They can’t say “Moo”!
Ever since I started writing this blog (April, 2013), about humanity’s most important existential crises, all the major actors on the world scene have consistently refused to do anything even remotely capable of solving any of those extremely difficult problems. Most of the time, they keep on doing whatever it was they were already doing before they were so rudely interrupted, either putting everything off until some unspecified “later time”, or making a few thoroughly inadequate, short-term moves designed to “get back to normal” as quickly as possible. They treat every single threat to civilization, even our specie’s continued existence on this planet, in the same superficial manner, refusing to make any of the thoroughly draconian changes that are so urgently required to face up to those enormous challenges seriously.
In other words, they behave like the artificially animated products in some silly television ad for meat products that was shown over and over again several years ago, in which the products belonging to the competitor could only say “Oink!”, instead of “Moo!” as well, because they contained nothing but pork and no beef whatsoever. In a similar way, nowadays, every one of the dozens of competing sources of power, wealth and influence, spread out all over the world, refuse to change their normal patterns of behaviour altogether, in order to deal with those existential crises head on. They go on behaving in traditional, comfortable, ineffectual ways, thereby ensuring that each one of those situations, as well as all of them put together, keep on getting a great deal worse than they were before. Those atavistic ways of acting, or reacting, even include the exceptionally stupid, imperialist reflex of going to war, either to preserve their traditional “sphere of influence” from foreign encroachment, or to continue enlarging the number of subordinate countries belonging to their own particular military alliance.
This sort of thing has been going on unabated for the past several decades, vis-à-vis every possible kind of crisis situation. So far as the official reaction to the constantly accelerating destruction of the natural environment is concerned, it has become particularly obvious since the 1988 founding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Ever time those scientists write another one of their increasingly strident annual reports about how little time we have left to change course before it will be too late, governments and corporations all over the world promise to stop denying reality once and for all, but then end up doing a great deal of nothing anyway.
Many of them have reacted even more miserably than that, deciding instead to go much further in the opposite direction, deliberately increasing the production of fossil fuels in a major way. As was done quite recently in Canada, when the federal environment minister, of all people, decided to support a huge new off-shore oil-drilling project in the North Atlantic. In the meantime, the original “window of opportunity” for stopping climate change seems to have disappeared altogether. Which means that we are now operating on borrowed time instead.
Not to mention the fact that climate change is only the worst of the hundreds of different ways in which untreated pollution has been allowed to render the natural environment increasingly unfit for human survival. Getting rid of dangerous, extremely long-lasting “forever” chemicals, such as the PFAS group, is only the latest aspect of the worldwide pollution crisis that seems to have captured, or re-captured, media attention. I will go back to this theme later on in this blog, by commenting both positively and negatively on a book published in 2021 by the prolific French author and former government minister of Research, trans-humanist Luc Ferry, about the seven conflicting branches of the worldwide ecology movement (“Les sept écologies”, 271 pages).
At the same time, very similar attitudes are also being adopted toward the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which was supposed to have disappeared several times already, after every one of its successive variants, or sub-variants, was replaced by the next one. The lack of any adequate response to that threat, focusing on the extremely unequal distribution of vaccines, has also helped ensure that this particular pandemic, the latest in a whole series of them, is far from over. Ironically, this totally ignorant virus seems to be quite capable of changing its behaviour rather often, but somehow “fails to realize” how very upset millions of human beings have become because of its unfortunate effects on their styles of life and ways of living. I will also be revisiting this theme later on, by referencing a much different book, also published in 2021, by the equally prolific French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “La catastrophe ou la vie: Pensées par temps de pandémie” (“Catastrophe or life: Thoughts written during a pandemic”, 260 pages).
Since my last blogpost was published (January 12, 2022), the world that we live in has once again become even more demoralizingly reactionary than it already was in 2021. One of the more absurd consequences of the pandemic, starting on January 28, was the almost four-week-long seizure of the downtown core of the City of Ottawa, where Canada’s Parliament buildings are located. Hundreds of truckers, organized by a group of ultra-right-wing populists, with financial support coming from all over Canada and the USA, decided all by themselves that they could no longer tolerate the admittedly inadequate but nevertheless highly necessary efforts being made back then, by all levels of the Canadian and Québec governments, to contain the pandemic (confinement strategies, mask wearing, and so on).
Dozens of huge rigs were then parked in such a way as to deliberately block off all normal traffic (family cars, delivery vans, ambulances, whatever), the truckers and their friends having determined to hold on to that territory “for as long as necessary”. They took over that district completely, honked their very loud horns over and over again, gunned their highly-polluting engines as often as possible, ignored half-hearted police attempts at getting rid of them, and generally made life very miserable indeed for all the innocent people living in that part of the city. Until they were finally booted out by combined police forces from all over Ontario and Québec, emboldened by the federal government’s hastily-written “Emergency Measures Act”.
