woensdag 5 februari 2014

De Mainstream Pers 136


In 2009 schreef de Britse geleerde John Gray, in het voorwoord van False Dawn. The Delusions of Global Capitalism:

The very idea of decline is taboo nowadays — as soon as any warning signs are evident, it is believed, the trend can be reversed. But great powers continue to rise and fall as they have always done, and the impact of the financial crisis extends beyond money and markets. […]

The collapse that is under way is larger than any in history, and the first to be truly global. It is bound to shake every economy, with results that will include regime change or state failure in a number of countries. While American dominance is gone for good, it has no successor. China may be the rising power, but it is not yet able to exercise anything like global hegemony… Instead a period of disorderly globalization has begun, in which industrialization will continue against a background of geopolitical conflicts, until it is derailed by a backlash from the planet.

Donderdag 23 januari 2014 berichtte de International New York Times op de voorpagina:

Europeans step back from climate goals…

High energy costs, declining industrial competitiveness and a recognition that the economy is unlikely to rebound strongly anytime soon are leading policy makers to begin easing up in their drive for more aggressive climate regulation.

On Wednesday, the European Union proposed an end to binding national targets for renewable energy production after 2020. Instead, it substituted an overall European goal likely to be much harder to enforce… the shift was seen as substantial backtrack by environmental groups.

Wednesday's proposals came from the European Commission, the Brussels-based executive arm of the 28-nation bloc… The commission also decided against proposing laws on environment damage and safety during the extraction of shale gas by a controversial drilling process known as fracking.

Donderdag 26 december 2013 gaf het Amerikaanse Truthout een globale samenvatting van de klimaatverandering: 

We are in the midst of an era of frightening contradictions, when it comes to public understandings of climate change. While climate changes are occurring more quickly than scientists have ever predicted, most people’s knowledge of these realities remains hazy and clouded by political overtones. Because of both the counter-intuitive nature of climate change and the massive misinformation campaigns created by the fossil fuel industry, the general population is 20 years behind most climate scientists when it comes to the straightforward fact of 'believing in' climate change. This is an ominous statistic: Now that scientists are predicting that even worse impacts than previously understood will happen significantly sooner, a rapid global response will be necessary for any attempt to stave them off. We are likely closer to irreversible dangerous climate change - if it has not begun already - and to take action, there must be a basic public consensus. There is, however, some hopeful news on the technological front if action is taken soon. […]

Climate measurements continue to become both more precise and more reliable - and thus, more terrifying. A new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which combines the work of 2,000 scientists from 154 countries, drawing from millions of observations from more than 9,000 scientific publications, confirms and strengthens previous predictions and adds one new and very important observation. Even 100 percent emissions reductions will no longer keep our climate from changing dangerously.


Op zondag 22 september 2013 verklaarde voor een uitverkochte zaal opiniemaker Geert Mak tijdens de Abel Herzberg-lezing met grote stelligheid:

Geen Jorwerd zonder Brussel. Geen Brussel zonder Jorwerd.

Niet alleen de problemen waarmee de mensheid vandaag de dag wordt geconfronteerd zijn inmiddels overduidelijk, maar ook de stupiditeit van de Makkianen in Nederland. Wat hier doorgaat voor de polder intelligentsia meent gespaard te zullen blijven voor de werkelijkheid. In het pamflet Thuis in de Tijd schrijven de jeugdige historicus en jurist Thierry Baudet en de bejaarde jurist Geert Mak, abusievelijk geïntroduceerd als doctorandus, dat er 'wegen' moeten worden gevonden die het 'het belang' benadrukken

van traditie, worteling en 'thuis' in een wereld die ogenschijnlijk steeds meer lijkt op een global village.

Let op, 'ogenschijnlijk,' dus 'het lijkt echt, maar dat is niet zo,' het is allemaal 'schijn.' De 'global village' bestaat niet in de optiek van Baudet en Mak. Voor de provinciaal bestaat de grote-mensen-wereld niet. Die wil koste wat kost 'thuis' blijven, terwijl de kapitalistische globalisering pretendeert de wereld met grootscheeps geweld te veranderen in een kopie van het neoliberale, oergezellige 'thuis.' Omdat het intellectuele niveau in Nederland zo beschamend laag is citeer ik buitenlandse denkers zoals onder andere de Franse filosoof Bernard Stiegler, die in zijn ook in het Engels vertaalde boek For a New Critique of Political Economy (2010) het volgende stelde:

Whether we must, in order to avoid a major economic catastrophe, and to attenuate the social injustice caused by the crisis, stimulate consumption and the economic machine such as it still is, is a question as urgent as it is legitimate so long as such a policy does not simply aggravate the situation at the cost of millions and billions of euros or dollars while at the same time masking the true question, which is to produce a vision and a political will capable of progressively moving away from the economic-political complex of consumption so as to enter into the complex of a new type of investment. This new kind of investment must be a social and political investment or, in other words, an investment in a common desire, what Aristotle called philia, and which would then form the basis of a new type of economic investment.

