The real “total perspective vortex”
The expression “total perspective vortex” was initially invented by science-fiction writer Douglas Adams, in his well-known 1979 novel, The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. Its original, fictional meaning as a literary device is not, however, the subject of this blogpost, but rather its use as a heuristic device for understanding the real world. Like Adams himself seemed to suggest in the 2002, posthumous collection of some of his previously published, and unpublished works, The salmon of doubt. My take on it, however, may not necessarily seem to other Adams fans to be directly related to his own thinking on that subject.
What I see as being a real application of the “total perspective vortex” idea is to imagine what would happen to a person who had developed a complete and total awareness of all human existence since the emergence of our species at the beginning of the palaeolithic era of pre-history, about 200 000 years ago, right up to the present day. Including, of course, all of recorded history itself, that began about 6000 years ago with the rise of the first urban-based civilizations in Mesopotamia. (The word “city” having the same root as the word “civilization”.) Since that time, hundreds if not thousands of such civilizations came into being all over the world, co-existing with competing palaeolithic, mesolithic and neolithic societies in every region, not only a long time ago but also quite recently. The number of people living in urban-based civilizations, however, rapidly overtook the number of those still living in pre-urban societies, with the result that nowadays only a very few people can still be found in what used to be called prehistoric societies.
Prior to the founding of the urban-based civilizations, which took place much more recently in some parts of the world than in others, the first (palaeolithic) human societies evolved beyond the levels of comprehension attained by their hominid ancestors. They depended largely on hunting, fishing and the gathering of whatever other food was readily available in nature, which means that they were mostly nomadic, as well as gradually becoming quite adept at making war on each other. After a very long period of palaeolithic development, most of those societies entered into a much shorter, transitional (mesolithic) period of more accelerated development, discovering ways of greatly increasing their food supply by finding out how to herd animals and/or to cultivate certain selected plants. This new-found prosperity brought them into the neolithic period, extended families morphing into clans and tribes, under the leadership of chiefs and shamans.
According to most of the sources that I have consulted over the past several decades, the chiefs of all those neolithic clans and tribes, which eventually spread out all over the world, were normally chosen among the best hunters, and/or the fiercest warriors. Each change of leadership was normally accompanied by an enormous amount of in-fighting between rival factions among the severely limited number of adult decision-makers, in almost every group. Some of those sources also believe that it was the women who made all the botanical discoveries, and who took care of the agricultural work, growing those plants next to their homes, a major economic contribution that was not often accompanied by any political or social recognition.
Contrary to the opinions of such utopian philosophers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, most pre-urban peoples did not behave like so-called “noble savages”, but engaged in the same kind of often murderous clan rivalry that also characterized political behaviour in most of the urban civilizations as well. In other words, human beings have always been human beings, and still are nowadays, regardless of the kind of society or civilization in which they happen to live. None of those living in pre-urban societies suddenly became corrupt and difficult as soon as they started living in much larger civilizations. Nor did they suddenly, or necessarily, become more “civilized” in their behaviour for the same reason.
For their part, the so-called “urban-based” civilizations became much more prosperous than the neolithic societies as soon as people figured out how to develop something better than primitive agriculture, which was only capable of supporting semi-nomad (or semi-sedentary) societies. What was required was some form of surplus-generating agriculture, which could only be achieved by overcoming the natural depletion over time of initially fertile soils, in various different ways. Once that was accomplished, the people in those civilizations could grow crops year after year on the same soils, without moving around every few years from one place to another.
Greater prosperity meant much greater populations, as well as division of labour, the rise of social classes, and all the other myriad characteristics of urban-based civilizations. The most important characteristics of such civilizations, however, became the incredibly poor treatment of all the lower classes by the upper classes, and the tendency of the vast majority of those civilizations to treat the women (not to mention the children) in each social class much worse than the men were treated. Not to forget the equally prevalent tendency to treat most of the people coming from “insider” ethnic origins much better than most of the people hailing from “outsider” origins, most of whom were relegated to the inferior classes rather than to the superior ones.
As an Arab-language scholar, Ibn Khaldun, first described it back in the fourteenth century, the history of most of the world’s regions then became rather cyclic, richer, sedentary, civilizations constantly being attacked by poorer, nomad or semi-nomad, societies. The military skills of which being often superior to those of the more “civilized” peoples, who had often not paid as much attention as they had done a long time before that, to honing their weapons in anticipation of future battles. Most of the time, whenever the former, nomad or semi-nomad societies succeeded in defeating the richer civilizations, they too decided to settle down and concentrate on the accumulation of wealth, as well as on the consumption of the myriad goods and services available to the wealthier people in such civilizations. Then it was the turn of some other nomadic, or semi-nomadic, people from beyond their borders to attack them, thereby starting the whole cycle all over again.
To be sure, most of the people living within officially designated “urban-based” civilizations were in fact peasant farmers tilling the land surrounding those cities, the urban portion of all those civilizations only having surpassed the rural portion a couple of years ago. The extremely small number of rulers governing those same civilizations lived mostly in the cities from the very beginning, along with an increasingly large number of people belonging to various other urban classes (merchants, artisans and so on), dominated as much as the peasants were by the same aristocratic and religious rulers. Not to forget that the much greater number of all humans living in relatively recent times, as opposed to the much smaller groups living a very long time ago, means that a global appreciation of everything human would necessarily focus a lot more on urban civilizations than on pre-urban societies, and even a lot more on the last one or two centuries than on any of the previous centuries.
It ought to be obvious, however, that this kind of total perspective vortex, involving such an enormous quantity of knowledge, could never exist inside any real human brain. The possession of such complete knowledge, even if it was “only” about human beings rather than about the rest of our fantastically large universe, would quite literally blow that person’s mind to psychological smithereens. Which means that any such imagined vortex is only useful as a learning tool, to help anyone wanting to get as close as possible to such an impossible dream. Which is to at least try to put everything about humanity into common and shared perspective, not emphasizing any particular human culture, ethnic group, gender, social class, historical period or geographic locus. In other words, thinking about the incredibly diverse human population as a whole, rather than exclusively about any one of its parts, or even about a mere arithmetic sum of all those historically separated parts.
In today’s world, the different cultures that have managed to survive humanity’s extremely tortured past are all being forced by a process of ever intensifying globalization, beginning with the exceptionally violent, long-drawn-out European conquest of all the other continents, to abandon the splendid isolation of days gone by. And to realize, at long last, that they are all sharing the same natural habitat (biosphere), or at least whatever is left of it. So it seems only appropriate right now for as many people as possible, from whatever particular background, to try to figure out in a balanced way what has actually been going on since our species first appeared on this increasingly beleaguered planet. Because, believe it or not, genuinely understanding what happened in history, as well as in prehistory, is the only way that we can get to know ourselves sufficiently well. In order to figure out what to do next in a rational way, so that our species can have a future, as well as a past.
