Image by Arnaud Mariat.
Fatal physics
Astrophysicists analyzed light and energy into their components, and figured out how they work together to form stars, black holes, supernovas. Observation of a red shift showed them that galaxies are moving away from us faster than previously thought. If all objects started from the same point, the universe is 13.58 billion years old and will probably exist for another 19 or 20 billion years when star formation will have ceased and galaxies will have burned out. It will continue expanding indefinitely, collapse into a hot nuclear state like the one that preceded the Big Bang, or else be torn apart by the mysterious gravitational force of dark energy. Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, so it appeared relatively early in the universe’s life, and is now halfway through its expected existence. Multi-celled animals appeared 600 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion. Homo sapiens emerged roughly 800,000 years ago. Irrespective of global warming, the Sun will get hotter and brighter as it ages. It will evaporate the oceans, degrade the atmosphere and eventually engulf Earth. The last animals will die out as early as 500 million years from now.
Fatal abundance
Unless there is an emergency like an earthquake or a flood, it is the world of images and words that dominates peoples’ attention in a fast-moving powerhouse like the North American economy. An interesting and absorbing secondary reality replaces the one around us that we see and touch and depend upon to survive. This secondary reality is made of language and is built upon models controlled by people who own property. It portrays government as the dutiful partner to investors who must be kept happy so that so that they don’t leave the country, and working people can continue to have jobs so that they earn the wherewithal to buy more things. Fast talkers monitor the abundance of man-made objects that spill out of shops and fill peoples’ vision as far as the eyes can see. They tell stories that advertise the use of products, and manicure the boxes that greet your eyes when you open up on Google. After the Civil War, abolitionists were defenceless against aggrieved white landowners who persuaded Andrew Johnson to change the outcome of the battle they had fought so hard to win. Plantation owners re-asserted their right to determine the fate of former slaves. They had the President’s ear, and since not enough programs were put in place to help freedmen and freedwomen get on their feet and start a new life, white peoples’ hokum made people forget about the reality of whips and chains until the 1970s.
People can both sense and talk at the same time, you might argue, but talking uses linguistic representations, and they belong to a different form of knowledge from sense perception. Representations belong to language, and language is a tool for promoting self and getting control over the world. Perception, on the other hand, is not about control. It just receives what exists. Listens. Savours. Perception is sensing what is there. It registers the reality of what exists and picks up on patterns in it. What exists is the universe.
The two behaviours are very different, representing and receiving, yet representations tend to take precedence when you are surrounded by talkers, and live in a place where manufacturing and selling objects are key to survival. The whole project of North America is a race to manufacture things that can be sold on the market so that you earn enough money to keep a roof over your head. Except for Mennonites and Doukabours, there is no other vision except make a buck.
And manufactured objects are attention traps. They are interesting to look at. They take attention to get working. They require attention if they do not work. They require energy to keep on functioning. They heat up the atmosphere. Their demands steal time away from sensing where you are. The yawning freezer on the other side of the horizon, and the endless kilometres you must travel before you meet a dust particle or a chunk of rock? Hidden by the abundance of things floating around in your field of vision, or else waiting to be put away in the front living room. North Americans have so much stuff, they don’t need reality anymore.
Fatalistic thinking
Capitalist formation occurred early in Europe’s history because the habit of extraction and exploitation created a strong push towards upward wealth redistribution. Persuaded by punishments like the rack, and property-owners’ voices, peasants found it hard to resist co-optation into a system of hierarchical control. Industrialization simply reinforced deeply structural and historical relations. Colonized by the British and the Normans during the 12th century, Ireland was under Catholic rule when Oliver Cromwell chopped off the head of Charles I and used his New Model Army to confiscate large amounts of Royalists’ land, much of which he gave to Protestant settlers in the form of plantations. Thousands of Catholic peasants were shipped to the Caribbean and North America as indentured servants.
Karl Marx read William Howitt’s Colonization and Christianity (1838) at the British Museum, and later on, Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) gave him a lively account of Iroquois culture in North America. Maybe nations didn’t have to go through the stage of capital formation first if they could find a way to resurrect indigenous communalism? By 1880, several colonial revolts e.g. Haiti, Algeria, Taiping, Sepu, Ireland, Africa, told him that peasant populations were capable of figuring things out on their own. In the Russian mir he found a form of communalism that was still viable.
Marx and Engels analyzed the American Civil War for the New York Tribune, but they never actually visited the United States. Despite its not having a feudal past to pave the way for capitalist development the way Europe did, North Americans would not be where the first socialist revolution would occur, in any case. Cheap land gave workers an outlet for their frustration. Slavery undermined solidarity across racial lines. White supremacy emerged victorious after the Civil War. Capital accumulation was on a fast track where work was key to wealth, and wealth was the only object of work. Indigenous people had been severely reduced in number. Given the fast turnover in products, inventors could reach a high standard of living simply by pinching pennies and working hard. After 1776, American capitalists would go to war at least 400 times in search of new markets i.e. the Mexican War.
Socialism didn’t stand a chance. Fake diamonds. Fake croissants. Fake penicillin. Anything to make a buck. No sales tax on financial asset exchanges means that stocks can be sold easily at no cost. When private equity firms purchase companies that went bankrupt there is no requirement that they take responsibility for the purchased company’s liabilities. Patent monopolies protect inventions from being copied by competitors. Lax laws hand enormous wealth to a tiny group of mostly white Europeans.
A legitimate question
So why did the universe encourage fish, elephants and whales to evolve on Earth if American settlers were going to duplicate Europe’s class system, steal resources from the Global South, and change the climate with their manufactured products? Why did it even bother to invent horses and giraffes in the first place if they were going to get asphyxiated in half a billion years when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere gets too low for photosynthesis to occur so all the plants will die. Is the universe some kind of fiend?
This question becomes pertinent as European nations convince themselves that a sick ethno-state is worth protecting from international law, and that re-armament is necessary to thwart an attack by Putin who has the nerve to dislike seeing Russian schools punctured by Ukrainian drones. What virus infects Merz’s brain to make him so paranoid he wants to start a war with the most nuclear-armed country on the planet, that lost 27 million people fighting the Nazis during World War Two, and for whom any attacks on its soil are existential? Does he want to kill all animals prematurely?
Fatal physics, fatal abundance, and fatalistic thinking have led Northern Europeans to a place with no exit. Long before frogs and rabbits will have a chance to croak their last croak and hop their last hop, they submitted themselves to vision of racial and intellectual superiority that reduced the universe to a machine, that destroyed the climate, and made citizens subservient to fascists, Zionists and tech bros. Meanwhile, the universe just watches. It is looking for evidence of awareness of its ominous presence, but all it hears are more speeches, and more bombs. 500 million years is a long time, long enough to wake up and get control over the insidious ideology that made white people think they are the smartest folks in the room. Would the universe have liked them better if instead of words and images, they’d followed the Moon the way indigenous people do? The universe doesn’t do likes. You have to like it.
This is part one of two.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Laurel Thompson.