G A N Z E E R . T O D A Y

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“The imperial civilization may well have absorbed numerous contributions from various conquered peoples, but the hybrid result was still alien to the vast majority. The process of assimilation was often painful and traumatic. It is not easy to give up a familiar and beloved local tradition, just as it is difficult and stressful to understand and adopt a new culture.”

From Yuval Noah Harari's SAPIENS.

“Worse still, even when subject peoples were successful in adopting the imperial culture, it could take decades, if not centuries, until the imperial elite accepted them as part of 'us'. The generations between conquest and acceptance were left out in the cold. They had already lost their beloved local culture, but they were not allowed to take an equal part in the imperial world. On the contrary, their adopted culture continued to view them as barbarians.”

Still the case today thousands of years since the first empires. Take Rishi Sunak for instance, a man of Indian ethnicity who ascended to the seat of British Prime Minister 167 years after the British conquest of India, and who still faced questions about the authenticity of his Britishness despite having practically nothing Indian about him other than his features. If instead a white British PM who'd developed a soft spot for Indian Culture had went on and on about his love for Indian food, music, history, cinema, and textiles, no one would've batted an eye. We still, as a species, seem to be hardwired to be optically xenophobic more than anything. Some of us more than others anyway.

To be expected though, given that the doctrine of equality and human rights is still so very young when considered in the context of human history. But then again, we've kind of been through all this before:

“During the second century AD, Rome was ruled by a line of emporers born in Iberia, in whose veins probably flowed at least a few drops of local Iberian blood. The reigns of Iberian emperors—from Trajan to Marcus Aurelius—are often seen as the empire's golden age. After that, all the ethnic dams were let down. Emperor Septimius Severus (193-211) was the scion of a Punic family from Libya. Elagabalus (218-22) was a Syrian. Emperor Philip (244-9) was known colloquially as 'Philip the Arab'. The empire's new citizens adopted Roman imperial culture with such zest that, for centuries and even millenia after the empire itself collapsed, they continued to speak the empire's language, to live by the empire's laws, and to believe in the Christian God that the empire had adopted from one of its Levantine provinces.”

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“An empire that cannot sustain a blow and remain standing is not really an empire. Yet even the Romans found it hard to stomach the news arriving from northern Iberia in the middle of the second century BC. A small, insignificant mountain town called Numantia, inhabited by the peninsula's native Celts, had dared to throw off the Roman yoke. Rome at the time was the unquestioned master of the entire Mediterranean basin, having vanquished the Macedonian and Seleucid empires, subjugated the proud people of Greece, and turned Carthage into a smouldering ruin. The Numantians had nothing on their side but their fierce love of freedom and their inhospitable terrain. Yet they forced legion after legion to surrender or retreat in shame.”

From Yuval Noah Harari's SAPIENS.

“Eventually, in 134 BC, Roman patience snapped. The Senate decided to send Scipio Aemilianus, Rome's foremost general and the man who had levelled Carthage, to take care of the Numantians. He was given a massive army of more than 30,000 soldiers. Scipio, who respected the fighting spirit and martial skill of the Numantians, preferred not to waste his soldiers in unnecessary combat. Instead, he encircled Numantia with a line of fortifications, blocking the town's contact with the outside world. Hunger did his work for him. After more than a year, the food supply ran out. When the Numantians realized that all hope was lost, they burned down their home; according to Roman accounts, most of them killed themselves so as not to become Roman slaves.”

Can we say hardcore?

History helps us see our present in new light, and perhaps make considerations for our future. We might therefore regard our modern day Numantians to be the people of Cuba and Palestine, both having endured blockades not for a mere year, but for decades.

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“With time, the 'wheat bargain' became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of 'improvements', each of which was meant to make life easier, added up a millstone around the necks of these farmers.”

From Yuval Noah Harari's SAPIENS.

“The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.

“One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.”

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“Compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely, when many of their vital systems are still under-developed,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in his widely-celebrated book SAPIENS: A Brief History of Humankind. “A colt can trot shortly after birth; a kitten leaves its mother to forage on its own when it is just a few weeks old. Human babies are helpless, dependent for many years on their elders for sustenance, protection and education.”

This could at first glance be taken as a disadvantage, but actually it seems to have forced us to evolve in different ways.

“This fact has contributed greatly both to humankind's extraordinary abilities and to its unique social problems. Lone mothers could hardly forage enough food for their offspring and themselves with needy children in tow. Raising children required constant help from other family members and neighbors. It takes a tribe to raise a human. Evolution thus favored those capable of forming strong social ties.”

Therefore, one can consider the “nuclear family” to be a kind of human devolution.

