So why be optimistic? This theme came up in a previous diary, and I'd like to revisit it, because I rather doubt that my previous answer satisfied my reading audience. The idea that we can be optimistic about the fate of the human race because of "human versatility" leaves a lot of questions unanswered. How are we going to solve all of our problems?
CAVEAT: I'm not going to solve all of those problems here. This is a LITERARY essay -- it suggests a basis for moving forward, rather than a quick fix.
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Why would anyone want to be an optimist in this era? One can easily pick from news items to find a good number of reasons why one shouldn't be optimistic, and so for instance from vice.com we have this:
Some Credible Scientists Believe Humanity Is Irreparably Close to DestructionHere's how it rolls out:
There have always been doomsday prophets and cults around and everyone has their own personal view of how the apocalypse will probably go down (ascension of pure souls, zombie crows), but in the midst of all of the Mayan Calendar/Timewave Zero/Rapture babble, there are some clarion calls coming from a crowd that’s less into bugout bags and eschatology: well-respected scientists and journalists who have come to some scarily-sane sounding conclusions about the threat of human-induced climate change on the survival of the human species.VL Baker's most recent diary has a curious graph front and center on the most significant probable cause of doom: global warming. See that sharp turn upward? Yeah, that's you and me dying. It's easy to dismiss the "doomsday people." They've predicted the end of the world before, and it didn't happen. But what happens when the doomsday people have the facts on their side?
And it's easy enough to imagine that the facts we know are not depressing enough, not when there are nineteen feedback loops that speed up climate change. Have the scientists calculated the forcing capabilities of all of them?
While we're looking at ecological mass death, we can only imagine what will happen to the radioactivity spread worldwide by the daily spread of 300 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. The pollution will be seen largely to hit the west coast of the United States. It's only going to get worse.
In that previous diary I mentioned, I discussed my optimism about the human predicament. Optimism in this era appears as a rather defective product, something that was cobbled together by a cherry-picked view of the facts of life in the era of late late capitalism. But I don't stand with the optimists because I'm trying to deny the facts of life in this era, which (when presented in a meaningful way) give the appearance of a global reality in steady deterioration. Rather, my optimism is compromised by an acceptance of those facts. Gopal Balakrishnan explains it in these terms:
We are entering into a period of inconclusive struggles between a weakened capitalism and dispersed agencies of opposition, within delegitimated and insolvent political orders. The end of history could be thought to begin when no project of global scope is left standing, and a new kind of ‘worldlessness’ and drift begins. This would conform to Hegel’s suspicion that at this spiritual terminus, the past would be known, but that a singular future might cease to be a relevant category. In the absence of organized political projects to build new forms of autonomous life, the ongoing crisis will be stalked by ecological fatalities that will not be evaded by faltering growth.This in fact seems to be the standard future, and the Pentagon has at least developed the foresight to plan for it:
http://www.theguardian.com/...?
Pentagon bracing for public dissent over climate and energy shocksClimate change is part of the Pentagon's concept of "security threats": it's coloring their negative scenarios in an important way.NSA Prism is motivated in part by fears that environmentally-linked disasters could spur anti-government activism
One of the Pentagon’s top strategists said climate change is fundamentally altering how the Defense Department (DOD) evaluates future conflict areas.Now that they have that "total information awareness" stuff in place, it'll be just the tool for them for when all hell breaks loose with global warming. But it isn't just global warming that provokes the Powers That Be in their paranoia.
So, in respect of the bad future that is the vogue product of today's arts of crisis prediction, let's consider the other crises lining up for our consideration.
On the narrowly-economic front, we can read about five reasons why austerity hurts today and will hurt even more tomorrow. Austerity is, of course, the last gasp of what Naomi Klein calls the "shock doctrine," in which profit-making entities crash economies so they can increase profits.
When considering economic realities, one should start with the global economic growth rate, which has been declining for four decades now. A consequence of the decline in economic growth in the 1970s was the financialization of the economy, which (in texts from Kees van der Pijl's Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq to Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine to Dumenil and Levy's Capital Resurgent) is called "neoliberalism." The point of neoliberalism, as one can see from a reading of Philip Mirowski's Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste or Harry Shutt's The Trouble With Capitalism, is to maintain the rate of profit amidst this uneven but (in the long run) steady decline in the global economic growth rate. To paraphrase that great orator of the 1980s Left, Jesse Jackson, hope must be kept alive, but, in true conservative fashion, hope is being kept alive for the richest 7% of the population at the expense of everyone else.
