"Surviving Progress"

             When Jane Goodall spoke at a book talk in New York she was wrapped in a silk scarf and her hair was pinned in her trademark gray tail.  Her latest book Hope for Animals and Their World described the many successes of the conservationist movement--the reintegration of species like the California condor into their habitats--detailing the extraordinary rescue efforts scientists and advocates make for the smallest progress.  As she concluded she removed a single condor feather from a leather tube; it seemed to stretch longer than one of her own legs.  The crowd, mostly urban and young, roared with approval.  Hope.  It is not just possible, it sells books, too.
              The memory of that talk and her beautiful book came to mind as I watched "Surviving Progress," not just because she is interviewed in the film, but because when confronted with the bleak realities of 21st century's globalized free market capitalism, one needs to hold on to something (even a single feather) of hope.  As she says in her interview, "Humans are a problem-solving species."
               In the documentary scientists, intellectuals, and writers take on the major concern of the next century:  Will humanity change its ways or ask for a bigger shovel?  For cynics, it should be said up front, humans aren't going anywhere.  No matter how much eco-freaks and God-botherers howl at an empty sky.  In Curt Stager's excellent book Deep Future we learn sure enough that we can't kill off the species through climate change, but we can make it miserable for the weakest and poorest among us; we can kill off huge portions of the population; and we can deplete (for us and our progeny) the natural abundance of resources in and on the Earth.  Yet it must be admitted that "Market fundamentalism," or the blinkered faith in progress, has tethered all of us to the crazed horse of a global economy with no stable of regulations and rules large enough to house it.
              One flattering problem the film reveals is that humans have been too successful.  It took 1300 years to add 200 million people to the world's population, now it takes 3 years.  With 6 or 7 billion people, some argue that this is too many by half.  But I don't see the ruling elite changing their behavior or the bottom half of the planet living much better just because there are less people.  Our numbers are going up, space and resources are limited, and as one interviewee says, "every time history repeats itself, the price goes up."
             An intriguing and reoccurring topic in the film is the "progress trap."  In learning and making progress 'we' saw at the very limb on which 'we' sit like the cavemen who discovered that charging a herd of animals over a cliff was easier than hunting them individually--smart but self-defeating if taken to extremes.
             Author Margaret Atwood preempts conservative arguments saying that we should think of the earth not as some holy abstraction but as a finite system.  "Unless we preserve the planet," she argues, "There isn't going to be any 'the economy' left."  Her comments carefully juxtapose with the experience of a middle class Chinese tour guide, made comfortable by the rising industrialism in his country, but one who self-silences:  He refuses to confront the problems of the environment directly for fear of retribution even when he and his own family recognize the drawbacks of development.
              Of course the greatest part of this film is blame.  It is not a conspiracy to speak of an international elite who literally dictate world policy.  It does exist.  And their instruments in the banking industry--who so excellently ensnared the developing world in debt obligations they could not possibly repay--have prepared the track for the great collisions of the 21st century:  Who will pay the debts?  Who says 'we' have to?  What will happen if 'we' don't?
              There are deficits to this sleek and beautiful film.  The pseudo-scientific babbling of Robert Wright never ceases to sound like a mad-chemist's parrot set loose on camera:  "Now more than ever you could argue that there's a unified social brain."  What nonsense is this?  And his imperative that we must make "moral progress" is as fantastical as it is a-historical.  As is one interviewees notion that "we're up against human nature...we have to reform ourselves, remake ourselves."  While he wasn't mentioned, philosopher and Enlightenment critic John Gray's recent (exceedingly bleak) arguments and historical work on this point are fairly conclusive.  (For more see The Immortalization Commission.)  Such a ridiculous frame for change as 'human nature' (whatever that turns out to be) will offer up human nature itself:  mercurial, uncertain, radically alternate.
              More convincing is the notion that we need to "prove nature wrong," as one scientist argues.  In this vein, we must prove that "making apes smarter is NOT a dead end."  (The experiment of civilization could topple, the film purports, unless we shore up our world.)  Human beings may not have a "united social brain" or be able to individually transform "their natures" but humans can arise to a challenge.  They can act collectively.  Perhaps the next challenge of societal progress--as opposed to human progress--is a collective decision to overcome impulses to greed for generations as yet unborn.  It will take reclaiming a simple word:  "We."
         

Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard, the author of (among other stories) “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” would have enjoyed the presidential election of 2012.  This campaign so devoid of ideas and so rich with agreed upon fictions would have been a bleak backdrop for one of Ballard’s own stories.  He died in 2009 just as the forty-year delusion of debt-fueled growth eradicated the middle class utopias he so often fictionalized.

 Ballard’s world was one of abandoned swimming pools and empty hotels; a post-political suburban wasteland populated with self-servers and mobs.  His last book, Kingdom Come, pushes a recurring focus—middle-class consumerism—to a weird and undercooked conclusion. 

In it the former advertising executive Richard Pearson returns home to suburban Brooklands after his father’s death.  What ensues is part detective story and part speculative fiction.  Pearson is an astute observer of consumerism’s effects on Brooklands population.  It’s a place where “the only real things are mirages.” 

As is usual in Ballard’s late fiction, characters are shallow and are mainly responsible for transmitting and debating his novel’s rich ideas.  In one scene a character says:

We have to prepare our kids for a new kind of society.  There’s no point in telling them about parliamentary democracy, the church or the monarchy.  The old ideas of citizenship you and I were brought up with are really rather selfish…“

Later, when mankind’s precious “rights” are invoked a character says:

What’s the point of free speech if you have nothing to say?  Let’s face it, most people haven’t anything to say, and they know it.  What’s the point of privacy if it’s just a personalized prison?  Consumerism is a collective enterprise.  People here want to share and celebrate, they want to come together.  When we go shopping we take part in a collective ritual of affirmation. 

In the Ballardian world, the empty lives and lonely crowds are a product of an Enlightenment project gone horribly wrong.  He explored this territory in Cocaine Nights and Millennium People.  In the former, early retirement in a world without work—“a billion balconies facing the sun”—leaves only darker pleasures to be explored.  A sleepy community becomes the playground of pleasure-seeking nihilists. 

Kingdom Come imagines a neo-fascist vigilantism somewhere between the airport and the ‘burbs.  Ballard’s characters include cardboard demagogues, the giggling herd, and toughs who fetishize symbols and violence.  And throughout the novel’s twists and turns there is the lurking memory of Brownshirts and the ustasha—the undead specter of 20^th century nihilism. 

The novel is, in effect, a Counter-Enlightenment work.  Having explored man’s crooked nature in books like Crash, which explores the sexuality of the road accident, Ballard’s vision is of a fascism birthed from the consumer economy.  Instead of the torch-led fury and coordination of a Nuremburg rally, contemporary society has the high-pressure orderliness of the supermarket. Instead of the Freikorps roughing up rabbis, our age has suburbanites in St. George Crosses truncheon-thumping immigrants.  And glowing above it all is the dome of the Metro-Center, a shopping complex from Albert Speer’s sketchpad.  It is a modernist cathedral that is visible from everywhere in town—a comfortable bowl for the listless, insatiable goldfish mankind has become.

But like Cocaine Nights, Ballard’s last novel swings at empty air:  Consumerism is not fascism.  Yes, technology has eliminated work.  But no iron safety net has caught the supplanted workforce.  Instead of a billion balconies, the population endures austerity.  Instead of bored vigilante violence, a generation of sex workers and lettuce-pickers scrambles desperately to survive.  The shrinking middle- classes may “dream of violence” in Ballard’s novel but in reality they mostly abuse themselves through self-loathing, anti-depressants, and a delusional hope in long dead notions of “fair play.” 

Both Ballard and his friend and advocate, the political philosopher John Gray, have a critical handicap in their critique of the Enlightenment project:  Their only muse is the nightmare and their only material is the supposed “crooked timbre” of mankind.  One must remember, in 2011 millions of people disgusted by greed and the consoling fictions peddled by their betters put the lie to these authors’ dark portents.  The most satisfying illusion today is the belief that one can resign himself from the challenges of history in a retreat to the study.  The puppet characters in Ballard’s last book have much to teach about humanity’s dark purposes, but their creator still had much to learn about man’s complex and surprising nature.