Which does not mean, however, that a person seeking this kind of quasi universal, but nevertheless incomplete, historical enlightenment would therefore be required to believe in some kind of multicultural utopia, whether bourgeois or proletarian. Simply by pretending to belong to an ethereal fraternity, or sorority, of heavenly souls forever detached from their earth-bound origins. No human being in this world, of whatever social class or gender, not even a demiurge like Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, French president Emmanuel Macron or the former president of the USA, Barak Obama, has ever succeeded in pulling off any kind of credible virgin birth. In the real world, everyone comes from somewhere, and somehow, and is never capable of self-genesis.
Nevertheless, all human beings living on this planet nowadays belong to only one species, with one common crucible of humanity. But that common origin took place such a long time ago, followed by so much cultural dispersion, division and diversity since that very far-off time, that no one living at any point along the way, certainly not now, could possibly remember anything surpassing our excessively limited, short term memories. Only the relatively recent discoveries of several modern sciences (anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, history, macro economics, sociology, group psychology, etc.) have placed ever increasing quantities of extremely valuable, new information in front of us. With the result that it has become possible for the first time to attempt to achieve at least a first approximation of what a total perspective about human development as a whole could possibly entail.
It has to be done quickly, however, given the fact that under the devastating influence, and cross pollination, of neoliberalism and neofascism over the past forty years, there has been an overall decline in the levels of comprehension of the real world among most of the world’s people. Even in those relatively fortunate countries for which most of the population has been deemed to have attained at least a completed, secondary school level of instruction, recent de-emphasis on content, in favour of artificially decontextualized, and therefore practically useless skills, has made it increasingly difficult for people to be able to distinguish real information from fake news.
This frightening tendency has also climbed the ladder up through the undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate levels of university instruction so as to greatly diminish the analytic capacities of millions of students, particularly in the social sciences mentioned above. If these trends continue over the next couple of decades, it will no longer be possible for the relatively large number of people, necessary to make a difference in this world, to understand even a minimalist version of what a total perspective vortex might look like. Or to figure out why anyone at all might want to go beyond the extremely limited horizons that have always kept most people in their own local version of the dark ages.
The level of comprehension of even the most basic ideas, affecting an every increasing number of minds all over the world, has also sharply declined in recent years because of the stultifying effects of addiction and dependency. Not only because of the usual culprits, like alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, opioids, pornography, gaming and such, for which overall consumption per capita has become much higher than before, but also because of cyber-dependency. Far too many people have become at least as dependent on the mind-numbing kinds of entertainment to be found on their computers, tablets, smartphones and so on, than they ever were on equally dumbing-down pulp fiction, comic books, professional spectator sports or situation comedies on television.
Instead of using all these newer machines in order to become more intelligent than they were before, as a disappointingly small minority of people have done, most consumers have simply accessed that equipment to cut themselves off even further than before from the real world, and hunkered down into a totally prefabricated, prepaid world of narcissism and self abuse. The combination of increased machine dependency and the declining capacity of the educational system to successfully impart real knowledge is making it increasingly difficult to convince most people to move beyond their constricted mindsets.
But even just attempting to achieve a reasonable facsimile of such an all encompassing perspective, before it is too late, would necessarily mean that the individual embarking on such a project would have to become much more aware than most people currently are, about all the multiple aspects of the ongoing evolution of as many as possible of the world’s different ethnic peoples. This would necessarily include a comparative comprehension of the political aspects (constitutions, geopolitics, ideologies), the economic aspects (primary, secondary, tertiary sectors), the social aspects (social classes, genders, minorities) and the cultural aspects (arts, thought, popular culture) of each one of those peoples.
It would entail keeping in mind all four aspects equally, even as each one of those increasingly differentiated peoples evolved over time, spreading out all over the globe from their common African origins. Eventually overtaking and/or replacing the several other hominid species that were also experiencing their own geographical dispersions during the first part of that process. Which in some cases would also have included numerous “back to Africa” movements within dozens of separate populations, as well as subsequent second or third departures of many of those same peoples.
Not to forget, either, that the composition of each analytically separate group would inevitably change radically over time, when such incredibly diverse events as thousands of succeeding episodes of imperial colonization, all-too-numerous examples of “successful” genocide, as well as the slightly less violent absorption of thousands of previously divergent populations, took place over and over again. As well as both individual and collective episodes of quite often violent religious conversion, competing varieties of economic development or decline, widespread famines and epidemics, frequent loss of social status among many different populations, as well as periodic, social reinstatement among many other populations, and so on and so forth. Which all would have altered the very nature of each specifically recognizable political, economic, social and cultural group over time.
Any person attempting to possess a realizable approximation of such complete knowledge about humans would therefore have to abandon any absurd notions that that person may have initially maintained, about how such and such a people entered some particular geographical locus, or adopted some particular religious or ideological stance, once and for all, from the dawn of time to the present. It would no longer be possible for such a person to continue supporting any particular example of culturally imposed identity (heteronomy) that currently exists in today’s world.
But it would also mean being just as completely aware of the diverse methods by which all those separated groups of human beings were independently representing (or rather misrepresenting) this same process during that extremely long period of time. Which is to say, via their own mythical interpretations of the cultural evolution that each group experienced over all those succeeding millennia. As a result, it would also not be possible for anyone possessing anything even remotely similar to such all encompassing awareness to still believe nowadays what any of our palaeolithic, mesolithic or neolithic ancestors might have thought about their own origins, such as in the animist totemism of many of today’s extant indigenous peoples. Some version or another which seems to have characterized all the world’s pre-urban cultures, quite often accompanied by some form or another of shamanist mediation between real people living within any particular period, and the “spirit world” of their cultural predecessors.
According to many such mythological interpretations of reality, any currently existing ethnic group was supposed to have emerged spontaneously from some deified animal, or totem, at the beginning of time. Each ethnic group claiming to occupy exactly the same geographic region then as they do now, never having moved from the dawn of their collective existence right up to the present day. Which could never really have happened in that way, no matter how sincerely people belonging to such cultures may have believed in such stories, in many cases still believing in them nowadays. It is completely unacceptable in our own time for any people to still adhere to the founding conceit according to which the members of their little group always defined themselves as “the people” (the literal translation of such words as “Inuit” and “Khoisan”, among hundreds of thousands of other examples), while all the other peoples that they soon discovered living nearby were held to be not really as human as they were.
All the different ethnic groups living somewhere or another on this planet nowadays are almost always quite different from the ones that first inhabited those same places a very long time ago. The Scots, for example, are not native to today’s Scotland, nor are any of the other European peoples likely to be the same ones who first showed up in any particular part of Europe way back when. Some, like the Basque people, may very well be the oldest European group still surviving nowadays, but even they were most likely not the first members of our species to arrive in Europe. At least not in the very early days when that section of homo sapiens apparently borrowed part of its DNA from the Neanderthals. Dozens of other peoples had also already inhabited modern Turkey before any of the Turks showed up, as was the case with the Thais in Thailand, and most probably with all the other Asiatic peoples.