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“The present crisis should be spurring us to reflect upon our behavior and imagine a truly different future for ourselves. But the imaginative and conceptual power necessary to do so has been taken from us by the experts and specialists who have monopolized technological development. There are surely too many who still think we can sit back and let technology solve climate change for us.”
It is indeed frightening how the belief in technology-as-savior is so widespread, when it is in fact technological development that has been the cause of so much destruction, mostly because said technological development has been subservient to capitalist interests, if not developed for them outright.

If ever there was a technological component to the solution, it wouldn't be useful without a complete revolt against the present sociopolitical economy.

“In short, the ideology of technology has become a cause of widespread impoverishment of imagination in today's society.”
Likely even more so with the advent of A.I.

“The wealth held by the twenty-six richest capitalists in the world is equivalent to the total assets belonging to the world's poorest 3.8 billion people, nearly half the world's population.”
And if you're curious who the twenty-six richest capitalists in the world are exactly, here you go:

  1. Bernard Arnault & Family – $233 billion (France)
  2. Elon Musk – $195 billion (South Africa/Canada/USA)
  3. Jeff Bezos – $194 billion (USA)
  4. Mark Zuckerberg – $177 billion (USA)
  5. Larry Ellison – $141 billion (USA)
  6. Warren Buffett – $133 billion (USA)
  7. Bill Gates – $128 billion (USA)
  8. Steve Ballmer – $121 billion (USA)
  9. Mukesh Ambani – $116 billion (India)
  10. Larry Page – $114 billion (USA)
  11. Sergey Brin – $110 billion (USA)
  12. Michael Bloomberg – $106 billion (USA)
  13. Amancio Ortega – $103 billion (Spain)
  14. Carlos Slim Helu & Family – $102 billion (Mexico)
  15. Francoise Bettencourt Meyers & Family – $99.5 billion (France)
  16. Michael Dell – $91 billion (USA)
  17. Gautam Adani – $84 billion (India)
  18. Jim Walton & Family – $78.4 billion (USA)
  19. Rob Walton & Family – $77.4 billion (USA)
  20. Jensen Huang – $77 billion (USA)
  21. Alice Walton – $72.3 billion (USA)
  22. David Thomson & Family – $67.8 billion (Canada)
  23. Julia Koch & Family – $64.3 billion (USA)
  24. Zhong Shanshan – $62.3 billion (China)
  25. Charles Koch & Family – $58.5 billion (USA)
  26. Giovanni Ferrero – $57 billion (Italy)

Surprising absolutely no one, 17 of those 26 are American.

That is not to say there is no poverty in America; about 12% of Americans live below the poverty line and a whopping 49% have less than $500 in savings.

“We usually think of capitalism as something that provides wealth and abundance, but the truth is quite the opposite. Capitalism is a system that functions by producing scarcity.”
Perhaps manufacturing scarcity might be the more apt terminology.

All quotes above are from Kohei Saito's brilliant SLOW DOWN: The Degrowth Manifesto.

Happy new year.

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“Politicalism is the belief that if we simply select good leaders within a framework of representative democracy, we can leave it up to these politicians and experts to put optimal policies and laws in place for us.”
More from Kohei Saito's excellent SLOW DOWN.

“However, this is the effect of narrowing the field of political action to elections.”
Kohei is an efficient writer and rather than dance around the point he wants to make as is common in much writing undertaken by academics, he gets right to the heart of the matter.

“Representative democracy cannot expand the purview of democracy itself and cannot effect a revolution across all society. Electoral politics always reaches its limit when faced with the power of capital. Politics does not exist separately from the economy—rather, it is subordinate to it.”
Indeed, the only time in America where major policies were undertaken to the benefit of the greater general public was under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the wake of the Great Depression, after the power of capital had already led to its own implosion. Still a case where politics was in essence subordinate to the economy.

The same thing should've ideally happened in the wake of America's 2008 financial crisis (otherwise referred to as the Great Recession), but that's not quite how things worked out despite the ballot box tipping in favor of the socialist-seeming candidate of African American heritage.

“This is why the field of political possibility must be expanded through a social movement that confronts capital directly.”
Kohei Saito, SLOW DOWN: The Degrowth Manifesto.

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“It would take the redistribution of a mere 0.2 percent of the world's wealth to end the hardship of the 1.4 billion people currently living beneath the world's poverty line of US $1.25 a day.”

More from Kohei Saito's SLOW DOWN.

“Economic equality if realized via the redistribution of subsidies currently spent on the fossil fuel industry ($5.9 trillion or 6.8 percent of the GDP of 2020), would produce no additional environmental burden. In fact, it would likely improve the environment!”

$5.9 trillion redistributed to 1.4 billion people would come out to about $11.5 a day per person, not a whole lot, but still 9 times more than what you've got if you're living on $1.25 a day.

