The Twenty-First Century Blues: Growth, Ecology,& "The American Dream"
Kohák, Erazim
To speak the truth: that is the most urgent item on the next president's agenda. We have been lied to, systematically and patronizingly, ever since the Gulf of Tonkin incident, deceived,...
...We would have to give that up and replace it with a serious commitment to social justice now...
...The negative utopians warned, falsely as it turned out, that technology has only a limited 322 • DISSENT ability to draw on nature's resources...
...The American dream has always had a poetic side as well, one that spoke of a land "beautiful for spacious skies," of "liberty and justice for all...
...The dictum of Karl Kautsky still holds firm: When a social ideal cannot be achieved democratically, it cannot be achieved at all...
...government sought from it...
...We have been lied to, systematically and patronizingly, ever since the Gulf of Tonkin incident, deceived, manipulated, flattered and lulled by illusions...
...Certainly, we also need a great deal more — a public-health plan, an adequate pension system, an educational system capable of assuring a future, adequate housing capable of revitalizing our cities, vigorous action to include in the common weal all hitherto excluded, an imaginative policy in pursuit of world peace, and a great deal more that the Congress can legislate...
...Today, nature depends on us for its survival just as we depend on it...
...Consequences no longer matter...
...Nor is the damaged ozone layer restoring itself...
...We ourselves might— such is the nature of human freedom—accept responsibility for the moral order of nature and for the moral order of the human community within it...
...Such a shift is surely intrinsically desirable...
...Our country is marked by immense individual affluence and shocking public irresponsibility, a rapidly widening gap between the rich and the poor, a burgeoning military establishment, the lowest level of taxation in the West, and runaway debt, both public and private...
...The perceived individual demand, conditioned by mass media, is only for "More...
...The global forest cover is vanishing at a terrifying rate...
...Only a short way beneath the façade, the facts tell a different story, one of a succession of administrations content to substitute placebos for policy that have left America looking like an immensely affluent Third World country...
...Is there any reason to suppose that an autocrat could accomplish what democracy cannot do...
...That is a weighty agenda: a revision of the great illusion into which the American dream has degenerated...
...For a century or more, we have countered the fact of inequality with the promise of infinite expansion that would, some day, include the deprived within the range of affluence, holding out a pie-in-the-future as a substitute for present solutions...
...A sustained barrage of advertising seeks daily to convince us that a "higher standard of living" means, quite crudely, being able to buy more things more expensively...
...The hope for a voluntary shift of priorities might appear vain...
...We allow our government to contribute to it by having census takers ask whether a family has a washer, a dryer, and a freezer rather than whether it has a good school, whether its children can walk to it safely or ride a clean, convenient bus, whether there is a park in the neighborhood, and a theater to open their horizons...
...Deep down, Americans bear the traces of a different vision, based on generosity rather than greed...
...Reality, though, is closing in...
...Our technological possibilities are potentially unlimited...
...The most urgent task of our next president will be to speak the truth, to restore reality to presidential rhetoric...
...326 • DISSENT...
...This is the land of Thoreau, Lincoln, Whitman, not only the land of the robber barons, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan...
...In retrospect, it is nothing short of staggering to note the extent to which social practice relied on the constancy of human nature and its capacity for regeneration and self-regulation...
...That does not change the value of the basic insight...
...The new human condition—that is, the alienation from nature—does not of itself dictate a specific human response...
...Given America's present mood, that task might well appear impossible...
...It was that identification that made the "ideology of the industrial proletariat" as transient as the "industrial proletariat" itself, relevant in countries just entering upon the smokestack stage, embarrassing in countries trying to pass beyond it...
...Force can fashion only the façade, and never the substance, of reform...
...Still, the ecological movement is stronger than ever, for there the need is obvious...
...Such a new American dream can offer us a future...
...And with that we have come full circle...
...No president since has so electrified his compatriots as John Kennedy — "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country...
...We SUMMER • 1988 • 323 can, as we have so far done, treat the new freedom as a blanket excuse for irresponsibility...
...Contrary to popular wisdom, that is not so much a matter of accepting a lower standard of living as of redefining what constitutes a high one...
...On that nihilistic premise, the bowdlerized version of the American dream—the relentless pursuit of ever greater material affluence, fueled by open-ended economic expansion, whatever the cost—may well appear legitimate, as long as it corresponds to individual desires—and the popular approval of Mr...
...What we need now is a radically new formulation of the American dream, based on that insight...
...Our society has for a century been characterized by the belief that ever-rising individual consumption sustained by an openended economic expansion is both the meaning of individual existence and a sufficient goal of public policy...
...Again, a person is surely enjoying a far higher living standard when he or she can walk freely on safe, clean streets than if he or she can afford a more expensive security system and a bodyguard...
...Nor is that simply a matter of tropical rain forests cleared to provide a marginal survival for surplus populations...