Even the Inuit people of the northernmost parts of North America, and their cousins in northern Siberia, apparently replaced a previously established ethnic group that died out shortly after the arrival of the Inuit. The Bantu peoples currently dominating sub-Saharan Africa seemed to have spread out from their earliest identifiable origins in modern-day Niger and/or Nigeria, while the Australian Aborigines and the peoples currently living in the Pacific islands originally belonged to the Melanesian diaspora, as did the first people in Madagascar. Most, if not all, of the “American Indian” peoples apparently came from Siberia. And so on, and so forth.
Even the dozens of different peoples belonging to all of those much larger groups, such as the overall “American-Indian” population (including the Mesa-American, the Andean, the Iroquoian, the Lakota, and dozens of other ethnic sub-sets), moved around a great deal, and were constantly absorbing captured people from neighbouring sub-sets even before the arrival of the first modern Europeans. Which means that no identifiable group of human animals living in recent times can possibly claim to be biologically (“racially”) pure.
To be sure, in today’s world, long term prior occupation of a particular piece of land, followed by a relatively recent invasion from abroad, certainly qualifies all such peoples living in our own time to receive a privileged role in the current political, economic, social and cultural development of any such geographical territory. But the simple existence of such erroneous beliefs in no way obliges anyone from within any such community, or anyone on the outside looking into any such community, to genuinely believe any more in any of those heteronymic origin myths in the current world.
Nor would it be possible to believe nowadays in any kind of much more recent, but decidedly pseudo-scientific mythology, such as the Aryan model of racial domination, initially based on the presumably common characteristics of what came to be called the Indo-European (Aryan) family of languages. To be sure, it still seems probable to many of today’s linguists that there was a common, central Asian (Aryan) origin for the Hindu culture and Sanskrit languages that conquered all the previously existing peoples of the Indian subcontinent thousands of years ago. As well as the more or less simultaneous conquest and colonization of most of modern-day Europe by successive groups of invaders speaking such apparently Aryan tongues as the Greek, Latin, Celtic, Germanic and Slavic languages. Not to forget the continuing existence of several other Aryan languages still being spoken in central Asia itself, such as in Iran, whose very name comes from a recent derivation on the word “aryan”.
But these linguistic characteristics, often contested by many anti-Aryan linguists, hardly justify any kind of added-on, racist mythology according to which the people speaking those languages nowadays have always dominated, or ought to be still dominating, any of the peoples belonging to any of the other language groups living in those same regions, such as those from the Dravidian, Basque or Semitic families of languages. Nor does it justify the ongoing, “Western”, domination of any of the other regions occupied during the world-wide, European conquests that took place during the modern colonial period.
Yet another current ideology that could not possibly be supported by anyone having undertaken to get as close as possible to such a total-perspective rigour, would be the Zionist idea. According to which the people professing the Jewish religion nowadays, or belonging to the Jewish ethnic group established quite a long time ago within the Semitic family of languages, have some kind of divine right to occupy the geographic space known to many as Palestine, at least prior to the foundation of modern Israel. Based exclusively on the fact that Israel’s presumed ancestors successfully invaded that same territory not long after the founding of the first urban-based civilizations in nearby Mesopotamia.
According to some accounts, the current ethnic group identifying itself as Palestinian nowadays originated in the Philistine (or Canaanite) people of the ancient world, as the name itself seems to suggest. Other accounts suggest instead that most of today’s Palestinians came from a large portion of the ancient Jewish (Semitic) population that converted to Islam, and the Arabic language, during the Muslim-Arab invasion of the seventh century. Whatever the origins of today’s Palestinians, none of that justifies the current “Greater Israel” gambit, often presented as a kind of post-1945 continuation of modern colonialism. Current “solutions” being proposed to whatever is left of the geographic stand-off between Israel and Palestine, such as the integrated, one-state solution or the two-state solution, can never become permanent solutions, if one particular group (the Israelis much more strongly than the Palestinians) insists on forcing everyone else to adopt its current interpretation of ancient history. Even if the fundamentalist “Christian Zionists” in the USA (and many other countries) support the Zionist claim for their own apocalyptic reasons.
By the same token, however, this reasoning also applies to any other ethnic group’s, or any other religious community’s, claims to forever occupy any other piece of terrestrial geography. Another obvious example is in the Muslim-Arab expansion mentioned above. In the beginning, the Muslim religion was founded by a prophet of Semitic origin (Mohamed), heavily influenced by both Jewish and Christian mythology. The initial, Jewish, myth having centred on the transformation of a local god (Jehovah) with limited powers into a universal God with infinite power, thereby justifying the Semitic conquest of the Canaanite territory, before and after the (real or imagined) Egyptian exile of that same people.
The subsequent Christian myth further universalized that original message into a platform for more recent attempts at world domination, at first during the imperial period of Romanized Christianity, then during the revival imperialism of the Crusades several centuries later, not to mention the even more recent, and much more successful attempt, during the modern colonial period of European domination (involving Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity). Arriving shortly after the founding of imperial Christianity, Mohamed’s idea was to subsume both the Jewish Jehovah and the Christian God into an Arab-speaking Allah, whose Koran would replace both the Jewish Talmud and the Christian Bible (itself combining the Old Testament of the chosen people with the New Testament of universal Christianity), as the main weapon of monotheist ideological conversion throughout the world.
The presumably original, Arab-speaking peoples of the Arabian peninsula, once militarily and ideologically united around the Muslim religion, were then inspired by Mohamed’s initial successes to conquer much of northern Africa and western Asia, not to mention beginning a seven-century-long foray (Andalusia) into southwestern Europe. Many, but not all, of the peoples conquered in those regions adopted either the Muslim religion, or the Arab language, or both at the same time, during that period. Some of the Berber populations of northern Africa, for example, became cultural Arabs, while others did not; in both cases, many of those same Berber populations participated in the joint Arab-Berber conquest of Andalusia during the eighth century. Previously Christianized Egyptians, surviving in today’s Coptic minority, were largely (but not completely) converted into Arab-speaking Muslims in the same way.
Islam itself continued to expand into many other regions, for several centuries after the original period. Islamized Turks and Mongols, including a few half Turk and half Mongol populations, eventually took the place of the original Arab warriors and carried Islam all the way into India. While those developments were still underway, the gradually islamized Ottoman Turks took over the previously Arab-dominated regions, and conquered several parts of eastern Europe as well, leaving various other Islamized populations in their wake. The Mogul empire in India, whose territory was largely seized later on by the more recent British (Christian) invaders, did not succeed in converting most of India to Islam, but did succeed in converting many different regions that eventually (with many changes along the way) became modern Pakistan. (As well as creating what is still quite a large minority inside today’s India.) Muslim missionaries and military leaders from various other, initially unrelated, populations then continued the somewhat more recent Muslim expansion into southeast Asia, as well as the equally recent, Muslim expansion into central Africa.