One thing to keep in mind, the necessity of wealth redistribution does not only apply to the Global South vis-a-vis the Global North, but also applies within the populations of some nations of the Global North.

“The per capita GDP of most northern European nations like France and Germany is lower than that of the United States. But their standards of social welfare are much higher, and many of these nations provide healthcare and higher education free to their citizens. In the US, by contrast, some people lack health insurance and therefore have difficulties accessing healthcare, and many people struggle with student loans they will never be able to pay back Japan's GDP is also much lower than America's, but the average Japanese lifespan is almost six years longer.

“In other words, the extent to which societies thrive changes greatly depending on how production and distribution are organized and how social resources are shared. No matter how much an economy might grow, if the resulting wealth is monopolized by one part of the population and never redistributed, large numbers of people will live in comparative misery, unable to realize their potential.

“This can be seen the other way as well: even if its economy doesn't grow, if existing resources are distributed well, a society may thrive more than ever.”

SLOW DOWN: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito

#reads #radar

“Carbon dioxide emitted by the top 10 percent of the world's richest people makes up half of worldwide emissions.”

From Kohei Saito's SLOW DOWN.

“On the other hand, the least wealthy half of the world's population is responsible for a mere 10 percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.”

One might be inclined to conclude that the answer may quite simply be to call on the rich to reduce their emissions, and the rich may even agree and conclude that the solution lies in greening the economy by shifting to renewable energy. Ain't that simple though:

“But we must also keep in mind the following: almost every one of us living in a developed country belongs to the world's richest 20 percent, and some of those who call themselves 'middle class' are actually part of the top 10 percent. In other words, it will be impossible to truly combat climate change if we fail to participate as directly interested parties in the radical transformation of the Imperial Mode of Living.”

Thing is though: a shift to renewables is by no means a transformation of the Imperial Mode of Living, given that renewable energy heavily relies on the utilization of lithium-ion battery technology, itself reliant on an exorbitant extraction of lithium and cobalt, which involves processes with severe environmental consequences, first on communities in the global south but inevitably upon the entire global ecosystem, all of which is detailed in Saito's book.

But the crux of Saito's argument is that even if that were not the case, “greening” the economy by cutting down CO2 emissions and utilizing renewable energy would not cause a reduction in consumption (it would likely even increase it), and as such would entail a continuation of the predatory resource extraction necessary to feed the current economic model and the consumerist lifestyles it fosters. CO2 emissions or not, exorbitant resource extraction spells the death of our planet.

“A team of environmental scholars headed by Australian professor Thomas Wiedmann has developed a calculation called the 'material footprint' (MF) to revise our understanding of the effects of international trade. The MF is a figure indexing the consumption of natural resources.”

The only solution then is the adoption of a different economic model altogether.

49 pages into SLOW DOWN, Saito hasn't gotten to that bit yet, but it's clear that's where he's headed. He takes his time giving us all the data and sound reasoning why not only our current mode of capitalism is doomed to fail, but why “Green New Deal”-like solutions are doomed to fail as well. Thus, paving the way for the only viable solution.

SLOW DOWN: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito

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“Character, for Kant, is a rationally chosen way of organizing one's life, based on years of varied experience—indeed, he believed that one does not really develop a character until age forty.”

From DAILY RITUALS by Mason Curry.

“Kant rose at 5:00 A.M., after being awoken by his lifelong servant, a retired soldier under explicit orders not to let the master oversleep. Then he drank one or two cups of weak tea and smoked his pipe.

“After this period of meditation, Kant prepared his day's lectures and did some writing. Lectures began at 7:00 A.M. and lasted until 11:00. His academic duties discharged, Kant would go to a restaurant or pub for lunch, his only real meal of the day. He did not limit his dining company to his fellow academics but enjoyed mixing with townspeople from a variety of backgrounds. As for the meal itself, he prepared simple fare, with the meat well done, accompanied by good wine. Lunch might go until as late as 3:00, after which Kant took his famous walk and visited his closes friend, Joseph Green. They would converse until 7:00 on weekdays (9:00 on weekends, perhaps joined by another friend). Returning home, Kant would do some more work and read before going to bed precisely at 10:00.”

What a delightful existence.

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Woke up today comforted by the knowledge that I will no longer be pestered by rich politicians to give them my money.

I have been on a roll of not-so-great reads lately for some reason, a couple of which I reviewed:

George Bataille's STORY OF THE EYE and Nathanael West's MISS LONELYHEARTS/THE DAY OF THE LOCUST are a couple others, yet to be reviewed. I'm annoyed at this bad book spell I seem to have fallen under, and am wondering how these books ever landed in my TBR pile to begin with. Moving onto WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin and keeping my fingers crossed that this'll be the one to break the spell.

#journal #reads