PART VII

FINAL SOLUTIONS

Lost Causes and Lasting Consequences

by Hugh M. Lewis

History has taught us a few important lessons. It is relatively easy to trick people into doing what is against their own best interests—all you must do is to lie to them in a consistent and convincing manner. Nazi Germany’s final solution to the Jewish problem was one of the few times in recorded history that a state’s bureaucratic machinery set itself to the single minded purpose of actually annihilating another racially distinct group of people, though the systematic deceit involved was really nothing new. What is frightening was its recentness and its massive scale of intent. Though it was not the first time that one group has destroyed another, it has probably been the worst case of such mass slaughter of human life.

But systematic bureaucratic exclusion of whole groupings of people from even minimal access to resources or to screens of support or to political economic participation within the world system goes on everyday as a matter of business as usual policy. And though it is not direct annihilation, its final consequences are often the same.

One of the lessons learned from the Nuremberg Trials was that knowledge creates responsibility. One could not claim ignorance and look the other way in the perpetration of crimes against humanity. It seems to be a lesson that our world system has forgotten, or neglected to take to heart. What is even more frightening to consider, is that what happened in Nazi Germany could have happened in virtually any modern nation state, even the most democratic and historically most liberal ones, if the ‘wrong’ group of people had gained control. With all our massive bureaucratic machinery in place, knowledge is systematically, routinely obfuscated, responsibility is routinely passed on and ultimately diffused into the oblivion of the System, and, once mobilized, the massive inertia of bureaucracy makes it extremely difficult to reverse or redirect.

The history lesson of the holocaust is that it can very likely happen again, if we are not careful to see who comes to power in the world.

There are many lost causes in the modern world. Pursuing paradise or a developmental utopia on earth is proving to be a lost cause. Saving the ecology of the earth is also proving to be a lost cause. Driving down the fast lane of Southern California’s freeways trying to get ahead in life is also a lost cause—there is always someone faster who is ahead of you. Dressing lavishly on credit for the daily fashion parade and impression management is also a lost cause. No matter how much you spend, there are many more spending more than you, and even more who do not care how much you spend. Getting a higher education in America is proving to be a lost, and expensive, cause. Similarly, pursuing peace on the earth through the escalation of increased destructive force potential, the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, and the mass production of expensive modern military machines, is also a lost cause. History has taught us that lasting peace has never been forthcoming from preparations for waging war. Consuming a limited supply of fossil fuels on earth is proving to be not only a lost cause but a bankrupting dead end in development as well.

There are many things people are doing on a regular, daily basis which, cumulatively, will have lasting consequences for future earth history. Building plastic mountains of disposable diapers is one. Spilling oil into oceans is another. Razing all remaining forests. Laying more reinforced concrete is yet another. Exterminating the few remaining species of wild mammals on earth is yet another. Having more babies is yet another. Watching television instead of reading a book is another. Letting our children watch TV instead of reading a book to them is another.

Casting about for answers, it should be readily obvious that there are indeed few if any ‘final solutions’ to the predicaments which face humankind on earth. The pursuit of progress in the development of the System is one such solution which has been proposed and is widely promoted. Human development is another, alternative, and perhaps more viable solution which nevertheless remains largely unheeded and neglected. Nazi Germany believed it had the Final Solution to all human problems in its eradication of inferior, non-Aryan races of people on earth. Widespread interethnic discrimination, the world over, has been one systematic bureaucratic solution to the problems of development. Scientists will tell you that the only solution is in the progress of Science. Theologians of the world will tell you that the only solution is a religious one—mostly likely their own particular brand. Ecologists will tell you that the solution is the greening of the world and in Gaia. The average Joe and Jane Doe on the street will tell you in a more common sense manner that the solution is in ‘more police protection,’ ‘stopping crime,’ ‘controlling drugs’ or in kicking people on welfare off their arses. Politicians will tell you they have the solution, if only you vote for them, and the President’s solution seems to be in developing mightier military machinery.

As we are running short on time, we must learn to be very careful in everything we do, that we are not pursuing lost causes, doing things which have lasting consequences, and promoting solutions to our problems which may be wrong.

The development of the System has been historically a process of ethno-schismogenesis in which boundaries and differentials have led to competitive drives and development in competition. This has occurred in the Arms race, the Space race, the race to carve up the third world pie. It occurs in market competition between businesses, leading to new and better strategies. It seems that national mobilization and focus in many countries depends upon this kind of productive ethno-schismogenesis by the competitive presence of another ‘enemy’ nation.

Such ethno-schismogenesis has conferred upon the history of such patterning of development a kind of evolutionary flavor and sense of inevitability of its progress. But it has also led to the recurrence of conflict and to the breaking down of the international relations which maintain the System.

There is a fundamental social psychology about such ethno-schismogenesis that entails certain characteristic consequences to its developmental cycle. It entails that people of the out group become derogated as something less than fully human, or if human, then as something fundamentally different, and inferior, than the in group. It also entails a kind of fascist solidarity of the in group which can turn into some forms of social hysteria and which can be easily manipulated and directed.

There is a particular blindness about the ethno-schismogenic development if the system that means that it stumbles somewhat haphazardly down its pathways. Perhaps it is a necessary blindness—the kind of Nietzschian illusion that is the prerequisite to social action. It is not the same kind of blindness which characterizes natural biological evolution, as it is in a sense a self imposed and self-reinforcing blindness while evolutionary myopia is innate and does not need to be self reinforcing. Selection will insure removal of species which reach their own dead ends.