The organizers of that protest, which has since been imitated in many other parts of Canada and copied in dozens of other countries since that time, most notably in the USA, blatantly proclaimed their goal being to overthrow the recently re-elected government of Canada. They attempted to provoke a neofascist seizure of power instead, like the one that took place in the USA on January 6, 2021, in the defence of their right to do whatever they damn well pleased, regardless of the consequences to their fellow citizens. Up to and including what was happening to the thousands of other people who were either dying in large numbers from COVID-19, or spending a very long time in hospital recovering from it. Not to mention forcing additional thousands of other people (suffering from cancer, diabetes, etc.) to have to wait several months later, or several years later, to get the treatment that they so urgently required. During which time they either also died or had to put up with those horrible diseases getting a whole lot worse than they were before the pandemic took over most of the available beds in our hospitals.
This kind of degenerate behaviour, which is still going on in many other countries, is just one of the most recent consequences of the organized decline in civility and social cohesion that began several decades ago. Since the early 1980s, the toxic tandem of neoliberalism and neofascism has taken over world politics almost completely, constantly gathering strength over the past forty years. This observation certainly applies to the most powerful bloc of nations, the Western one, based in North America and Western Europe, but also including Australia and Israel, with major influences on Japan and Taiwan. Under US leadership, those nations collectively pretend to uphold deliberately limited forms of internal democracy, while nevertheless pushing their imperial ambitions forward in every possible direction.
At the same time, the core ideologies of neoliberalism and neofascism are also being supported even more frenetically by the world’s most authoritarian nations, such as the Russian Federation, the “People’s” Republic of China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, India, Pakistan and a whole lot of other countries. A stance that also applies to such lunatic fringe organizations as Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Taliban and similar ultra-right-wing, fundamentalist organizations embedded in all the other religions. In some cases, such as in the Russian Federation, the people in power include not only those who control the government but also the equally reactionary leaders of the Christian Orthodox Church.
In every case, the most powerful people in those countries, and in every copycat movement, whether officially democratic, authoritarian, or totalitarian, constantly promote their own imperial ambitions as much as they can, at best casting only a side-long glance from time to time at any of the other collective issues that threaten every human being alive today. Not the least of which being precisely the inability of all those countries and militant movements, many of which are armed with nuclear weapons, to understand that their constant belligerence is becoming perilously close to setting off the Third World War. Which, if it is allowed to happen, could very well become the first genuine “war to end all wars”, by wiping out all of us at once, without any help required from any of the other major, ongoing crises.
During that same period, the ever-increasing income gap between the social classes, in all the richer countries as well as in all the poorer countries, each one of them combining varying proportions of private capitalism and state capitalism, has gotten to the point that a few ultra-privileged people are making millions of dollars per day, while hundreds of millions of severely under-privileged people are only making one or two dollars per day. A fact that does not prevent those extremely powerful elites from being adulated by hundreds of millions of ordinary peons, who do not seem to realize that their irrational support for their oppressors is diametrically opposed to their own legitimate interests.
Whenever some of those ordinary people manage to get paid slightly more than what the world’s poorest people receive, or to possess even the tiniest parcel of property, they tend to support the prevailing system, no matter how ultra-elitist it has become. Immediate satisfaction of their short-term goals is often much more important to them than any long-term changes aimed at sharing the wealth much more equitably. All of which adds up to a thoroughly unprecedented degree of social division that has made any attempts at preserving whatever is left of genuine democracy, anywhere in the world, an even more unattainable proposition than it already was during any of the previous periods of history.
The kind of aggravated elitism that led to the unprecedentedly huge income gap between the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor is constantly interacting with the equally important increase in corruption and organized crime. Legal and illegal corruption happens everywhere, but certain countries stand out as having recently fallen prey to much more extensive degeneracy than they had already attained in the past, as in Mexico, Haiti, Nigeria, Lebanon and Pakistan, where criminal gangs fight with each other to control large sections of each country. A situation that also afflicts, albeit to a lesser degree, dozens of other countries, in every part of the world. The traffic in illegal drugs seems to be the main source of this social disease, to feed a market largely based in much richer countries, of which the USA is the most outstanding example. In order to find out what drives the opioid crisis, in particular, one has only (as usual) to follow the money; in Québec, for example, one of the most lucrative sites being the main campus of McGill University, where most of the students are a great deal richer than those on any of the other university campuses.
As if all of that was not bad enough, an even more dangerous event than the populist rebellion against the consequences of the pandemic has now been added to the constantly increasing roster of catastrophic absurdities. On February 24, 2022, the Russian Federation launched an all-out attack on the entire territory of the Ukrainian Republic. The quick Russian victory, that Vladimir Putin and almost everyone else was expecting, now seems to have completely bogged down, at least for the moment, a situation that was caused not only by unexpectedly fierce Ukrainian opposition, but also by genuine division within Russian ranks. It looks now as though Russia may have to be satisfied with a great deal less than it initially hoped to achieve, focusing on the eastern part of the Ukraine, if it wants to avoid total humiliation.
Ever since the end of the Cold War, in 1991, the immensely richer and much better-armed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries in the Western world have been extending their military alliance right up to the Russian border, adding most of Eastern Europe to their ever-expanding empire and refusing to exclude any of those countries from their intended takeover. For the past thirty years, hundreds of political pundits in the West, not only well-known left-wingers like Noam Chomsky but also even more well-known right-wingers like Henry Kissinger, have been warning everyone about the potentially dire consequences of doing just that.
