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not the article I'm starting in about, but also relevant, here |
A friend recently shared an interesting short video by environmentalist "philosopher" Derrick Jensen, about development problems young people encounter. It wasn't really mostly about that, since he was extending that idea--really about personal development and transformation--to include why culture needed to change, especially in relation to environmental perspective. It adds up to a range of interesting ideas.
I'll cover what he said in this, explaining it a bit, especially unpacking that extended range. I'll mention a second longer interview where he clarifies what he meant, and covers more of the rest. His more general point is that the current Western perspective on environment isn't tenable, that we are headed towards ecological collapse.
The more specific early point was that young people feel an inclination towards personal transition, in their late teens and early 20s, and experience this as an inclination to an (end), since they don't realize that it's about personal development, not personal extinction. Of course this is edited to take out how he framed it; these websites and platforms are so restrictive now that if include certain words all of the writing will be censored.
I think he's missing a big part of it all, a layer that really goes in between those two ideas. I think young people do experience a real transition phase, as he describes, and agree that the current impact to the natural environment isn't sustainable in the long term.
He talks about people blowing up dams in response; I'm not sure that his radical eco-terrorism approach is practical. Then I think he's not fully unpacking how cultural supports and required culture change needs to happen, instead of applying this radical end-of-the-world approach. It could work as a critique, in a limited sense, that he's copying the immature, not fully considered approach of young people towards their own problem (I must change, which can be accomplished by personal cessation) onto how Western society needs to change.
Maybe society will crash and end in spectacular fashion, and 90+% of all current humans will be extinct over the next few decades. It's more practical to consider other possible outcomes. As a talking point it works well, as a way of really placing broader environmental issues.
Let's start with the initial video, which is interesting, and framed in a novel form. His words:
These kids want to (end). And the reason they want to (end) is because they're teenagers, and when you're a teenager you're supposed to want to (end), but that (end) is supposed to be metaphorical and spiritual. Your childhood has to (end) so you can become an adult. But nobody's told them that it's metaphorical and spiritual, so they have this () urge, that they then actualize in the physical world, as opposed to through ritual or through maturity.
I've often thought that it's similar that you know this culture is so wretched and so many people are so very, very unhappy. They want this nightmare to end and they don't recognize that the death that they want is a cultural (end), and is a spiritual and metaphorical (end), especially because within this culture you know the spirit is separated from the Earth, and from the flesh, and so you know you can't have this transformation that simply occurs in your body. And so they (end) the world and all physical reality as opposed to that spiritual transformation.
Great stuff! It's clear enough what that means, isn't it? At least the first part. It's about the "hero's journey," the Joseph Campbell idea that young people faced with self-discovery demands typically undergo a pre-established pattern of internal transformation, initiated by first looking outward for the basis for changes that really need to occur internally.
Derrick Jensen covers more on all this in this extended Youtube video, again on Why Young People Want to (End) (interviewed by a conservative Youtuber, who wasn't really into the environmentalism theme so much, so it's scope is limited there). I won't fully break that down, but this is based more on his broader take from there than the minute or two clip version. It includes that video clip, and his direct explanation of it, but then the whole video is a longer expansion on the same ideas.
I think that we can accept and set aside that the first half works. People have different experiences in their youth, and suicidal thoughts aren't experienced by everyone, but to some extent the transition patterns do apply in different forms to everyone. These are interesting points, but there isn't a lot more to make of them.
The second part we can do a lot more with. Do people really want their native culture to come to an end, seeing it as untenable? He doesn't even cover there what the problem is. His take is mostly about environmentalism, although surely there must be other dimensions he doesn't get to in that other second explanation. I found another video where he covers it all more directly, which I'll draw on more after some limited discussion.
Only the deeper basis for his ideas really helps explain what the problem with environmental destruction is. Of course climate change is coming, and we're in the midst of a die-off of many of the other species on the planet. One of his early works was about how trees really do communicate with each other in a vast range of forms, exchanging chemical messages, seemingly communicating intent and concern for other plant life. It helps to see the natural world as having inherent agency and value, in order to not place humanity as the single main goal to be served in this world. Then a conclusion that human civilization should either radically change form or else should end makes more sense.
