As I mentioned in my last post, I've been working on a novella in the last few months. It's still a work in progress, but having finished a first draft I thought that I'd run it past my readers as an "added bonus" or "weekend funnies" sort of thing. Feedback is greatly appreciated.
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It’s approaching two generations since “the Great Turning” took place in human civilization. We all know how the human race finally took action after decades of wilful blindness. That it took the death of millions in Bangladesh, a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, reducing the American South West to being as dry as the Sahara desert, and so on, is indescribably sad. But as social science tells us, entire cultures are not individuals---they cannot reason.
In retrospect it is now obvious to all that the theories, narratives, ideologies, faiths, and, stories that people had been telling themselves for millennia were totally out-of-sync with reality. The “invisible hand of the market place” couldn’t deal with the greenhouse effect. And praying to Jesus for rain didn’t put water in the taps once the Ogallala Aquifer had been drained. After the old, tired, stories failed, people finally decide to roll up their sleeves and really get serious about solving the problems facing us.
Politicians finally realized they could have international treaties that solved problems if they actually bargained in good faith. They also found there were enough countries of good will to impose tough sanctions forcing the hold-outs to abide by the rules too. And after the debacle on the Indian subcontinent, no one seriously thought they could bully or cheat their way out of the crisis.
At the same time, it also became obvious there was enough money to deal with the most dire problems. The highest tax rates were raised to levels not seen since World War Two---which amounted to a maximum allowable income---and all the world’s tax havens were put out of business. Add to that carbon taxes, and governments found themselves awash in money for the necessary mega-projects. Flood control, relocation, massive alternative energy projects, restoration ecology, geo-engineering, etc, turned out to be affordable after all. And the large expenditures also mobilized the workforce when government realized that you actually could have full employment---but not if you ignored society’s problems and gave most of the wealth to a tiny elite. At the same time, strict and fair rationing ensured that no one got “left behind” during the still on-going “long emergency”.
The secret to all of this was mass social mobilization. It will take generations of academics to explain all historical details. This short little book only deals with just one particular aspect: The Climate Trials.
In some ways the trials weren’t totally without precedent. There had been war crime trials at places like Nuremberg and there had been various “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” around the world. They had all been been attempting to deal with social problems through public proceedings. What made the Climate Trials different was the way they had been specifically designed to not punish individuals, but instead to examine the ideas that led people to totally ignore over a hundred years of warnings about the effects of large-scale fossil fuel use.
Thoughtful people have always known that court trials are never about “truth”, “justice”, “victims”, or even “criminals”. Instead, they are meant to be morality plays that are designed to safely channel people’s fears and anger away from questioning society’s ruling elite. That’s why the judge wears robes and is given a deference and the sort of personal authority that is a holdover from the days of the aristocracy. (It’s no coincidence that kings used to have “courts”---the word comes from the same source.)
According to philosophical conventions, the individuals in a criminal court were not actually people. Instead, they are puppets that act out conventional ideas about society and human nature. Criminals are assumed to be perfectly Cartesian, atomic individuals who are constantly aware of all the various objective options before them. Based on that God-like omniscience, they freely choose every action that leads them to being placed in front of a judge. No one is a product of their family, their historical accidents, their biology, etc. Instead, they were all like Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, who thoughtfully decided “to make evil their good, and, good their evil”.
In contrast, victims are irrelevant and usually have no place in a court.
Also, police are assumed to always be honest and never lie to the court about anything.
Finally, advocates are expected to be wind-up clockwork mechanisms who exercise absolutely no moral judgment. The job of the prosecutor is to win cases---whether or not the defendant is actually guilty is totally irrelevant. Similarly, the defending lawyer is totally uninterested in the facts. The only thing that matters is to defend the client.
Courts---alas, like so many other parts of human society---are also totally isolated from the results of over a hundred years of scientific research. For example, it didn’t matter how many studies had shown that there is absolutely no such thing as a deterrent effect from harsh sentences, judges still attempt to prevent future crimes by making examples of individuals.
There is no sense going on---.
