Convergence of Catastrophes, page 18
5) The initial project of the Treaty of Rome[201] to construct an economy that was to be self-centred and protected over its large territory has been scandalously diverted from its objective and has generated a Europe open to the four winds as a result of immigration and the markets, whose currency is managed by no political authority. The European Central Bank of Frankfurt lets the euro fluctuate at the will of the markets. The result is that the European Union, stripped not only of its internal national boundaries, but of its external frontiers as well, cannot claim that it is becoming a ‘federal state’.
We have the worst alliance that can exist, combining ultra-liberalism and a subventionist and dirigist[202] bureaucracy, quite the reverse of what should have been done. Anyhow, if the USA has not been opposed to the ambition of the European Union, there is a reason. This submissive, emasculated, headless Europe, which scores goals against its own side, suits the USA perfectly. When asked the question, ‘Are you for or against the construction of the European Union?’ a high American functionary answered, ‘In favour, as long as it does not work.’
4. Toward a Giant Economic Crisis
The End of the Paradigm of ‘Economic Development’
There has been a revolution in the way people think. They have just noticed, without daring to say it, that the old paradigm, according to which ‘the fate of humanity, individual and collective, is getting better every day, thanks to science, democratisation, and egalitarian emancipation’, is false.
The age that believed it is over. This illusion has fallen. This progress (debatable anyhow according to people like Ivan Illich)[203] lasted probably less than a century. Today, the unintended consequences of mass technology are beginning to be felt: new resistant viruses, the toxicity of processed food, the exhaustion of the soil and the shrinking of the world’s agricultural production, the general and rapid degradation of the environment, the threat of the invention of new weapons of mass destruction to add to nuclear weapons, and so on. In addition, technology is entering its baroque age. The fundamental inventions were discovered by the end of the 1950s. The improvements to them made in later decades have contributed fewer and fewer concrete ameliorations, like so many useless decorative motifs added to the superstructure of a monument. The Internet has probably had fewer revolutionary effects than the telegraph or the telephone. The Internet is a significant improvement applied to a pan-communication that was already substantially realised. Techno-science is following the ‘80-20’ power law. At the beginning it takes 20 units of energy to obtain 60 units of force. Later it takes 80 units of energy to realise only 20 units of force.
A possible objection is raised: is it not an excessive pessimism that causes some people to exaggerate the negative consequences of progress and world growth?
The answer is, no. Contrary to the comments made by French intellectual Jacques Attali and repeated everywhere, humanity as a whole has nothing to gain — for example — from the economic rise of Asia. The bill to pay in terms of the exacerbation of competition with the old industrial countries, and so forth, will be very expensive. Anyhow, this economic growth is not going to continue. It is going to become unsustainable, will run up against ecological limits and will provoke massive socio-political and even military problems. Catastrophe by itself, not the will of governments, will cause the change of the current macroeconomic model.
The various positive effects of global economic growth are in reality ephemeral and fragile and they will bring serious consequences.
The universalisation of techno-science has made us pay for each of its advances with a step backward. Life expectancy is increasing (although even now it is starting to stagnate and even regress in many countries), but are people living more harmoniously and with less anxiety? There are always more atomic, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction. Agriculture is getting better, but renewed famines are threatening an overcrowded humanity, who have been duped by falling mortality rates and confronted by the exhaustion of the soil, tropical deforestation, the shrinking of arable land and the exhaustion of oceanic fauna.
The negative effects took twenty or thirty years to arise, but after an illusory phase when people’s lives got better (which is over today), they always show up in the end. The intensified volume of production and trade encourages cooperation, but multiplies the reasons for conflicts and national chauvinisms, and arouses everywhere the backfires of ethnic and religious fanaticisms. Easy communication spreads over the entire planet, but loneliness strikes the individual and communities are in despair.
The urban technological way of life affects 70 per cent of humanity, but in many places, especially in the global South, it is necessary to put up with hellish cities, cesspools of violence and human chaos. Do people realise that, proportionally to the increased population, humans living in poverty and job insecurity are more numerous than before the Industrial Revolution? Medical science is progressing, but this has provoked a demographic explosion and increased the resistance of new viruses that are then spread by migration. The level of energy consumption is rising, but the environment is deteriorating and the danger of ecological collapse is becoming clearer. African and Brazilian peasants have access to machines for clearing land, but by destroying the forests, they increase desertification and prepare future famines. In brief, after an incubation period, progress, growth, and the uncontrolled expansion of techno-science see their goals reversed. A world is being born harsher than the one we want to transform and improve.
The Impending Death of World Economic Development
We must now confront a serious objection. We can never prevent poor countries or those ‘on the path to industrialisation’ from trying to industrialise, get rich by every means, or follow the West’s path and the ‘global religion of the growing GDP’. What a terrible injustice, if we did . . .
