HUMANITY WITHOUT HOPE
Most people would say that it is impossible to live without hope. And yet this is just what most people are expected to do nowadays.
This is not just because of recession. There is a vague hope that recession will end and eventually there will be economic upturn – ‘something will turn up’, so meanwhile we can sit it out.
Perhaps it will turn up sooner if different policies are followed to ‘kick start’ the economy so ‘normal’ growth will resume. Except growth under capitalism is as normal as bust. It was only an illusion that deregulation and privatization in the 1980s to allow banks and big corporations to speculate freely would end this inevitable cycle.
In any case, endless growth to produce more and more commodities, while it may help some people to secure the necessities of life, does not make those who already have more than enough any happier or less insecure. Worse, growth is unsustainable; on the 23rd August it was calculated that humanity began to take from the earth more than nature produced in 2012. For the rest of the year we live in debt to the planet and every year this day moves forward as we take even more from the earth than it can give back.
Again, as the hopes for our species’ survival diminish, we hope that something will turn up. ‘It’s happened before,’ we say, hoping for technical solutions so that humanity can invent its way out of impending climate and other catastrophe. But each of these temporary fixes have perverse consequences that threaten disaster in their turn; the worst of which would probably be the attempts at geo-engineering that are now being talked about as ways to slow global warming.
More far-sighted Utopians used to insist that social change was necessary instead of trying to patch things up technically so that we could go on as we were. This revolutionary transformation would happen more or less gradually and democratically but if necessarily violently to bring about a rational ordering of human affairs in the interest of the vast majority.
This old Utopianism has been trumped by the new Utopianism of free-market capitalism, to which all the mainstream political parties, dominant media and, of course, the global corporations and banks that profit from it are committed. If only the wealth-creating entrepreneurs are given the freedom to invest their capital to gain as much profit as possible for themselves and their shareholders, we will all benefit – so they all say. But this is the deregulated free-market capitalism whose boom ended in bust in the first place.
So, it is not surprising that many people place their hopes in dreams of wealth – winning a lottery, becoming a celebrity, or marrying one! Or they strive to live fully in the moment: ‘driven from distraction by distraction’, looking for the next high to become a legend. Hopes of such instant gratifications are easily manipulated by the advertisers of fashion. They are not so different from physically addictive behaviors and as easily controlled.
There are myriad other ways to adjust to an insupportable reality – from therapy to meditation, but religions offer the most desperate hopes of all. Their elaborate visions of other worlds that render lived experience illusory are tributes to the power of the human imagination, even if the reassuring feeling of being looked after by a benevolent deity derives from infant psychology, just as it is understandable that hopes of an afterlife comfort the dying and the bereaved.
Most people of course keep their heads down and don’t think about such things. We fill our lives with family and friends, following football or other sports and enjoying moments of relaxation from routine work. But even these modest hopes of a good life are removed from the younger generations by prospects of employment to sustain independent living that have become increasingly remote.
We are encouraged therefore to invest our hopes in education which has been substituted for employment and which is so tediously and interminably discussed instead of it. Conservatives typically advance the notion that education amounts to the preservation of culture – handing down unchanged the best that was ever thought and achieved. And of course, we have to learn from the past accumulated experience of humanity that constitutes culture but we have to learn critically to apply that knowledge to nurture new hopes of changing the self-destructive behavior of society in the present.
Instead, academic cramming on the one hand and vocational training for jobs that no longer exist on the other, only serves as an induction into the existing social divisions of knowledge and labour. These are changing with the relentless applications of new technology to deskill and outsource production, requiring a ‘flexible workforce’ to move from one mindless, short-term, low-paid and often part-time contract to another – if you’re lucky enough to find work.
Professional and managerial jobs are also being reduced in number and towards the conditions of waged labour, ending the hopes of a career entertained by so many overqualified but underemployed graduates. Hopes of escape through education leading to upward social mobility are dashed as the only mobility nowadays is down.
Philosophy – the love of knowledge – enables us ‘to confront with sober senses the real conditions of our existence’. So, as another Jewish philosopher wrote, ‘Do not laugh, do not cry but understand’. If the situation really is hopeless, we will then at least know how it happened that we threw away the heritage of humanity and we will still struggle to bring about the vast changes in our lives and in our societies that are needed so we ‘Do not’ – as a Welsh poet said – ‘go gently into that good night’ [but] ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’
By Patrick Ainley with thanks in the last paragraph to Karl Marx, Baruch Spinoza and Dylan Thomas; T.S.Eliot in the middle – for we stand on the shoulders of giants, so let’s not crap on their heads!
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 30
