Earlier this week I wrote about the work of environmentalist Bruce Sterling, one of the interviewees in David J Brown's Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse.
Three other philosophers interviewed in the book steal the show, and
for those unfamiliar with their work and ideas I thought I would
summarize what they told Brown.
Noam Chomsky (his blog is here)
seems to get both more political and more pragmatic in his thinking as
he ages. He remains one of the US's most conspicuous, articulate and
controversial anti-war activists, although he sees war not as a moral
issue but as one that is foolish simply because history shows it is
incapable of achieving the war-mongers' intended results. Chomsky
loathes our cynical political system and wasteful, ruinous economic
system, but blames these as much on human passivity, ignorance and
indifference as on ruthlessness and abuse by the power elite.
In
his interview with Brown, he warns "there are major efforts being made
by the corporate owners and advertisers to shape the Internet, so that
it will be used mostly for advertising, commerce, diversion, and so
on." I recall in the early days of the Internet there was a plan by
major corporations to create a more secure, business-oriented "Internet
2", which they would own and control. Now we're facing court cases
holding software vendors liable for what customers do with their (free)
products, laws banning certain uses of the Internet like online
gambling, and other restrictions. What interests me about this is not
that corporatists want one set of rules for themselves (a completely
untrammeled, unregulated, amoral 'market driven' corpocracy) and
another for everyone else (laws indemnifying them from litigation by
victims of their criminal conduct, expanded rights to sue and invade
the privacy of customers, and hamstringing the Internet to the point of
dysfunction), but that political leaders are rolling over so meekly and
acceding to these inequitable and discriminatory demands, and that the
public is not up in arms about it.
The reason for this, Chomsky
tells Brown, is that "3/4 of the population regard presidential
elections as essentially a farce -- just some game played by rich
contributors and the PR industry which crafts candidates to say things
they don't mean and don't understand... The same has been happening in
Latin America and much of the world... John Dewey once said that
politics is the shadow cast over society by big business, [and he
called for a shift] from industrial feudalism [which we still have
today] to industrial democracy."
Chomsky warns that nuclear
war "is not far away", and "if you were watching from Mars, a rational
person would be amazed that the species has survived this long and
wouldn't put very high odds on it for the future". Being hopeful
"doesn't really matter", however, he concludes: "We should do exactly
the same things no matter what our [guesses about the future] are".
Media commentator Doug Rushkoff (his blog is here)
is on a mission to convince the world that we're each more powerful
than we think, and that our 'learned helplessness' can be unlearned.
"The corporation doesn't really exist", he tells Brown. "The
corporation is paperwork. It's a list of rules, through which people
are supposed to interact, or priorities that they're supposed to
follow, but there's nobody home"... Rather than actually taking down a
corporation, [all that is necessary is] just demonstrating to everyone
in a community that they don't have to buy their stuff at Wal-Mart.
That they have a say in what goes on. That they can choose how they
think. That they don't have to work seven days a week. That they might
have enough stuff. That there are ways to have fun without buying
products. That they can get laid without buying those jeans." He
continues:
I come from a
tradition. The tradition is not one of media theory so much as a
trickster tradition. The object of the game to me is to exist in this
kind of liminal space between the way things are and the infinity of
the way things could be, and help people open their minds to other
possibilities... Most people are afraid of possibility because they
can't deal with a shifting reality, and they can't accept their own
responsibility for the way things are... So they would rather shut
down, and agree to the consensus reality where they are victimized and
unhappy, than accept a more plastic, open-source conception of reality
where everything is possible.
Rushkoff also has an interesting
metaphysical take on what happens to us after our deaths: "The only way
for a person to have anything approaching a consciousness after
[physical] death would be, while that person is alive, to learn to
identify so profoundly with something other than his or her own ego
that when the self dies, the identification goes on. But most of us
believe in the illusion of individuality. We believe who we are is
us... The only way out would be to get out while you're here. I don't
think you can get out after you're dead."
George Carlin (his website is here)
also talks about how we as individuals have abrogated our
responsibility to the Earth by turning it over to 'those in control'.
