“This age is both comic and tragic. Tragic, because it is
perishing; comic, because it continues.”
–Kierkegaard
ENERGY, GUILT,
CATASTROPHE
Energy is a
category within the science of nature, or physics. It refers to "the capacity to
effectuate change" (E. Hecht, 2013). Like all such abstractions, the word began
with a concrete sense that became abstracted over time. “Energy” is a composite
from Ancient Greek, whose first syllable means “in,” while the second means
“work.” In terms of “ordinary language” (Austin, 1961), energy is whatever
invisible force pervades a process of work, without which it could not be done;
it is also that unperformed work hidden inside an object, person, or state of
affairs, which is then liberated by some kind of activity. En-ergy is the work
inside something, or the powerful something inside of a work process.
Abstraction has widened the scope of the term to the point where it can mean
almost anything, and this is most obvious in New Age discourse, where “energy”
is a ubiquitous word whose metaphoricity is always indeterminate: nobody knows
what it refers to, so it can do jobs that can’t be done by other terms that are
more clearly understood (Greer, 200).
The categories of
scarcity and abundance have been connected to the concept of energy from the
Beginning: in Genesis, Adam and Eve are forced out of the abundant Garden of
Eden and into a world of scarcity and labor. This myth, as many anthropologists
have argued (e.g., Brody, 2002; Thompson, 1981), is a description of the advent
of agriculture and the end of foraging as the central regime of human
subsistence. Hunting and gathering, goes the claim, afforded people far more
leisure and limited their appetites to what they could carry; whereas farming
both bound people to their local fields and allowed the accumulation of
agricultural surpluses which could be traded for other goods and services.
These goods required storage, which required fortification and guard labor;
soon enough, the more people a community could produce, the more crops it could
grow and the more wealth it could amass and protect from competitors. With
enough wealth, a community could launch an imperial project of raiding its
neighbors, annexing their territory, and assimilating or slaughtering their
populations. All that food production and all that soldiering require large
populations, so the reproductive capacity of women tends to get commandeered by
the state, embodied in the fathers and husbands who depend on it (Lerner,
1986).
This shift away from
hunter-gatherer culture has long been understood as a disaster in gender
relations; Friedrich Engels (1884) famously called it “the world historical
defeat of the female sex.” As Stone (1976, p.199) notes, Genesis 3:17 suggests
that the advent of hard labor was caused by the mistaken practice of listening
to women: “And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of
thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou
shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou
eat of it all the days of thy life…” In the Garden of Eden, energy scarcity and
social inequality were non-issues; they arise together, as a consequence of
eating a forbidden fruit so potent that a single bite changes the world
forever. The abundance in Eden was absolute, not quantitative; no measurements
were made; nature was a seamless relational matrix, not a planetary stockroom
loaded with catalogued “resources” awaiting exploitation (Heidegger, 1954). If
the ancient and medieval worlds were afflicted by energy scarcity and a
dependence on the muscle power of humans and other domesticated animals, the
advent of fossil fuels brought an abundance that seemed absolute but was in fact quantitative, measurable, and
all-too finite. As the literature of Peak Oil has articulated (Heinberg, 2003),
the emergence of fossil fuels was so profoundly impressive and transformative
that, like the bitten apple in Eden, it suddenly changed the whole world,
producing a culture of boundless optimism (Peale, 1952), manic ambition
(Whybrow, 2006), and “the civil religion of progress” (Greer, 2013). Modernity
is this falsely infinite abundance, together with the ideological lubricant by
which criteria of race, class, and gender entitle a colonial class of resource
extractors, disenfranchising several billion persons at home and abroad who can
directly access neither the means of production nor the sources of that fossil
energy which drives production, distribution, and exchange. Only after a century
of life under that worldview—that modernity of cheap energy, endless capital
accumulation, and ideologically grounded inequality—did it become noticeable
that its ultimate driver was neither “technology” nor “innovation,” but energy,
in the form of fossil fuels.
Technology and innovation are endlessly touted in American public
discourse because they are products of human virtue, whose importance flatters
our narcissism. Fossil energy, by contrast, is a natural endowment of the
planet (mostly from two episodes of vast algal blooming, 90 million and 150
million years ago) which we merely extract and consume, remaining powerless to
replace those depleted fuels, and powerless to sequester the pollution we
produce in burning them. We did not make oil; we can’t replace it; we can’t
clean up after it; we can’t stop using it. Along one vector, fossil energy provides us with
unprecedented godlike power; along these other vectors, it delivers us over to
overwhelming feelings of helplessness, rather like an addiction to heroin or
methamphetamine.
While the
discipline of English uses “early modern” as a term for the European
civilization of the sixteenth century, what we regard as contemporary is a form
of the modern in which energy is cheap and abundant (Heinberg, 2003); infinite
material wealth is pursued for its own sake (Weber, 1905); and life is increasingly
subject to what Max Weber called “rationalization,” a process of measurement
and calculation that tends to homogenize, systematize, and disenchant whatever it
subsumes. For historians like
Bauman (1989) and Rubenstein (1975), the Nazi Holocaust represents the heart of
modernity, since it combines mechanized technology (which requires cheap and
abundant energy) with pseudoscientific racist ideology and bureaucratic
organization, both of which can be seen as forms of Weberian rationalization.