I want to keep the scope limited to these ideas, because it's plenty to discuss, but in another famous online talk on anarchism he leads into other range as follows (from "Anarchism and Queer Theory Jeopardy):
Here's the problem is that or one of the problems is again the sort of black and white thinking where just because there are some social norms that are oppressive therefore all social norms must be destroyed and that leads anarchism to some atrocity-inducing madness. For example there is a long correlation between anarchism and pedophilia and support for pedophilia...
Of course he's not moving towards supporting pedophilia, surely the opposite, but he is developing problems with a conventional take on anarchy itself in an unusual way. This point doesn't adjoin or support the rest of what I'm actually getting to; the idea here is that he is communicating parts of a broad set of ideas, broader than I'll even point towards, and that it all may hang together better than it seems when just considering parts of it.
Sketching out Derrick Jensen's issues with society
The direction he is taking these ideas, in the original clip, and the longer explanation video covering the same scope, is that "Western society" or industrial based human civilization is fatally flawed because its interests directly conflict with the basic survival of the natural world. He seems to think that ecological catastrophe is already well underway, and that the natural world will be further impacted in devastating fashion by the continued existence of modern technological human society.
What to do about that, if we accept it? He calls for it all to end. That's bold, pointing towards the collapse of human society as a positive outcome. He literally suggests that people blowing up dams is one possible positive step towards ecological recovery, advocating radical and extensive forms of terrorism.
Is he serious? It could just be an extreme version of a talking point. The way he frames it all it's not though. Wouldn't a vast majority of the people currently alive relatively quickly come to perish if this happened on a broad scale, a dropping out of supporting infrastructure, which would be followed by a human die-off? Sure.
So he's crazy? Unless he means all of this in some figurative sense then he is radically disconnected from practical reality.
Following an old guideline form in philosophical discussion we can try to interpret his ideas as making the most sense possible, as filling in what he should have said, if he was more reasonable, developing the ideas some. Again, to be clear, I'm not going to fully do justice to his ideas, because I'm not about to go and read a half dozen books in order to write an even better 2000 word commentary blog post (although again, I will work with more direct background content I've turned up at the end).
Is our current society--the US version, let's say--truly a "wretched nightmare?" Kind of; that actually kind of works. US society is far less stable and positive than it was 25 years ago, and many of the deep-seated flaws were already evident then. Division of wealth is much more problematic than it was then; crime also is, health problems related to people's diets, social issues, etc.
I've recently seen a couple of test case issues that highlight this in more specific forms. In one a pharmaceutical industry insider explained how the US drug approval system has evolved to put so much weight on private interests, and the input of solid financing, that drugs are now approved that people know don't work. It's documented that they don't, by the very research used to support their approval. How and why? Because the system has morphed to accept the influence of potential profit as the highest good. Corporate interests pay for studies and re-position what they express, and then pay for support within approval agencies. It becomes irrelevant that the drugs don't work; that's not a critical point. When early acceptance guidelines emphasize the importance of effectiveness, and evidence assuring that, it works to just change those guidelines.
A second video I've seen recently was by a young woman reviewing what food additives are in current commercial food and health care products (this one), which can be identified as probably bad for your health. She ended up throwing away a lot of what was in her home. Many of these chemical compounds are banned for use in the EU, because likely potential negative impact is known, for ingredients like food colors, preservatives, artificial flavor inputs, or stabilizers.
The "why" is the same; because it's profitable. Corporate interests control regulatory input more than a respect for the common good. It's cheaper for huge corporations to use chemicals instead of natural product inputs to mass produce goods, and influence with legislators and then indirect influence with regulatory agencies have led to this.