Putin’s initial decision to attempt a total military occupation of all the regions in the Ukraine, before it became permanent NATO territory, and not just to grab parts of it as in 2014, was nevertheless an incredibly stupid decision, even from the Russian point of view. The pre-announced reaction of the much more powerful Western bloc of countries was to immediately apply huge economic sanctions designed to severely set back the entire Russian economy, for a very long time, oligarchs and ordinary people included. The effect of those sanctions, however, has been considerably blunted by the dependency of several Western countries, such as Germany and Austria, on Russian oil and natural gas. As well as by the lack of compliance with that strategy by dozens of formerly “third world” countries such as China, India and South Africa, compounded by only lukewarm compliance coming from such official Western “allies” as Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia. At the same time, the Western countries have also been held back from decisive military action against Russia by trying to avoid provoking a nuclear holocaust, which could quite easily kill off the entire human race once and for all.
Luckily for NATO, the Ukrainians are still resisting quite well, with a great deal of outside help, at least as of this writing. The original goal of the US-dominated Western empire still remains, however, to help the Ukraine defeat the Russian assault, thereby completing the takeover of every part of Eastern Europe that does not directly belong to the Russian Federation, and eventually incorporating the entire Ukrainian Republic into both NATO and the European Union. As opposed to letting the Ukraine, and Belarus, remain dominated by what is left of the non-federated parts of the Russian empire, the tottering “Collective Security Treaty Organization” and the even more moribund “Commonwealth of Independent States”.
It remains to be seen what is going to happen next, the dynamics of such incredibly complicated systems as international geopolitics, worldwide ecological perturbations, global pandemics and unprecedented social divisions in every country, being extremely difficult to predict. Especially when they are all linked together into one stinking, inextricable mess. Since the invasion began, it has become even more difficult for any of the world’s governments, or for any of its private corporations, to do anything real about any of those other crises, even if, all of a sudden, they had wanted to get serious about any one of them.
The potential consequences of the war between Russia and Ukraine are considerably more dangerous than the consequences of all the previously-started wars still going on in such places as Syria, Yemen, Libya, Sudan/South Sudan, West Africa (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, etc.), and Israel/Palestine, as well as geopolitical confrontations still flaring up from time to time in places like Iraq, Cuba, Myanmar and so on. This is true in spite of the fact that far more people have died recently in several of those countries (500 000 deaths just in Syria) than have so far perished in the Ukraine, even if the 2014 Russian invasion of several Ukrainian regions is added to the constantly accumulating 2022 total.
It is incredibly foolish, as well as blatantly racist, for people being interviewed in the Western media to make comments about how the Russian invasion of the Ukraine is so much worse than anything that has happened anywhere on this planet since the end of the Second World War. As took place recently in Montréal when some people claimed that all Russian musicians playing here, even ones who criticized Putin, should be forced to leave right away because “there’s a real war going on”. Not only are such people forgetting how murderous the ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen have been, they also conveniently forget the US invasions of Iraq (the Gulf War of 1990-1991 and the 2003 occupation), as well as the UN-sponsored embargo (1991-2003), the three of those events together having caused at least another 500 000 deaths in that extremely unfortunate country.
Not to mention also forgetting the tens of millions of people who died during the Korean War (1950-1953), the Vietnam War (1957-1975) and the dozens of other geopolitical conflicts since 1945, many of which were also considerably more murderous than anything that has so far happened in the Ukraine. Another example being the very un-civil war between the Hutu and the Tutsi peoples in Rwanda and Burundi, centring on the attempted genocide of 1994, as well as the extension of that conflict into the neighbouring “Democratic Republic” of the Congo, claiming more than two million lives overall. Without under-estimating the total devastation being caused by the current Russian invasion of the Ukraine, Westerners should not lose sight of their historical perspective simply because many fewer white people were dying in wars that began between 1945 and 2021, than were non-white people.
Vladimir Putin has been trying to “justify” his horrendous invasion by claiming that he is only trying to “de-Nazify” the Ukraine, whereas in reality his own actions bear a much stronger resemblance to what the Nazis were doing back in 1933-1945, than to most of what the Ukrainian government is currently doing, at least officially. With the notable exception of incorporating the ultra-right-wing, Azov battalion into the Ukrainian National Guard, a move quite similar to the invitation sent out by the Russian invaders to ultra-right-wing fighters from countries like Syria and Chechenia, and private mercenaries from the Wagner Group, to help them quell Ukrainian resistance. There are quite a few more populist supporters of neofascist organizations currently residing in the Russian Federation than there are in the Ukrainian Republic, the most important of which being the ultra-right-wing populist party run by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, until his very recent death.
Nevertheless, most well-informed people know that a large section of the nationalist movement in the Ukraine joined forces with Nazi Germany and its other fascist allies, against the USSR during the Second World War, under leaders like Stepan Bandera, many of them also participating in a large number of anti-Semitic pogroms. One of the most murderous pogroms took place in Babi Yar, a suburb of Kiev, where tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews were shot in 1941 by Nazi German forces, to the considerable delight of their ultra-right-wing Ukrainian supporters. The same sort of thing also took place in Nazi-occupied countries like Poland and France, each time with local support from collaborationist governments and movements.
