Jonathan Schell has written a brilliant article about the present moment.

[Winslow Myers]

Obama and the Return of the Real

By Jonathan Schell

This article appeared in the February 9, 2009 edition of The Nation.
January 22, 2009 (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090209/schell)


I see the work of gods who pile tower-high the pride of those who were
nothing, and dash present grandeur down.
--Euripides, in The Trojan Women, referring to the fall of Troy


The inauguration of Barack Obama, "whose father less than sixty years ago
might not have been served at a local restaurant," is both a culmination
and a beginning. The culmination is the milestone represented by the
arrival of a black man in the office of president of the United States.
That achievement reaches back to the founding ideals of the Republic--"all
men are created equal"--which have been fulfilled in a new way, even as it
resonates around a world in which for centuries white imperialists have
subjected people of color to oppression. The event fully justifies the
national and global jubilation it has touched off. This much is truly
accomplished, signed and sealed.

The beginning is, at the very least, the beginning of post-George W. Bush
America, and fact-tempered hope rather than joy must be the keynote. In
this context, the event is like a candle that has been lit in a dark and
gusty room. How high its light will blaze is anything but clear. For the
election of this unreasonably talented and appealing man occurred together
with a remarkable array of crises, of which the economic one is only the
newest. A man and an hour: a familiar matchup. A lot has been said about
the man. Analyzing the makeup of the new administration has become the new
Kremlinology, and a good deal of ink has been spilled pondering whether
the avatar of "vision" has opted instead for the status quo, whether the
fresh breeze from the hustings has already stagnated in the swamps of the
capital, whether a bold campaign platform is being traded in for
mainstream governance. And it is true that a centrist drift has been
unmistakable. Joe Biden as vice president, Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Robert Gates as
defense secretary and Larry Summers as chief economic adviser--these are
hardly fresh faces. The $275 billion tax cut as part of the stimulus plan
was not calculated to please the Democratic "base." Yet other
appointments, especially those to environmental posts, have suggested a
more venturesome presidency. And public expectations are high: nearly 80
percent of the people are hopeful about his presidency.

But what of the hour--the broad shape of the new world that Obama and all
of us will face? If only the economic crisis were involved, the path ahead
would have something of the known and familiar. Economic cycles come and
go, and even the Great Depression eased up in a little more than a decade.
But this year's crisis is attended by--or embedded in--at least four
others of even larger scope. The second is the shortage of natural
resources, beginning with fossil fuels. Oil prices have fallen sharply
from their peak of last summer, but does anyone doubt that when the
economy bounces back those prices will rise with it?

A third crisis--less on the public mind, perhaps, because it is so old it
is taken for granted--is the spread of nuclear arms and other weapons of
mass destruction. The problem is not so much an arms race (though Russia
has just announced a step-up in its production of intercontinental
ballistic missiles and the Defense Department is bent on modernizing the
US arsenal) as arms seepage, arms osmosis, owing to the deadly know-how
that is spreading from brain to brain in a kind of virtual pollution.

A fourth crisis is the ecological one, comprising global warming, the
wholesale human-caused annihilation of species, population growth, water
and land shortage, and much else. Like nuclear danger, the planetary
ecological crisis threatens something that has never been at stake before
our era: the natural foundations of life on which humans and all species
depend for survival. Economic and military ups and downs are for a season
only. Extinction is forever.

Cutting across all these crises is a fifth that will be of immediate
concern to the new president: the failure of the American bid for global
empire and the consequent decline of American influence abroad. The roots
of the American will to empire go deep into history but reached full
flower in the Bush administration. The bid has run aground in the sands of
Iraq and in the mountains of Afghanistan, among other places. Even in the
unlikely event that Obama escapes those quagmires without precipitating
new fiascoes, the appetite for military takeovers of other countries (an
idea already thoroughly discredited more than a generation ago in Vietnam)
is going to be dead for a long time. The world is not going to be run by
the Pentagon, and everyone knows it. The downfall of overambitious,
overreaching empires is an old tale. Yet if the other crises on the agenda
are to be addressed, the world must be run somehow or other. The reason is
not that anyone loves world government but that the problems present themselves on a global
basis and will not yield to provincial solutions. The American decline
thus creates--or perhaps merely accentuates--a global political vacuum.
It will not be enough to mouth the words "cooperation" and
"multilateralism." Something more muscular, something more definite, will
be required. (In this effort, by definition a common one, the United
States must of course play a significant role.)

