Most Americans prefer the myopic life found aboard the Titanic, that is, the psychological states of malignant narcissism and present hedonism, to the imaginative utopian foresight, difficult planning and arduous work necessary to rebuild Noah’s Ark, which assumes an appreciation of the capacities and powers made available to us through individual and collective “self-binding” and constraints (Jon Elster, among others). Perfervid U.S./MAGA nationalist identity is irrationally yet inextricably intertwined with the developmentally arrested qualities of a cultural adolescence (Werner Sombart*) stuck in the muck and mire of a hyper-technological and high finance capitalist ethos that is increasingly susceptible to moments of violent regression steeped in self-deception, states of denial and the hallucinatory phantasies of illusion and delusion. Which brings us to the chapter title, ”Who Will Build the Ark?,” in Mike Davis’s book, Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory (Verso, 2018), a small snippet from which I quote:
“Scholarly research has come late in the day to confront the synergistic possibilities of peak population growth, agricultural collapse, abrupt climate change, peak oil, and in some regions, peak water, and the accumulated penalties of urban neglect. If investigations by the German government, Pentagon, and CIA into the national-security implications of a multiply determined world crisis in the coming decades have had a Hollywoodish ring, it is hardly surprising. As a 2007/2008 UN Human Development Report observed, ‘There are no obvious historical analogies for the urgency of the climate change problem.’ While paleoclimatology can help scientists anticipate the non-linear physics of warming Earth, there is no historical precedent or vantage point for understanding what will happen in the 2050s, when a peak species population of 9 to 11 billion struggles to adapt to climate chaos and depleted fossil energy. Almost any scenario, from the collapse of civilization to a new golden age of fusion power, can be projected onto the strange screen of our grandchildren’s future.”
For Davis’s visionary guide to urgent political action, in effect, answering the question posed in the aforementioned chapter title, please read the book!
* As summarized here by the late Raghavan Iyer (and in important respects updated in the works of Christopher Hedges as well as psychoanalysts on the Left with anthropological and sociological sensibilities), this entails the dispositionally constituted
“… tendency to mistake bigness for greatness; the influence on the inner workings of the mind of the quantitative valuation of things, the connection between success, competition [in which there is a meritocratic conception of ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’] and sheer size; the tendency to regard the speediest achievements [be they in hyper-technology or shameless high finance shenanigans] as the most valuable ones; the connection between megalomania, mad hurry, and record-breaking [in conventional mass media or more ubiquitously the virtual reality of smart phones and social media]; the attraction of novelty [which psychological and sociologically suffuses the wider culture]; the habit of hyperbole [this habit has degenerated into a penchant for utter disregard for what is or might be true and the systematic spread of the crassest ideological propaganda and myths; as illusions, delusions, and phantasies make for what Fromm called the ‘pathology of normalcy’ and Hedges calls the ‘triumph of spectacle’]; the love of sensationalism [be it in newspapers, or on TV, computer screens, and smartphones]; the fashion in ideas [consider the many American academic intellectuals who fawn over French intellectual fads] as well as clothes; and the consciousness of superiority [on all fronts, but especially the economic, political, and military] that is [in the end or all things considered] merely an expression of weakness [or fear, insecurity, anxiety, and so forth].” — Raghavan Iyer, Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979): 307.
Some Relevant Bibliographies (embedded links)
- Samir Amin;
- Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice;
- Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization;
- Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing;
- Beyond Punitive Capitalist and Liberal Society;
- Blacks on the (Radical) Left;
- The Black Panther Party;
- Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education; Democratic Theory;
- Ecological and Environmental Politics, Philosophies and Worldviews
- Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice;
- Housing;
- Human Rights;
- Ethics, Law, and Politics of Immigration & Refugees;
- L.R. James: Marxist Humanist & Afro-Trinidadian Socialist;
- The History, Theory & Praxis of the Left in the 1960s;
- Malcolm X;
- Marxism (or ‘the Left’), Art & Aesthetics;
- Marxism and Freudian Psychology;
- Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law;
- Otto Neurath & Red Vienna: Mutual Philosophical, Scientific and Socialist Fecundity;
- Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism;
- Philosophy, Psychology, & Methodology for the Social Sciences;
- Psychoanalytic Psychology Beyond the Color Line;
- Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy;
- Public Health: Social Epidemiology, Ethics, and Law;
- Social Security and the Welfare State;
- South African Liberation Struggles;
- Sullied (Natural & Social) Sciences;
- Toward Green Socialist Democracy;
- Utopian Thought, Imagination, and Praxis;
- Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law.
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