“Watch your civilisation slide out of view” – End of Days Diary #02 – #powerlessness…

Day 2 of the “Doom Diaries”, also known as the Lehrer diaries, because, as Tom Lehrer said, “If any good songs can come out of world war three, we better start writing now.” 

First, thanks to people who responded with reading suggestions, encouragement, comments, likes and the like;  I will try to keep going. The second part of this post will be about what the quote “science” says. And the third about “powerlessness.”

Are we doomed in the next 18 months – or is that the wrong question? Rather, is it going to be an extremely interesting 18 months in terms of temperatures and impacts? (Yes) Here’s some interesting reading about ocean temperatures, Antarctic ice cover and so forth by retired mathematician and computer guy, Professor Elliot Jackson. And here’s a thread from esteemed climate scientist Michael Mann (the guy who came up with the hockey stick graph showing late 20th century temperatures as high, based on tree ring data and other proxies, and so incurred the organised wrath of the denialists). 

AFAICT, the main point of dissension is the impact or lack of impact of decreased sulphur emissions from maritime shipping. Mann of course, is relatively sanguine about what impacts will hit how hard, how fast and has doubtless been denounced as a gatekeeper by the doomer community. 

Ultimately, we’re talking about “how soon” not “if” severe, (very severe) impacts hit us. I’m not qualified, I’m guessing. But then I suspect everyone is guessing a bit more than they’d like to admit, even to themselves. And we are off the map or even through the looking glass as Milhous put it. 

There’s also this just in about crop failures in Kansas and now possibly Alberta. Fun times.

Finally, this question of powerlessness, which also came up in twitter responses to the frit post. The following brain vomit narrated as I bought to the gym has been lightly edited. Firstly, it’s true that as citizens in countries with the formal accoutrements of separation of powers, elections, freedom of speech, freedom of information we do have power. But not – despite what we are constantly told – but as individuals, but as members of civil society organizations. 

The problem is with that, is that civil society is not so much on its knees as on its face. The neoliberal effort to gut competing power sources besides corporations has been wildly successful over the last 30/40 years. Not that social democracy was “all that” –  see Jeremy Seabrook’s brilliant book “What Went Wrong?” 

If we as individual citizens can claim to have power, it is as members of functioning groups, which resist co optation or capture or oppression, and have links with other functioning groups. Without that, we’re just atoms, who jostle.

With the civics lesson over (you wish it’s only paused!) let’s now turn to the emotions that you get when you realize you are powerless

You look away, You pretend, You freeze like that cat we caught and locked in the bathroom. (Rip Machiavelli who had a good long life afterwards). You learn to keep your head down your mouth shut and ignore all the problems that are above your paygrade, And being cajoled, exhorted, blamed by people with more education, more disposable income, and more discretionary time than you is unlikely to change that stance, to put it mildly. 

And there are various songs and books that you could read alongside vast, densely footnoted sociological terms, most of which leaves me cold unless there is a particularly entertaining mashup of Chomsky, Bourdieu Haraway and Amaire Cesaire that I’ve missed ,,,

There’s Antony Giddens concept (possibly the last useful thing he did – ‘Consequences of Modernity’ – before he went full Blairite) of the juggernaut.

“For these images I suggest we should substitute that of the juggernaut-a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of our control and which could rend itself asunder. The juggernaut crushes those who resist it, and while it sometimes seems to have a steady path, there are times when it veers away erratically in directions we cannot foresee.”

(Giddens 1991, p139)

Basically, we’re riding a tiger, and whether we are a flea in its ear or a flea in its butt, we’re not in charge, and the tiger is about to get wasted (the metaphor doesn’t fully work, of course, because the reason tigers are endangered is, well , us, the human fleas).

That sense of futility (as per Wilfred Owen’s poem).  In that sense that you can know what’s going on, but not be able to make a meaningful intervention in the system because you don’t have a functioning group and that functioning group doesn’t have other functioning groups which add up to a movement that is able to grow, learn, organize. Instead, we have repeated spasms, and we ride the emotacycle within the Smugosphere. 

I don’t know how many words are put down on the page so far, but I’m going to pad out the preceding blog, so that I can end with surely one of the great popular culture contributions to the understanding of powerlessness and class of the late 20th century. I refer of course, to Pulp’s common people. The narrator explains that the millionaire’s daughter can cosplay being a prole all she likes. She can rent a flat above a shop,cut her hair and get a job, smokes and fags and play some pool. pretend she never went to school. But still she’ll never get it right. Because when she’s laying in bed at night, watching roaches climb the wall. If she called her dad, he could stop it all. 

So she’ll never understand what it feels to live your life with no meaning or control, nowhere  left to go….

Further reading, 

And We Are Not saved by Debbie Louis. 

Woody Allen about punching Nazis. 

There’s TV Smith. “The policies are planned”, “makes you feel so useless” and “runaway train driver.”