Watching Apocalypse

The garbage islands-- and the above one in the Pacific is but one -- are the epic result of the last hundred or so years of intensifying, technologically homogenized globalization.  Most of that homogenization is related to an originally cheap, now increasingly expensive, potent, and very flexibly transformative form of energy found in the earth.  What's taking place for all to consciously observe today is a desperate attempt to keep that energy flowing throughout this global system.  Desperation of this sort is induced by both institutional and individual denial of encroaching despair, an urgency to stave off the revelation of truths.  Recall that the revelation of truth is embedded in the meaning of apocalypse.

 

Dead Zones at the mouths of major rivers around the world are the result of industrial agriculture wastes, much of it simply excess nutrient and pesticide runoff.

 

Most of today's political and economic institutions have adapted their rules of behavior -- for both their institutionally-designed purposes and for the individuals involved -- to making these institutions function within a global systems environment.  None of this is a neutral process.  The processes transform the natural environment and humans adapt and change to fit into these systems.  What this amounts to is design -- a human design, not some fictional omnipotent being's -- that evolves out of a certain set of problem-solving procedures that go into developing any type of institution.  An institution itself amounts to an abstract set of ideas put into action through human decided-upon rules and controlled through increasingly sophisticated management procedures. 

 

Any relationship of modern managed institutional societies to an organic, community-based democracy is essentially a fabrication of ideas on another order, call that order sociological propaganda if you wish.  I think the term fits.

 

Meanwhile, we have many stories floating around society, accumulating much like garbage islands, that serve to justify this modern social design. They tend to be stories about something related to that hierarchical-inducing institutional process, and many stories are generally a transformation myth reiffying the essential nature of these institutions as a human-centered story about progress, drawn from some mythologized notion of some sort of evolution from a state of ignorant primitivism to our present advanced stage of wondrous technological civilization. 

 

For the most part we are all floating in an ocean of this daily meaning-reinforcing fare.  When I do get an opportunity to experience directly one of our primary cultural garbage collection gyres while visiting with acquaintances who allow modern television programming to be washed into their homes, I experience the many different ways that story is told.  For me it comes as an affront, a collective junk pile of raucous sounds and images. If it has coherence, that coherence is its effect on my psyche.  I don't know what those who experience it on a daily basis see while this intrudes upon their home environments.  They may make a different sense of it. 

 

As Jacques Ellul perceives this process in an in-depth study into the specific technology of Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, a follow up to his more general treatment of the formative force of modern technology in a technology-baring The Technological Society, these stories are a form of ongoing indoctrination, a cultural programming designed to maintain a narrative that will support a certain order to the established way of life.  (In Scene 1 I linked to Jacques Ellul's  hour long interview about the Treachery of Technology done just before he passed back in the nineties.  If you missed it, and are interested, he shares some of his impressions of all this technological indoctrination.)

 

As these ruling, system-creating institutions of modern "advanced" civilizations fail us, competing stories will very likely come about to explain the world in new ways.  We will, as societies, have an opportunity to adapt in new ways by creating new stories.  Many past societies have also had these opportunities.  Most failed to take them, as Jared Diamond points out (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed).  Otherwise we individually float on the currents of society, generally sucked into the garbage heaps unless we find ways to sail away and keep clear.  But even with these heroic individual efforts, we will unlikely fail to escape the global effect of globalized economics collapsing the living systems of this planet.

 

The following by David Holmgren, who, with Bill Mollison, developed permaculture design and a narrative to go with it, is one of those emerging revitalization stories.  This failure of current ruling institutions, by the way, didn't just start happening last week, it's been going on for a while now: