For all the nightmare scenarios mapped out for us if we don’t do something about this insiduous phenomenon there is also something perculiarly timely about the greenhouse effect. We live in the age of globalisation, the resulting effect of the last century’s momentous changes in human society; its size, interconnectedness, spirituality, increased prosperity and longevity for its members (the lucky ones). There has been an increase in disproportionate well being, that is another feature of all this and might, for some, raise questions over whether we’ve been ‘getting somewhere better’ the whole time. The wholesale slaughter of the twentieth century just probably has to be accepted as a byproduct of the human reaction to great upheaval due to newly revealed possibilty; the inevitably various political and philosophical responses to new horizons that have always been the human reaction, historically, to how to order society and the lives of citizens.
Now it is clear that the phenomenon of the terrorist is an extreme response of relatively powerless minorities to a perceived unjust repression of spritual or political freedoms. Even the Islamist extremist traces some of their greviances to a conspiracy to suppress their freedom to worship a religion in the terms stated by that religion. Although the west denies it has done this, historically there are plenty examples of violent intrusion upon sovereign lands. The spread of global capitalism is seen as a subtley undermining force which is gradually undermining the extremists notion of what their ‘freedom’ ultimately is. What terrorism has clearly demonstrated is how the relatively small effects (in physical terms) of a depraved crime can have massive consequences for the whole social and political structures of the global community.
What happened in the post 9/11 world was a fundamental shift in geo political consiousness. The sense ‘we’ were ‘under attack’ and ‘our way of life’ was threatened by malevolent forces that would stop at nothing to annihilate us meant people were willing to allow politicians a higher than average proportion of irrationality in the use of a nations influence over other nations in the name of our ‘freedom’. The ease with which the image and idea of insecurity was translated into brutal effects, more slaughter and suppression, is telling and very familiar in a world hemmed by media and political slogans that work to simplify (as religion previously did) the immense complexity of the lived moment into an easily digestible course of action, way of thinking.
Could the very real threat of global annihilation, not through a violent clash of ideologies and technologies but an impersonal malevolent force intimately connected with us, partly created by us but ultimately progressing at its own pace, work to reorganise the massive dislocation of still emerging new world order into a new kind of global society? Already people seem ready to allow inroads into their lives and ‘security’ with the nightmare scenario of a world turning to waste land in soon to be realised future. Doesn’t this very imaginative grasp of our close connection to the world’s eco-systems and sense of how our lives contribute to their functioning provide a similar urgency to action as is seen in the religious extremists who will stop at nothing to see their ideals recognised? We have been, generally, unhappy with our lives. Without the invigorating effects of a passionately held religious belief life has become dictated for most by the draining perogatives of the 9-5 and whatever family and leisure perogatives you can fit in besides. The outer wasteland we may well create has already been matched by an inner wasteland that has lead to ceaseless expansion of industry and consumption in order to try and fill the hole.
Now, perhaps, a new perogative has arrived. I talk of ‘we’ but previously large sectors of the earth’s communities have been only on the border of this ceaseless game of expansion and consumption that has left the world’s environment on the verge of calamity. India and China of course make up about a third of the global population but are just getting down to the really serious wholsale leveling of resources which is necessary to really play the game of modern capitalism. They, too, however are an the seeming grip of the spiritual wasteland; Maoist Communism and the various ancient sects of the Indian religions are no better at diluting the facts of the new global malaise than the Christian way. It is clearer now than it has ever been that we are all in this together and this is the greatest potential that lies beyond the terrifying science of the Greenhouse phenomenon.
Does the united response of the post 9/11 reaction and a new global awareness that seems to be coming into being suggest that a new level of commitment on the part of the individaul citizen is emerging? Could we look upon our individual wastelands and come to understand how our collective proclivities have lead to immense suffering in the balance of well-being and so be brought to a kind of extremist consciousness that is now only seen in the minds of the terrorist? Not that we all go out and bomb malls but that we now more and more refuse, at every level, to be sheep-like consumers (and this may include idealogy too) and demand of political institutions that they act in, at last, an ethical way that is actually grounded in something. That something being the clear fact that the extreme conditions of life we vainly allowed the worlds poorest to rot in over the previous century and more (when we had the means to do something about it) are now starting to threaten us. We are not without compassion but genarally it only seems to start to work when reason is really brought kicking and screaming to the table.