The main mechanism of what Mirowski calls "the neoliberals" is economic restructuring. At times my diaries attract readers who confuse neoliberalism with the rise of the "laissez-faire" economic doctrines which attained a vogue with the rise of Reagan and Bush. Such doctrines are preached but not granted any real attention in this era, because they are really just fodder for the masses.
Constant and increasing government attention has been needed over the past forty years to maintain the global economic house of cards in an era of declining growth -- the ideological aegis of the global "free market" is needed to subordinate people to markets, so that more and more of society can be made into a conduit for corporate profits. So what we have is "market reform" of a continuous and increasingly interventionist kind, from NAFTA to the WTO to the 1996 Welfare Bill to the end of Glass-Steagall to the bank bailouts to Dodd-Frank to the Race to the Top's promotion of charter schools to the ACA. In Europe, of course, the "debtor" nations are forced to institute austerity planning while the slightly-less insolvent Germany barely comes in on the plus side of the growth ledger. "Market reform" in this era seeks to preserve markets for rich people rather than humanizing them, and (given the intellectual bankruptcy of the whole scheme), increasingly intensive philosophical, political, and other propaganda regimes must be deployed to maintain the loyalty of the masses.
Political elections reflect the uniformity of the drive to market preservation. For instance in last year's US Presidential election one could observe the winning margin obtained through a massive swing-state anti-Romney effort from the Obama campaign, while an overall majority of Romney voters appeared not to care who Romney was as long as he wasn't Obama. There's a certain flavor of desperation to a nationwide election which promises the great bulk of the people a better candidate than "the other guy," while the agendas of both sides share a scary similarity amidst their real differences.
But I suppose whoever is in power will have to sell the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Grand Bargain somehow, when it actually passes. We can therefore expect more of "the Republicans would have done far worse!" and "The Democrats are bad (except not in the ways in which they really are bad)!"
On the narrowly-psychological front, Bruce E. Levine has an interesting observation: living in America will drive you insane. Now, much of Levine's definition of "insane" is worth examination -- people are becoming "insane" under an increasingly tight straitjacket of "sane" behavior. But his general conclusion fits the thesis here:
When we have hope, energy and friends, we can choose to rebel against societal oppression with, for example, a wildcat strike or a back-to-the-land commune. But when we lack hope, energy and friends, we routinely rebel without consciousness of rebellion and in a manner in which we today commonly call mental illness.The education front in America (if not elsewhere) reveals that going to school is no longer about learning anything. Rather, education is now about money. When our economy is caught between increasing corporate demands for profit amidst a global growth rate declining to zero, education (like all services receiving government money) becomes a corporate cash cow. K-12 education becomes the site of the charter school movement, with the school-to-prison pipeline as a disciplinary cudgel to keep the passive audience of young people in line and to feed further profits to the prison industries. College education becomes the site of $1 trillion in student loan debt -- and what are the folks in government claiming to be worried about? The interest on the debt! Never mind that the debt itself is expanding at astronomical rates.
So with job prospects increasingly bleak and student loans both impossible to discharge through bankruptcy and growing onerously with the withdrawal of the states from education funding, college, like K-12 education, has become about money. It has become another game in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And this isn't to take into account what the new Obama plan for colleges will do to them.
Even on the narrowly-healthcare front we can say that even though the new law will help some people, any morass of regulation that complex is likely to develop more in the wrong direction than in the right one. Medical bankruptcy will still be a big thing here in the US.
So, indeed, there are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about this era. But my prognosis is optimistic. However, so far I've only explained my optimism in terms of my trust in the versatility of the human species -- I cam convinced that we are versatile enough to work our way out of our current predicament. But I've never really explained how I think our versatility will "play out" in terms of the multiple crises of the current era. Below the fold, I will examine optimisms, past and present, to see what can be applied from them in an era which tends toward despair.