The Secular Fundamentalist

War, Peace and the Ongoing Struggle

Chapter 35: War, Peace and the Ongoing Struggle

Nobody can predict the future.  Discerning probability from arbitrary guesswork is a hazardous art form, for probability is but chance, slightly loaded.  So we resort to referencing and extrapolating from our past to give us clues about our future opportunities, challenges and threats.  From this rather limited tool set, we invest our presentiments about a possibility into a probability gamble that joins plausible faith/gut instincts with usefully researched and evidenced reasoning, and variously leverages it with planning, resources, commitment, courage and hope, to create an enterprise that whether it succeeds or fails, or works for good or ill, creatively shapes the future and becomes part of history.

We can make our history, despite the fact that what comes out may scarcely approximate the original vision that drove it into being.  But that is the nature of the beast and we just have to take our chances, and trust to our best efforts, that our projects will turn out for the best, as we had hoped....or not

‘Best’ and ‘hope’ are optimistic, for the journey that we must make is perilous and only to be attempted because the present is so at hazard.  This book is a narrative of dynamic decay, paradoxically driven by expansion that bloats as it over replicates as it corrodes, and eats its way through the biological and software linings of the life force, ravishing it, and us.  It absorbs our best and most liberal intentions and turns them into leering caricatures.  Faith and reason no longer discourse as each balks at and falsifies the other.  One becomes blind and the other rationalizes.  Liberty becomes the freedom to conform to what the voices know you really want.
 

Sexuality becomes a sacred site
just as what it produces
becomes a slum. 
Ideology trumps science
just as it’s being brought undone
by wanton misuse and megalomania;
the curse of Coca Cola,
sweet diabetes
and the king’s ransom for the keys
to cure it,
that keeps us drinking more,
more often,
slamming down our necks
for longer than we ever thought,
till the very sea is choked
On PET containers sailors net,
for fish have gone
and starving seagulls spit their guts
and bottle tops upon their decks. 
Their lives foregone are set at naught.

We are paralyzed
By an ambiguous god
A sod who makes us fail
The more that we succeed. 
The seed of enterprise
grows beyond our wildest dreams,
But parasites the earth
And poisons all the streams,
Till all that’s left are drains
And undercurrents of unrequited,
Insatiable greed,
That drowns the unsuspecting
In their overwhelming
And never ending need.

We cannot find salvation by worshipping our economic gods and treating their products and services as if they were manna from heaven.  This is the same kind of mistaken idolatry of things that the earliest monotheists, the Jews, identified as corrupting their relationship with the one true God. 

Gold and worldly wealth were and are indulgences; a diversion from the real message, if they are allowed to substitute for it.  This is not to say that producing and having wealth is a sin, but the risk of losing perspective comes with the territory. And it is a severe risk in an economy whose very foundations function on, by and for indulgences, which turn apparently benignly democratic societies into gulag feedlots.  They force feed mass populations on an energy rich, but nutritionally bankrupt ‘diet’ of fatty sweet treats, bloating them just like the economy that feeds them.

We cannot live on bread alone, without our existential veggies, a meaty commons and the fruit of goodness and virtue.  The material hardware of life cannot exist without or substitute for the existential and social software that regulates, contextualizes and makes sense of it. And nothing can prosper for long without a full and healthy panoply of bioware to provide the environmental services that makes life possible and benignly tolerable.

Modern people no longer need to reference cosmological gods, or a divine sphere that transcends life and makes possible the ultimate transfer of the soul out of the body and into an afterlife.  We can quite easily content ourselves with forging strong social infrastructure that builds a robust and high integrity reproductive culture, whose legacy continues even though the individuals who constructed it die.  Reproduction is its own vision of immortality.

In the modern version, the divine spark is abiding respect for the life from which we spring. Honor, virtue, farsightedness and discipline are its currencies.  Investing them in others raises capital for the common weal and builds the next generation’s wealth in our children.

I am my mother’s woman
And my father’s man, 
They taught me how to deal with life’s travails
And to withstand. 
Their voices echo still in imagination’s halls
And in the choices that I made. 
Their gestures and abiding love bind to mine
As I re-export them down the line.
I am the product of my forbears
As I am to my descendants
Who shall bear the brunt
Of life and all its cares
When I am but a memory
Returning to the mist
As ethereal as a fond blown kiss,
An eyebrow raised,
A phrase,
An idiosyncratic gaze or gait
Walking ever onwards
To whatever that it is
That is their fate.