Along the way, those steadily expanding Muslim empires also started steadily dividing, the forced incorporation of so many distinctly different ethnic origins into those multicultural empires creating the same kind of religious schisms inside Islam that also plagued the rival Christian empires along the way, in many other parts of the world. Similar varieties of imperial multiculturalism also caused similar schisms inside Hinduism, Buddhism and every other religion that existed at that time, including Judaism (Zealots, Essenes, etc.). In the Muslim world, the most important initial schism, between Sunni and Shiite Islam, started not long after the death of the prophet Mohamed, several different ethnic groups switching allegiances back and forth for several centuries afterward. Eventually resulting in today’s regional war between the ex-Persian Shiite empire in modern Iran, reinforced by important Shiite allies in such places as Yemen, Bahrein, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, and the Sunni forces based in Saudi Arabia, leading an uneasy (anti-shiite) coalition including Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, as well as many other countries.
Each one of those coalitions, the Sunnis and the Shiites, also divided up over time, as did all the other religions, into dozens of sects and religious tendencies, waging ideological war on each other between each tendency, as well as participating in the ongoing conflict between the overall Sunni and Shiite interpretations of the Muslim message. In today’s world, all the Muslim-majority countries, in every different region, are also split by international politics, some being more or less aligned with some of the Western powers (the USA, France), or with some of the Eastern powers (such as China) instead. Or even with that fascinating Eurasian hybrid, the Russian Federation, its imperial pretensions bridging the gap between eastern Europe and northern Asia.
Just like some of the same Islamic factions were also split by similar varieties of international politics that existed during what Westerners call the “Middle Ages”, as well as the early-modern and late-modern periods of history, encompassing all the centuries from the founding of Islam to the present day. Many contemporary Muslim-majority nations, like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, also seem to be split (once again, like all the other religions), into “radical” or “moderate” factions, supporting exact opposites. The Saudis supporting either the USA or groups like the Islamic State movement, or both at the same time, and the Pakistanis (backed up by China) either helping the USA against the Taliban movement, or supporting the Taliban instead. African countries in the Muslim world are similarly divided, as are the ones in southeast Asia.
In other words, the Muslim part of today’s world combined religion and politics in ways that were often quite similar to how all the other parts of the entire world also combined those same two aspects. The Christian world started out by taking over the Roman empire during the fourth century and by treating all the pagans within that empire in the same horrible ways that they themselves had been treated during the preceding centuries. Shortly after that, however, they provided the necessary, ideological justification for the division of Rome into two separate empires, the Orthodox one in the east, known as the Byzantine empire, and the Catholic one in the west. The western region was subsequently divided up into several competing (feudal) sections, some of which went on to inaugurate the Protestant schism during the sixteenth century, that has persisted until this day. Becoming still further complicated by the relatively recent rise of another major ideological grouping, the evangelical fundamentalists (including all the different varieties of the Pentecostal movement).
For its part, the Byzantine empire managed to overcome several temporary schisms over a thousand-year period, but was forced by the Muslim-Arab expansion to vacate most of its original territory in western Asia and northern Africa. (Several other minority religions, such as Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity, also survived for several centuries after that, in and around the Muslim empires.) Meanwhile, the Byzantine empire was completely eliminated during the fifteenth century with the ongoing expansion of the Islamized Turks of the Ottoman empire into eastern Europe. Prior to its fall, however, the Byzantines had sent out missionaries into the Slavic sections of Europe, including places like the previously pagan Ukraine and Russia, that were converted to Orthodox Christianity during the ninth century. (At about the same time as the Turkish-speaking Khazars were converted to Judaism.) Hence the Russian “Third Rome” mythology, with Moscow inheriting the role previously passed on by Constantinople (presumably via the Greek monks from Mount Athos).
Even though most of those countries were then invaded and controlled for several centuries by various, initially pre-Islamic, Turkish and Mongolian empires, the Russians eventually managed to liberate themselves during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in order to create a new Czarist, Orthodox empire. They were then able to undertake their own expansion eastward, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, capturing several Muslim and pagan regions that remained within the Russian Federation during both the Czarist and the Soviet periods, right up to the present day. Not to forget that, during that same (early-modern) period many of the more western Slavic countries were also colonized, militarily and ideologically, by several Catholic empires based in central Europe. Resulting in the current eastern European mosaic of Catholic and Orthodox Christian countries existing alongside each other, as well as alongside several Muslim countries left over by the post World War I fall of the Ottoman empire, taking place at the same time as the fall of the Catholic Hapsburg empire.
While the Russians were slogging their way along the terrestrial route now followed by the Trans-Siberian Railroad, from Moscow to Vladivostok, the Western Christian empires (Catholic and Protestant) initially avoided taking on the Ottoman empire and expanded southward instead, taking the maritime route around Africa, then eastward toward Asia. Rapidly meeting up with their fellow empire-builders who had taken the western route around the world, conquering and/or physically eliminating all the new-found peoples in the Americas, before occupying all the Pacific islands, including Australia and New Zealand. Together, all those European expansionists eventually succeeded in dominating all the previously established, local empires along the way, whether or not those empires had previously been organized in pre-urban societies or in urban-based civilizations, such as the Muslim empires in Asia and Africa. As well as then converting many of the peoples (urban or pre-urban) previously practising pagan-animist religions into adopting hybrid forms of Christianity (more often Catholic than Protestant), most of the Muslim populations refusing to follow suit.
Most of the countries conquered during the Western Christian onslaught became formal colonies, characterized by both political and economic domination of their territories by each of those separate European nation-states (Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Britain, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Denmark). The Russian Christian occupation of many parts of central and northeastern Asia also adopted formal colonization, but in this case the dominated territories became contiguous Asian “extensions” of European Russia. After its initial conquest of all the lands and peoples between the Appalachian Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, the USA’s belated participation in formal imperialism (overseas) turned the western European expansion into just plain “Western imperialism” later on.
Not to forget that the much greater emphasis on economic domination of colonies by modern Western empires, as opposed to the kinds of colonial domination that had been established throughout the world before the modern period, was a product of increasingly profitable economic exploitation of conquered peoples. Largely because of the exchange of primary products (minerals, plantation crops, etc.) on a global basis, for the first time in history. (Including the introduction of several, devastating infectious diseases into the Americas, also for the first time.) And by the much more intensive forms of exploitation developed during that process by first the mercantilist system, then by the even more profitable industrial system. As well as the simultaneous development of finance capitalism, that has become much more important to the world’s dominant classes nowadays than any of the other parts of the world economy.
This was accompanied by much greater ideological emphasis on economic gain by those same capitalist (commercial, industrial and financial) empires. However, this certainly does not mean that any of the empires set up prior to the world-wide European expansion were not interested in the economic exploitation of their own, very poorly treated colonies. All it means is that the methods of exploitation adopted in previous eras, all over the world, were not considered to be as glorious, as prestigious, or as symbolically significant, as geopolitical and religious (ideological) domination. Pre-capitalist economic exploitation was, however, every bit as important as any of the other aspects in explaining the ongoing practical success of all the different varieties of imperialism established before the rise of the modern kind.
