Industrialism is a religion: eugenics its key tenet.
I've been an environmentalist since ... I vomited chicken noodles all over the interior my Mom's Pontiac station wagon while my brother Cliff was outside filming carcinogens spewing from smokestacks in Norwalk, CT. It must have been around 1968, just before the EPA was instituted by the Nixon administration (!) in 1970. I was in kindergarten or first grade.
I recall loving the first half of the journey, because it was cool to see Cliff making a movie for a high school presentation about an issue—"lack of environmental regulation"—he was passionate about. I also loved my Mom, the adventurer, looking up in the sky and following the toxic clouds to its sources.
The second part of the adventure featured me screaming to be taken home because I was nauseous, a request unheeded because disbelieved. After I puked, I said "I told you so!" I was mad but felt much better. The car reeked, and after wiping the wet seats a bit, my Mom drove us home. Even now, I see the smokestack that made me retch, towering blandly above us, belching a combination of soot-snow and chemicals so vicious my body voided itself, in self-defense, trying to protect my life which, according to sermons I'd heard, was both a spark and a gift of the Divine.
Because my brother's movie led to the creation of the EPA, or something like that, I grew up with this lesson: when the USA understood it made a mistake (pollution), it corrected it (the EPA).
Instilling me with such faith, the lesson was religious, part of the larger theology of industrialism called Progress. If everybody just had faith, things would always get better! Of course, I had no idea then that this religion was, like JudeoChristianity, something deployed by those of the elite, who were more or less in control of our mass population, to mollify, appease and misdirect reformist political energies.
Now we have entered the Anthropocene, an epoch defined by global warming, pandemics and planetary biocide caused by Progress. Our religion of industrialism has failed, but it was failing us all along.
That's why faith was essential. We've been taught here in the USA, and farther back across the Atlantic in Anglo culture, for centuries that "nature" had to be subdued and forced to serve human purposes because it was nasty, female and savage, the font of lusts and source of death, and in toto demonically contrary in essence and process to the transcendent goals of EuroAm JudeoChristian civilization—but we were never taught what we know now: we did succeed. Subduing and controlling "nature", our political and economic elite changed the climate and set off an extinction avalanche that descends upon us from on high.
We look to our political and economic elite, even now, to change our situation. COP 26 in Glasgow presents another opportunity for the high priests of Progress to reform our ways, but that won't happen for 2 basic reasons. One, neoliberal ideology says the "market" must determine all political decisions, and it is staunched, bipartisan orthodoxy, within DC, Wall St and all prestigious universities. Two, industrial culture is global and transforming it can't be done without deconstructing, then reconstructing, the world. Not only will our elite never allow this to happen, because it would lose its power, but also our mass populations have no way of stepping out of their culture; for example, even this screed is written and posted within industrial culture, using the same global warming fuels that our failed theologians of Progress used and use.
Our elite prefer to mollify, distract, promise, entertain, divide and conquer, whatever it can do to continue to enrich itself. DC dedicates itself to economic growth, not to de-industrialization. The smokestacks that made me puke in 1968 were moved by them to parts of planet called "sacrifice zones" where classist and racist eugenics are employed on the poor and non-white. But now the whole planet is a sacrifice zone. The elite face extinction too. It is sickening to observe them choose short term wealth and the intra-humanity violence it provokes and requires over earth- and bios- care. > So, how did we get to this present moment, where no matter how much we know about how we are destroying our own futures, we don't do anything about it?
When exactly did our bipartisan elite decide that collective suicide was necessary, if they were to stay in power? The exact date was March 16, 1995.
On that day, President Clinton and Vice President Gore issued “Reinventing Environmental Regulation,” a directive that changed the mission of the EPA. Henceforth EPA would no longer police industries as it once had, because victory was declared: the environmental crisis that begat the EPA was mostly over; plus, enforcement was expensive and often defied "common sense": “By regulating emission sources to the air, water, and land, we have addressed many of the obvious environmental problems.
But as we achieved these successes, we learned a great deal about the limitations of "command-and-control." Prescriptive regulations can be inflexible, resulting in costly actions that defy common sense by requiring greater costs for smaller returns. This approach can discourage technological innovation that can lower the costs of regulation or achieve environmental benefits beyond compliance” (2). Unobvious "environmental problems" would now be solved by virtuous corporations and the magical powers of the "marketplace": “we have learned that setting "performance standards" and allowing the regulated community to find the best way to meet them can get results cheaper and quicker -- and cleaner -- than mandating design standards or specific technologies. We can promote both lower-cost environmental protection and innovation in pollution control and prevention technology. Using performance standards along with economic incentives encourages innovation. The lowest-cost and most effective strategies earn a greater return in the marketplace.” Clinton and Gore told the EPA that corporations would devise and enforce their own "performance standards," regulate themselves, and find the cheapest, most profitable, way of doing so. This would "achieve environmental benefits beyond compliance"(2).
Who actually believed that corporations would willingly reduce profits to protect the environment? The deep cynicism of their reinvention of the EPA was obvious.
(I can recall no great protest against Clinton and Gore, except by Republicans who intended to annul the EPA entirely. Soon, the GOP understood that Clinton and Gore had, more or less, achieved the neoliberal goal and supported the Dem deregulatory approach.)
Clinton and Gore were even more cynical though when they handed Federal environmental law enforcement powers over to corporations under the pretense of advancing democracy:
“We have certainly learned that Washington, D.C. is not the source of all the answers. There is growing support for sharing decision-making by shifting more authority -- and responsibility -- from the Federal government to states, tribes and local communities” (3). They pretended "local communities" would be empowered by their reinvention of environmental regulation. They might have been laughing as they envisioned local communities taking on multinational corporations without Federal law enforcement.
Laughing also when they imagined new environmental laws being drafted and passed—because in a world where there was no enforcement, why would laws even be needed?
Yes, Clinton and Gore destroyed the environmental movement when they took executive action to rid the USA of the "EPA’s jobs-killing agenda". That was something would have been noticed if a Republican had done it. But they did it, charmed everybody and made tons of $$$—more magic of the marketplace.
> Next I will dwell on the on the way neoliberalism, with its industrial religion of Progress, succeeded in US culture by making promises that it can't, won't, didn't fulfill. Living as we do at a moment when it is obvious that our trust has been betrayed, and our lives are in peril, this will be useful. When it launches, neoliberalism bases itself in a commonwealth ideal, ie, that all will benefit and those on the bottom especially (trickle down). By the time neoliberalism manifests as fascist plutocracy and constant borderless war, it is too late to stop it. That's where we are right now. But history is not over.
> We are writing it.
Комментарии