Of course it keeps going. The petroleum industry has suppressed uptake of renewable resource fuels; essentially everyone already knows this. It's a call-back to the lead industry limiting already-known awareness of the impact of that compound, or to the smoking industry delaying the finding that smoking definitely causes cancer by decades. In general no significant government decisions or restrictions are decided based on the long term health of the environment. The US government has taken a hands-off approach to even climate change resolution; they're not playing any role in it, beyond making it possible for corporations to also avoid the subject.
I'm not really trying to argue these points. If you think the opposite is true, that the US government has US citizens' and the environment's best interests in mind, and that it all might somehow turn around, then that seems to ignore a very obvious and pervasive reality, to me. In a sense such a person would live in a more pleasant reality than this real one.
The next transition, "killing the world"
If Derrick Jensen really is advocating radical environmental terrorism, and the end of human civilization as we know it, then he's extending the same set of perspective context and final conclusion from the suicidal teens all the way up to a societal level. We can't tolerate this impact to the environment, so we need to kill civilization itself, just as impending personal transition could be resolved through death by suicide. He covers all the background here.
Surely Derrick sees this. One way to resolve this problem is to accept that it's all intended in a figurative sense. He is talking about blowing up dams not because people should do this, or it really would serve some purpose, but instead because it describes just how radical a change would need to be, just not one that actually takes that form.
US corporate control of government needs to end. People marching with signs won't help, and people writing books also won't. Blowing up dams probably wouldn't be a practical resolution, but some shift on that level of severity and completeness is required. It's absolutely impossible at this time, given the current set of conditions, but then he's saying the impossible will need to happen. I kind of agree. One dam coming down would be kind of a shame but it might be worth the sacrifice, to raise awareness.
I don't see any potential practical resolution either. Actual large scale terrorism probably really wouldn't be helpful, as a step towards expanded dialog. Protests extended to the level of public rioting may be.
There is no likely trigger for this to occur, that I can see. People protested unfair treatment by the police in the US last, as waves of broad protest went, but then underlying tensions from pandemic experience helped stoke that discontent, and it was an openly known problem for decades that justice isn't blind to race or economic status inputs in the US. Millions of people had been through negative personal experiences; this was not an abstract issue. Maybe that really did help, a little.
Climate change being likely to greatly impact the next generation, and the ones after, is something else. It's gradual and subtle, up until an environmental input destroys your own home, and then it's not.
Why does it seem that Derrick means this end of civilization mandate literally?
It all works well as a hypothetical statement of importance, a way of framing the context. If humanity cannot stop impacting the natural environment, and if this seems to clearly be leading towards ecological collapse, then this form of human civilization should be ended. Of course it's framed as an imperative to work on the first two, that way. So why do I take it more literally?
In that second interview, that I mentioned but didn't discuss yet, Derrick implies that this is what he means, that industrial society must be attacked, literally. He says that this demand is difficult for people to fulfill because industrial society is feeding people, providing them with safety. It's all offered as if a radical solution really is a main one on the table, that people should temporarily turn aside from their own clear interests and go and blow up a dam, literally.
To some extent he's really saying that we need to burn it all down.
Again in a limited sense I agree. It's not workable to have corporate interests and the main goals of a very small and very wealthy minority set government policies, and determine government functions. We see this failing in a number of critical ways. The unequal division of wealth in the US has become untenable, within the last decade. This is too fast for things to change so negatively and so completely.
Derrick explains that this has been going on for thousands of years, and that the natural environment in the Middle East is a clear historical reference to where it was headed. He claims that places like Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and others were not wastelands, 2 to 3000 years ago, and that human societies turned lush and productive lands into what they are now, mostly deserts. Maybe; I'm not really much of a biologist.
In studying the philosophy of history a recurring theme came up, that civilizations experience a natural lifespan of origin, expansion and development, aging, stagnation, and radical decline. In the two forms this was presented in, in Middle Eastern Islamic philosophy and in a US based offshoot in the early 20th century, there was no clear explanation of the cause for this transition. Ecological impact could've been a main driver, or a naturally progressive unequal distribution of wealth, related to infrastructure burden, or any number of other causes. Maybe relatively complete destruction of the environment is a universal theme.
