Top Ten Reasons I'm Not Emergent

10. I can't grow facial hair.

9. I don't actually like Guinness.

8. I don't see the point in pretending I'm not liberal.

7. I've never posted a video to YouTube.

6. I've never liked Johnny Cash

5. I'm sure as hell not going to drink PBR just so I can be "ironic."

4. I don't have a fixed-gear bicycle and don't know why I'd want one.

3. I have no idea what Sufjan Stevens even sounds like.

2. I last updated my Twitter feed two months ago.

1. I actually know what deconstruction is.

[Disclaimer: I don't have any significant beef with the emerging church, which seems to be a combination of self-absorbed hipsters and people asking important questions. Sometimes these are the same people.]

Be Not Afraid

I hear the word "scary" a lot in political conversations; Obama is not simply someone with whom my conservative friends have significant political disagreements; he's "scary." Sarah Palin is not just laughably naive and delusional; she's "scary." The Obama administration's agenda is not some half-assed attempt to move us closer to European democracy hopelessly hamstrung by partisan politics; it's "scary." The Tea Party is not just a bunch of right-wing wackos getting way too much media attention; they're "scary." Oh wait -- I'll concede this one. People making a big show about how they have guns and threatening to use them against their political opponents are, in fact, scary.

This taps into some kind of apocalyptic zeitgeist in which we are headed inexorably toward oblivion. I remember seeing a book that predicted that Bush would find a way to get elected for a third term and set up a fascist dictatorship. Obama is marching us toward socialist totalitarianism. Muslims are going to take over the world and make us all wear burqas. Fundamentalist Christians are going to take over the world (or just the Texas school board) and take science back to the Dark Ages. Mexicans are going to come streaming across the border and, um, get jobs or something. Al Gore is going to take over the world and make us all drive hybrids.

The litany is as varied as it is hysterical: Our way of life is at stake. Our cultural values are at stake. Someone, somewhere, is making a mockery of everything that made this country great. America is no longer the Christian nation it used to be. America is no longer the secular nation it used be. [Both of those are, to some extent, true, but I digress.] The arm of American imperialism is reaching farther and farther. The American empire is in decline. Technology is getting out of control. The environment is getting out of control. We're too smart for our own good. We're getting dumber. Kids aren't keeping up with technology, and won't be competitive in the global market. Kids are too reliant on technology and can't read any more. And so on.

All of these things -- some of them more connected to reality than others -- are "scary."

Maybe it's always been this way. Maybe we've always demonized the opposition in the strongest possible terms. Maybe we just have this tendency to throw everything onto an apocalyptic screen. I call this "archetypal projection": some things are so important to us that we have to talk about them in terms of life and death, of heaven and hell, of impending judgment and The End of the World As We Know It. I don't mean to be glib. Bad things -- scary things -- can and do happen. A post-capitalist society might also be a post-collapse society. A terrorist cell might just get a nuke and use it. Somebody might actually put Sarah Palin in charge of something important. But as I hope my (very ad hoc) list indicates, not all of these "scary" scenarios can be true at the same time.

One of my Facebook friends is looking for a flagpole, or materials to make one. This is a man whose "about me" section used to read "Only two people have ever offered to die for you -- Jesus Christ and the American soldier," so there's no doubt he needs the flagpole to show his patriotic colors. I'm a little surprised he doesn't already have one. And I think he's doing it because he's scared, because he feels there's a great spiritual battle going on for the soul of the nation. Old Glory becomes an ebenezer.

I can relate to my friend on a certain level, I think (or would like to think) but really nationalism makes me uncomfortable. Were I of a more fideistic bent, I might call it a form of idolatry, and at one point I did. I suppose even now I might find that language useful, even if I don't connect the dots the same way I used to. I still can't bring myself to say the Pledge of Allegiance or sing the National Anthem. To direct one's attention to an object, make a special gesture, and say special words or sing a special song seems an awful lot like worship. I like to keep the list of things I consciously worship very small, and I'm working on the list of things I unconsciously worship. A piece of colored cloth doesn't make the cut.