...Today, America is at peace, enjoying unprecedented prosperity...
...Given those, we can do the rest...
...The neoconservative prescription for restoring glamour to the quest for affluence rests on the improbable assumption that the person bored with three hundred thousand dollars will become magically motivated by the prospect of a million...
...It is far more difficult when the common weal diverges significantly from such perceived desires...
...The British voters shuffled along with Neville Chamberlain's willingness to trade self-respect for an ephemeral promise of "peace in our time," but they responded powerfully to Churchill's sober call for "blood, toil, tears, and sweat...
...Throughout history, neither traditional elites nor self-proclaimed vanguards have shown themselves immune to the same short-sighted greed that they claimed to overrule by seizing power...
...Yet in our century we went on believing that, whatever damage we might do, once we won our victories, nature would clean up after us and restore the devastated earth...
...while the urgent need is for restraint and redirection of our resources...
...A commitment to self-restraint and gratitude is difficult to present to a society marked by flagrant inequality...
...Humans have destroyed whole ecosystems before...
...From our president, though, we, the American people, need truth and vision...
...And, most basically, the quality of life is surely far higher, living amid a healthy, self-renewing living nature we can bequeath to our children than amid countless gew-gaws in an industrial wasteland...
...It was Marx who first explicitly recognized that the constancy of human nature is contingent on the constancy of the human condition and was willing to recognize the consequence: that the industrial revolution, radically separating the lives of humans from the life of living nature, changed "human nature" as well...
...Thus the American dream of wealth and expansion might be refurbished by stressing the possibilities of social justice, perhaps by making economic expansion collective rather than corporate and extending its benefits to those hitherto excluded...
...So the negative utopians of the 1960s, predicting global starvation as the needs of growing populations exceeded the maximum yields then possible, appeared discredited as the green revolution drastically increased agricultural productivity...
...It is easy enough to be both democratic and responsible as long as the common good coincides with the sum of individual desires...
...A government that wins easy popularity by relying on massive borrowing to avoid taxation can hardly ask citizens to restrain their own profligate habits...
...Today, it has become obvious that while the resources of technology and its ability to exploit nature may be infinite, the resources of living nature are painfully finite...
...The symptoms of personal disintegration among the affluent confirm that the quest for ever-greater affluence ceases to provide an adequate source of meaning in life once some fairly basic minimal needs have been met...
...If neither living nature nor human nature teach a moral norm, then there simply is no norm, only the interests and desires of individuals...
...It took all the exertions of Reaganite rhetoric to blunt that perception...
...That is what suggests the possibility of a second response: that though the moral order of nature and of our humanity may no longer be a fact, it has lost none of its validity as an ideal and a responsibility...
...What is required is a massive shift in priorities from the maximization of individual consumption to the pursuit of the common good...
...Against such a background, it might well seem utterly unrealistic to expect any politician to appeal to the electorate's generous impulses, asking it to defer individual gratification for the sake of a higher common aim...
...All that is true today of living nature is no less true of human nature, the other constant on which we have depended to compensate for our greed and folly...
...Even a massive redistribution of wealth, however, cannot restore long-range viability to the vision of unending affluence and expansion...
...Nor has borrowing been of the overt, financial variety only...
...Throughout their millennia on earth, humans have shared a fundamental human situation, as finite, free, and social, in the context of a constant living nature, and have responded to it in a limited number of predictable ways...
...We shall no doubt be hearing that argument frequently in future years, but the question needs to be reversed...
...The question has always been in principle a closed one, asking about the optimal accommodation between two relative constants, the reality of living nature and the needs of human nature...
...Perhaps the first symptom of trouble in dreamland has been the declining marginal utility of individual affluence...
...The very Americans who dismiss themselves as greedily egotistic have responded and are responding altruistically whenever challenged to do so by a clearly perceived need...
...In a democracy, a reordering of unquestioned values is extremely difficult...
...We need a president who would combine a grandeur of vision with a stark honesty about reality—and the confidence in America's ability to transcend its present reality in the pursuit of an ideal...
...Recognizing the limits of expansion—the meta324 • DISSENT phonic "closing of the frontier" —has always represented a crisis for democracy...
...Some three quarters of Europe's forests are dying as well, choked by automobile exhausts and industrial pollution...
...We need a president who would speak the truth about the difference between what we are and what we could be...
...The progressive devastation of our natural environment and the erosion of civilization's infrastructure represent a far more vicious form of borrowing, undermining SUMMER • 1988 • 325 our future...
...Reagan's rhetoric of irresponsible affluence strongly suggests that it might...
...Only a decade ago, they responded positively to the recognition that "small is beautiful...
...It is possible that our shared humanity, while real enough, may well have been relatively constant and universal in great part because of the universality and constancy of the human condition in the context of living nature...
