When considering the implications of the Gulf oil spill disaster there is the feeling that in this episode lies embedded the truth about human existence on our planet.
While Naomi Klein concentrates on the attitudes we have to the 'blood of the earth' rent open by the evisceration of her womb Klein's meditation does not encompass the extent of the social forces to which we are all subject and that can be seen in mass group behaviour.
While the earth exudes her blood, millions of barrels of oil from beneath four tons per square inch at the ocean floor, it defies every human evasion to sweep ashore poison and devastate.
Naomi Klein calls this hubris, we the modern Canute.
The language of those who have some apparent power is just to mollify. Few believe them, nor the billions that will be spent. Where does this leave us, though?
Like all crises this has been predicted and has been a long time in the making. That is largely the problem. We are walking forwards quite knowingly.
What is it that we know?
That containing forces being dealt with, the mass of complexity, are unequalled by the mechanisms of thought and activity we deploy against them.
This is where I differ from Klein. The lesson taught by the U'wa people suggests our technocratic attitude is hubristic however, very often, for one level of problem there is another level of solution.
When I experience a train as gliding gracefully into a station while my fellow passenger points out the huge weight of steel cannot be graceful, neither alternative description stop us from using the trains.
We are willing and content consumers of our technology as is. What is actually at stake is the elemental forces of the human population, our one time tribe, with its will to life.
From this perspective both Tony Hayward and President Obama fairly represent us. Though both parties are hardly credible, neither are we.
Except that our credibility comes from our will to life.
We know that we depend on that oil. No matter that this tranche is accompanied by particularly egregious folly as it bursts forth from underneath the ocean.
To concentrate on the folly is only to suppose that we might steer a more sensible path in future. But there isn't a more sensible path.
This is the dreadful truth that Mother Earth is telling us.
The damage to these human lives will be amortized across other lives, the damage to wild life and beaches across other populations and their beaches.
While we see the life ebb away, step by painful step obliterated by the inexorable entropy of our anti-pattern, we know that it is we who are being amortized across that huge swathe of humanity yet to come.
The life we complain is being stolen from us has been measured and bequeathed to those that will replace us in an actuarial equation.
This actuarial contract states "While some of you have had it rough others have had it smooth, but look, the numbers will not diminish, they will increase, and then it will be those others, the you of the future, who, no longer subject to the rough, will have it smooth instead. This is your actuarial bargain."
The very meaning of heaven is the posterity of human kind.
An equation that transfixes us with the notion of the "you of the future".
Human progeny that belong to no one and to everyone and are as inevitable in their increase as their lives will be a travail of increasing pain in a diminished world.
We have a will to survive, it is so huge that not only are there the existing tensions between us, but we willingly defer to the future generations our portion in an imaginary process with the impetus of a crashing wave.
How should we respond? Tear these illusions from our eyes. Rend ourselves sensible to the consequences of our actions. We cannot.
Ignoring all the evidence that for future generations to have an improved life there will have to be far fewer of us, is a process that we would have to actively engage in now.
But we know that we are going to choose the path of greater cruelty. The will to life emerges from deep beneath our own interior ocean, and as it does it seeps out a mixture of intense cruelty honed over millennia that aid us in the perennial battle to survive. We cannot have one without the other, and no funnel can contain it nor its devastating self destructive power as it wends its random, arbitrary path to the farthest shore of the future.
Resources
Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world, Naomi Klein, The Guardian, Saturday 19 June 2010