We are not serious

BDR links to a post by John Gallaher commenting on a recent silly-sounding entry at Huffington Post about overrated poets. I can't be bothered to read the HuffPo thing, because why would you read HuffPo? But almost as an afterthought to his post, Gallaher mentions another poetry-related controversy that had somehow escaped my notice: Ron Silliman has turned off commenting at his very popular blog and hidden the existing voluminous comment threads dating to the beginning of the blog. I don't read Silliman very often, primarily because I too often don't know what he's talking about, but I have read him often enough to know that there have been many long, detailed, often acrimonious conversations in his comment section. There have also been countless comments from people I would have banned long ago as a matter of principle for being annoying or stupid, but that's just me. I have little patience for pointless acrimony, even less for distractingly stupid commenting.

Anyway, people are upset. However, one thing stuck out at me in the conversation at Gallaher's blog. In his original post, he writes:

. . .amid the mess of comments on the most popular blogs (a really big mess), are there nuggets that should remain in the public record? Useful things? Yes, Ron Silliman could, if he wanted to, make visible the comment stream of old posts, but the question is, should he? Is there something to be gained by doing so? Is there something, by extension, about the Huffington Post comment stream, perhaps, that in the future should be archived as well?

There follows some conversation about the implications of this and about how weird and frustrating it is that webpages can just disappear; then one commenter, who was also a contributor to threads at Silliman's blog, says: "It wouldn't surprise me at all if posterity found Silliman's comment box a treasure trove of data."

I admit that this kind of thing used to bother me. I'd ponder the problems posed for future scholarship by email and blog comments and disappeared websites and uncached memory, etc., etc., and I'd wonder about the potential loss. Now I wonder what the hell I was doing worrying about "future scholarship"! What bothers me now are the implications of the blasé attitude reflected in the commenter's remark. We will attack someone who denies the truth or effects of global warming, and yet we act as if our way of life is not contingent on the very processes we claim to know are causing it. We expect, still, for our way of life to continue on into the future, with all of the ongoing technological change that we take for granted as normal. We are not serious about global warming and climate change. We claim to know that we are on the brink of (or in the midst of) ecological disaster, but we act as if it will not really affect us. If you're like me, you have days where it makes you want to curl up in a ball, terrified, and other days where you're angry about the world being left for your children and grandchildren. But then most days you're updating your iPod, updating Facebook or Twitter, writing a blog-post, surfing the web, going to fucking work, as if today is the same as yesterday and the same as tomorrow, an unbroken chain into the future. Along the way you might wonder what options for meaningful action are really available to you.

Meanwhile, on a related note (says me), IOZ, as he tends to, has it exactly right:

Liberals are the most egregious American exceptionalists, and they are the most avaricious preachers of the gospel of expansion. America could suffer a substantial economic contraction and still remain far and away the richest society the earth has ever known. I regret that this is true, because so long as we can afford it, it's gonna be faster, pussycat, kill, kill for the engine of empire.

The world is never over!

At zunguzungu, Aaron Bady offers a useful reminder for those of us, like myself, who have a tendency to give occasional vent to our apocalyptic jones:

The world is never over! The “deckchairs on the Titanic” metaphor is a nice way to belittle people who prefer to rearrange deckchairs rather than address the iceberg, but the world is not a ship, ontologically defined by whether it is sinking or floating; the world is a place in which history has a way of going forward, even if those living in it have difficulty imagining how.

[. . .] Life always goes on, somehow, and maybe badly, but the character and dynamism of its continuity is of profound importance for those of us who want to live in the future.

I should say that I intend my catastrophic comments here as a little different than what Aaron is talking about. He is posting in response to Brad DeLong's semi-apocalyptic outburst about the Geithner Plan. DeLong cannot imagine the world working differently (perhaps, because it simply shouldn't--he might say doesn't, can't--work otherwise) (I don't pay too much attention to DeLong, usually, since he first came to my attention some years ago for his stupid attack on Chomsky; his more recent attack on David Harvey didn't help matters (latter link via)--Harvey commented to that, and followed up here). For my part, I'm trying to imagine the world being otherwise than it is, both ideally (how I would like it to be or think it ought to be) and in the reality in which we might find ourselves in the coming years or decades (how I think we might be able to live in such an eventuality). In addition, my desire to try to figure out a way to live differently pre-dates the actuality of this particular crisis. Admittedly, my ability to imagine is severely hampered by the current system itself and my position within it. The problem is huge, the task before us enormous.

Aaron closes his post by observing that everything he's read tells him

that we do live in a world economic system that’s just lost all four engines. But the difference between a controlled crash-landing, where most of the passengers have a good chance of survival, and pretending that the engines still work (because the alternative is too dire to imagine) is extremely important, and needs to part of this discussion. To ignore it would be stupid, almost suicidal. Or rather, it’s a kind of thinking that those members of our society equipped with parachutes are more likely to indulge in, isn’t it? They can afford the fallacy. They’re not the ones flying coach.

This, for me, is the key thing. It appears that the capitalist system, which necessarily undergoes periodic crises, may have entered its terminal crisis. This could mean any number of things, of course. When we factor in environmental limitations (the barely yet registered effects of global warming) and whatever the truth may be about the remaining availability of oil, the system, in one way or another, could and likely will limp on, more and more destructively, for decades. The very rich are not likely to be as negatively affected by such an increasingly unstable system. But the rest of us are going to need to make potentially radical adjustments in how we live, and those adjustments can be very painful indeed, or a lot less painful, depending on how we respond collectively to the problems. In my view, efforts at re-localization are crucially important ways in which we can make that crash turn into a softer landing. Hence the focus on food.