The Gordian Knot

The contemporary crises are interwoven, forming a kind of Gordian knot.
The world does not have the luxury of dealing with them seriatim. Consider
the relationship of the collapsing economy to the collapsing environment.
Joseph Stiglitz has noted that economists are wondering if the graph of
the economic crisis will eventually prove to be V-shaped or U-shaped; but
he argues that it will prove to be L-shaped. Indeed, there can be neither
a V, a U or any other upward-turning graph if the remedy does not include
a green revolution and a sustainable-energy program. A dirty recovery,
even if possible, would be worse than no recovery. It would be the
quickest path to a bigger bust. The upturn cannot in truth be "re-"
anything--short of revolution--for the just-crashed "successful" economy,
excellent as it was in producing cheap goods, was also producing
environmental catastrophe. (Paradoxically, the recession, by cutting back
on fossil-fuel use, may have done more to ease global warming than electric cars or solar panels could have
done in a comparable period.) Environmentalists have long observed that
if China tries to reach Western standards of living along the automotive,
carbon-gushing Western path, the planet will be cooked to a cinder in
short order. Now we are all in a sense in the Chinese boat. China can't
have the economy we so recently had, and we can't have it again either.
We'll all have to have something quite different.

The same is true of US military power, discredited by the Iraq and
Afghanistan quagmires. Additional follies of this sort also have become
unaffordable. To the extent that America is to be powerful in the
twenty-first century, it will have to be so by cultivating a quite
different sort of power.

At a glance, this tangle of crises might seem merely to be the result of a
colossal accident--a world-historic pileup on the global thruway. Yet in
addition to being interconnected, the crises have striking features in
common, suggesting shared roots. To begin with, all are self-created. They
arise from pathologies of our own activity, or perhaps hyperactivity. The
Greek tragedians understood well those disasters whose seeds lie above all
in one's own actions. No storm or asteroid or external enemy is the cause.
Today, the economic crash is the result of investment run amok: the
"masters of the universe" are the authors of their own (and everyone's)
downfall. The nuclear weapons that threaten to return in wrath to American
cities were born in New Mexico. The oil is running short because we are
driving too many cars to too many shopping malls. The global ecosphere is
heading toward collapse because of the success, not the failure (until
recently), of the modern economy. The invasion of Iraq was the American empire's
self-inflicted wound--a disaster of choice, so to speak. All we had to do
to escape it was not to do it. Here and elsewhere, the work of our own
hands rises up to strike us.

All the crises are also the result of excess, not scarcity. Too much
credit was packaged in too many ways by people who were too smart, too
busy, too greedy. Our energy use was too great for the available reserves.
The nuclear weapon overfulfilled the plans for great-power war, making
it--and potentially ourselves--obsolete through oversuccess. The economic
activity of humanity--the "throughput" of productivity, to use James
Gustave Speth's term for the sheer quantity of natural stuff processed by
the economy and dumped back into the ecosphere--was too voluminous to be
sustained by fragile natural systems. The environmentalists' word
"sustainability" applies more broadly. The collateralized debt
obligations, the oil use, the spread of WMDs, the military pretensions of
empire: all are "unsustainable" and crashing at once. Taken together, the
crises add up to a new era of limits, which now are pressing in on all
sides to correct overreaching.

All the crises (but especially those that are endangering the ecosphere)
involve theft by the living from their posterity. It's often said that
revolutions, like the god Saturn, devour their children. We are committing
a slow-motion, cross-generational equivalent of this offense. My
generation, the baby boomers--ominously nicknamed "the boomers"--has been
cannibalizing the future to provision the present. Though we are not
killing our children directly, we are spending their money, eating their
food, cutting down their cherry orchards. Intergenerational justice has
been a subject more fit for academic seminars than for newspaper
headlines. The question has been, What harm are we doing to generations
yet unborn? But the time frame has been shortened and the malign
transactions are now occurring between generations still alive. The
dollars we have spent are coming directly out of our children's paychecks.
The oil we burn is being drawn down from their
reserves. The nuclear weapons we cling to for a dubious "security" will
burn down their cities. The atmosphere we are heating up will scorch
their fields and drown their shorelines. A "new era of responsibility"
must above all mean responsibility to them. If it is true that all the
crises are part of this larger crisis, then the economic crisis may
simply be the means by which the larger adjustment is being set in
motion, in effect dictating a forced march into the sustainable world.