Of course, but historic dreams and hopes are not determined by moral motives, but by the thresholds of physical impossibility. This is the logic of catastrophe that will limit the ambitions for ‘development’ of countries of the global South, who, especially in Asia, have not yet become disenchanted with progress. Developing later than the West, they are still positivist, attached to the egalitarian universalism they are just discovering. They want to do what the West has done to obtain their piece of the pie. Unfortunately, it is too late. The Asian financial crisis was a harbinger. The Earth will never be able to sustain — and so neither will humanity — a technological and industrial development of all Asia and Africa at the present level of belief in miracles typical of universalism. Massive industrialisation of ‘emerging countries’ is likely to be physically impossible because it will exhaust scarce resources and destroy the ecosystems. The Cassandra cry of the Club of Rome will perhaps turn out to be right fifty years too early.
But there were Africans in the 1960s, like the South African Credo Mutwa,[204] who were already saying that pre-colonial tribal societies, which were not very populous, scattered and demographically stable, were much pleasanter to live in than contemporary African societies, which are complete failures, the results of botched imitation, a badly performed transplant of the European model totally foreign to them. After all, why should the entire human species desire to go to Mars, travel 500 kilometres per hour on high-speed trains, fly on supersonic airplanes, eat ice cream in summer, live a hundred years thanks to transplants and antibiotics, write blogs on the Internet, watch television shows, and so on? This fever belongs only to certain people and certain groups.
This fever cannot be transmitted to the whole human species. This technological and industrial way of life can no longer be applied to the entire population, even in Europe and the United States, in the eventual case of structural collapse. Here a new objection arises, advanced from technocratic circles. Technology can counter the unintended consequences of technology. It can reduce pollution and discover new resources, if there is a real willingness to work with it.
Optimism is a beautiful thing, but all these hopeful statements are only words. Anyhow, it is not happening. This system is coherent in its global logic and it cannot reform itself. It is, in the true sense of the term, incorrigible. It has to be changed.
Anyhow, the new system will impose itself in the coming chaos. We need to be concrete and stop daydreaming about the masturbations of the pseudo-experts. None of the resolutions of the Rio and Tokyo conferences have been put into effect, and they were, after all, nowhere near strong enough. Nature, which we wanted to conquer and put under our control, is as a consequence reacting violently, after a period of silence, in its bacterial, viral and other, more visible, forms. The collective certitudes are giving way to doubt and confusion. A new nihilism is appearing, which is very serious because it is hopeless, and has nothing in common with the philosophies of decline and the reactionary prophets of decadence that was only the dogma of progress stood on its head, of an ideological attachment to the past. Now it is the philosophies of catastrophe that are going to impose themselves. Uncertainty confronts us and its disturbing hulk casts a shadow on the techno-science that was believed to be predictable and controllable, which it is not. Heidegger turned out to be right, not Husserl[205] and the rationalists. The Jewish allegory of the Golem saw the truth.
Toward a ‘Civilisational Break-up’
But what new ideologies or types of social, political and economic organisation could replace those of the pursuit of progress and individualism? Must we return to theocracies, to which some Islamist countries are pointing the way? Let us remark first of all that an ideology that is non-progressive and rejects egalitarianism is not necessarily unjust, cynical or tyrannical. Egalitarians, aware of the failure of their projects of justice and humanitarianism, paint their opponents in these demonising terms. A new non-egalitarian vision of the world will have to present itself as concretely philanthropic, where egalitarianism is only ideally humanitarian. The end of progressivism is obviously also the end of Hegelian rationalist idealism. Already, spontaneously, disordered and irrationalist ideologies are advancing all over the world. They are anti-scientific and anti-industrial, which is what worried the signers of the Heidelberg Appeal.[206]
But hold on: it is not necessary either to believe or hope that science and civilisation are going to disappear and be replaced by cultures based on magical beliefs.
Techno-science will continue to exist and develop, but it will change its meaning and will no long be supported by the same ideal. Global economic growth is soon going to shrink because of physical barriers. It is physically impossible to realise the ideal of progressivism: a techno-scientific consumer society for ten billion people. When the dream collapses, another world will arise. Scenarios for this new world are obviously uncertain in detail, but they are much less unrealistic than the program of infinite global economic development under a world government parcelled out under UN supervision. The new scenario envisages the coexistence of globalisation, the end of state control of the economy and a civilisational break-up of the Earth that will be endured and not chosen. In this scenario, the Earth would not be divided into states that are politically independent and economically interdependent, but between types of civilisation. States that preserve the techno-scientific and industrial mode of existence (but animated by different values) would coexist with traditional societies, which may be magical and irrational, religious, rural and neo-archaic, expending relatively little energy on hunting, polluting and consuming.
There is No Reason to Believe that Traditional Economies are ‘Underdeveloped’
Progressivist advocates will reply that this scenario will mean organising a sort of voluntary underdevelopment, with the gifted above who consume and the ungifted below who vegetate. This concept of underdevelopment is unfair and stupid. It is an invention of progressivism to signify that only the industrial way of life is humane and valid. A traditional rural non-technomorphic society is in no way barbarous and ‘underdeveloped’.
