Long view re: the project of Green transformation 

Understanding the social and ecological crises of our times requires an appreciation of how radical and disruptive the transition to modernity has been.

For all of human history prior to the onset of the gradually accelerating pattern of development and urbanization which dates to approximately ten thousand years ago, people lived in a communitarian social reality - at home amongst a stable group of others, relating to a particular place-on-earth. This is the context in which we evolved, and it constitutes our sane, healthy, and satisfying social habitat. Life lived in what Gary Snyder calls the “Old Way” was oriented to the tribe, village or town, within which the domain of experience was familiar and manageable. Technologies and institutions, to the extent they could be said to have existed at all, were human-scale and personal.

The social reality of modernity, recognizable as early as the period during which the ancient empires emerged, is characterized by mass society, mega-technologies, and impersonal institutions (as well as obscene concentrations of wealth and power). The accelerating trendlines in that direction have brought us to a point where we are, as a rule, alienated and unmoored from a basic grounding in community and place. Not having anything to contrast it against, people now gamely try, with widely varying degrees of success and satisfaction, to cope with and to find a place for themselves within the modern Leviathan.

It can be argued that there are “progressive” benefits that accrue from increased population density, technological proficiency, and economic productivity. Whether or not that is the case, the Green critique says that we have come so far, lifeways have changed so radically - in the direction of modernity, away from the Old Ways - that we have arrived at a state where things are egregiously out of balance.

To resolve the crises that we face, to back away from the precipice, we’ll need to simplify, decentralize, and re-localize. We’ll need to restore human-scaled community - indeed, restore the human scale in all things. And there must now be a re-balancing between the natural ecosphere and the human-made technosphere.

What would such a transformation entail? David Watson offered a suggestive outline at the end of his 1992 article analyzing the disintegration of the Soviet Union ("The Collapse of Communism, The Triumph of Capital") where he showed how socialism and capitalism both embody the problematic essential characteristics of industrial modernity. He said Green transformation would entail . . .

. the abolition of all empires, of a world
. of sacrifice zones, drudgery, penury, and
. the toxic cornucopia of commodity society.
. It would entail the renewal of subsistence
. cultures. It would mean making a life that
. is slower, quieter, and more contemplative;
. revivifying an aesthetic not of the
. assembly line but of the forest; restoring
. a life that can hear what the natural world
. is telling us - what we once knew long ago
. and have forgotten as the urban labyrinth
. grew up around us and enclosed us.
.
. Megatechnic capital may, of course, find a
. way to entirely suffocate what is humane in
. us before it reaches its inevitable limits
. and implodes under its own inertia. There
. are laboratories and think tanks working
. around the clock to do just that, even if
. they call this eclipse our ultimate
. “liberation.”
.
. But life’s adventure cannot be found at
. control panels or desks, or in digging the
. foundations for the work pyramid, or
. building higher stories in its edifice. Nor
. is it to be found consuming the laboratory
. chow of McDonaldization at the
. petrochemical banquet table, or running on
. its treadmill to nowhere. It is with the
. fabric of the living world, the universe
. itself. We are living an aberration, a
. nightmarish turn from our true journey.
.
. Let all the empires crumble. It is time we
. rejoined the dance.

SW

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