The kind of blindness characteristic of the ethno-schismogenesis of development is that we must see one another and ultimately ourselves, as something other than what we really are—as something less or more than fully, naturally human. It requires that we superimpose illusions of super humanness upon ourselves and our system, and dehumanize other’s and their systems.

The blindness of ethno-schismogenesis requires that nonbeing and becoming be reinforced and that the subjectivity and naturalness of beingness in the world be consistently denied. It requires that we superimpose upon the world, in the name of development, the system, our way of life, a kind of moral imperative and normative injunction as a model or paradigm for the Nonbeing and becoming of the entire world, for all of humanity.

The tragedy of the ideology of ethno-schismogenesis is that in the final analysis the development of the System is a totally inhuman one. And from the standpoint of human development, mostly unnecessary.

Anthropology can and ought to make a lasting contribution to the realistic understanding of where the development of recent earth history is leading us. Anthropology can contribute the kind of understanding that Nietzsche claimed killed social action, ‘for action requires the veil of illusion.’ Unmasking the monster of development and the system. We can see that it is not a strange, impersonal god, but that it has an all too human face. The proper point of departure for a development oriented Anthropology is not the systemic development of global civilization, but the problem of human development within the transforming environments of global civilization. Such an understanding requires that anthropology no longer be so much a system’s science or a synchronic, structure oriented analysis, but that it become preeminently and historical, and culture historical science that means that we must also be dealing with an irreducible human science. To see the development of civilization as an extension of natural evolutionary process is to mistake the general principles and lessons of human history with the laws and constraints of selection governing natural history, and in the process to implicitly ignore and even deny the arbitrariness, customariness, ideology and unpredictable consequences which characterize historical changes—to ignore the human contribution to the making of this history, and ultimately, to deny humanness of historical realities altogether. It does not need to be reiterated that such system oriented, law searching, natural scientific and paradigmatic anthropologies are tethered to the structure and service of the system within their own mode of information promotes and promulgates.

The crises of identity and definition which anthropology has been undergoing has in large part been a reflection of the larger world crises of change and history which it is internalizing and coming to be more and more reflective of. It is a consequence of its own failure to embrace the more human oriented aspects of recent earth history—as a matter of human development, and thus, in its failure to make any lasting contribution to the illusion-deflating understanding of the realities of this history, it instead becomes blindly crippled and susceptible to the effects of this illusion.

Human history and civilization is running up against both internal and external constraints—what might be described as social/environmental circumscription. The System, given the finite delimitation of its basis for development, is reaching the zenith of its self organizing criticality. The System is being forced into a double bind in which, in its extreme hyper-development, must further develop in order to maintain its own Systemic order in the World. It must continue to create ways to push back or circumvent the constraints to its development, but in the process, it must also further augment the constraining effects of those limitations.

We have stepped outside of nature’s evolutionary fold, and in the success of our development we have virtually brought evolutionary process to a standstill on earth. But evolutionary clocks are ticking away within us as well as around us in our earthbound environments. We cannot escape the inexorable unwinding of this natural clockwork. Evolution is rebounding upon our development not only around us, but also through us, in our own problem of human over population.

It is working through other ways to further stress and constrain our systemic development. As our development is leading to inexorable Ecocide if the earth, we are inadvertently and blindly destroying with our technological development the very foundation for life on earth, our own included. The social structure of the system is becoming historically transformed in unforeseeable directions, in spite of what or where we expect or wish it would go. It is leading to increased differentials in resource acquisition and availability and in greater social inequality in the process of development. Old identities are suffering the shock of the new as structural realignments necessitate psycho social realignments.

Further systemic development is running up against its own human horizon, as the stresses and strains and tensions of its super criticality become focused more and more upon the role and position, and tolerance of the individual within the system. Further development is leading down the road to human de-development, but in this effect, the system exhausts itself at its own human horizon. It cannot continue without itself becoming realigned and reoriented in a more human way. This may result in further, deeper, ethno-schismogenesis that sunders the system into more than one part, into one that is more extensive and human oriented and one which remains rooted to the intensive development of the core, and the system oriented. It is possible that evolutionary process could be inaugurated in the impending ‘Dark Ages’ of human de-development of Civilization, and that a new and different kind of human being may emerge from the ashes of the old.

Overpopulation, over development, ecocide, evolutionary, all will have unintended and unexpected consequences and side effects for the future development of both humankind and its system. The blindness of our progressive pursuit of systemic development has always been a history of unintended consequence. But it is the consequences of the blindness and myopia of our systemic development which we will have to live with in the long run, whether this is a radioactive pollution with a fifty thousand year half life, no ozone layer, no natural primeval forests, no polar ice caps, no wildlife, no natural ecology, and no more mineral resources or fossil fuels.

The paradox of the alternative pursuit of human development is that from the structural standpoint of political economy, it is relatively inexpensive and easy to pursue. It does not have the long term dangers which are inherent in the ecocidal side effects of systemic development, and it eventuates in the long term improvements of human quality of life and greater relative equality. Its paradox is also that it leads to the development of vision, instead of blindness, and of understanding, rather than delusion.

We have a final choice to make in our determination of our own history on earth. We can continue to pursue systemic development at the cost of human de-development or instead choose the alternative course of switching to human development at the necessary price of systemic de-development. This is the lesson of our historical anthropology and anthropological history.