Maybe even if the reset form is problematic, actually causing any end of civilization from within, this is the only trade-off that would stop the process.
Even though it's a bit secondary one point Derrick raises is worth considering; there is no possibility of a successful "green movement." People are arguing over generation of power being sustainable, which is 20% of the energy actually consumed by any society. If that could be 100% resolved, which is already impossible, the problem would still be only 80% solved.
I suppose a die-off within humanity is promising. If somehow 90+% of everyone alive today died within the next two decades, and were not replaced, it's possible that under 1 billion humans could be sustained in a different kind of way.
Another impossible alternative
Something is being left out here though, along the line of the disconnect between elected governments and who is really running the US.
People continue to identify as conservatives or liberals in the US, as Republicans or Democrats, and as I see it this elected leadership is clearly not acting in the interests of the country as a whole, or the citizens of the US. It's not industrial society that needs to be rejected and deleted, it's the US political system, and any other version that can turn a blind eye to critical factors, like the destruction of the natural environment. All US elected leaders, from the last dozen Presidents on down to local leaders, serve themselves and the financial interests that support them, not the people, or the country.
It just trades out one impossible task for another, deleting a system of rulership and control instead of an underlying mechanism or layer, the industrialized economy. There is no way that this can be changed in any way. A vast minority of that layer of controlling interests would need to want to make the same change in order for initial stages of it to begin. It would run counter to their own best interests, as those are currently defined. Overall consumption of goods would need to be completely reversed, which is all but unforeseeable.
To some extent it's not industrial society that people can't wrap their minds around rejecting, which would prevent them from continuing to eat. It's the false paradigm of divisions of people into two broad types, conservatives and liberals. Even if that were to fall it's not a given that it would lead to much more complete transparency and better intentions within human experience. There are some real aspects to this divide, but at the most functional level it means nothing in relation to the more official meaning. There is no "good side" to be on, only the two bad sides, both of which fully support the status quo.
Republican and Democratic leaders know that a main goal of leadership has long since been driving the wealth divide, the good of the few. They know that the pharmaceutical industry isn't mainly focused on promoting good health. It's known that food quality is dropping to a dangerous level, that a lot of what people eat is now poison, which is a means towards food production companies making good profits. It just keeps going from there. It's obvious that the natural environment is going away.
Ignoring climate change is just one more relatively benign example, even though it is known that this will severely impact the next two generations, and possibly human experience beyond that. It's known that US government debt is untenable, that the collapse of the US is being assured by each subsequent annual budget. The role of outrageous defense spending is obvious in relation to this point, and the primary goal of personal profit in that pursuit, instead of national security.
So why would Derrick set his sights back on infrastructure, on the continued existence of modern industrial society? To an extent this is the most direct link in the cause and effect chain that threatens the natural environment. Carbon release unbalances global climate, and deforestation and species extinction literally eliminates the earlier natural environment. Derrick sees that environment as a higher natural good than human existence. I don't completely blame him.
But why, since he is also a member of the human race? I suppose the myriad of problems in human societies must be a big part of that. So many human stories are about suffering now. You wouldn't need to be on the receiving end of too many of those forms of societal failure to truly resent it. There is so little hope for comprehensive reform now, essentially none.
These large scale disasters are our only hope, really. Nothing will change for as long as the current status quo goes as "well" as it currently does. We can't realistically dream that a small group of well-intentioned billionaires are already planning out a form of this broad reset for us. It would be just as practical to count on alien intervention to change things.
I saw a humorous bumper sticker post promoting "vote giant asteroid strike 2024." Derrick just completes that connection, as a real hope.
I too love animals and the natural environment. Maybe as much as anyone else I get it. It's hard not to think that things will need to get infinitely worse before they can get any better. Hoping for the end of US civilization seems a bit extreme, but I get it, it does make sense, on one level.
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