In the non-egalitarian and organic vision of the world, there is not a single axis of ‘development’, but several. Real ‘underdevelopment’, more exactly real barbarism, is the result of progressivism: it is all the cast-offs of the industrial way of life, who have abandoned for a mirage traditional societies with small populations to cram themselves into the overpopulated metropolises of the countries of the global South, which have become human hells. Furthermore, members of a traditional society without much cash are not ‘poorer’ or unhappier than the inhabitants of New York or Paris weighed down by too many gadgets, even if their medical standards and life expectancy are lower. Lastly, we can point out that this likely socio-economic division of humanity in the course of the Twenty-first century will not result from a voluntary plan, but will be imposed on people by catastrophe, by the present system’s collapse into chaos.
But what will make different types of society coexist? Will not those on the bottom again want to imitate those on top and ‘develop themselves?’ Not necessarily, because, on the one hand, the memory of the failure of the botched universalism of industrial society and techno-science will appear as a Dark Age (as Communism does today) and, on the other hand, because these neo-traditional communities will sanctify their way of life. Societies that preserve the techno-scientific way of life will be perfectly able to live in a globalised planetary economy, but one much less burdened than today’s economy by the volume of trade and production and therefore much less polluting, because it will involve only a minority of humans. This minority will then no longer be animated by the eschatology of progress, but by the demands of the will.
Is the Techno-scientific Economy Viable?
After the inevitable catastrophe that will mark the beginning of the Twenty-first century, once the stupid celebrations of the year 2000 have passed away, it will be necessary to pragmatically construct a new global economy with a spirit free of every utopia and unsustainable ideal, and without the spirit of oppression and neo-colonialism toward the part of humanity that will have returned to neo-traditional societies. History will no longer be conceived as progressivist idealism, but a realistic, concrete and contingent vision of reality, nature and man. Voluntarism, thinking about the concrete and the possible, is opposed to the idealism of today’s global civilisation, which is founded on the abstraction of unrealisable ends. The techno-scientific spheres share with the neo-archaic a non-egalitarian and naturalist worldview, the one based on rationality, the other on irrationality.
Obviously, many people fear that the death of the idea of progress and the new organisation of the Earth will put an end to all rationality and destroy science and industrial production. Will this mean a general regression of humanity?
A contemporary prejudice holds that techno-science rests naturally on a progressivist and egalitarian pedestal that is the necessary condition for its existence. This is a mistake. The end of progress and the dream of universalising the society of industrial consumption do not signify abolishing techno-science and condemning the scientific spirit. Techno-science has been perverted by the egalitarian universalism of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, which has tried to extend its sphere excessively.
Those who continue to maintain a techno-scientific civilisation, globalised but numerically restricted, will base it on other intellectual foundations than frenzied consumption and the generalised hedonism of the universalised progress of consumerism.
This will be easier because the true foundation of science and technology is fundamentally non-egalitarian (the life sciences), poetic and undetermined. Real scientists know that their thinking progresses only by destroying certainties. Their rationality is only a means and not an end. They know it never ends in automatic qualitative improvements that are the consequences of their discoveries. They know that technological experimentation is an opening to the unexpected: risks taken, enlarging the field of the contingent and the opacity of the future. On the contrary, in traditional societies, the future is predictable, because history is experienced cyclically. So linear progressivism will be replaced in neo-traditionalist areas by a cyclical vision of history, and in techno-scientific zones by a belief in chance and a ‘landscapist’ vision of history (Giorgio Locchi’s[207] ‘spherical’ and Nietzschean conception,[208] which I mentioned earlier). History will unfold like a landscape, an unpredictable succession of plains, mountains, and forests, with no way to ‘read it’ rationally.
This vision of history and destiny increases the liberty, responsibility and lucidity of the people who share it. They rigorously analyse the true nature of reality and time, without utopian dreams, conscious of the risks. They deploy their will to realise their projects, to order human society in the most conformable way possible for justice, for recognising man as he is and not as some people want him to be.
The Neo-global Economy of the Post-Catastrophe Age
A question arises: according to the hypothesis that the future two-tier world economy will be ‘globalised’, how can we define this concept of ‘globalisation’ in relation to universalism? Are they really opposites? Yes.
Universalism is an infantile concept, founded on the cosmopolitan illusion. Globalism is a practical idea. How many planetary networks for computers and exchanges exist, but do not in any way involve all humans! Universalisation is the ambition to extend a single way of life to all humans, mechanically and quantitatively, which is comprised of industrial consumption and urban life. Universalism is perfectly compatible with government control of the economy and egalitarianism drives it. All the billions of living human atoms have to be converted to the same rule of life, the kingdom of the market. Globalisation, on the contrary, describes a process of spreading markets and firms across the planet, internationalising economic decisions and major actors, but it does not need to be universalist and can easily tolerate billions of humans readopting traditional ways of life. On the other hand — and this is a very important point — globalisation is equally compatible with the construction of semi-autarchic blocs on a continental scale (the autarchy of large spaces), which practice different economic systems.
