that does not, it turns out, require advanced schooling: water is heavy. Hauling only a gallon or two on one occasion is no big deal. Hauling gallon after gallon, continually, day after day, many times a day, is quite another matter altogether. It will change the way you live. And that was just two weeks! This was a counter-factual pedagogy based on actual experience, one that could have been accomplished in any number of ways, that connected us more appreciatively to our environment and our history.
Given current and forecast conditions, we are likely to be encountering a great many of these impromptu “teachable moments” involving our civilization’s most frightening longer-term counterfactuals concerning climate change and resource depletion. The unfolding three-way race among these two and economic catastrophe will be one, literally, for the ages.
Hope among the ruins
There is no chance to move towards a better future if we misunder- stand the situation we are currently in.
Steve Keen64
Just as the Stoics advocate negative visualization for individuals, I am advocating a negative counterfactual pedagogy on the group scale. What if we no longer had this? Or that? Economically. Environmentally. The kicker, though, is that, for reasons outlined above, it seems to me that a pedagogy that aims to consider societal collapse is unlikely to be successful via formal instruction taking place in regular schools. I would be highly suspicious of pedagogues creating workbooks and writing “lesson plans” on collapse (and educationists getting grants for the same). In this realm, the best teacher will be the actual experiences that are likely to unfold in the coming years. Therefore the psychological readiness for these events is just as important as material preparedness. There is already much to learn: the “storms of our grandchildren” may already be upon us and if so the open air “schools” of our collective negative visualization will be all-too vivid and their lessons all-too real.65 As I have indicated in these pages, class is now in grim session from Greece to Spain, from Tahrir Square to the streets of London, from Kinshasa to Port-au-Prince and from the dry Great Plains to what used to be the beaches of the north Jersey Shore.
Compounding the urgency of an opportunistic and experiential pedagogy is the demise of possibilities within our increasingly constrained and resource-starved public schools and colleges. The venue for an education about what matters most seems increasingly possible only outside the formal educational assemblage. Here is a sliver of pedagogical good fortune upon which to capitalize: as the structural necessities extinguish what is possible on the “inside,” the kind of learning that needs to take place is best accomplished on the “outside” anyway. There is the obnoxious cliché that one should “never let a good crisis go to waste” and, as Klein has illustrated, capitalism often evolves not in a smooth fashion but in a punctuated form through a “shock doctrine” where volatility opens possibilities. Seizing back that pedagogical momentum is central to the agenda of a revolutionary opportunism whose time is fated - yes fated - to arrive due to financialized capitalism’s self-immolating character and its world-killing thirst for unsustainable growth at all costs. The shock doctrine can work both ways, as it started to when the 2008 financial crisis gave birth to the various occupy movements.
We are soon to face directly another period of imperative inevitability, where a harsh disjunction presents only one possible choice, as it did for Rosa Luxemburg when she offered the choice of “socialism or barbarism” before the First World War. (Her world chose the latter.) Trotsky amplified the motto in a way that eerily presaged the next world war, the nuclear age, and environmental destruction: “Capitalism, enveloped in the flames of a war of its own making, shouts from the mouths of its cannons to humanity: ‘Either conquer over me, or I will bury you in my ruins when I fall!’”66 With the rise of the planetary threats of nuclear war and environmental destruction that are preconditioned by the awesome power of capitalist production, we see now that there are worse things even than a reversion to “barbarism” which, from an environmental point of view, might not be the worst of all possible outcomes in the long run. Barbarism might at least leave us (and other creatures) with a habitable planet. Our primary need is to ensure the very existence of a long run.
Despite our best efforts, it may come to ruin - as in Marx’s “mutual ruin of the contending classes” - but still, even with this strong possibility hanging over us, there is something to accepting fate, not denying it or wishing it away, and persevering in the fight. Even when it is perceived as hopeless. As Seneca writes, “Even in the case of shipwreck we should extol the helmsman whom the sea overwhelms as he still grips the rudder and does battle with the elements.”67 Besides, the fact of human fallibilism should mitigate absolute despair just as much as it does unjustified optimism. The helmsman may lose his battle with the sea yet still, somehow, survive. It is possible. There may be some factor unknown to us in the situation and, lacking even that, there may be such a thing as chance. Our inherent finitude and lack of omniscience is not just a limitation but may constitute a saving psychic grace as well.
That one creature that did not escape from Mother Pandora’s jar, Hope, may lie in our adaptive capacity to learn, this time not clever external fixes, but about ourselves and the lies contained in the stories of which we have become collectively enamored. Especially the one about how we are allegedly inter-galactically chosen by the Big Other, specially favored, and placed at the center of the moral universe. The necessary lessons may thus be right there before us; but for that reason very far away. It is our fate that those lessons will always recede from us, the eternal Socratic insight being that true learning not only presupposes ignorance but continually generates more of it. Yet we persist; there is no other way for us. As our first poet instructs,
For the gods keep hidden from men the means of life.68