The important issue to understand about the courts is that they are exceptionally good at reifying the stories our culture tells itself. (That’s why for generations courtroom dramas had been rich fodder for plays, movies, and, television.) This is also why the people behind The Climate Trials decided to use the form of a court trial to accelerate the adoption of a new, more environmentally-sophisticated culture. They realized that they were standing in the middle of a rare “axial shift” in human consciousness and they could use this time to consciously “push” people’s stories, ideologies, and, myths in a direction which would be helpful to the problems we all face.
Governments never take advantage of such an opportunity unless they reacting to a obvious cataclysm. Luckily the humanity didn’t have to wait for governments to take the initiative. Instead, civil society did it for them by utilizing the World Wide Web to broadcast volunteer-run trials that riveted the attention of hundreds of millions of people all over the world. These in turn created a narrative that allowed the people who were grinding away at dirty, tiring jobs to hope that there was some sort of far-too-late, but none-the-less-real change taking place in the world.
In effect, a small number of brilliant individuals used YouTube to create an “Archimedean Point” that allowed them to create the leverage needed to move the world.
:Prof. Greta Hultman, University of Uppsala
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I understand that a lot of folks are hurting right now, so if you are one of them just ignore the blue print. But for those of you who aren't, I'd ask that you consider signing up for a subscription through Patreon and Pay Pal. There are other ways to help too, for example a local business man has offered to pay for my subscription to News Guard after reading my last post. (Thanks Rich for being so awesome!) No matter what happens financially, I'll never hide this blog behind a paywall---.
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Unpublished Personal Recollections by Mikhail Bookchin
I was sitting in a pub with a guy I sorta knew talking about climate change. The guy was a denier. He had all the usual razz-a-ma-tazz about how scientists were conspiring to get money for grants. That a few years back they were warning about a coming ice age. That this spring was quite cool. Sunspots. Yadda, yadda, yadda. I eventually lost my temper with him and he left in a huff. I was left feeling kinda crappy---both at myself for losing my temper and with the human race for insisting on offing itself.
A guy I’d seen around sat down besides me and asked me if I wanted another martini. I said I wouldn’t mind. He ordered one for me and a local draft for himself. He introduced himself, told me his name (Ian), and, asked me why I looked so bummed out. I told him about the conversation I’d just had and he started talking about this and that. Eventually he mentioned that he knew some guys that I might be interested in meeting. They were people who were concerned about the future of the earth.
Whatever. I’d met lots of guys over the years. I’d joined lots of groups, been somewhat successful with some, but they burnt me out. I had my own thing now and it allowed me the freedom to do what I thought best without having to bend myself into a pretzel to get idiots to do something that was obviously the best path of action. Nope, I said, I’m old and my patience is worn right out. I don’t do “groups” anymore.
He insisted. This one was different. I’d fit right in and it wouldn’t be an exercise in frustration. These were people that understood certain things, some of these things I also understood, some I didn’t but would “click into” really fast if I heard about them. The group didn’t let just anyone get involved---you had to have paid your dues and be someone who had something worthwhile to bring to the table. And you had to be invited.
This made my radar kick in. I asked him if he was talking about some sort of violent organization. I had less than zero interest in that, didn’t want to hear about it, and, if I did I’d go straight to the cops. “Direct action” of that sort is the ultimate dead end. It positively drives supporters into the other camp.
He said that that was the absolute direct opposite from what he was talking about. He also said that he understood my lack of interest. He was prepared for it. Indeed, it was one of the signs that I was exactly what the group was looking for in a new member. I still said I wasn’t interested. I’d had enough of that sort of thing. It wasn’t that I didn’t think that people had to be organized, just that I’d already done my fair share and that I was too old to waste my time anymore dragging people kicking and screaming into trying to do something to stop the human race from committing suicide. Besides, I was already doing something useful with my news blog.
He asked me what if there was something new, something I’d never seen before, something that just might make all the difference in the world? Something that might help someone really make a difference. Not something that was just another rich, ripe, form of self-delusion, but an actual, culture-changing historical engine?
