This is a simple question, but one I think of the most important to ask right now. It is two questions, in fact. What is left to humanity? on the one hand, and then What has become of any meaningful counterculture?
Claims the world is about to end are not new. Certain religious beliefs to some extent encourage a hope that it is about to end and the path to heaven ready for the taking. The signs are plentiful though that the threat to humanity today is real. The technology to achieve the annihilation of humanity certainly exists. A single nuclear missile can apparently level all France. In the old days Chingis Khan, for all the destruction he caused, had no such technology. You can’t destroy the world with swords and bows and arrows. Aside from technology, a second threat lies with the environment. Climate change has a good chance of making impossible the globally interdependent economy that currently exists. Nature can simply remove the resources making such a society conceivable. A third threat is the more or less magical and mystical religion of money that has evolved over the last forty or so years. This really is a world of funny money, of forged and imagined values that exist only in the form of bits and bytes. The amount of money in the world far exceeds the amount of wealth in the world, and this difference requires belief (a more or less religious belief) in order to maintain itself. The system can maintain itself if it believes in itself. So if it loses faith, then what? Crash.
These dangers can easily fire off into a feedback loop. What better way for the necessary faith in funny money to be lost than the climate making the planet unlivable in many regions? What if the Middle East — Iraq, say — grows so hot that life above ground becomes an impossibility? Who will extract the oil, and how? Without the oil to feed the economy, how easy would it be for the investor to lose faith? If society starts to collapse, how would conflict be avoided, and if not avoided, resolved?
So, I ask the question again and in that context: what is left? I ask also, how can that not be the question of our times? Why is there no effective opposition to the path to doom? Why is what opposition there is so ineffective? What happened to the left? If there is to be a left at all, then what would it be? What is left?
Thresholds
Olaf Stapledon is not a well-known writer, but he is for me a key thinker via his great work ‘Star Maker’ (1937). This, I felt on reading it, must be one of the most profound workings of the imagination ever written. If you don’t want to listen to me, Arthur C. Clarke wrote that it is “probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written”. I think we can be said to agree on that issue.
The book begins in a Lancashire town set in a valley. A man is reading his paper waiting for his dinner. He decides to pop out for a bit of fresh air. He climbs up the hillside behind his home, lies on his back, looks up at the stars. A short while passes, then he feels himself possessed by a force beyond his control: he is now floating up into the air! He looks down at the town he will never see again and sees it grow smaller and smaller as he rises higher and higher. On and on he floats, far away from his home planet and then even the solar system itself. It seems he is being directed, for at length he arrives at a planet inhabited by an intelligent alien species. The alien people cannot see him and this allows him to observe them and their habits. When he feels he has understood their society sufficiently, he feels the pull again and is directed to another planet. Then another and another. After a while he starts to see patterns in the societies he has observed, in their similarities and differences. As he widens his travels, visiting countless planets and observing cultures at many different stages of development, he becomes increasingly able to control his movements and eventually the ‘geography’ of the universe itself becomes second nature to him. In the end he has attained a more or less godlike knowledge. He has seen it all.
So what does he learn? In the end, he knows about all that exists or has existed and has analysed it all and he knows all there is to know about the dynamics of civilisations and how they succeed or fail.
Perhaps the key term for him is: threshold. There are smooth paths over the whole of a civilisation’s development, but within this lies an invariable set of thresholds. When a civilisation reaches such a threshold it is do or die time. A successful civilisation — the species that survives the challenge — enjoys a huge leap in progress. The unsuccessful species destroys itself.
That, the unnamed hero of the book says, is a universal truth. The question is, that even if this insight is approximately true, it is not unreasonable to believe that humanity has reached such a threshold in the here and now. It has been approaching it for decades and we today are now there.
And The Left Is…
Humanity can destroy itself or save itself from doing so and the big question is, ‘Which path will it take?’. If we also re-ask ourselves, ‘What is left?’, we can define it as the opposition to the right. But then we see that there is no opposition to the right. The right has been industriously absorbing and adopting left language and so much so that the ‘public left’ — the mediated left — is merely the right speaking left words to itself. The Guardian here in the UK and Le Monde in France are both neoconservative voices these days. Which is left how?
This means that an opposition party — a left party — needs to be found. A left party needs to be found to counter the brainwashed primate, the psychopathically indifferent, the sociopath up in cloud-cuckoo-land leading the charge to the last dead-end — a left to counter the Flock Party, the Void Party and the Death Party.
The left is nothing today. ‘What is left’ is thereby nothing. It is, this is my argument, the survival of humanity itself that is dependent on creating something out of nothing. Humanity needs a left, with all its ‘political correctness’ (a right-wing propaganda term that can be translated as ‘moral values’), idealism, dreams and hopes. But it needs as well to gain an awareness of what it is opposing. It needs to have a head looking up at the clouds and not in them.
We need a left that can challenge a right that has achieved almost ‘full spectral dominance’ over the world and all it has. A left that understands this right, can articulate the problem it represents, can see beyond it, and offer an alternative to it.
In short, to be a left to its right and not a nothing in a nowhere.
In the beginning, it is not whether this can be done or will be done but of what must be done. That is ‘what is left’ – a question. A question must precede its answer and so at the moment the left is merely a question mark waiting for the question to be filled in. In the meantime the moron, the mannikin and the mad are everywhere on the march.
And they are so many and ye so few.
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