In a similar way, the division of labour among all the different social classes, set up by the modern (mostly Western) empires, had a lot in common with the division of labour that had previously existed in the ancient and medieval empires, all over the world. Slavery, for example, although not founded on exactly the same principles throughout history, existed every bit as much in dozens of different empires established in many different areas of the world, prior to those set up during the modern period. In Africa, for example, various different sub-Saharan kingdoms and empires practised their own kind of “indigenous” slavery at the same time as the Muslim empires in northern Africa also founded their own versions of the slave system. The two systems coming together as sub-Saharan slaves were sold by African kings and emperors to Muslim traders.
When the European empires showed up, they joined that ongoing process by buying slaves from both existing networks, as well as by hunting down and capturing millions of “their own” slaves. What was new about the European-origin systems of social class, however, centred on such innovations as the gradual replacement of aristocratic rule by bourgeois (capitalist) rule, the eventual transformation of artisan labour into working-class (industrial) labour, and the accompanying transformation of peasants into farmers, rather than on the mere existence of the slave trade. The one thing that was really new about modern slavery was the shipping of millions of African slaves overseas, mostly to the Americas, which had never been done before on such a massive scale.
A few of the Asian countries managed to resist the formal variety of Western imperialism, “only” becoming economic satrapies of those same empires. The Ottoman empire in its dying years was economically dominated by several Western investor countries, Germany in particular, while what was left of the Persian empire was divided into two zones of economic domination, the British one and the Russian one. Japan suffered a period of foreign economic domination during the last half of the nineteenth century, before emerging as a formal empire possessing its own colonies during the first half of the twentieth century. China, which had previously enjoyed several centuries as the world’s leading economic power, and the source of many important inventions, was nevertheless divided into three zones of economic domination (Russia then Japan in the north, Britain in the centre and France in the south). Thailand was also divided into British and French economic zones for awhile. Along the way, this kind of economic neocolonialism was also applied to all those countries eventually achieving political independence, after having suffered through shorter or longer periods of formal colonialism. At first mostly in Latin America but later also in Africa, Asia and the Pacific islands as well.
Equally important to remember is the fact that all the other major religions in the world, involved in this same long drawn out process, were every bit as influenced by imperial geopolitics as the Christian and the Muslim religions were. Judaism, for example, although not nearly as “popular” a religion as Christianity and Islam, was also eventually divided along something resembling ethnic lines (such as Ashkenazy and Sephardic Judaism), not to mention an accompanying division between what eventually became Orthodox, Conservative and Liberal (Reform) Judaism. To which should be added, according to a recent issue of The Canadian Jewish News, increasingly influential ultra-Orthodox, as well as ultra-ultra-Orthodox sections.
For its part, Hinduism in India had originally developed among the Aryan-Brahman invaders from the northwest, after the collapse of the Indus Valley (Bronze Age) civilization, gradually taking over all the pre-Hindu peoples to the south and imposing its own Vedic prescriptions. It successfully fought off rival religions founded in India later on, such as the Buddhist religion, which had been originally quite successful but was later confined to a small minority of today’s total population. As well as the Muslim onslaught much later than that, which managed to convert a large minority of Indians but never enough to claim a majority (except in what eventually became the secessionist state of modern Pakistan, initially including Bangladesh). Hinduism also evolved internally over the ages, just like every other religion, under the influence of different ideas, some of them imported from rival religions, but initially dismissed as completely unacceptable heresies.
During the establishment of British India, both the Hindu and the Muslim religions also successfully fought off most attempts at Christian conversion, with the result that today’s Christian minority is also relatively small, just like the Buddhist one. The British, however, were quite adept at playing off the Hindu majority against the Muslim minority, siding with one or the other according to the political conjuncture of each succeeding period. They also managed to divide and conquer the Indian population militarily, incorporating rival religious regiments into their army, both during the earlier period when the East India Company governed the colony, as well as afterwards during the period of direct imperial control. Regiments were also formed among the Sikh minority (a religion born in the sixteenth century, combining elements of faith from both Hinduism and Islam, along with many original characteristics), the Nepalese minority and so on.
Indian independence in 1947 was marred by a murderous war between most Hindus and most Muslims, also involving large portions of the Sikh population, characterized by a great deal of ethnic cleansing of various regions frequently abandoned by one religious community or the other. Other wars have also been fought since that time between India and Pakistan, for the control of the Kashmir region as well as during the even more violent liberation of Bangladesh from (western) Pakistan, that was supported by India. Wars between guerrilla and counter-insurrection forces have also been fought recently between the Buddhist majority and the Hindu (Tamil) minority in Sri Lanka, as well as between elements within the Sikh minority in the Punjab region and the all-Indian government.
For its part, Buddhism was carried by missionaries to various other countries around India, surviving quite well up to the present day inside China and Japan, as well as becoming the majority religion in such places as Sri Lanka, Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand. In China, the original, ancestor-worshiping, feudal, Confucianist religion and the more esoteric Taoist religion (but not any of the other Chinese religions that died out along the way), were combined under the control of succeeding dynasties, both of Chinese and of foreign origins, with a large Buddhist influence. For imperial purposes, all three religions were supposed to be tolerated by everyone, some believers even going so far as to try to accommodate all three, completely contradictory, systems of belief inside their own heads. A somewhat similar situation prevailed in imperial Japan, which accepted both Confucian and Buddhist influences, but tried to combine them to a limited extent with native Shintoism, also largely based on ancestor worship, as well as transforming the emperor into a god-like figure until the end of the Second World War. (A lot like the still very god-like kings of modern Thailand.)
The various, conflicting schools of Buddhism set up over the centuries in each one of the above mentioned countries, including the Tibetan kind (now continuing to exist both inside and outside the current Chinese empire), mostly abandoned the original, ascetic and monastic vision of the founder of Buddhism (Siddhartha Gautama), in favour of turning many ethnic local gods into Buddhist demiurges. With the result that in very recent times, with the military expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims from mostly Buddhist Myanmar, a monk from Quebec (Matthieu Ricard), who became one of the Tibetan-origin Dalai-Lama’s interpreters, was forced to denounce the extremely belligerent Buddhists in Myanmar as not being real Buddhists at all, because they repudiated pacifism.
The problem with that statement is similar to that of all the other deprecations pronounced by millions of other critics of heresy, or of rival religions, over the centuries. To the effect that such and such an individual (or heretic tendency), is not being a good Christian, or a good Muslim, or a good whatever else, because that person (or that group) is not practising that particular religion in “the proper way”. Unfortunately, it is impossible for any real human being (or sect) to practise any religion perfectly, its prescriptions always obliging every true believer to do things that are not only highly impractical, but often completely insane. Jehovah’s Witnesses preferring to die rather than to accept a blood transfusion, because of some excessively literal interpretation of a verse that they found in the Bible, or various religious organizations nowadays creating dangerous health situations all over the world by refusing vaccination against infectious diseases, are only two of the thousands of examples of such irrational behaviour.