Apparently, Bandera’s organization used the same black and red flag, and the same “Slava Ukraini” (“Glory to the Ukraine”) slogan, that are currently being promoted by the Ukrainian government these days, as well as by many of their supporters living in several other countries. Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, whose grandfather (Michael Chomiak) was also a Nazi collaborator of Ukrainian origin, exiled to Poland during the Second World War, has been displaying that same flag and using that same slogan. Apparently, Freeland’s mother also belongs to the group of prominent Ukrainians who helped draw up its current constitution, a document that contains a section declaring that country’s intention to join NATO at some point.
In spite of those historical facts, it is not a good idea for anti-establishment political activists outside Eastern Europe to support Putin’s demand that Ukraine voluntarily abandon more parts to its territory to Russia than those already taken, notably two largely Russian-speaking regions in the eastern part of that country, that have been declared “People’s Republics” by the Putin regime. Like the editor of one of Québec’s leftist monthly newspapers, “L’Aut’journal”, did last month, as part of an editorial calling for unity between Québec pacifists, ecologists and supporters of Québec independence. For the simple reason that supporting such a stance, even if such a partition were to be eventually accepted by the Ukrainian government, too closely resembles the strangely similar points of view of several other varieties of imperial consolidators, such as the English-Canadian federalists.
According to those people, in the event of Québec’s eventual “separation” from the “rest of Canada”, the Québec government should be obliged to cede the largely English-speaking parts of Québec, to the surviving Kingdom of Canada. The same newspaper is also making a similar mistake whenever it supports the People’s Republic of China’s claim that Taiwan is definitely an integral part of Chinese territory, and always has been. China may indeed take over Taiwan at some point in the future, one way or the other, but it is not up to people living outside independent countries like those to promote such decisions.
It has also become a great deal more difficult for any of the world’s countries to do anything to alleviate suffering from the ecological crisis, the pandemic or monstrous social divisions worldwide, when enormous amounts of money are being spent instead on war. A reality that now includes huge increases in military spending currently being announced in most of the NATO countries, as well as in most of the “emerging” countries. Not to forget the immediate, and equally monstrous increases in atmospheric pollution in the new war zone, even more so than in most of the ongoing wars in other parts of the world. The negative repercussions of that war are also quite extensive, even in countries that do not import most of their fossil fuels from Russia or Ukraine, such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Turkey, Egypt, Ethiopia, Congo and Eritrea, where a large percentage of foodstuffs and fertilizer have long been imported from those same two countries.
Every one of the world’s major crises is also having an equally deleterious effect on social spending as well. A team at Montréal’s Concordia University recently estimated that the negative effects on women alone, of the 2019-2021 portion of the sanitary crisis (which is by no means over), would probably set back the world economy by about a trillion dollars, if allowed to continue between 2022 and 2030. (See the article by Lise Denis, “La parité fragile des milieux de travail” (“Fragile parity on the job”), in “Le Devoir”, March 7, 2022). One of the most important causes of this massive setback for women’s liberation being the fact that millions more women than men, all over the world, had to quit their jobs, at least temporarily but in many cases permanently, to take care of millions of children and other vulnerable people during the repeated periods of massive confinement already ordered by dozens of governments, on every continent.
These days, even the “People’s Republic” of China has joined the ever-growing list of countries that have encountered unprecedented popular resistance to its latest attempts to contain the spread of the virus in its country of origin. Things are not just going to “bounce back to normal” for everyone, even in the world’s richest countries, if the sanitary crisis should suddenly cease to exist, all by itself. That is not the way that these things work.
Each one of these worldwide disasters—unprecedented environmental destruction, successive pandemics, highly aggravated social divisions and the return to a period of considerably more dangerous geopolitical confrontations—always causes extremely negative effects on the potentially much more successful performance of the world economy, as well as on the occasionally positive effects of that relative prosperity on society as a whole. Instead, the horrendous setbacks that the pandemic has had on women’s incomes (so far) are only one example of how all those intersecting forms of decline combine to keep humanity from moving forward in so many different ways. Rather than moving backward instead, even to the extent of at some point causing the possible extinction of our species as a whole. It is not just most women (half of humanity) that are being set back in these ways, but also the dozens of other categories of relatively under-privileged people, most of whom belong to the lower classes of society, in every region of the world.
These converging catastrophes are currently reversing the more positive tendency that used to exist, until quite recently, that had brought about a brief reduction in the massive numbers of ultra-poor people on this planet. Which took place during the 1980s and the 1990s, when several hundred million people, who used to be thoroughly destitute peasants in the emerging countries, became significantly less poor industrial workers instead. Very few of the world’s even relatively well-informed observers, however, realize just how many hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens are now suffering from the radically deleterious effects of the current, antediluvian trend known collectively as “the end of progress”. People favouring more progress rather than less have been denouncing the world’s most powerful, reactionary ideologies, especially social-class elitism, misogyny, racism, climate-changing extractivism, economic liberalism, fascism, ethnic exclusivism, imperialism, militarism and religious fundamentalism, for a very long time.
What many of those forward-looking people do not always seem to realize, however, is that the ultra-right-wing populist, or neofascist variety of each one of those atavistic ideologies is a great deal more virulent and more deadly than the significantly less dangerous kinds that we have had to deal with, especially in the relatively liberal Western countries, since the end of the Second World War. The ultra-right-wing versions of those backward ideologies are considerably more destructive than the more traditional, right-wing manner of promoting them used to be.
