PEACE THROUGH SOCIAL EMPOWERMENT 2. HOW SHALL WE ACT?
return to top pageThese remarks may be viewed as a preamble to the question of exactly what policies any serious minded opponent of war should pursue today, given the manifest impracticality of achieving beneficial results through mass political structures. Indeed the question really confronting us is how we can ensure that moral primacy takes precedence over power considerations.
It is a question posed against a background where power is now running amok, our giant states and their economic institutions are out of control of any moral constraints or objectives, for the simple reason that they have become so enormous as to be the creatures not of moral decisions but of the power considerations attendant on the centralised anarchistic market forces the political power seekers have themselves created and, symbiotically, by which they are sustained. In this light an answer to our question may be more easily discerned if we seek to establish more clearly the nature of the problems these forces have engendered as they now confront humanity everywhere.
WAR A global nuclear or biological war (or both) is an event now waiting to happen, the spread of the requisite weaponry in recent decades has been so pervasive that the likelihood it will not sooner or later be used is becoming increasingly remote. "A nation armed and prepared for war can no more keep going to war than a chicken can help laying an egg. (Shaw).
ENVIRONMENT The ozone layer, which helps to regulate climate and temperature, as well as to protect life from the ultraviolet rays of the sun, is being increasingly and irreversibly depleted as a result of excessive industrialisation and the wholesale destruction of forest cover, and the consequent massive doses of carbon dioxide now afflicting it.
One result is global warming, which has gradually increased over recent decades and now seems set for a more rapid increase in the immediate future. This has already seen the beginning of the gradual melting of the polar ice caps and already areas covering many square miles are breaking off. The relative consequent desalination of the oceans cannot fail to have adverse effects on marine life; already traditional fishing socks, cod and whiting for example, are disappearing from the North Sea as tropical fish take their place.
The consequent misbalance of land to water on the earth's surface is also already resulting in massive floods, droughts, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes and windstorms in various parts of the globe. These look likely to increase. The rise in ocean levels alone, as further meltdown ensues, will inevitably submerge many low-lying land areas.
FOOD The 20th century has seen a massive increase of the application of chemicals and of power-driven machines to food-growing, plus an increase in the size of farms, which has resulted in the elimination in many areas of the small family farm and the peasant cultivator.
One result has been an immediate increase in the amount of food produced, both in terms of 'per acre' and 'per man', but at a quite prodigious long-term price. The crops themselves are generally nutritionally inferior and they are increasingly disease prone, (which has prompted a much-vaunted return, by a minority at least, to 'organic' farming).
As a result there is an increasing resort to chemical means of destroying pests and disease-bearing organisms. Again, in the short term, the results have been impressive in terms of higher crop yields. But the evidence is unambiguous that man has launched a war on nature. In the nature of things it is a war man cannot win. Diseases once thought to have been eradicated with anti-biotics are now re-emerging in much more powerful forms.
The current outbreak of foot and mouth disease is one such result. It is the result of several decades of intensive abuse of animals.
The growth in the size of 'farms' and the development of agribusiness - has driven many people off the land altogether; their numbers simply help to swell the numbers of a dispossessed urban proletariat dependent no longer on its own labours on the land but on the vagaries of market and stock exchange activity in remote urban centres.
"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay."
So wrote Oliver Goldsmith 200 years ago.
POPULATION This colossal increase in human numbers might be thought to set alarm bells ringing in every centre of government across the world, instead it is met with almost complete indifference and even with measures which might increase it!
In 1930 the population of the world was smaller than the population of China today.
This sort of increase needs to be seen against the background of the policies being pursued by dominant economic forces. These policies can be summed up in one word, 'growth', by which of course is meant growth of industrialised forms of production.
The assumption would appear to be that we live on a planet of infinite resources and that with 'growth' the presently impoverished billions of the world are going to enjoy the same excessive consumption standards that prevail in the over-developed countries; that they will have the same access to cars, aeroplane journeys, washing machines, TV sets, computers, cameras, golf courses, swimming pools, yachts, foreign holidays, 'luxury' hotels, 200 page newspapers and the rest of it.
As Ghandi observed, 'There is enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed'. The blunt fact is we have already destroyed essential aspects of the natural environment with our present levels of production and consumption; to press further along this road is to advance along a road of global tidal waves of starvation and disease, and ultimately of biological suicide.
RESOURCES We live in a finite world, yet again economic policies appear to be based on a presumption of infinitude. It is a world of finite resources and not least of oil, on which currently nearly all transport and industrial production depends.
