“Now you see it and it’s up to you to choose.
It sure looks funny for a new dinosaur to be in an old dinosaur’s shoes.”
(Captain Beefheart - “The Smithsonian Institute Blues”)
Like anyone stuck out on a cold remote rock, the Easter islanders needed trees for timber and firewood. But they also needed them to roll and drag those huge stone heads about on, and they kept carving and rolling those damn heads until the last tree had been chopped down and the last bit of topsoil had washed off.
Jared Diamond’s Collapse is subtitled How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. It documents the likely causes of the decline of Norse Greenland, the Maya, the Anasazi and those enigmatic ancients of Easter. It then draws parallels with our own plight.
In the above account the Easter people sound barking but of course from a similar distance so would we: Both clans seem intent on destroying their own habitat. Rather than reduce production as catastrophe approaches they swing more axes, step harder on the gas.
But of course it doesn’t look like that on the ground. Collective madness doesn’t require mental illness or stupidity. The fact that a society becomes addicted to an insane idea doesn’t demand insanity on the part any given individual. The tragedy of Easter society and modern society is their mutual adherence to a suicidal logic, or rather something that grew into a suicidal logic. For one reason or another, the imperative to keep living in a certain manner came to override basic survival.
Blind faith is a madness that frequently afflicts the sane. Presumably the Easter people earnestly believed that however bad things got they would only get worse if they stopped carving and dragging the statues, and offended the spirits of the ancestors they represented. Better to cut the last tree than offend the god is a sensible dictum for any true believer.
The western economic religions of monetarism and consumerism are turning out similarly suicidal. Presumably, twenty years ago, some people really did believe that selling-off public utilities and mutual assets would produce a world of happy shareowners – but that wasn’t the way things panned out. Whatever the original intention the fact is three decades of privatisation have left global corporations in control of human destiny. We run our lives to suit corporate logic and corporate logic is to maintain profits at any cost, whatever the consequences. You don’t have to be mad to labour-away night and day for global catastrophe, you just have to be a good CEO. That’s what the bonuses are for.
Consumerism is a related god, brandishing a similarly destructive set of commandments:
Worry you haven’t enough possessions.
Worry your current possessions are outdated.
Throw away perfectly good things when new versions are released.
Fear what people will think of you if you don’t own the latest things.
– this is the logic that drives Asia’s twin miracles of industrial slavery and global-destruction.
Again it sounds like lunacy, but it’s more an induced bewilderment. The fraction of humanity wealthy enough to actually practice consumerism is subject to relentless propaganda. Advertisers strive to sow insecurities into our minds, encourage us to think we can’t be happy without the product.
In truth consuming doesn’t make us happier; shopping trips to New York don’t make us happier, children are no happier for owning flashy toys. Going out is actually less fun with mobile telephones. Imelda Marcos’s shoes certainly didn’t make her happy, why would a content person continue to worry so much about footwear? If she’d acquired every style on earth she still wouldn’t have been happy, she’d probably just have moved onto handbags.
Of course we’re not all unquestioning believers. To varying degrees at different times, every clan has its dissenters. During lean times particularly doubters and challengers arise to question the strategy of the leaders, even question the power of the gods.
On Easter there must have been people who appreciated the damage and the impending danger and even some who dared to call for a halt, particularly towards the end. But then as now it was rare that anyone in power held this view – they were more likely in cahoots with the parties organising the destruction. Whatever the exact details, clearly the pressure to plough-on outweighed the pressure to turn back. The plough-on brigade won the day – and lost the world.
At the moment too the plough-ons prevail. Certainly there’s lots of oppositional discourse, but it’s greatly outweighed by the positive propaganda, and the temptation to look away. The luxury of cars and flights has a compelling hold over many of us. Add the fact that corporations actively want us to over-consume and the outlook does look bleak. ‘No party will ever get elected on that ticket’; ‘You can’t expect people to stop flying and get rid of their cars’ – these are the most chilling mantras of the anti-environmentalists, left and right.
When all the trees were chopped, the soil gone, and the forty species of seabird all eaten, they started on each other:
“Oral traditions of the islanders are obsessed with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was ‘The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth’.”
Although global cannibalism seems unlikely in the near future, our current trajectory is leading to equally desperate social relations. In the race to exploit the planet billions are being trampled underfoot. If the plunder continues we can only expect more suffering and insecurity to follow.
Diamond shows us that we are all still just animals, squabbling over limited resources – it doesn’t matter if it’s ten thousand on an island or six million on a globe, there’s only so much useful land and sea to go round, and a constant temptation to over-exploit it. This much will never change.
But he also shows us how we differ from the other animals. He shows how some ancient and some modern societies responded intelligently to environmental crises, and ended up safeguarding their future. As much as it was ingenuity that got us into this mess it remains our only means of escape – should we choose to use it.