He said he was a member of a group known as “the Old Ones” or “the Elders” that had an idea to do a project, and they thought that I would be a useful addition to the people working on it. He said he wasn’t going to be all “mysterious” about this thing. What they wanted to do was create a piece of performance art, one that they hoped would go some way to getting the human race to really take the climate emergency seriously.
I asked how they thought that one piece of art could make a difference.
At that point Ian asked if I knew what a “supersaturated solution” was. As he explained it, it’s a solvent like water that a crystalline chemical like salt has been slowly and carefully added to. In fact, it has been so carefully added that it actually has slightly more stuff dissolved in it than it really should be able to hold. Ian said to not bother thinking about how that happens, just accept that it does. (Later I looked it up on line---it’s a real thing.) At that point all you need to do is bang the beaker or drop one salt crystal into the solution and what happens is that other, new crystals start quickly forming and very soon the entire liquid is gone and been replaced by a solid mass of crystals. The crystals used to be dissolved in water, but now the water has been absorbed by the crystals. Nothing big happened---but everything has changed.
He said that his group, the Old Ones, had decided that society is either now like or close to being like that supersaturated solution. That is concern about climate change has been slowly added to the culture bit by bit by bit to the point where there was more than enough concern to totally change the world. But because of the mechanics of our political system, and opposition by vested interests, and the fragmentation of people into isolated sub-communities, this concern hadn’t manifested itself into real action. Ian and his friends believed that some specific, well-thought-out “nudge” might help get that fragmented concern into a mass wave of action aimed at ending fossil fuel use, preparing for the worst effects from climate change, and, eventually undoing the damage to the world’s ecosystem.
I said that sounds OK in principle, but that’s sorta like the language that terrorists use. They also believe that if you perform “propaganda by deed” it will create state repression that will in turn make people sympathetic to the terrorists---eventually leading to revolution. So you guys are talking about something the same, but non-violent. Good luck to you. People have talked like this before---think about Occupy Wall Street and the huge anti Iraq war demonstrations. They achieved something, but not a huge amount. What makes you think that you can do better? I’m not interested unless you can show me that you have something in your group that gives you a better shot at pulling it off. I’m old, I’m arthritic. I’ve already got my own gig on the go. I don’t have a lot of time left and I don’t want to waste it on another thankless task.
Ian’s response was odd. He said that the Old Ones understood. They said that they’d share something with me that wouldn’t really show that they could do what they said, but that would let me know that they knew some things about what it means to be a human being that the overwhelming majority of people don’t. They thought that that would make me interested enough that I’d be willing to make the effort to learn a little more about them.
I asked what that could be. Ian said just a tiny little experiment. He gave me a couple of simple sentences to memorize. “I want you to sit someplace comfortable where no one will disturb you and repeat those words over and over again for fifteen minutes. If nothing happens you’ll never hear from us again. But something odd does take place, something you simply cannot explain, we’ll be in touch.”
I said that that was kinda odd. He agreed. But suggested that I had nothing to lose, and that part of the “test” on both the part of the Old Ones and me was whether or not I actually did the experiment. If I didn’t---well maybe I wasn’t the right guy for them---and also, maybe they weren’t able to influence people as much as they thought they could. Ian told me the two sentences.
Then he changed the conversation and talked about a lot of other things. Stuff I don’t really remember anymore. Eventually, he said he had things to do and I went home myself.
A week later I bumped into Ian when I was waiting for a bus. He drove up in a car and asked me if I wanted a lift. I said “sure” and got in. He said that it was obvious that I’d taken advantage of his little experiment. He asked me about the results. I said that I’d rather not talk about it and asked what the point of all this was.
He said absolutely nothing more than to point out that the Old Ones had some knowledge about what it means to be a human being and what it means to live in the world that is greater than that held by the people who currently run it. The hope was that just by showing me this little glimpse of something bigger than “conventional wisdom”, I might become interested in learning a bit more. I said that I was, and asked how I could do that. Ian said that that they would contact me.
At that point I was at my destination and he dropped me off.
Later on, I got an email from someone who simply identified herself as someone who was one of “the Elders”. The message had an attachment that she told me to read. She said that if I had any questions, to send them to her by “reply”.
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Furthermore I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!
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