Surrender and sacrifice

How we relate to things is more important than what we think they are.

You can view the landscape as just so much rock, mud and the stuff that happens to live on it. That will make you relate to it a certain way. In the absence of a stable spiritualised morality, it won’t matter how much detailed knowledge you add. A doctor who assaults someone is no less culpable because he happens to know all the anatomy. In fact, he’s probably more so.  

On the other hand, if the world is a deity and/or a direct ancestral member of your family you'll act in ways that reflect that.

Which do you think might be more sustainable? 

The dominant culture assumes people only do the latter when they haven’t worked out the former. We call that “progress”. I’m not convinced. I think progress may lie in the opposite direction. 

Animism, then, the understanding that all is alive, is ecological morality. Because we tend to only apply morality to living things. That’s why people tend to get upset when we kick puppies, but not when we blow the tops of mountains. 

Dehumanise and de-animate things. Then you can act immorally towards them.

I suggest we reverse the process. 

Nowadays we have both modes of being in operation around us. We have the industrial scientific mode. This leads us to exploit the shit out of everything, kill each other and kill ourselves. Then we have the indigenous mode applied by most of humanity throughout most of time. It offers up other options. 

So, given that we have a choice, which path do we choose to follow?

We’re currently finding out that it’s very difficult to try and follow both. It’s like trying to ride two horses. We’re also experiencing the ‘flicker’ as one paradigm fails and a new one emerges from the chaos. This makes us oscillate between the two. We’re spiritual one moment, scientific the next. We profess our love of ecological consciousness, then continue to exploit and destroy. 

Let's take an example. I've often wondered about the potential for an ecological, science based religion. Could we find a way of ‘redeifying’ ecological systems? I thought if we did, we might view them as too sacred to destroy. Then I read how people in the deepest religious or spiritual revelries switch them off when it suits them. Vicars don’t give ‘the blood of Christ’ to babies, because it's wine. Shamans are suddenly ever so rational when their hut catches fire mid-trance. 

This explains why even humans in ecological belief systems exterminate species and exploit landscapes. There’s an almost indestructible element of pragmatism in even our most cherished beliefs. Industrialisation has flourished by replacing the beliefs entirely with pragmatism, and scaling from there. 

At some point though, all of us will have to leap back into the void.   

So how do we loosen our grip on one thread to reach for the other? Can we do that without loosening our grip on reality? We can see what happens when the conspiracy crowd lets a little too much slip.  

How can we surrender? How can we sacrifice what we must to walk us back from amusing ourselves to death?  

We're individualised, materialist people. We consider sacrifice a bit nuts. We kind of get it for our biological family. We can see the obvious genetic benefits underlying our deep bonds of affection and love. But what about voluntary sacrifice to protect something larger than that? 

That requires a shared coherent belief system. 

Industrialisation doesn’t provide one. In fact, it has deliberately destroyed those we had.  

Would you willingly sacrifice for McDonalds, Apple, Starbucks and IKEA? Of course, we already do to some extent. But mostly, we do our best to sacrifice others. 

On a day to day basis, our dominant industrial culture requires little or no sacrifice. That’s a powerful aspect of its appeal. Instead, we sacrifice the other to our consumerism. We enslave, torture and kill millions of people to avoid any sacrifices ourselves. But then, every now and then there’s been a few wars to sacrifice to. And they’re  interspersed with really big wars where there’s a lot, if not everything, to lose. 

And that’s where we’re headed today. 

Which brings us to some important choices. Not whether we sacrifice or not. But, given that sacrifice is inevitable, what do we sacrifice and what for? 

The environmental movement has been suggesting we might like to sacrifice a little of our superfluous wealth. That might have reduced the sacrifice we will otherwise make on the pitchforks of others. 

But it's been pretty comprehensively ignored. So we acquiesced. We said you wouldn’t have to sacrifice anything more than a regular donation to your chosen charity. We said you might have to sacrifice a particular kind of underarm deodorant. You might lose some light bulbs or single use plastics. Lately we’ve started suggesting people might like to sacrifice some of the meat from their table. Or maybe you could downsize the car you drive? Reconsider that extra holiday flight? 

Many people agree that they should do this at some point. Maybe when the collapsing circumstances force them to. Others have simply told us, and reality, to fuck off. We’ve busied ourselves trying to continue to convince them all. With ersatz meats. Electric cars. The promise of electric planes and fusion sometime in never never land. 

So now the environmental movement is stuck in a terminal bind, along with our political leaders. We all know sacrifices are screaming towards us. But nobody wants to be the person who seems to be forcing them on anybody. So environmentalists pretend the impossible, that no sacrifices are necessary. Politicians impose sacrifices on the poorest and least powerful. They call it “austerity” and blame it on somebody else. The last government. The warring Russians. The Chinese property market. 

All the time what’s actually happening is we’re running out of world.  

The positive sustainability people say this is not a problem. It's a “challenge”. An “opportunity”. 

They're normalising disaster capitalism. It's exactly what they are supposed to oppose. 

How sick and deluded are we going to get? We’re describing the likely death of billions of people as an “opportunity”. Shall we don the black uniforms with the skulls on them now? Will Hugo Boss host another pre-World War sale?

When we, rich industrialised people, talk like this, we’re choosing to continue sacrificing others by default. 

The circular economy pretends that regathering all the materials we use into our factories will make global capitalism sustainable. The emerging Degrowth movement gets kneecapped before it can walk. At its heart is the lie that collapse can be averted. Just another deck chair concession on the Titanic. 

I got incredibly annoyed about this. Stupidly, and against all my experience, I had genuine hopes for it. Given the name, I thought Degrowth was to be a movement that embraced the reality of what’s coming. 

I went to two Degrowth events. One at a corporate accounting firm, the other was a session at a conference. Both operated under the assumption that most everything would be okay. We just have to switch the tired old word “sustainable” for the shiny new word “Degrowth”. Then brandish the same old wish list of things that should happen, but are not going to. 

Degrowth would only be meaningful if it includes decolonisation and deindustrialisation. But those are going to be the major battlefields of the next few decades. They won't be resolved with PowerPoint slides about organic gardening and car-sharing apps, without even mentioning surrender or sacrifice. 

We’re still shimmying up to the insane driver of our burning suicide bus. It's screaming towards the cliff while we're whispering, ever so gently, if he didn’t think we might all be a little happier if he slowed down just a touch.