Belief in God, in the afterlife (including reincarnation), a mandate from heaven, or in any other metaphysical (idealist) entity, ancient or modern, always functions like a motion picture, or an animated cartoon. Inducing viewers to flip rapidly through the pages so as to anthropomorphize every religious or ideological invention into what appears to the naive observer to be something real, instead of something deliberately faked. With the result that in the thumbnail sketch provided above, of the joint evolution of various geopolitical empires, along with various religions, during various different periods of history, it is obvious that none of those religions were ever independent from politics. Each one of them was used by whatever empire to keep ordinary people as loyal as possible to whichever group of rulers, each religion always becoming a genuine “opium of the people” (Karl Marx), designed to discourage rebellion in spite of the umpteen horrible ways in which said ordinary people have always been treated by their aristocratic or plutocratic superiors. Even in all the formally “democratic” countries, as well as in the somewhat more straightforward (and generally more brutal) authoritarian, theocratic or totalitarian nations.
The other major pretension of every religion is the curious idea according to which people without religion, or practising someone else’s religion, such as pagans belonging to animist religions or “post-religious” non-believers, do not follow any moral codes. Religious proselytes are always claiming that all human morality must have a religious basis in order to survive, with fundamentalists adding that their kind of morality is the only acceptable one. In reality, as any honest student of history can attest, none of the known religions have ever prevented large numbers of their believers from committing a huge number of sins, or crimes, in their lives. When it comes to VIP believers (those possessing a great deal of power and/or money), they have never been prevented by any religion from committing every heinous crime in the book, covering all the “seven cardinal sins” of Christianity and then some.
The aristocratic and plutocratic rulers of every community in history have never let any kind of moral stance get in the way of winning their wars (commercial and ideological wars as well as geopolitical wars). “The end justifies the means”, not only in ancient history, but also during the European Renaissance (Machiavelli), as well as nowadays (Trump’s “art of the deal”). “Might makes right” is also a common slogan, not to mention “identification with the aggressor” and “nice guys finish last”. Also similar is the current tendency among the world’s most disgusting leaders to turn truth on its head by accusing every political adversary of spreading “fake news”, to camouflage the fact that they themselves are even more serious fakers. Fake news, however, are really in the eye of the beholder, each hyperactive, ten-year-old kid with his finger on the panic button, always concluding that good news is real, while bad news is fake. In the USA as well as in many other countries, even principles ponderously written down in the founding constitution are either fake or real, depending on current attitudes toward those supposedly eternal prescriptions.
In this context, how are we supposed to be able to “drain the swamp”, when all those doing the draining turn out to be even uglier denizens of the self-same swamp, than the ones that they dislike so much? Not only for all the crimes and misdemeanours that reasonably well-informed people know about already, but also for all known examples of so-far secret evildoing. Such as the privileged information that intelligence services always convey to newly-elected officials, like all the secret information passed on to the president-elect of the USA, just before that person is inaugurated as commander-in-chief.
Politicians like Hillary Rodham Clinton, who characterized many of Donald Trump’s supporters as “deplorable people” because of their thoroughly ingrained racism and sexism, certainly told the truth that time about the Trump crowd. But that dead-on political accuracy does not take away from the fact that she herself is also a deplorable person, insofar as she was, and is still, simultaneously and hypocritically, chumming around with the ultra-elitists from investment banks like Goldman Sachs (those most responsible for the world-wide, 2008 financial crisis). As is her husband, Bill Clinton, who was not only just as deplorable during his years as president for being even closer to the very same investment bankers, but also much more deplorable than she was for his misogynist treatment of many different women, throughout his political career.
Every established system of belief is considered to be a marker of the fundamental art of belonging, particularly in today’s world-wide epidemic of identity politics. Which means that the swamp-system necessarily projects the idea of total compliance of each member to each religion, or to each political ideology in the world, to avoid the complete disaster allegedly brought on by the “demoralizing tactics” of the officially designated “enemies of the people”. The slightest criticism of the prevailing system in any region or period is therefore seen as a frontal attack on the entire machinery of power. Language of this nature is also particularly obvious in every country or system using “the cult of the personality”, not only in such authoritarian republics as Russia (Stalin, Putin), China (Mao, Xi) and Zimbabwe (Mugabe, Mnangagwa), but also in such equally authoritarian monarchies as Thailand and Morocco, not to mention theocracies like Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Sadomasochistic societies like these ones must have complete adhesion, otherwise all is lost. If people stop believing in God (or whatever other imagined, immaterial, metaphysical version of thought control), they are supposed to instantly become potential serial killers, just waiting for some mundane incident to set them off. Which is why official religions, or similar ideological affiliations (such as Maoism), supposedly provoking “deep, sincere belief”, consider support for those designated beliefs essential for maintaining group “morality”. As defined not only by the sadists running such systems, but also by the masochists slavishly adhering to every irrational system of thought.
During most of humanity’s past history, philosophical rationalism never became a very popular, alternate form of thought. In a few places, such as in some parts of ancient Greece, rational thinking and scientific discovery influenced an intellectual minority for a time, while similar individuals also managed to make several contributions to rationalism and science, against all odds, even from within various religious empires. But it has only been in our own time, following the relatively recent development of modern, universal science, that at least the rational portion of humanity has been given the necessary tools to step back from the hundreds of competing varieties of obscurantist mysticism and complementary political fictions, in order to understand what was really going on during this extremely long process of cultural evolution. In other words, enabling some of us to abandon the enormous distraction of having to wade through billions of pages of metaphysical/religious/ideological BS about every (to coin a phrase) God-forsaken thing that was supposed to be going on in the past, as well as right now.
The fact that a very large number of people, even quite recently, refuse to abandon mysticism, like the Nazis who invented (or reinvented) the Aryan myth, or the climate skeptics who convinced the US government to abandon the fight against environmental pollution, cannot be blamed on the scientific community. Even if more than a few people from that community seem to enjoy hobnobbing with people in power, like Canada’s current governor-general, ex-astronaut Julie Payette. Who continues to bravely support scientific thinking about biological evolution while still placing herself in the curious position of agreeing to represent the feudal Queen of England inside the fictitious “Kingdom of Canada”. Thereby upholding an antiquated projection of the once-glorious British empire, upon which the sun was never supposed to set.
It bears repeating, however, that anyone searching for any useful approximation of a total perspective vortex, in the here and now, would have to repudiate all the true believers from his or her own original starting-point. It would be totally impossible for such a person to support not only any of the world’s older ideologies (based on religion), but also any of the more recently developed, “secular” ideologies, such as liberalism, conservatism, capitalism, imperialism, socialism, communism, anarchism, nationalism and fascism (“national socialism”). Nor any of the even more recent, currently hegemonic subsets of some of those ideologies, such as neoliberalism and neofascism.
To be sure, a few of those ideologies, socialism and communism in particular, may look appealing from a total perspective point of view, as long as one’s understanding of them remains at the level of their original definitions, favouring an end to class-based exploitation, as well as the demise of all the other forms of social and cultural elitism, such as racism and sexism. Most of the individuals and the organizations promoting socialism and communism in the real world, however, never managed to go beyond lip-service in their promotion, always adopting either the totalitarian short-cuts of the Leninist movement, or the corrupt compromises with liberalism that characterized the democratic socialist movement, or both at the same time. Those people never seem to get any closer to the presumed, theoretical content of those ideologies than the religious zealots ever get to any of their own manufactured ideals.