Neither, I'm afraid, does "the republic for which it stands." I don't hate America. I am neither proud to be American nor ashamed, simply because I had nothing to do with being an American. I am American by the accident of birth. I happen to have been born in a particular time and a particular place and I don't see why I should have rights that others don't simply by virtue of that fact. Am I supposed to be proud to be lucky?

Add to that fact the circumstance of having been born white, and male, and now we can add to that constellation of rights a set of privileges I'm only vaguely aware of. Should I be proud of that as well? I'm not sure Jewish men ever really prayed "Lord, thank you that you did not make me a Gentile, a dog, or a woman," but that's what this is starting to sound like. I'll pass.

At any rate, it recently struck me: isn't there some point at which the philosophical musings of a handful of disaffected white middle class British colonials who happened to win a war in the late 18th century cease to be relevant to our present condition? Isn't there a point at which the vagaries and vicissitudes of our collective social life so far exceed the Founding Fathers' capacity for foresight that the system itself is hopelessly stretched at the seams?

What would that look like? Would it look like a two-party system so ideologically bifurcated that that both sides see the other as a harbinger of the apocalypse (and at least one side seems hell-bent on inaugurating it)? Would it look like our being so far removed from our history as marauders, conquistadors, and squatters that we become hypersensitive to immigration and religious alterity? Would it look like a world in which everything is "scary?"

I don't know. My biggest beef, I guess, with this kind of hyperbolic language -- besides my personal aversion to drama -- is that it leaves us of bereft of a language to describe things that are genuinely devastating, like the BP oil spill. On one hand, this is simply an incredible travesty for which have a hard finding the appropriate words. There's a whole world -- a world once teeming with life and livelihood -- now gone. Fixing it is not available to us. All we can muster is some kind of meager damage control. It's not the End of the World As We Know It, but it is the end of a world.

We lack the language to describe it because we've cheapened our stronger language by using it to describe people whose politics we don't like. But we also lack the language to describe it partially because we know, somehow, that life will go on. This won't significantly change policy. It won't cause us to re-think our relationship to oil so much as it will encourage us to be more careful, like the lung cancer patient who decides to cut down to a pack a day.

In a world where everything's "scary," nothing scares us.

The Invisible Hand is Giving Us the Finger, part 2

[See part 1.]

There's more to the story than just capitalism, but I don't want to venture too far afield. There are any number of anti-capitalist movements one might be a part of, and I think these are necessary, but I'm not much of a joiner. Most of these end up being some kind of anarchism or socialism. I am not using those designations dismissively; I mean them merely as descriptors -- these are the sites of anti-capitalist critique. I don't mean, by "anarchism," people who have an affinity for spray paint and Malatov cocktails (or the teenager who buys an anarchist T-shirt at Hot Topic), nor by "socialism" do I mean the failed attempts to bypass capitalism by people who can't read German.

For the socialist -- and I'm painting with a terribly broad brush -- the issue is primarily economic -- but addressing the economic issue will take a major overhaul of the structures of society, especially given the rise of neoliberalism (note that this designation covers all US fiscal policy from c. 1980 onward, regardless of which party is in power, and that "neoliberal" is not the opposite of "neoconservative"; neocons are just neolibs who like to bomb people).

The anarchist critique is more ambitious, calling into the question at least the state (in classical anarchism -- Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin), but often extending to all structures of domination up to and including civilization itself (anarcho-primitivism -- Zerzan, Perlman, Watson). In most cases they are not anti-society or anti-organization; they see significant problems with the kinds of society and organization we've attempted thus far, and seek forms of social organization that are not oppressive, coercive, or hierarchical. (Having said that: yes, there are anarchists who just want to burn everything down. They're honestly not that interesting, though I suppose they could be fun at parties.)