To the same extent that SARS-CoV-2 is a much more deadly virus than the one that causes the common cold, or that smallpox is considerably more deadly than is chicken pox. Or that the USA, because of its enormous power, nevertheless causes a great deal more harm in this world, even under a more democratic president than the Putin supporter he replaced, than does the much weaker, but thoroughly fascist, Islamic State movement. Not to forget that it is possible, even probable, that an American form of ultra-right-wing neofascism could very well return to power very soon, and take over all three branches of the US government next time around.
Getting back now to the 2021 book about “catastrophe or life”, that I was referencing earlier, Jean-Pierre Dupuy repeated the argument that he had already advanced in a prior contribution (2002), that any discussion of such ongoing disasters as climate change or the pandemic cannot be treated, as many other intellectuals have done, as if they could not possibly be prevented. In Dupuy’s view, it is only after such massive events have already caused all, or most, of the damage initially predicted that they can legitimately be considered to have been real catastrophes, not before. This is an interpretation of such events that he called “enlightened catastrophism” (pages 10-11). In other words, before those kinds of disastrous events really do take place, it is scientifically and philosophically impossible to know for sure that they are really going to occur in as thoroughly devastating a way as that predicted.
Dupuy attributed that kind of misinterpretation to the fact that most of those extremely pessimistic intellectuals only received a literary education, with the result that they do not have any real grounding in the physical sciences (pages 21-22). He then proceeded to outline all the major contributions made by people like the founder of cybernetics, John von Neumann (page 153), who dedicated their lives to understanding complex physical systems that seem to produce order and complexity out of mere “noise” (page 162). An observation that he also applied to the entire grouping of NBIC systems (nanotechnologies, biotechnologies, information and cognitive technologies) (page 169).
Unfortunately, his argument later converged on supporting the theory of intelligent design (page 175), a point of view that is vehemently rejected by the vast majority of scientists, who consider that concept to be a creationist illusion, conjured up by pseudo-scientific apologists for the revealed religions. This curious error seems to be directly related to Dupuy’s earlier argument, according to which many of the French intellectuals that he denounced in his book, this time for falsely claiming that they were not afraid to die from the coronavirus, came to that absurd conclusion because of their incapacity to understand metaphysics (page 23).
I also disagree with his claim that the virus was caused uniquely by chance, having nothing to do with human intervention (pages 92-93). In the first place, I do not think it is appropriate to dismiss out of hand the theory according to which SARS-CoV-2 may in fact have escaped from an over-ambitious virology lab located in the city of Wuhan. But even if we accept the much more likely (and much more popular) theory, that the coronavirus that caused the pandemic evolved naturally out of viral ailments found in bats, and was then transmitted to human beings via various other wild animals being sold in Wuhan meat markets, the word “chance” does not seem to me to be the appropriate word to describe that process.
Quite a few observers have referred to the pressure that the ever-increasing Chinese population has been constantly putting on the natural environment, by pushing up against the remaining wild-animal habitats in China, which would point to a rather different kind of indirect human intervention. I also read a report in the Western press about how the dominant, Xi Jinping faction of the Chinese Communist Party refused for populist reasons to get rid of those very same meat markets, as was apparently being proposed by some rival factions in that same party. A more direct accusation has also been levelled by hundreds of observers like Québec journalist Jean-François Lisée (“Les impunis”, or “The unpunished ones”, in “Le Devoir”, January 12, 2022), to the effect that China’s delayed reaction to the appearance of the virus in that country led to considerably larger numbers of deaths (according to him 66% higher than a much earlier intervention would have entailed), particularly outside of China.
Most of Dupuy’s text, however, is devoted to explaining the absurdity of several other arguments relating to the pandemic, advanced by such other French intellectuals as André Comte-Sponville (pages 32-33, 46 and 49), about the “low degree of fatality” of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the “over-reaction” of official government attempts to contain the coronavirus through social distancing, obligatory mask-wearing and so on. Dupuy considered such arguments to be “ignorant sophisms”, similar to the sophism committed by those who described the preparations for the Y2K event (January 1, 2000) as also amounting to over-kill, since nothing really happened after 300 billion dollars were spent on warding off any possible repercussions! (page 110).
As he pointed out, however, in the case of the pandemic, without similar preparations, a much larger disaster would have taken place, claiming as many as 500 million more victims (page 115), if so many different governments had not responded in the way that they did. Countries that refused to react properly most of the time, such as Brazil and the USA, had the highest numbers of overall deaths in relation to their total populations (pages 36-38). According to Dupuy, people suffering from Covito-scepticism always get everything wrong, even to the extent of confounding average and median figures, in many different countries, concerning the age of death of the victims of the coronavirus. An error that Dupuy claimed (page 235) to be the historical equivalent in literary writing of not being able to decide whether French author Victor Hugo lived before or after the French Revolution, as if the revolution itself had had no discernible effect on his literary work!