All the crises are characterized by double standards, which everywhere
block the way to solutions. One group of nations, led by the United
States, lays claim to the lion's share of the world's wealth, to an
exclusive right to possess nuclear weapons, to a disproportionate right to
pollute the environment and even to a dominant position in world councils,
while everyone else is expected to accept second-class status. But since
solutions to all the crises must be global to succeed, and global
agreement can only be based on equity, the path to success is cut off.

Finally, all the crises display one more common feature: all have been
based on the wholesale manufacture of delusions. The operative word here
is "bubble." A bubble, in the stock market or anywhere, is a real-world
construct based on fantasies. When the fantasy collapses, the construct
collapses, and people are hurt. Disillusion and tangible harm go together:
as imaginary wealth and power evaporate, so does real wealth and power.
The equity exposed as worthless was always phony, but real people really
lose their jobs. The weapons of mass destruction in the invaded country
were fictitious, but the war and the dying are actual.

The "safety" provided by nuclear arms is waning, if it ever existed, but
the holocaust, when it comes, though fantastical, will be no fantasy. The
"limits on growth" were denied, but the oil reserves didn't get the
message. The "uncertainty" about global warming--cooked up by political
hacks and backed by self-interested energy companies--is fake, but the
Arctic ice is melting anyway.

A New Stance Toward Reality

One day someone will undertake a comprehensive study of how all these
bubbles grew and why they were inflated at the same time. It will be a
story of a crisis of integrity of the institutions at the apex of American
life. It will recount how the largest government, business, military and
media organizations, as if obedient to a single command, began to tell
lies to themselves and others in pursuit of or subservience to wealth and
power. Individual deceivers must arrange their untruths by themselves, by
flat-out conscious lying, self-deception or a combination of the two. Huge
bureaucracies have wider options. Banks, hedge funds, ratings agencies,
regulatory agencies, intelligence services, the White House, the Pentagon
and mainstream news organizations can grind inconvenient truths to dust,
layer by bureaucratic layer, until the convenient lies that had been
wanted all along are presented to the satisfied money- or war-hungry
decision-makers at the top.

The study of these operations will be a story of groupthink; of basic
facts relegated to footnotes; of wishes tweaked into facts; of deepening
secrecy; of complex models, mathematical or ideological, used to
supplant, not illumine, reality; of new offices created to draw false new
conclusions from old facts; of threat inflation; of the sinking careers
of truth-tellers and the rising careers of truth-twisters. It would be
interesting, for instance, to compare the creation of the illusions of
the real estate bubble with the creation of the claim that Saddam Hussein
possessed weapons of mass destruction. In both cases contrary facts were
readily available at the base of the system but were filtered out as the
reports went up the chain. For a somewhat contrasting, top-down model,
the White House method for suppressing the truth about global warming
within government agencies is instructive. In that case, the science was
duly gathered but often squelched at the last minute by political appointees editing the reports.

A concluding chapter of the study will note that the rudiments of a new
stance toward reality began to be articulated. Its motto can be the famous
comment a senior Bush adviser made to writer Ronald Suskind, whom he
belittled as belonging to the "reality-based community," which, the
adviser said, believed that "solutions emerge from your judicious study of
discernible reality." But that was no longer true, for "we're an empire
now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Over at the American
International Group, the recipient of $152.5 billion in federal bailout
funds, then-chief Maurice Greenberg was saying much the same thing in
happier days: "This is never going to get any better than it is today.
We're so big, we're never going to swim against the tide. We are the
tide." In short, the relationship between observation and action had been
reversed. Reality was not the field of operation in which you acted, and
whose limits you must respect; it was, like a play or movie, a scenario to be penned by human authors. Fact
had to adjust to ideology, not the other way around.