Nationalism has also sometimes been used for progressive purposes, such as whenever some of the smaller, or newer, national independence movements have tried to combine that ideology with democratic socialist programs aimed at setting up a functioning welfare state. Some large countries have also occasionally tried to promote a few, specific, anti-elitist ideas (such as a “war on poverty”) in order to shore up popular support for mainstream regimes, particularly when they are pushed in that direction by large left-wing movements or by geopolitical rivals. Like some of the Western countries did during the Cold War, egged on by (theoretically) communist and/or social-democratic parties at home, and/or by ideological rivalry with the “Eastern bloc” of totalitarian communist (state-capitalist) nations.
Nationalism, however, has not historically been very good, to say the least, at fighting class-based elitism, nor any of the other kinds of elitism, such as sexism and racism. Even the idea of the nation was originally developed by reactionary plutocrats to fight against even more reactionary feudal aristocrats, as in the bourgeois revolutions in England, the USA and France, initially aimed at overthrowing the absolute monarchy. Over the years, dozens of underdeveloped nations nevertheless used economic nationalism (particularly the “infant industry” argument) to protect their manufacturers from much larger economies that had been inundating their tiny local markets with relatively cheap exports.
One can dream even now, like some centre-left politicians in the USA have done recently, about creating a world-wide movement aimed at inducing the world’s nation-states to compete among themselves to develop programs designed to substantially lower the enormous income gap (and the associated human rights gap) between the social classes. Especially those that simultaneously also lower similar gaps between the genders, and the different ethnic origins composing each national population. Similarly, in today’s European Union, some nationalist (anti-elitist) sentiment has been directed against the huge, multinational, neoliberal bureaucracy in Brussels.
Just as often, however, nationalist sentiment has also fuelled neofascist movements in countries like Hungary, Poland and Spain. Not to mention Israel, Turkey, Russia, China and dozens of other countries, each one of those regimes again combining authoritarian political control with religious domination of some kind. Even more often, from the beginning of the modern period, nationalism in the larger, dominant countries, has always tended to morph into imperialism, even when it started out in initially less-powerful countries, when it was (paradoxically) known as anti-imperialism. Nationalist myth-making has always been an extremely important component of every modern expansionist project, whether regional or global in scope, from the founding of the first nation-states in post-feudal Europe right up to our own time. Regardless of the official religious, monarchical, republican, democratic, fascist, or communist pretensions of each succeeding myth.
Anarchism as well sometimes attracts small numbers of initially well-intentioned people. It has the advantage of pouring scorn on every kind of establishment religion and ideology, a lot like my own habit of practising “equal-opportunity” denunciation, leaving no faulty approach unscathed. The anarchists, however, like the ones in France’s “comité invisible”, are always promoting the completely unrealistic idea that some day all the oppressed people everywhere will suddenly join some kind of world-wide insurrection, in an all-out assault on all the different kinds of evil. Not only that, they also assume that all the practical difficulties those amateur insurrectionists will meet up with on their way to total victory will all be solved communally, in the heat of the action, by the highly inventive people on the spot who always show up for that kind of thing, and always know what to do immediately, right then and there. Even if no one at all has done any advance planning about what human society ought to look like after said insurrection, since doing so would necessarily mean introducing another form of less than spontaneous tyranny. Not very convincing, to say the least.
As I have pointed out in several other blogposts, no one should be allowed to forget that the different varieties of elitism, sexism or racism, promoted by all of those established religions and ideologies, have become totally unacceptable nowadays. Including so-called “reverse racism”, a form of racism based on the curious idea that various peoples opposed to Western imperialism are morally superior to people of European-origin, rather than being inferior like the Western empires pretended. In any case, all of those reactionary forms of domination will have to be defeated, if we are to succeed in overcoming any of the self-induced barriers to our continued existence as a future, and not just a bygone, species. The simultaneous founding in Chile 44 years ago, of both neoliberalism and neofascism, and the ongoing cross pollination between the current world’s two most successful ideologies, is probably the most dangerous ideological collaboration that has ever existed on this benighted planet.
That was when the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende, with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency in the USA. The neofascist aspect of that regime, which lasted until 1990, was obvious from the outset, not only because of its brute-force, anti-democratic, pro-imperialist characteristics. But also because of its upholding of the traditional alliance of the military with the upper hierarchy of the Catholic Church, intent on simultaneously eliminating “liberation theology” (a form of Christian socialism) among the lower ranks of the priesthood. The neoliberal aspect of that same dictatorship was also obvious from the start, with the immediate arrival of the “Chicago boys”, economic “advisors” from the USA attempting to showcase their newly-developed program of a return to “free enterprise”. Using Milton Friedman’s theories on the revival, and the radicalization, of eighteenth-century economic liberalism, as transmitted to Friedman by the Austrian founder of anti-Keynesian neoliberalism, Friedrich von Hayek.
To be sure, most of the ultra-right-wing populist and neofascist regimes gradually being set up in dozens of different countries, such as the Trump presidency in the USA, are relatively recent arrivals on the scene. During the 1980s and the 1990s, most of the ideological emphasis in the mainstream media was on the developing hegemony of neoliberalism, such as the successful, monetarist assault on inflation by the world’s most important central banks, and the removal of any perceivable trade-union influence, or social-democratic influence, on contemporary society. It should never be forgotten, however, that neoliberalism started its political career in alliance with neofascism. The economic and social policies of all of today’s right-wing populist regimes, such as Trump’s enormous tax-cut for rich people and his scuttling of all post-2008 attempts to control finance capital, are even more neoliberal than the wayward policies of such slightly more democratic, but still neoliberal, politicians as Bill Clinton, Barak Obama, Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron.
I was reminded of the entire, four-pronged history of the human race, as I have tried to set it out very rapidly in this text, when I was reading a travel booklet that I bought several years ago, during a visit to the Heidelberg castle ruins in Germany. That booklet summed up very succinctly the ongoing attempts of the Wittelsbach aristocratic family to build, and to re-build over and over again, the fabulous fortress, castle and landscaped grounds, that were constantly under attack from that family’s foreign enemies. Such as the particularly violent kings of France, who eventually turned the entire place into the impressive ruins still being visited by millions of tourists nowadays. The Wittelsbach themselves, of course, being only slightly less violent toward their own people, as well as toward their enemies, as were the considerably more powerful French forces of that time.