For the last part of this curiously-constructed blogpost, I want to get back next to the book by Luc Ferry, that I also referenced earlier, about the seven conflicting branches of the ecology movement. In a long introduction to his work (pages 9-55), Ferry outlined just about everything that he wanted to accomplish in his book, devoting the rest of it to providing a more detailed examination of each proposition. According to his analysis, the first group of ecologists that he identified believe in the inevitable collapse of civilization, stemming from our increasing incapacity to control the negative effects of human-generated pollution on the natural environment. A catastrophe that many French “collapsologues” proclaim will result in the deaths of at least four billion people in the very near future, starting around 2030 (pages 9, 15 and 16)! The surviving population from that kind of mega-death would then have to “voluntarily” embark on an extremely reactionary return to something resembling a medieval village economy, everywhere in the world, focusing entirely on local survival, as well as “suspending” any form of democracy, in order to stay alive.
The next branch of the ecology movement that Ferry designated had an almost completely opposite approach to his first group, a category that he chose to call the “reformist” ecologists, who, although still sounding the alarm bell about massive and extremely dangerous increases in pollution, nevertheless put their faith in slogans like “sustainable development”. They believe that with this concept they can prolong the “life-span” of the modern, productive economy indefinitely by promoting what they so optimistically refer to as a “transition economy”. According to Ferry, this is the point of view that was adopted by the all the official, government-led “COP” assemblies (“Conference of the Parties”), begun back in 1994 (pages 17-18). (The 27th edition of which is planned for November, 2022).
The third division of the multi-faceted ecology movement that Ferry identified are what he called “revolutionary alarmists” (page 18), who disagree with the inevitability of the collapse of civilization that the first category considered to be imminent, but whose proposed solution is quite similar to what the “collapsologues” were predicting that the possible survivors of the upcoming disaster would be forced to adopt. According to Ferry, this third group of ideologues believe that everyone should switch over right away to the same kind of self-sufficient village economy mentioned earlier, abandoning economic growth altogether in favour of promoting a “revolutionary” return to the distant past, in order to avoid causing the total catastrophe that continued growth would render inevitable. In my opinion, Ferry should have called that option “counter-revolutionary” rather than “revolutionary”, since it would entail giving up every kind of industrial, technical, cultural or political advance (i.e., progress) known to mankind since the end of the European “Middle Ages”.
Ferry’s fourth, fifth and sixth categories of ecologists are all based on the writings of various intellectuals, mostly from the USA, who claim that environmental degradation has been caused by the same kinds of domineering attitudes that were also used to promote the oppression of women, the oppression of the colonial world and/or the oppression of a large part of the animal kingdom. So far as the women’s movement is concerned, he referred (page 21) to theoretician Karen J. Warren, who according to him became the “grandmother” of eco-feminism following the 1987 publication of an article in which she declared that the oppression of women had strong links with the wilful destruction of the natural environment. An interpretation that led her to proclaim that all feminist theory and practice should henceforth include an ecological perspective, while all solutions to ecological degradation should necessarily include a feminist perspective.
Ferry then went on to cite the contributions of several other university professors during the 1990s who linked the ecological point of view to the kinds of oppression imposed by Western imperialism on Latin America, as well as on the rest of the “third world” (page 22). Following which, when those same messages were taken up by such well-known popularizers as Swedish militant Greta Thunberg, led to the idea of linking the ecology movement not only to feminism, but also to the fight against imperialism and the fight against racism (page 22). Ferry was highly critical of French president Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to link global warming with the rise of Islamic terrorism (page 23), as well as citing anti-colonial, French feminist Françoise Vergès’ defence of the Islamic veil (page 116), who (I think mistakenly) argued that the hijab was not really anti-feminist, nor reactionary. He also seemed to agree with Vergès’ claim that mainstream feminism in France suffers from Islamophobia merely because that religion hails from the global South (the colonial, or neocolonial, part of the world).
In my opinion, it is completely absurd for people in the Western world to support reactionary viewpoints coming from the former “third world”, merely because they want to show just how anti-imperialist they have become. In fact, imperialism and colonialism have existed for at least six thousand years, long before some of the European nations started constructing their own empires, all over the world, during the period known as “modern imperialism” (from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries). The first empires in history were founded in western Asia and northern Africa, before spreading out onto almost every continent before the Europeans even got started on their own imperial ambitions. Some of those same non-European empires also continued to compete with the gradually more powerful European empires, in many different parts of the world, right up to the present day.
It is therefore ridiculous for any theoretically “anti-imperialist” left-wingers nowadays to identify with reactionary movements and tendencies, whether “traditional” or recent, coming from non-European peoples. The entire gang of atavistic ideologies that I listed above (class-based elitism, racism, sexism, imperialism, militarism, etc.) were every bit as reactionary when they were expressed by those earlier elites as when they were expressed later by elites of European origin. Those same reactionary ideologies are also supported nowadays by many indigenous people currently living inside the home countries of the European empires (the Western world) as they are by many non-Europeans currently living in several of the former European colonies, now suffering from economic neocolonialism.
As for the sixth branch of the ecology movement, Ferry also described the intellectual process (pages 24-26) by which the most radical forms of vegetarianism were gradually incorporated into an ecological framework over the past thirty years. Essentially, those militants believe that the rotten treatment of animals bred for slaughter in the meat industry can be directly linked to the enormously negative effect that the increasing, worldwide emphasis on carnal food has had on the natural environment. They also point out that it would be much less damaging to nature if we could succeed in convincing everyone to avoid eating meat altogether.