I am the grass and leaves
That fed me
As I shall feed them
That fed me.
I have breathed the sigh of life
‘pon green and flowered trees
As they have breathed their scents
Exchanging on the breeze
With me.
I am the water in the well
And clouds and rain
that moistened me
And slaked my thirst
So that I could give it
A living spigot
Back again.

But what if I took more
Than what I gave?
How shall I account or recompense
For this net expense
Upon the common weal?
How will my descendants cope
When all the losses crystallize?
No room left for alibis
Or enterprising backroom deals
With consequences taking some
To early graves?

My legacy,
My only claim to immortality
Sullied.
My memorial trashed and buried
My descendants in a cleft
Whether to acknowledge me
As accessory
To wanton murder
Or egregious theft.

And knowing this what shall I do?
How to comport myself in time that’s left
To unburden conscience with the uncompromising
Hardest word of all,
The power of ‘no’,
And willingness to go down harder roads
Whose uncertain and hazardous routes
Are strewn with mines and well armed troops
So that even friendships
Bought by time and trust
Can be betrayed and turned to dust
Rubble, blood and bone
By an unobtrusive loitering drone.

There’s not much time to make amends
For our mistaken means and ends.

Thus we must build and weld
A world with walls and rooves
To withstand all and regulate
All that we shall do and all the moves
With rules to make us strong
And little time for fools who would impede
Prevaricate
To justify
Why we should not
For defeat is not to lose the fight
Or be obliged to make retreat
But not to have even tried.

There is no god.
No buses run to paradise.
We’re on our own
And desultory behavior cuts no ice.
The road to hell is where we’re going.
It’s all downhill from here.
Inertia will suffice.

The road to war is always noisy
with the barking of its dogs
and littered with sad protests
at its progress,
the anger that it fertilizes
feeds and nests
as all as one begin to play
for keeps
The drawbridge of their friendships
raised too steep
as all the bets come off
impossible odds
the stakes too become too great
no one can afford to lose their bets
and the fear of that
Turns to hatred of those
who'd make it real
takes over as the sun
on civil discourse sets.
And conscience turns to steel.

There is no good or happy end to this
For war must do what reason should
If we’re to salvage much for hope
By wearing down our enemies
Till they no longer have the means
To cope
Or die in the attempt
Not because we had to
But because we could
For salvation is as much
The manner of our death
As how long or how often
We took breath.

Sober is the mind that thinks these things
Knowing that the peace is stretching thin
Like skin upon a rotting corpse
That in due time will fissure and irrupt
All that stinks and is corrupt.
That sweet rancid aroma slowly creeps
Under doorways through the carpet seeps.
Every house upon the street
It will disrupt
And rage will have its day
To sound of drums and marching feet.

This is a threat wrapped in a warning, veiled behind a plea and served with analysis of all the variables, one or more of which will pull the thread that unravels a status quo under whose seemingly powerful facade is a precarious tower of overly optimistic and already crumbling assumptions. 

We aren’t just stealing the pillars of our future, but living on borrowed years.  Smoke seeps out of the foundations of our times and we’ll just have to leave, retreat, ready or not.  The modern age is coming to an end and while we cannot possibly know the time or means by which that will eventuate, it is prudent to look to the construction of life craft that can make passage through difficult times, even when all else is lost.

Environmental, economic, social, psychological and moral integrity become un-negotiable, fortified and armed bottom lines.  The tolerances for off messaging and undermining of those lines narrows considerably.  Ideological fudging will be fought with ruthless clarity. Indulgence and egoism will be replaced by selfless sacrificial love and willingness to invest heavily, thoughtfully and proactively in others, without thought to reward. Templating, regulating, mentoring, training and discipline capitalize and maintain new infrastructure that is sufficiently robust to survive extreme pressure. 

There is room for individuals, but not at the expense of the commons, or accountability to it.  Rights are completely conditional upon meeting the responsibilities and obligations that underpin them, for nothing in life is unconditional, unearned or free. 