Estimates of the extent of oil reserves vary; some authorities reckon that by 2050, at current levels of multiplying consumption, there will be none left, or that what is left will be too deep below land or ocean surfaces to be economically recoverable. Others say there are vast reserves, which will see us through the 21st century, by which time 'science' will have found us suitable alternatives to sustain the momentum of industrialised production and consumption.
One may admire the confidence of these latter predictions without necessarily sharing it; the fact is we just do not know in exact terms beyond the obvious fact that it is a finite resource in a finite world, and this factor of uncertainty is to be added to other essentially negative factors in a situation dependent on a high degree of market confidence, any one of which may suffice to prick its bubble.
We have to pose, in any case, a question on the morality of a proceeding, which squanders whilst it ignores, that the finite resources of the world are part of the heritage of posterity and of which we are but the temporary guardians.
ALIENATION Civilisation has always been accompanied by, and in some respects based upon, an increase of artistic sensibility in the sphere of plastic, pictorial, literary and musical arts. The later phases have been characterised by a widening of the franchise of artistic excellence extending far beyond the land-owning, aristocratic and priestly classes, who often took a lead in promoting it, to embrace the generality of people everywhere.
The achievements of Renaissance Europe, for example, would have been impossible without the existence of vast numbers of highly skilled artisans, craftsmen and tradesmen. If these people helped to build palaces, cathedrals and city centres of resplendent beauty it was a degree of creativity practised as a matter of course by hand craftsmen across the entire spectrum of human needs. The making of a loaf of bread or the building of a harvest-time haystack, for example, are seen today as starkly functional exercises, the one mass produced by factory operatives, the other a matter of rolls of hay shaped by machines and wrapped in plastic sheeting.
But until quite recent times such mundane attendance on human need were works of art, the result of ordinary people applying their creative skills to their callings and achieving results in which their artificers would feel a justifiable pride. This was the seedbed from which all great art sprang.
To assert as much is not to seek to recall a lost legendary golden age, but to observe that the history of civilisation would be unintelligible if we failed to acknowledge the evidence it provides with almost wanton abundance that the need to create is a characteristic as deeply embedded in the human psyche as the need for sex, for food, or simply the need to learn and to understand.
Modern war-prone industrial civilisation has robbed man of the capacity to express this need, one perhaps unique in the way it distinguishes him from the beast, in two ways. First it has robbed man of reality, and machines, which man might have used to lighten his labours, now enslave him. He does not use them, he dances attendance on them in ways marked by monotony, repetition, uniformity and standardisation, all of which repudiate his humanity and combine to destroy the expression of any vestige of his creativity. If man is born free and yet is everywhere in chains, those chains are the bureaucratic bonds which tie him to attendance on machines and on machine processes at the price of losing an essential component of his humanity.
Man is a social animal and everywhere, to indicate the second form in which he has been robbed, he has lost control of his social machinery. In an age, which likes to assume it has ushered in the birth of democracy by giving everyone the vote, this may seem a strange claim. But the idea that democracy can be achieved by regular electoral exercises on a mass basis is not merely, a widely prevalent myth, it is the reverse of reality, and that reality lies in the capacity of the ordinary citizen to play a significantly creative role in the forces which shape his society.
This was a fact of life in all tribal and former human-scale societies, for however dominant or oppressive a tribal chief might be he was ultimately the creature of the well being and the goodwill of his people. In the absence of both, his days were generally numbered. It was also a fact of life of medieval society in Europe. If men controlled their work through their guilds, the guilds played a significant role in determining the nature of the society of which they were a part. It should be noted with major emphasis that one reason why this control could be exercised by the citizen stemmed from the localised, non-centralised, small-scale character of the social unit.
Well, where is that citizen control today? On every hand the citizen is confronted with giant administrative machines, the edicts of which he must obey or suffer various onerous penalties. He does not control these machines, they control him, and the factor of sheer size ensures that his capacity to influence their workings is generally infinitesimal. In many countries significant forms of local government have been largely abolished. In urban areas a 'local' government may be responsible for a population larger than some countries with a seat in the United Nations, whilst in rural areas, where a village or parish council may still exist, it has been shorn of all but a shadow of its executive and fiscal powers.
Modern man in mass societies is per force isolated, manipulated and alienated, and the loss of his community structure, the oldest and the most vital of all forms of social organisations, and its replacement with centralised mass structures, has been the means by which this social catastrophe has been engineered. We live today in consequence in societies which are increasingly stressful, sick and degenerate; for all their technological marvels they are not marked by beauty, creativity and human fulfilment, but by ugliness, anti-social behaviour, family breakdown, urban squalor, poverty, drug dependency and an unbridled increase in human frustration and unhappiness.
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