...The direct dependence on the soil and on the cycle of the seasons, enforced by limited possibilities and well-defined demands, were not significantly different for the Roman peasant of whom Virgil wrote and the eighteenth-century farmer...
...In fact, had we but stopped to consider it, we could have found empirical evidence that the self-regenerating capacity of human nature, like that of living nature, has its limits...
...As of last count, payments on private debts swallowed up 84 percent of our disposable income...
...The image of humans as consumers whose only motivation is self-indulgence may appear superficially accurate amid the monotony of everydayness, yet the times that people remember as their finest hours are invariably those when they responded to a challenge to self-transcendence...
...America's prosperity, much like that of Poland in the 1970s, is financed by massive borrowing, both public and private...
...The only thing that despotism, no matter how enlightened, has ever achieved has been to deprive its subjects of the ability to choose wisely and to act responsibly, reducing them to the lowest common denominator of passivity...
...Perhaps at no time in American history have ideas of service, self-restraint, and responsibility been held in such low esteem...
...Marx is easy to criticize for treating a far more transient mode of being human, that of the massed unskilled laborer of the early smokestack industries, as the definitive human condition...
...Yet, surely a person is enjoying a higher living standard when he or she has access to a clean, safe, and efficient public transport system, even though he or she may not be able to afford a status-priced automobile...
...Alone among the world's developed nations, the United States today is without a comprehensive health system, without an adequate old-age pension scheme, without a balanced system of public transportation, without concern for decent and affordable housing, without a public education policy...
...Life is surely better in a community of well-educated and financially secure fellow humans than alone in a fortress, no matter how luxurious, barricaded against a desperate, depraved mass...
...Just as we have assumed that living nature will regenerate itself after our orgies of destruction, we have taken it no less for granted that human nature would restore itself, no matter to what horrors and destruction it might have been subjected...
...Though few ever admitted it, warriors and revolutionaries alike have always relied on the constancy of human nature to make sure that, win or lose, there would still be a future on the day after the cataclysm...
...Altogether, there is significant evidence that the Americans are still willing and able to respond in farsighted, altruistic ways when they recognize a clear need...
...As critical, though, it becomes solvable as well...
...It is up to us to set our limits, based on the limits of nature's tolerance...
...We have always assumed that after the devastation of war or revolution life would simply "return to normal...
...By contrast, the unspoken assumption that American liberals and socialists share has been that the dream of growth can be salvaged by shifting its benefits from the affluent to the underprivileged...
...Today, the situation is simply different...
...Thus far, acting on that assumption has produced only some of the most revolting displays of conspicuous consumption since Veblen's time...
...Even if we were to tax advertising and use the proceeds to buy equal time for the message of the common weal—surely a highly desirable practice—we could compete poorly with the peer pressures of a consumer society...
...This faith has become so intertwined with our conception of modernity that we cannot face the prospect of giving it up: We would sooner believe lies and incur massive debts, as the Reagan presidency demonstrates...
...Would it take an autocrat to save both nature and civilization from our runaway greed...
...The first response is essentially Nietzschean, articulated by Dostoevski's Ivan Karamazov: If God is dead, everything is permitted...
...Living nature can simply no longer compensate for our irresponsibility...
...The situation may be less dramatic, but it is hardly less critical...
...As to public indebtedness, in the second quarter of 1987 Japan, one of our major creditors, refused to underwrite yet another ten billion in credits that the U.S...
...Call it glasnost, or truth in politicking: one way or another, the great challenge of the next century will be to reintroduce reality into our political rhetoric...
...The evidence is now overwhelming that nature is no longer restoring itself...
...the old dream, reduced to greed, cannot...
...The art of leadership is so to guide the common will, as to have it recognize the common weal as its own...
...And yet, repeatedly in human history, people have responded far more wholeheartedly to a clear call for sacrifice than to vague placebos of prosperity...
...The quest for a personal computer in every garage and a Jacuzzi in every pot may be absorbing but is not satisfying...
...Or is it...
...I am not predicting a catastrophic demise of humankind upon the exhaustion of a particular resource, what we might call a "negative utopia...
...Or we can accept it as a challenge for assuming responsibility for what we have long taken for granted...
...To be sure, the examples we have cited came from times of clearly recognized need...
...Entire species are becoming extinct, and in spite of some successes, our conservation efforts are only slowing the process...
...Negative utopias, such as the coal utopias of the late nineteenth century or the food utopias of the 1960s, effectively obscured the problem as a whole by focusing on one particular aspect...
...When Richard Hooker wrote of that which "Nature herself hath taught," he was speaking quite literally...
...It was Jefferson who substituted the pursuit of happiness for Locke's phrase, the pursuit of property...
...Fortunately, a second response is possible...
Vol. 35 • July 1988 • No. 3