Carnality is a bottom feeder somewhere between eating and excreting.  Sex, the dance of life, is just an introductory offer to get people into a very demanding, difficult and long term reproductive cycle.  Sexistentialism is a pretentious and decadent marketing con.  Utilitarianism was one of the first of the great privatizations, along with that of the land by modern landlord ‘reformers’, at the expense of the commons and orchestrated by capital to reshape consciousness and economic life in its own image.  And as capital retreats, so will its ideologies and the commons will be returned in a post-modern form.

Modern times are par excellence about the roll out of capital into every niche there is.  From the emergence of mass production to the efficient distribution of its product to the creation of the capital man and woman, whose sole aim is to produce enough to consume more than they earn, the system overwhelms everything it touches.  Nothing is spared.  Nothing will spare us when it starts to unwind.  And as we retreat, we will only be able to take as much of our past as we can carry without slowing us down too much.

Something of the memory of capital will linger with us for a long time, but like all memories, it will likely be recontextualized and slowly fade as other driving forces push their way forward.  My guess is that it will find its way into the cultural software as business modeling for social reproduction, much in the same way as the Roman Imperial legacy made its way into the religious empire of Christianity, where it survived into a third millennium, based still in Rome for most of that time.  Its priest class became the repository, even if in a very limited way, of literate memory, and something of the extraordinary burst of knowledge that was the product of capital will survive by analogous means. 

Capitalism ‘lite’ will evolve into an economic side dish that gradually residualizes into the collective commons, as the social effort refocuses onto resuscitating what is left of it, so that our descendants are not held permanently in the thrall of grinding ecological, economic, social and existential poverty.

Just as the West European Roman cities and their sophisticated manufacturing, services and communications infrastructure decayed, or were overrun, and populations disappeared into the rural hinterlands in search of food and security, so it will very likely be with us.  And some version of democracy and even kibbutz style socialism ‘lite’ may well take a place in opposition to gangster and warlord barbarism in the competitive jostle, disorder and violence of a post-modern period.

Communities that do not exploit the talent, labor and resolve of their women to the full will on balance lose to those that do, for the latter will have greater reserves of all the things necessary to prosper and survive when push comes to shove.  No community will have the luxury of being able to waste even the smallest edge, and the participation of women is by no means a small one.  This will likely be one of the major legacies of the modern period and one that can be built on to deliver on more of the bottom lines that were originally promised.

None of this presentiment may come to be, but those who do not prepare for the possibility of a full devolution of the modern period just won’t make it out of the transitional disorders that every major change in the history of our species brings in its train, if that indeed is what happens. 

No matter how secure the status quo appears to be, that does not render life craft and drills for them redundant, for no one can generally tell until it happens upon them, when those craft will need to be launched.  And how the crew and passengers fare after the launch will be very largely a result of the extent of the training and preparation, the good design and robustness of the craft and the survival practicality of the equipment and supplies that they carry into better times.

You do not have to be weatherperson to see which way the wind is blowing, or its increasing strength, or the storms that that appear to be brewing on the windward horizon.  However flexible and robust modern capital might be, only a fool would ignore the risks it now faces. Whichever way we look at it, the next hundred years is likely to produce a rough ride for everyone. 

So prudent leaders and people will prepare against it with the possibly worst in mind.  And as they do that, it may well be that another world and vision of it will start to form itself in their minds; that the lifecraft are not just a temporary escape and rescue mechanism, but a route into a world which while possibly very difficult, will produce opportunities that in some ways will be an improvement on what may have to be left behind. 

The last fifty to a hundred years of the western Roman Empire was a very difficult time for most of its citizens, allied subjects and slaves, but they learned that salvation was not just about physical prosperity and security.  Landlords diversified their land holdings to hedge against invasion losses.  The cities and great rural estates started to fortify.  And while none of this activity did more than delay the inevitable, they did create templates for managing life that would survive until the beginnings of the modern age.

As the empire collapsed, enterprising Romans moved into the swamps and islands around Venice to escape the Gothic cavalry, braved the disease and mosquitoes, worked like there was no tomorrow and started to build one of the really great, powerful and beautiful cities in the world.

And when and if the crunch comes, we should expect no less of ourselves.  That is our hope and resurrection for life perhaps not forever after, but for our immediate descendants and the legacy we shall give them.