Leaving the best for last, Ferry then declared that the seventh, and final branch of the ecology movement, that also came into being over the past several decades, is a grouping that he called “eco-modernism”, the only one of the seven sections that he chose to support. This is because, in his opinion, it is the most intelligent branch of the ecology movement (page 30), favouring a “circular” economy based on promoting truly massive forms of recycling of modern industrial products, including the agricultural industry. Eco-modernists believe that all producers of all goods everywhere should be forced to abandon the short-term approach promoted by neoliberalism, through reinvigorated government intervention (page 226), so as to start the whole recycling process at the initial point of production. An approach that he claimed would be much more efficient than trying to figure out what to do after those goods have already been used or consumed, often with disastrous consequences for the natural environment.
Ferry was particularly fond of citing a book “(Cradle to Cradle”) published in 2010 by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, that proclaimed that we should copy the natural world by (metaphorically) refusing to manufacture any more garbage cans. Instead, they felt that we should adopt Mother Nature’s method of getting things done, by producing truly enormous quantities of everything that we need, every time. According to them, human industrialists could only succeed in that assignment if every product that they manufactured was specifically designed in advance to be thoroughly absorbable within the natural environment.
McDonough and Braungart’s chosen example of how nature itself functions being the huge amount of cherries normally growing on ordinary cherry trees, in a much greater quantity than what those trees in fact require to satisfy their basic biological need to ensure plant reproduction (page 29). Each one of those “surplus” cherries is rapidly recycled by biological agents found on the ground, or by the animals who eat them. According to them, all human production should henceforth be based on the same principle, which means that we must abandon the neoliberal, “just-in-time” practice of basing production on satisfying only the short-term market for such goods.
At one point during his long introduction, Ferry’s analysis of contemporary society took a more philosophical bent, when he took note of the fact that contemporary society, having rejected both the Christian and the communist world-views, has instead adopted a hedonistic, self-centred approach to life, that he called the “pleasure ethic” (page 42). In my opinion, however, the whole idea of a pleasure ethic in fact fits in very well with the neoliberal emphasis on immediate satisfaction of people’s desire to consume increasingly large quantities of material goods, as soon as possible. Ferry’s criticism of hedonism reads as if it were limited only to condoning the use of state “intervention”, to induce private capitalism to go beyond very short-term profit maximization by adopting a somewhat longer-term approach to capital accumulation. A new way of doing things that according to him would enable us to make sure that there will still be a natural environment, and a functioning human society, long into the future.
Nevertheless, his approach seems to me to be only a slightly longer-term version of the pro-capitalist idea of “sustainable development”, designed to enable private capitalism to go on dominating and exploiting human society, as well as the natural world, forever. In that sense, his embrace of a modified version of the pleasure ethic amounts to no more than an extension of the neoliberal attitude, rather than to a genuine rejection of it. Other contemporary thinkers, such as the quixotic French philosopher Dany-Robert Dufour, have criticized the hedonistic approach, otherwise known as the pleasure ethic, as constituting a form of pleonexia, defined as a hubristic desire on the part of privileged people to accumulate as many material possessions as possible, without taking into account the consequences of doing that on either less privileged people, or on the natural environment.
Ferry’s eco-modernist approach seems to me to be nothing but an elaborate apology for the kind of economic liberalism that was developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in Great Britain, and that has recently been revived in the form of neoliberalism. In my opinion, his somewhat extended version of neoliberalism will still continue taking us all down the garden path of self-indulgent, relatively short-term investment and “just in time” production, toward ever more massive social divisions and ever more probable ecological extinction.
It seems to me that Ferry continues to believe that what he calls the “most capable” people on this planet can still get away with pursuing their own slightly-deferred pleasures forever, deliberately ignoring everything and everybody that gets in their way. He went on to cite (page 192) Michael Schellenberger’s “Eco-modernist Manifesto” (2015) to the effect that we should certainly not copy the “prehistoric” populations from the Pleistocene era, who successfully wiped out all the huge herds of large mammals that existed back then. But Schellenberger, and Ferry, still think that we could somehow turn today’s Anthropocene era into a remarkable success story by adopting an intelligent program of eco-modernism instead.
Eco-modernists like Ferry believe, in their trans-humanist way, that in order to guarantee that success, modern society also has to come up with a series of entirely new technologies, such as nuclear fusion power, that do not rely on any raw materials currently being used, but rather (as I understand it) on isotopes of hydrogen found in truly abundant quantities in ordinary seawater (pages 26-29). In this context, it is interesting to note that British scientists made a major breakthrough in February 2022, only a few months after Ferry’s book was published, succeeding for the first time in producing more energy in a confined laboratory experiment than they had put into it. Nevertheless, it seems to me that replacing fossil fuels with fusion power, as the number one source of energy in the world, would undoubtedly require a truly gigantic, world-scale investment, lasting several decades.