If the taint of Original Sin once marked humanity as fallen exiles from an
Earthly Paradise, this reading of the Holocaust as modernity’s essence marks
contemporary people as fallen exiles from the eighteenth century Enlightenment
and its utopian social hopes. The essence of our times is also the nadir of
human behavior.
The same symbolic
system that conceived Original Sin—derived by Iranaeus and later by Augustine
from the Letters of Paul—later developed the idea that it was this sin from
which humanity required the redemption offered by Christ. But Christ was killed
by human beings, a sacrifice understood to have exemplified his ethics, where the
victim gives good in exchange for the evils of his assailants (e.g., Matthew
5:44). So goes Luke 23:34: “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they
know not what they do.” Traditional Christian anti-Judaism holds “the Jews”
responsible for the death of Jesus (Farmer, 1999), whereas the political
realities on the ground seem to implicate the Roman administration (Crossan,
1996). Matthew 25:40 seems to
universalize, or render collective, the guilt for the Crucifixion: “The King
will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these
brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” The Holocaust raises similar
questions about concentric circles of guilt and responsibility, implicating
first those individuals –some of whom were executed at Nuremberg, whereas others
were welcomed to America by the Central Intelligence Agency for their
anti-Soviet abilities (Simpson, 1989) – whose active participation was concrete
(Arendt, 1963); then, the German people who supported the Nazi regime
(Goldhagen, 1996); and finally, all of “modern” mankind, since we are all
subject to the same forces that produced the Nazis and their atrocities
(Rubenstein, 1975). Indeed, Stanley
Milgram’s famous “peer shock administration” experiments of 1963 (codified in
his 1974 book Obedience to Authority)
helped to establish the universality of the capacity
for behaviors like torture, as Hannah Arednt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) had
done for mass-murder, slavery and genocide.
This issue of
collective guilt (Branscomb, 2004) has been kindled anew by the advent of
catastrophic climate change. Concrete responsibility seems concentrated among
policymakers and corporate officers whose decisions directly result in
particular instances of resource extraction and pollution (Jensen, 2011), but a
collective guilt afflicts everyone who has ever benefitted from the consumption
of those resources. This is easily (and often) quantified by statistics showing
per capita energy use, with the United States among the most energy-profligate
of existing nations. Climate negotiations are routinely deadlocked by this
logic of quantified responsibility, since the major interests represented at
the table are nation-states (whose representatives generally want carbon
restrictions to be proportional, either to fuels already burned by “developed”
states, or to fuels set to be burned by “developing” ones) and fossil fuel
corporations (whose representatives generally want the talks to fail). There
seems to be a parallel between the burning of fuels for electricity, and the
entailment of responsibility for climate change: most of the liberated energy
is lost as heat at the burn site, but the rest is exported by transmission
lines to millions of end users—as the most concrete responsibility lies with
the fuel corporations themselves, who then export a more attenuated form of that
responsibility to millions of beneficiaries of the oil, gas, and coal they have
expropriated. To press this strange analogy further, note that the heat
generated at the power plant is not employed for any purpose (except at
“cogeneration” plants, which use their heat for desalination or for municipal
hot water), but lost locally as waste; similarly, the responsibility generated
at ExxonMobil headquarters is not experienced as guilt (which might be
converted into remedial action), but transmuted into its opposite—entitlement,
as the remorseless zeal for more wealth—via the defense mechanism known as
reaction formation (Czander, 2008).
Psychoanalysis
emerged in the heyday of commercial fossil-fuels, when animal muscle power was
replaced by coal-fired steam engines, followed by the liquid fuel internal
combustion engine, and the eventual electrification of urban and rural
landscapes. In the posthumously published 1895 “Project for a Scientific
Psychology,” Freud’s model of the mind was informed by his studies with
Helmholz and Brucke (Sulloway, 1979), whose Berlin Physicalist Society held
that “no other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within
the organism” (du Bois-Reymond, 1842, cited in Sulloway, p. 14). For Freud, the psychic representative
of this “physical chemical force” was drive,
and the “Project for a Scientific Psychology” is an effort to explain emotional
life in terms of an economy of drives within the organism. Though this
physicalism of the early Freud is easy to exaggerate (Mills, 2012), he does seem to have emphasized the
individual mind as an embodied but somewhat isolated unit—at least compared to
his successors in the object relations school. It may be fair to say that
Freudian drive theory remained hegemonic in the United States for most of the
twentieth century, waning only in the aftermath of President Carter’s national
conversation about the new energy scarcity. It is as if modernity’s American
citizen were a Freudian subject, an isolated mind with its own tank of libido,
seated in the driver’s seat of an isolated Studebaker with its own gas tank,
seeking its fortune. The new talk of “renewable energy,” chiefly solar and wind
power, imagined energy no longer as a stably stored resource lying ready in the
ground, but as a relationship arising within a cosmic system; the wind and the
sunshine flow through the universe, and those who would make use of them must join
in those larger processes of circulation, interposing their energy-gathering
equipment into the existing system of wild, active forces. Correspondingly, the
subject of relational psychoanalysis (Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983) is part of,
and even constituted by, a web of relationships that constitute an environing
field—like the photosphere of the Sun or the atmosphere of the Earth, tapped
into by PV cells and wind turbines, respectively.
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