Anarchism and socialism, then, are both radical, not in the colloquial sense of "extreme" or "crazy" but in the etymological sense of the word which means get to the root of something. Neither is content to simply prune capitalism and trim its branches; they want to uproot it and replace it with something else. Anarchists typically want to replace it with considerably less at least in terms of governing apparatus (or they want to uproot more than just capitalism), but it's difficult to find an articulation of what comes next (from any camp) that doesn't sound a little crazy. I think this is okay. In fact, I'd say the smart money is on not claiming to know exactly what comes next. This isn't to say we don't need some ideas, but simply to admit that our attempts to predict are going to fall short. We need people experimenting, exploring the possibilities.

I believe our best future is a post-capitalist future, and I'm looking for ways to contribute to that future that don't feel forced, contrived, or naive. Cribbing a bit from Steve McIntosh, let me point out that the broad arc of human social history is toward larger, and farther-reaching, structures, from tribes to warrior fiefdoms to kingdoms to nations to nation-states to a kind of postnational global capitalism and increasing tendencies toward collaborative governance (the EU, etc.). I'm not saying these stages are inevitable or predetermined but they have happened, and there seems to be a kind of ratchet dynamic; it's hard to go back.

Moreover, each stage breeds its own resistance as it creates new kinds of oppression regardless of the extent to which it answered some of the problems of the earlier stages. In other words, each click of the ratchet is neither wholly good (as progressivists would have it) nor wholly bad (as primitivists and other reactionaries might have it). For each step of the way, there is a price to be paid, and we're never going to reach a point where there is no price (as utopian visions would have it).

This is a dialectical process, and let me suggest that it is also fractal, happening all the time at every level of human organization. These larger shifts are different in degree but not in kind. What I'm suggesting, however, is not a predetermined entelechy or teleology, but an undetermined -- and thus risky -- unfolding. Something, we know not what, is calling us, and the call is never answered or completed or fulfilled.

At least, you know, until the sun goes supernova or whatever.

McIntosh's work suggests that the next logical step is global governance, the bugaboo of many a Christian/conservative conspiracy theory (I specify Christian only because the "one world order" is so commonly a part of paranoid end-times scenarios), and the scope of capitalist ideology in our day suggests that the only salient response is going to have to be global in kind. I think this will include, and have a place for, dumpster divers and off-the-grid communes, but it won't be carried by them -- certainly not exclusively.

What I'm saying, as kindly as I can, is that it won't be the anarchists. I like them. I think we need them. That sounds condescending; it says "We need you, but not for the reason you think, and toward a purpose with which you don't completely agree." Anarchists are good at local direct action and the construction of alternative communities. Our post-capitalist future will need to learn from that. Socialists are good at imagining the economic and political infrastructure necessary to realize a post-capitalist society on a global scale. We need that, too.

We also need the technological infrastructure bequeathed to us by global capitalism. The kind of large-scale-but-grassroots- organization necessary to pull off this next step won't happen without that technology, which itself probably wouldn't have existed without capitalist excess.

Capitalism, like anything else, contains within it the seeds of its own deconstruction. This is something my friend Thom Stark pointed out to me, though he shouldn't be blamed for anything else I'm saying here. Part of what this means is that the post-capitalist future, whatever it might actually look like, won't come to us until we're ready. But, lest we capitulate to an unhelpful eschatological helplessness, it won't come to us until we're prepared -- and I mean this in the sense of a prepared salad, or a prepared piano. Something needs to be done before we're ready. There's work to do, and it takes various and varied forms.

As each new horizon comes to us, what emerges (I am loathe to use this word, but it is the best one) is neither a recapitulation of the status quo that the establishment seeks to protect nor precisely what any of the forms of resistance are fighting for, but something new that is contingent upon the old, answering some of the old problems while creating new problems that will be addressed by future yet to come (and which, in a very Derridean sense, never fully arrives).

If I had to guess, I'd say that a post-capitalist future will look more like democratic socialism than anything else we might think of, but it won't be, exactly, any particular democratic socialism being articulated now. The future comes to us as a gift, and is not going to rubber-stamp anybody's pet project. Nor does it come with a guarantee. It will not be utopia. It will not be the "end of history." It will be a next step, and a necessary next step.

It will be risky -- but it is worth our imagination.