"I think we've turned everything over -- mankind in general, not just
our culture -- to the high priests and the traders. Everything was
turned over to those who wanted to control us through mysterious
beliefs... They twisted and distorted that into these narrow,
superstitious belief systems, where you have this invisible man in the
sky who's judging you.. And then the traders, the businesspeople, the
commercial, the merchant class, they turned everything into acquisition
and ownership, to having the latest thing... We're given many choices
to distract us from the fact that our real choices have been diminished
in number. [Oligopoly control over political machinery, oligopoly
ownership of the media and every industry but] 35 flavors of popcorn."
Carlin
is a cynic about our current situation. "There's no real enlightened
self-interest", he says. "I don't think [recent wars] have anything to
do with spreading democracy and giving people free choice, because
there are no free choices... There is an ownership class in America...
People say, What about the antiwar movement and Vietnam? Yeah, how long
did it take? And it didn't happen until the ownership class decided it
was no longer in their interest. Same thing with the civil rights
movement... People are dreaming if they think they have rights. They've
never had rights. There's no such thing... These are privileges,
temporarily granted to the people to keep them placated so that the
market economies [and corporatist political systems] can function."
And
people say, Oh, your conspiracy thing. Listen, don't be making fun of
the word "conspiracy". It has meaning. Powerful people have convergent
interests. They don't always need a meeting to decide on something.
They inhabit the same clubs. They sit on the same boards. They have all
this common ownership and they are very few in number. They control
everything, and they do whatever they want. [Their] two-party system
keeps the people at bay. They give them microwaves, fanny packs,
sneakers with lights in the heels, dustbusters, to keep them
distracted, keep them just calm enough that they're not going to try
something.
You know, of course, that he doesn't think it's
that hopeless. "Scratch a cynic, you'll find a disappointed idealist.
That really rang a bell with me. Within me there is this flame of
wishing it were better, wishing people had better lives, that there was
more of an authentic sharing and harmony with nature. So this thing
that sometimes reads as anger to people is largely a discontent, a
disappointment in what we have allowed to happen to us as a species and
as a culture."
Carlin's prognosis for the future reflects this ambivalence -- cynicism tinged with idealism:
Some
sort of cataclysm will alter this thing. There are too many people...
I'm a little bored with the almost Christian fervor of
[environmentalists]. I do like vandalism, by the way -- spiking the
trees and vandalizing the SUVs, that's fun. But the idealistic sitting
around kind of bores me. But I also understand that Earth is an
organism and that life is completely interdependent, everything upon
everything... We will always overstep. We will always use our brains to
our self-disadvantage, ultimately. And there'll be a tipping point.
Either it'll be environmental, or one of these lovely germs will get
loose... And then the systems will be compromised enough, and the
numbers reduced, so that there will be -- not a fresh start, because it
won't be that -- but a regearing. Maybe there'll be 100 thousand people
left. Maybe there'll be 10 million... I have no idea. But let it be
violent, and let it be funny. That's all I ask.
If there's a
common message of these three eloquent gentlemen it is that the power,
influence and control of the rich elite in our society is substantial
but far from insuperable, and that we as individuals and collectively
have a lot more power to act and change things than we might think. And
that no one is really
in control -- we cannot expect our leaders and big corporations and
governments to get us out of the mess we have created for ourselves,
even if they are inclined to do so. It's all up to us, and it's fraught with danger, but it's possible.
As Carlin says "Those who can dance are considered insane by those who
can't hear the music." We need to help others to hear the music, and
then it will be more than possible -- there'll be no stopping us.
[If
you've clicked the links above, you know another thing these three guys
have in common is that they all have crappy websites. What is it about
celebrity that changes good people from a willingness to converse with
real people to a preoccupation with touting their books? Is it just
that there's only so much bandwidth for any human to share with others,
and once you reach a certain level of popularity you run out of that
bandwidth and shift automatically from two-way to one-way
communication?]
Image 'Chemical Bonding' by David Nash |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
