[Peakoil] new term of derision: "collapsitarian"

[Alex Pollard]

The following comes highly recommended.

Interesting quote from their manifesto

"The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not
regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth
integral to the triumph of our civilisation."

http://www.dark-mountain.net/about-2/the-manifesto/5/

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [roeoz] Terms of dismissal
From:    "Michael Lardelli" <michael.lardelli at adelaide.edu.au>
Date:    Tue, August 3, 2010 12:53
To:      michael.lardelli at adelaide.edu.au
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear All,

The essay below is so good that I wanted to send it around to as many as
possible.

Regards,

Michael
_______________________________________

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/53651

(Published Aug 1 2010 by The Dark Mountain Project)

Terms of dismissal
by Paul Kingsnorth

I don’t think I’ve ever met a collapsitarian. At least if I have,
they’ve never admitted it to me. It’s possible that some of my best
friends may be collapsitarians in the privacy of their own homes, just as
they may also be, in their own time and strictly in confidence, devotees
of bestial porn or the novels of Jeffrey Archer. But it’s never come out
in public. The same is true of doomers. I keep hearing about these people.
Apparently they’re all around us. From what I can tell they’re a sort
of political goth. They’re terribly difficult and probably socially
inadequate. In a world free of austerity they would be entitled to
psychiatric help, but these are straitened times.

But then I probably just don’t get out enough. These days I spend most
of my time closeted on my hill farm reading Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and
oiling my shotgun. For this reason I have never run into a nimby or a
nihilist either. Self-declared reactionaries are also thin on the ground.
Fascists are certainly in evidence here and there – I have one as my MEP
– but they do seem to be considerably fewer in number than some would
have me believe.

This is odd, because in the last year I have been called all of these
things and more. I never knew it was possible to be, for example, a
utopian nihilist. I would have thought that the varying political demands
of being a fascist, a Romantic, a conservative and an anarchist all at the
same time would be simply exhausting, not to mention contradictory.
Apparently not.

When we wrote the Dark Mountain manifesto we knew that, if anyone read it
at all, some people would hate it. Quite a lot of people, in all
likelihood, given the challenges it laid down. ‘If you want to be
popular’ we wrote, ‘it is probably best not to get involved, for the
world, for a time, will resoultely refuse to listen.’ If we’re right
about nothing else, we were right about that. Extreme reactions, from all
over the spectrum, have been a feature of the response to Dark Mountain.
For every email we get from someone telling us they’ve been waiting for
us all their life, there’s a blog post by someone else calling us names.
I find the name-calling very interesting, and have been musing on it a
lot.

What we are dealing with here is what we might calls Terms Of Dismissal
– let’s call them ‘TODs’ for short. TODs are a crucial feature of
all political and cultural debate. Humans are social creatures and tribal
animals. We exhibit a need, apparent in every human culture, both to band
together with others and to mark ourselves out from other, opposing
tribes. This behaviour spills over into politics daily, where it is
disguised, often very thinly, as rational disagreement about policies or
positions.

The function of TODs is to delineate tribes, so that other tribes may be
easily dismisssed without the need to respond seriously to any arguments
they might be making. TODs are, in effect, the grown-up equivalent of the
kind of names you called each other in the playground. Remember when being
called a horrible name at school would stop you in your tracks? Remember
the inadequacy of that old saying about sticks and stones? Being called
names is nasty. Calling people names, conversely, is very effective.
We’ve all done it. It’s easier, and far more common, than engaging
seriously and decently with people whose worldview you don’t share.

Take, for example, the increasingly polarised world of US politics: it’s
almost the perfect example. The USA seems to me at present – as an
admittedly outside observer who gets most of his information from various
imperfect media sources – to be a land in which even pretences of
rational disagreement are being abandoned in favour of angry tribal
entrenchment. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the end of the
American republic in any meaningful sense in my lifetime, and I wouldn’t
be surprised either to see its slide to the hard right continue until it
becomes something very nasty indeed. After all, this the most powerful and
heavily-armed empire in world history, and it’s in increasingly
precipitate decline.

But anyway: the point is that this country is currently so angrily
polarised that TODs almost count as political debate. If you support
Obama’s healthcare package, for example, you will be dismissed as a
‘socialist’ by millions of people. There is nothing objectively
socialist about anything Obama does, but objectivity is not the point.
This is a term of dimissal, remember. It’s dog-whistle politics: calling
someone a socialist signals to millions of other people that they are not
to be listened to. They are on the Dark Side. They are not One Of Us.
The same function is served on the left by the word ‘fascist’ (or,
over here, the words ‘Thatcherite’ or ‘neoliberal’, which seem to
be interchangeable.) Call someone a fascist and it’s pretty much debate
over: after all, who wants to be seen having polite discussions with
someone who wears jackboots and glorifies the master race? If you don’t
like environmentalists, you call them ‘sandal-wearers’ or
‘Romantics’ or ‘hippies,’ or maybe just ‘communists.’ If
environmentalists don’t like you they might call you a ‘corporate
stooge’ or even a ‘nimby’ (ironically, since this is a term dreamt
up by a corporate PR machine with the express purpose of discrediting
environmentalists.) And so on.