The overall history of that place also reminded me of Percy Shelley’s well-known poem, “Ozymandias”, about a fictitious, ancient ruler whose own ruined statue, abandoned in the desert, became the basis of Shelley’s ironic attack on the ridiculous pretensions of thousands of egotistical maniacs (rulers) all over the world. All of whom sincerely believed, as did the rulers of all the above-mentioned empires, religions and ideologies, that the imperial system that they were setting up would necessarily live on forever, because it was so much more powerful and glorious back then, than any of its contemporary rivals. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes)
These days, the neoliberalism of the private capitalists, and the neofascism of the state capitalists, are shared back and forth in greater or lesser degrees, among all the powerful people in the whole world, with no leviathan anywhere nearby, capable of arbitrating the entire stinking mess. What seems to be coming up on the horizon, over the next forty years, is a perfect storm of impending disasters, at least if we continue on the same primrose path down which we have been travelling over the past forty years. Which itself just seems to be a coming-together of all the failed policies and strategies so far proposed during the entire history, and prehistory, of the human race, from the beginning to the present day.
First of all, there is the environmental crisis, with the already enormous, but still continually increasing levels of pollution, posing major health problems all over the world, as well as fuelling equally dangerous vectors of climate change. None of the ecological movements, governments and private investors involved in various schemes aimed at curtailing pollution are doing anywhere near enough to have any kind of positive, long-term effect toward resolving that situation.
At the same time, ideological pretensions about how such and such a group of people are showing the way forward to the entire world, such as the “naturally”, environmentally friendly, indigenous peoples, only make things worse. As far as I know, there simply never has been any period of time, way back when or recently, during which indigenous peoples all over the world have genuinely developed a more ecologically friendly attitude toward the natural environment than non-indigenous peoples. In recent times, some of them, like the indigenous peoples living on the great plains of North America, may certainly have killed a lot fewer bison than did the much better-armed hunters of European origin. Nevertheless, the existence of pre-urban methods of slaughter like the “Head-smashed-in buffalo jump”, which has now become one of Canada’s national parks, seems to put the lie to the idea that indigenous peoples always carefully used every part of every animal carcass for their own needs, and never let any carcasses rot away on the plains like “the white man” did later on.
The complete disappearance of thousands of large mammals all over the world started several millennia before that, during the palaeolithic period, even though it has obviously accelerated enormously in more recent centuries. Regional climate change, in the Sahara region for example, also started out, apparently because of over-farming, a very long time ago, also several millennia before the advent of modern industry and agriculture. In other words, human beings all over the world, in every economic system, have always been much more limited (while still quite destructive) in their relative capacities to influence the natural environment, on existing levels of technology than on any “inherent” ecological morality.
Then, there are all the geopolitical crises, like the current confrontation between North Korea (the DPRK) and the USA, that do not show any sign whatsoever of being handled in any more responsible, diplomatic, compromise-oriented fashion than similar crises were handled in preceding periods of history. People always run around nowadays talking about the fact that during the Cold War no really hot “World War Three” ever broke out, involving the simultaneous deployment of all the world’s nuclear, chemical and bacteriological “weapons of mass destruction”. And resulting in the total elimination of human beings, along with all the other multicellular forms of life on this planet. They pretend that that non-event proves that our collective attitude to war has changed forever, and that only some kind of unfortunate “accident” could possibly bring about Armageddon nowadays. So why is the Trump administration actively promoting the idea of the instant annihilation of 25 million North Koreans, and pretending that such a “local” tragedy could never escalate into a world-wide apocalypse?
Then, there is the ridiculous idea that an equally world-wide financial crisis like the one that took place between 2007 and 2009 could never break out again. Does anyone really believe the absurd claims coming from ultra-optimistic (“jovialist”) politicians and economists that all the world’s major investors have learned their lessons from that crisis, and that none of the controls over international capital movements adopted by various governments are really necessary? Do any of those neoliberal “wizards of Oz” not realize that before the 2007-2009 crisis broke out, the same group of people (such as Bill Clinton in 1999, when he decided to abrogate the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933) were claiming that no such crises could ever happen again, since everyone involved had already learned “eternal” lessons from the Great Depression of the 1930s?
What about the fact that the income gap between the social classes has never been greater, leading investors like Warren Buffet making about 30 million dollars a day, while hundreds of millions of other people are still living on the equivalent of less than two dollars a day? Are we supposed to assume that such enormous divisions between people can go on forever without at some point causing world-wide social unrest on a gigantic scale? Does the fact that the richest men in the world would take about 2738 years just to spend any one of their current fortunes, at the incredible rate of one million dollars per day, not impress anyone at all?
What about the recent “revelations”, that everyone suspected all along without having amassed sufficient proof, according to which millions of women all over the world are constantly being sexually mistreated in hundreds of different ways, by millions of men? Particularly men possessing a lot of wealth and power, like movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, and the freely-elected Donald Trump once again? Not only in the USA, but also in every other country? What about the equally significant fact that neoliberalism hurts most women a lot more than it hurts most men? Or about the fact that the world’s very numerous neofascist governments, currently running not only most of the world’s most important countries, but also a majority of all the world’s less powerful countries as well, are also based on the kind of ultra-right-wing political ideologies, and fundamentalist religions, that deliberately foster much greater suffering among women, as opposed to men?
What about the fact that the same kind of neofascist ideologies and fundamentalist religions, all over the world, are also mistreating every possible kind of minority peoples, such as officially recognized indigenous peoples, “visible” minorities as well as other kinds of ethnic minorities? In what way is that kind of crisis not supposed to adversely affect human relations everywhere? What about the fact that every religious majority, or official religion, in the world, constantly “racializes” (demeans) every religious minority in sight, not only in majority Christian, and post-Christian, countries, but also in every Muslim majority country, every Buddhist majority country, and every other place where any such religion controls the most important centres of power?
Not to mention the addiction and dependency crises mentioned earlier in this text, including the ever-increasing dependency on cyber entertainment? Or the equally devastating, unprecedented, world-wide increase in private corruption of public institutions, accompanied by an equivalent rise in the military power of organized crime? The overall point being that not only are each one of the current crises not being dealt with anywhere near adequately, but also the fact that the very existence of each one of those crises weakens humanity’s capacity to deal successfully with any, or all, of the others. With all these different crises coming together over the next few decades, in a perfect storm of mutually reinforcing catastrophes, how can anyone possibly be complacent about the future? How are we supposed to feed the simultaneously ever-increasing human population, projected to grow toward a total population of nine or ten billion people, in that increasingly deadly context?
The enormous gap in contemporary approaches toward ending each of these crises, between what is currently being done to contain them, and what people ought to be doing instead, is on a par with the enormous differences between Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics. In each case, they both exist in the same universe, but the connection between the two ways of looking at the world are extremely difficult to comprehend. Which leaves anyone attempting to look at the entire history of the human race in a rational way with the exasperating conclusion that it is not at all obvious how we are supposed to resolve all of these problems. Before we end up wiping each other out in the process.
It is easy to say that we ought to be setting up a world based on popular sovereignty, and on the goal of moving toward a world much less focused on elitism, sexism and racism, than the current one. It is a great deal more difficult to figure out how to do that with the kind of human mentalities and outlooks that we have to deal with, most of the world’s richest and most powerful people fixated on a completely narcissistic paradigm, and a very large number of “ordinary people” suffering from exactly the same psychological disorder.