Obama, of course, cannot wait for such a study to appear. He must batter
his way out of the various bubbles and lay his hands on what is real
immediately. It will not be easy. His election has done part of the job,
but the mists of illusion still hover over the land. Fantasies of wealth
and power, not to speak of superpower, die hard. Happy hour is more
pleasant than the morning after. For bubble thinking was projected beyond
the deluded institutions to national politics as a whole. The falsehoods
that led to war, the fact-averse ideology that inspired the bid for
empire, the investments based on fictitious ratings and the denial of the
evidence of global warming: none of these grew in a vacuum. They were
supported or tolerated or insufficiently discredited by the media and
other organizations that inform and constitute the mainstream. The credit
and debt booms were national, corporate and personal, symptoms of a nation
living beyond its means at all levels. The facts of global warming, it is true, were increasingly
accepted by the public--but not by the president it put in office, and
there was little appetite for measures, like a gas tax, to cut back
carbon emissions. As global warming intensified, the iconic American
vehicle of the era was the gas-devouring, pseudo-military Hummer--an
imperial auto if there ever was one. The grandiose conceptions of
American power found a ready audience, as reflected in election results.
They linger still as troops shift, with Obama's blessing, from the
unpopular Iraq quagmire to the better accepted Afghanistan quagmire.

In short, the mainstream, like a river that jumps its bed and ravages the
countryside, has overflowed the levees of reality and carried the country
to disaster after disaster in every area of national life: military,
economic and ecological. These depredations have paradoxically led a
groggy public to yearn for the stability that Obama's centrist cabinet
choices seem to promise. But they know--Obama, who denounced the "dead
zone that politics had become," told them in the campaign--that these
appointees had a hand in creating the ills they are now charged with
addressing.

"Reality" has bifurcated in a manner confusing to politicians and citizens
alike. On the one side is political reality, which by definition means
centrist, mainstream opinion. On the other side is the reality of events,
heading in quite a different direction. If Obama makes mainstream choices,
he is called "pragmatic." And it may well be so in political terms, as the
poll results attest. But political pragmatism in current circumstances may
be real folly, as it was on the eve of the Iraq War and in the years of
the finance bubble preceding the crash. Smooth sailing down the middle of
the Niagara River carries you over Niagara Falls. The danger is not that
Obama's move into the mainstream will offend a tribe called "the left" or
his "base" but that by adjusting to a center that is out of touch, he will
fail to address the crises adequately and will lose his effectiveness as
president.

The difference between merely political pragmatism and the real thing is
illustrated by the recently ended career of George Bush. From 2001 until
2006, he and his party dominated politics. Karl Rove's dreams of a
permanent Republican majority looked feasible. The values voters, the
soccer moms, the Reagan Democrats and so forth were all lining up. But
another key "constituency"--one that never appears in any poll result--was
quietly turning against him. It was the constituency of the real. The
adjustable-rate mortgages were heading south, the energy markets were
nonplussed, the warlords of Afghanistan were restive and the skidding
Greenland ice shelf was voting with its feet. These were the votes that
undid him. To paraphrase the old saying, Bush won power but lost the
world. In the short run, the arts of delusion and deception (including
self-deception) can keep politics and reality apart, but in the long run
the two must meet. And then it is politics, not reality, that must adjust. Euripides understood that, too.

Hence Barack Obama's victory on November 4. He must be clear-eyed as well
as brave if he is not to squander it. In this era, political safety can
spell danger, for himself and for the country and world. As he faces the
Himalayan problems of the twenty-first century, he should look on his
stratospheric approval ratings with a wary eye. They could mean that he is
adjusting too much to the rogue mainstream and not adjusting it enough to
the real world. For him putting aside "childish things" means a wide berth
to the dead zone. Doing so will require a toughness, even a ruthlessness,
that has nothing to do with bombing villages in faraway countries. No poll
can tell him what trade balances are going to be or what the people of
Afghanistan or the carbon molecules are going to do, but he would be wise
to let them be his masters. The path of ruling through illusion has been
tried and failed. It is not open to him. He should figure out what's wrong
with America and the world, honestly and directly communicate his findings to the
public, do his best to fix things and then let the results speak for
themselves. It's a very simple prescription--but light-years away from
anything that has been tried in the United States for a very long time.


About Jonathan Schell

Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute
and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale. He is the author of
The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.