Dark Mountain has had plenty of TODs thrown at it over the last year. We
can’t really complain, and we shouldn’t blow our own trumpet too much
either. Anyone who writes or speaks about the likelihood of a depleted
future, and the false hope peddled by those whose various schemes for
avoiding it are looking more ragged by the day, will be showered in TODs.
TODs come into play when things are being said that are a threat to the
inherent psychological assumptions of the listener. If you talk about the
likely crumbling of our way of life, and ongoing crumbling ecosystems of
the Earth on which we depend, you will have TODs thrown at you like rocks.
Some of them will be from the business-as-usual crowd, but others will be
from people who consider themselves campaigners for change, mainstream
(albeit corporate) greens, and even radicals. Sometimes their tone will be
mocking and sometimes it will be pious: they will huff and puff and call
you ‘irresponsible’ for daring to publicly discuss what you believe to
be the facts. You will find that your very desire to discuss these things,
precisely because they are difficult, is not only called into question but
is violently attacked.

There are all sorts of undercurrents at play here. One of them is that
many people who consider themselves to be radical opponents of the status
quo are nothing of the sort. George Orwell famously wrote, with typical
over-statement, that ‘every revolutionary opinion draws part of its
strength from a 
secret conviction that nothing can be changed’ and
there’s certainly some of this going on today. It’s easy to rail
against ‘the system’ if you think the system will always be there to
rail against. If you start to believe that it might actually crumble,
exposing you and yours to something much more uncertain and horrible, you
may, in a very short time, find yourself converted into a reluctant but
stout defender of the strength and vitality of the status quo. I’ve seen
this happening to a few prominent green voices in the last couple of
years, and there’ll be more of it to come.

But the main point, I think, is this: that when you are called a
‘doomer’ or a ‘collapsitarian’ or a ‘miserabalist’ or any of
the other playground names that are currently doing the rounds, it is not
you that is being attacked: it is the facts which are piling up to
illustrate what is happening around us. I am currently reading Bill
McKibben’s new book Eaarth, which I strongly recommend: it’s an
important book, not least because it’s the first time that a prominent
mainstream green writer has broken ranks. I’ll write more about it here
when I’ve finished it, but McKibben’s essential point is that decline
is already with us and that our task now is not to try and prevent the
decline of industrial civilisation but to do our best to manage the
descent.

The first third of McKibben’s book wraps up all the evidence you could
possibly need to make this case, with hundreds of references. He explains
the over-complexity of industrial systems, makes a strong case for peak
oil and the inability of alternatives to fossil fuels to sustain anything
like current levels of western comfort, looks at the likely retrenchment
of economic globalisation and, most of all, scares the shit out of you
with the ongoing realities of climate change which, in almost every single
studied case, is moving much faster and more alarmingly than scientists
had imagined. Climate change, says McKibben is not, as so much empty
rhetoric would have it, a scary legacy that will face ‘our
grandchildren’ if we don’t ‘act now.’ It was a problem for our
parents: they didn’t tackle it, neither will we and the result is to all
intents and purposes a new planet: one which will not act the way the
Earth has acted for the 10,000 years in which we built our various
civilisations. All bets on the future are off. It’s too late to go back.

I read and talk a lot about this stuff, but Eaarth still scares me. Part
of me would like to be able to insult McKibben: throw some TODs at him and
hope he goes away. But he’s too canny a writer and too good a researcher
for that. That won’t stop some people trying. The ironic thing, for me,
is that both ‘doomers’ and anti-doomers seem to want certainty.
Doomers apparently long for the apocalypse. They want revenge on the
world, or they want poor people to die, or they want to lead a revolution
to erase the memory of their teenage acne (the tenor of the cod psychology
at this point will depend upon the imagination and personal background of
the name-caller.) Their critics, conversely, long to be told that
everything will work out fine: that the life they know will keep on
keeping on, that the tech will save us as it always has, that those who
think it won’t are motivated by sour motives, or are just idiots.

The third possibility – that of a decline, painful and in many ways
horrible, but far from unprecedented and also presenting opportunities –
is the hardest notion of all to consider. It requires hard thinking, and
action to negotiate challenges, and it doesn’t offer up any easy
answers. It means that there’s no ‘cleansing catastrophe’ and no
voyages to the stars. It might not work, and we don’t know how it will
pan out. Neither pieties nor rude words can help negotiate it.

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