Between the absolute urgency which obviously imposes the imperative of salvaging the present situation and of avoiding the passage from a global economic crisis to a global political crisis that might yet unleash military conflicts of global dimensions and the absolute necessity that consists in producing a potential future in the form of a political and social will capable of making a break with the present situation there is clearly a contradiction. Such a contradiction is characteristic of what happens to a dynamic system (in this case, the industrial system and the global capitalist system) once it has begun to mutate.

This question is political as much as it is economic. It is a question of political economy, a matter of knowing in what precisely this mutation consists, and to what political, but also industrial, choices it leads. It is a matter of knowing what new industrial politics is required.

Only such a response is capable of simultaneously dealing with the question of what urgent and immediate steps are necessary in order to salvage the industrial system, and with the question of how such steps must be inscribed within an economic and political mutation amounting to a revolution – if it is true that when a model has run its course, then its transformation, through which alone it can avoid total destruction, constitutes a revolution.


In 2010 interviewde ik de Amerikaanse publicist Tom Engelhardt in zijn huis in New York. Engelhardt is een alom gerespecteerde criticus van de westerse consumptiecultuur. Ik ben al langere tijd onder de indruk van de wijze waarop hij met niet aflatende helderheid de absurditeit van het westerse neoliberalisme analyseert. Zondag 2 februari 2014 wees hij op het volgende:

Ending the World the Human Way
Climate Change as the Anti-News
Here’s the scoop: When it comes to climate change, there is no “story,” not in the normal news sense anyway.
The fact that 97% of scientists who have weighed in on the issue believe that climate change is a human-caused phenomenon is not a story.  That only one of 9,137 peer-reviewed papers on climate change published between November 2012 and December 2013 rejected human causation is not a story either, nor is the fact that only 24 out of 13,950 such articles did so over 21 years.  That the anything-but-extreme Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offers an at least 95% guarantee of human causation for global warming is not a story, nor is the recent revelation that IPCC experts believe we only have 15 years left to rein in carbon emissions or we’ll need new technologies not yet in existence which may never be effective.  Nor is the recent poll showing that only 47% of Americans believe climate change is human-caused (a drop of 7% since 2012) or that the percentage who believe climate change is occurring for any reason has also declined since 2012 from 70% to 63%.  Nor is the fact that, as the effects of climate change came ever closer to home, media coverage of the subject dropped between 2010 and 2012 and, though rising in 2013, was still well below coverage levels for 2007 to 2009.  Nor is it a story that European nations, already light years ahead of the United States on phasing out fossil fuels, recently began considering cutbacks on some of their climate change goals, nor that U.S. carbon emissions actually rose in 2013, nor that the southern part of the much disputed Keystone XL pipeline, which is to bring particularly carbon-dirty tar sands from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast, is now in operation, nor that 2013 will have been either the fourth or seventh hottest year on record, depending on how you do the numbers.
Don't misunderstand me. Each of the above was reported somewhere and climate change itself is an enormous story, if what you mean is Story with a capital S.  It could even be considered the story of all stories.  It’s just that climate change and its component parts are unlike every other story from the Syrian slaughter and the problems of Obamacare to Bridgegate and Justin Bieber’s arrest. The future of all other stories, of the news and storytelling itself, rests on just how climate change manifests itself over the coming decades or even century.  What happens in the 2014 midterms or the 2016 presidential elections, in our wars, politics, and culture, who is celebrated and who ignored -- none of it will matter if climate change devastates the planet.
Climate change isn’t the news and it isn’t a set of news stories. It’s the prospective end of all news.  Think of it as the anti-news.
All the rest is part of the annals of human history: the rise and fall of empires, of movements, of dictatorships and democracies, of just about anything you want to mention.  The most crucial stories, like the most faddish ones, are -- every one of them -- passing phenomena, which is of course what makes them the news.

Climate change isn’t. New as that human-caused phenomenon may be -- having its origins in the industrial revolution -- it’s nonetheless on a different scale from everything else, which is why journalists and environmentalists often have so much trouble figuring out how to write about it in a way that leaves it continually in the news. While no one who, for instance, lived through “Frankenstorm” Sandy on the East Coast in 2012 could call the experience 'boring' -- winds roaring through urban canyons like freight trains, lights going out across lower Manhattan, subway tunnels flooding, a great financial capital brought to its proverbial knees -- in news terms, much of global warming is boring and repetitive.  I mean, drip, drip, drip. How many times can you write about the melting Arctic sea ice or shrinking glaciers and call it news?  How often are you likely to put that in your headlines?
We’re so used to the phrase 'the news' that we often forget its essence: what’s 'new' multiplied by that 's.  It’s true that the 'new' can be repetitively so.  How many times have you seen essentially the same story about Republicans and Democrats fighting on Capitol Hill? But the momentousness of climate change, which isn’t hard to discern, is difficult to regularly turn into meaningful 'new' headlines ('Humanity Doomed If…'), to repeatedly and successfully translate into a form oriented to the present and the passing moment, to what happened yesterday, today, and possibly tomorrow.
If the carbon emissions from fossil fuels are allowed to continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, the science of what will happen sooner or later is relatively clear, even if its exact timetable remains in question: this world will be destabilized as will humanity (along with countless other species).  We could, at the worst, essentially burn ourselves off Planet Earth.  This would prove a passing event for the planet itself, but not for us, nor for any fragment of humanity that managed to survive in some degraded form, nor for the civilizations we’ve developed over thousands of years.