Along the way, Ferry also made a related mistake by agreeing (page 158 and pages 165-167) with fellow intellectual Jean-Pierre Dupuy to the effect that the current sanitary crisis has no connection whatsoever to the ecology crisis. This strange interpretation of events may be related to Ferry’s dismissal of today’s China, where the pandemic got its start, as a country that for him does not really possess a modern industrial economy, even though it certainly seems to favour a very extensive development of private capitalism, under the overall tutelage of state-capitalist bureaucrats. In Ferry’s view, the pandemic started in China through “natural causes”, in China’s traditional, backward, village-oriented meat markets, backed up by a completely anti-capitalist, totalitarian-communist system. In so doing, Ferry did not seem to realize that the enormous pressure of China’s ever-expanding population, on what is left of the natural habitats in that country, may indeed have had a great deal to do with its colossal, recent, industrial expansion into the number two spot (or even the number one spot) in the world of industrial production.
Summing it all up, the main weakness in Ferry’s approach to his subject, is his astonishingly excessive optimism, typical of people who support the trans-humanist point of view. On several occasions, he appeared to completely ignore the regularly repeated warnings from most of the world’s climate scientists about how devastating a continued reliance on fossil fuels is going to become, everywhere in the world, only a very short time from now. At one point, he even seemed to suggest (page 152) that global warming could somehow be absorbed within the hundred-degree difference between average temperatures in the polar regions and average temperatures in the Sahel region!
He also claimed (page 167) that we can still rely on a hundred-year supply of carbon-based energy, backed up by already-existing nuclear fission energy, before we have to introduce any of those completely new technologies. In my view, this is just a particularly severe case of wishful thinking, similar to the way in which Ferry avoided acknowledging that any transition to a truly circular economy would take at least as long as the four decades (1979-2019) that it took for the neoliberal approach to take over most of the world economy. Or that it will take for new technologies like fusion power to replace fossil fuels altogether.
However, unlike many other trans-humanists, such as Tesla’s Elon Musk, Ferry did not support the idea that we should save the world from global warming by replacing fossil fuels, such as in the transportation industry, with battery-powered vehicles instead. As he described it, battery power is indeed a form of renewable energy, but it also relies on electrical energy being produced by various metals, the extraction and transformation of which also produce a great deal of harmful pollution. A situation made even worse by the fact that the rarer metals being used are almost exclusively controlled by a completely unreliable country (at least from Ferry’s pro-Western point of view), the “People’s” Republic of China (page 105). For similar reasons, he pooh-poohed massive investment in wind power, which also relies largely on similar kinds of metallic extraction and production, thereby also causing a huge amount of pollution in the process (page 169).
At one point, he also claimed, in the same overly optimistic way, that the problems caused by the massive reliance on such metals could be overcome at some point by the industrial producers themselves, through some kind of future innovations (page 138). Unfortunately, merely wishing for innovation is often quite unrealistic, because we never know in advance how long we are going to have to wait before such “innovations” take place. The first laboratory success with fusion power, for example, only occurred after fifty years of coordinated experimentation, in dozens of different labs working non-stop in at least a dozen different countries.
Another related weakness in Ferry’s argument, repeated throughout his book, was his strange attempt to treat left-wing ideologies, such as the Marxist form of communism, as if they necessarily ended up supporting some kind of ecological fascism. He cited several French authors, such as Serge Latouche (page 91), who according to him denounced “sustainable development” as an ethnocentric, colonialist and imperialist concept used to justify the ambitious projects of transnational corporations. In Latouche’s view (at least according to Ferry’s presentation of his work) what we really need to be doing is to develop local collectives working to replace the enormous world market based entirely, as it is now, on short-term growth, and to emphatically reject the whole concept of economic growth altogether (page 93). Ferry also contended (pages 125-126) that such well-known authors from the recent past as André Gorz, René Dumont and Ivan Illich were all a bunch of raving Marxist fanatics, favouring Maoist totalitarianism, an extremely harmful ideology that in his opinion was not very different from the current arguments of a great number of contemporary, anti-growth militants.
It seems to me, however, that communism, at least according to the original Marxist point of view, was certainly not intended to favour a worldwide return to feudalism or to a medieval village economy. Nor was it intended to be based on a rejection of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, with which Ferry seems to identify completely. Such as when he referred to Emmanuel Kant’s concept of developing a much wider vision than that normally offered in society, rejecting narrow egocentrism, and capable of understanding points of view differing substantially from one’s own (page 171).
The Marxist definition of communism was rather to incorporate the wider vision of the Enlightenment into its overall message, and to go beyond it by rejecting nineteenth-century-liberal, and twentieth-century-neoliberal, capitalism’s anti-Enlightenment focus on short-term profit maximization. It was never designed to support anything like medieval feudalism. The fact that many of the reform socialists favouring social-democracy, and of the revolutionary socialists favouring totalitarianism instead, both completely lost sight of that initial vision, over time, and eventually ended up supporting a return to feudalism instead, cannot in all honesty be blamed on the original Marxist point of view.
Summing up everything that I have been writing about in this blogpost, what we have to deal with right now is a situation in which the elites dominating almost every country in the world all support some kind of combination of neoliberalism and neofascism, as well as simultaneously competing against each other for global domination. Which is a very dangerous situation indeed. Any one of today’s world’s most important crises—inter-imperialist rivalry between the nuclear powers, the degradation of the natural environment, the succession of uncontrolled pandemics, the enormous divisions between the social classes—or all of them together, could easily bring about an end to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, not only in the USA but everywhere else on this planet as well.