In other words, unlike 'the news,' climate change and its potential devastations exist on a time scale not congenial either to media time or to the individual lifetimes of our short-lived species.  Great devastations and die-offs have happened before.  Give the planet a few million years and life of many sorts will regenerate and undoubtedly thrive.  But possibly not us.

Geert Mak en Thierry Baudet. 'Intellectuele lichtgewichten.'
Deze wijze van anlyseren krijgt in de Nederlandse mainstream media geen ruimte. Hier wordt datgene wat doorgaat voor een discussie beheerst door intellectuele lichtgewichten als Thierry Baudet en Geert Mak, die aan de haal gaan met de politieke waan van de dag. Ze zijn op zoek naar hun kleinburgerlijke 'roots.' Ze willen zich ergens 'thuis' voelen, daar waar ze elkaar 'mogen' en 'naar elkaar [luisteren]' om zo 'het publieke debat open te breken.' Een 'debat' dat geen 'debat' is over 'een aspect van het bestaan' dat uiterst oppervlakkig behandeld wordt en de grenzen van de neoliberale ideologie absoluut niet overschrijdt. Volgens Henk Hofland kan geen enkele 'natie zonder' een 'politiek-literaire elite,' maar gezien de producten die deze 'elite' in Nederland voortbrengt, stel ik vast dat de nestor van de Nederlandse mainstream journalistiek onzin verkoopt. Het zijn juist de 'intellectuelen' in de commerciële massamedia, die als 'termieten van de reductie' zelfs de grootste liefde weten terug te brengen 'tot een geraamte van schrale herinneringen,' zoals Milan Kundera schreef. Ze kunnen gemist worden als kiespijn. Ze lijden volgens hem aan 'de moderne dwaasheid.' In een essay over Gustave Flaubert beschreef Kundera hoe de Franse auteur al in de negentiende eeuw, eerder dan wie ook, besefte dat ondanks de vooruitgang de dwaasheid niet zou wijken, een feit dat 
de grootste ontdekking was van een eeuw die zo trots was op haar wetenschappelijke rede... de dwaasheid vervaagt niet ten overstaan van de wetenschap, de techniek, de vooruitgang of het moderne, integendeel, met de vooruitgang gaat ook zij vooruit! 
Het probleem is namelijk dat 'de moderne dwaasheid niet' betekent 'onwetendheid, maar de gedachteloosheid van pasklare ideeën.' Kundera:
De Flaubertiaanse ontdekking is voor de toekomst van de wereld belangrijker dan de meest schokkende gedachten van Marx of Freud. Want je kunt je de toekomst wel voorstellen zonder de klassenstrijd of zonder de psychoanalyse, maar niet zonder de onweerstaanbare opkomst van pasklare ideeēn die, ingevoerd in computers, gepropageerd door de massamedia, het gevaar met zich meebrengen binnenkort een macht te worden die elk oorspronkelijk en individueel denken verplettert en zo de werkelijke essentie van de Europese cultuur van onze tijd verstikt. Zo'n tachtig jaar nadat Flaubert zijn Emma Bovary bedacht had, in de jaren dertig van de vorige eeuw, zal een ander groot romancier, Hermann Broch, spreken over de heroïsche inspanningen van de moderne roman die zich verzet tegen de golf van kitsch, maar er tenslotte door gevloerd zal worden. Het woord kitsch verwijst naar de houding van degene die tot elke prijs zoveel mogelijk mensen wil behagen. Om te behagen dien je je te conformeren aan wat iedereen wenst te horen, in dienst te staan van de pasklare ideeen, in de taal van de schoonheid en de emotie. Hij beweegt ons tot tranen van zelfvertedering over de banaliteiten die wij denken en voelen. Na meer dan vijftig jaar wordt de kernspreuk van Broch nu alleen nog maar meer waar. Op grond van de dwingende noodzaak te behagen en zo de aandacht van het grootst mogelijke publiek te trekken, is de esthetiek van de massamedia onvermijdelijk die van de kitsch en naarmate de massamedia ons gehele leven meer omsluiten en infiltreren, wordt de kitsch onze dagelijkse esthetiek en moraal.
Later meer. 

Vraag u af: hoe verhoudt zich het begrip 'thuis' ten opzichte van de ondergang van een aanzienlijk deel van de mensheid als gevolg van de grootschalige milieuvernietiging?

Geen opmerkingen:

Peter Flik en Chuck Berry-Promised Land

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