Category: Politics

The Denial of Blackness

Blackness is disruptive, appearing from beyond the sharply codified ‘civilized’ landscape, arising from the relational, the tribal, re-enacting the alchemy of kinship, the recovery of natural authority, the intuitive recapitulation of one’s source, a perpetual invitation to and reminder of the inherent precarity of life.

Race is such a raw topic in America (and elsewhere) that I might well question what I, a white person, imagine I’m doing writing about race. I have no authority to be doing this, neither personal nor academic. But I’m not really intending to write about race. I’m regarding blackness as a construct. I am noticing an arrangement of ideas around what blackness symbolizes, to find meaning in that arrangement that reaches beyond race and intra-acts with mass consciousness. 

Small (b) blackness has been characterized by Bayo Akomolafe as a quality of being, as a metaphor beyond the constraint of racial identity. In the most general sense, blackness emerges as a statement about culture and history in a world—what we call Modernity, or if you prefer, late-stage capitalism—which itself is increasingly untethered to either history or culture. blackness is a quality of presence, consciously and unapologetically bringing history into the moment as a way of making meaning, making visible its intrinsic garments. In that sense, blackness is independent of superficialities like pigmentation. It’s an implication of the unexpected, an embodiment greater than physical dimensions. It is the language of uprising, a voice of the whole heart. It arises from instinctual guidance rather than the inertia of mass culture. It’s an expression of wholeness beyond the atomization and categorizations of modernity. It’s the fugitive self, the unchained, the unbowed, uncolonized by modern convention.

blackness is a mark of independence, whether momentary or perpetual. It is disruptive, appearing from somewhere beyond the codified ‘civilized’ landscape, arising from the relational, the tribal, re-enacting the alchemy of kinship, the recovery of natural authority, the intuitive recapitulation of one’s connection to an unregulated past, a perpetual invitation to and reminder of the inherent precarity of life. blackness is an escape, a temporary reprieve, however brief, from the Modern Plantation; it is also a recovery of something rapidly receding from human memory. 

blackness is not owned solely by Black people. It may be embodied by anyone, and its enactments are not trivial. As an elementary example, it’s Colin Kaepernick kneeling (at the sideline) and it’s Eminem kneeling (at the Super Bowl). It’s disturbing, enlivening, seductive, anarchic, and destabilizing. Its implications reside in hidden capacities, in the molecular algorithms of traits, inherited wisdom, communal practice, shamanic ritual borrowed from the bones of the more-than-human, in whatever remains of traditional cultures everywhere. It threatens to redefine self, family, social responsibility, community, and economy. It’s definitely an affront to the State. Most of all, it’s a crack, breaking through the cultural obscuration of existential alignments.

In the conquest of North America, settlers, refugees, religious extremists, and revolutionaries escaping monarchic Europe brought their treasured ethics with them. The entire project of Christianity since its origins had been the transformation of the primary spiritual relationships sustaining every culture it encountered.  Instead of relying on one’s horizontal and historical bonds with land, gods, tribal practices, and pagan customs, the unconverted were called to discard all of that and replace it with a vertical relationship to a single omniscient authority. And if they refused, they invited extermination.

Christian whiteness is built on a limited foundation of sacred rules and structures supporting, from an animist perspective, a narrow definition of God, to the exclusion of all other possible sources or views. Its relationship to the irrational, the lustful, the profane, the un-christened disorder of a complex, tangled and uncontrollable world is the essence of its original denial of blackness. blackness strikes fear in the heart of the modern Crusader. No wonder Christianity is obsessed with missionary zeal.

The morality of the Christian compendium of rules, aligned with capitalist interest, requires incremental repression and restriction. The denial must always be reinforced in ever more confining ways, at increasing cost, to manage spontaneous stirrings or any unbridled celebration of what institutional Christianity might regard as the ultimate threat—the discovery of divinity in everything, all the time. In this light, Christianity, for centuries and especially as it came to America, was always a radical departure from the typical inclusion of unseen forces, the witness of animal, of stone and sky, of forest and river in the cosmology of tribal cultures. blackness is a force of nature. If we do not know it, we cannot love it.  Resisting its resonant freedom relegates us to a life compacted in purgatory, neither fully arriving at the new nor being able to return to the old.

Europeans and white slavers from North America also brought their bias with them. It wasn’t on social or political grounds that slavery was undertaken. It was mercantilism supported by a religious certainty that any culture or people relying on anything other than the promise of eternal salvation could never be worthy of equality or the abundant promise of the New World. Even now, American religious extremists are still embedded in the belief that America was originally a religious endeavor in search of unimpeded freedom and that even democracy itself was sourced in religious principles, never mind what the Constitution or its framers might say. For them, church and state could never truly be separate, and some peoples are marked by God to remain eternally superior. Conversion can never even truly erase their primal nature. To Rome, conferring Roman citizenship to conquered barbarians of the North could never change their intrinsic identity. It only changed their allegiance.

The shadow of racism was never solely an issue of color; it’s an institutionalized denial of the pagan Other, the utter refusal to regard any vestige of social and spiritual structures of indigeneity worthy of equal regard.  And even after 400 years, Black people in America can never totally outgrow their roots even if they aren’t exactly familiar with them. They cannot live their way to authentic equality because blackness is unforgivable. Even behind the appearance of total assimilation, they are viewed, along with other ethnicities, Jews, Asians, and Native Americans, by many white people as beyond assimilation—beyond homogenization. 

Racism is much more than a denial of the dark recess of one’s own being. The purpose of structures and elaborations, both the subtle and obviously brutal controls, the hierarchies of the State, the elimination of Black history is to preserve racist preferences, to protect whiteness from any direct experience or confrontation with the Other. Unapologetic, full throated, fully empowered blackness today is the undoing of white hegemony. The more so it becomes, the greater the threat it poses to the privilege of white supremacy and the greater the violence employed to tame it.  

Globalization has been the project of the West for much longer than the appearance of neoliberal economics. Wherever it goes, cultures are undermined and slowly dislodged from their indigenous foundations, the ancestral, historical, cultural, and spiritual anchors that sustained them, to be discarded in favor of the religion of the market. Yes, globalization is a religion. blackness carries an intrinsic challenge to its narrowly defined cosmology. It implicates a receding past and a present increasingly beholden to the techno-driven bureaucracies and efficiencies of modernity. blackness can be an electric charge that shakes whiteness out of its delirium, its narrow view, its privilege, and complacency. blackness is a call to connect with the subliminal, the repressed, denied, and buried pre-colonial common human heritage. Its power lies in drought-resistant derangement, in its disregard for the ceremonies of exclusion, the protocols of inequality.

blackness is messy, uncontrollable, uncouth and…in opposition to the dominant ethic of the time, irrational. blackness is the paradoxical, unruly, weedy, muddy, and unpredictable ongoing-ness of person-making. It is the intergenerational transmission of rules from the inside out, from the ground up. It’s the inversion of Artificial Intelligence. It’s the continuous shedding of the memory of chains, defying the relentless marketing of the new ‘freedom,’ the pseudo-individualistic human whose authenticity is quietly digested by the modern anaconda, The Machine. And at the same time, blackness, wherever it manifests, recalls and breaks through the protocols of state-defined ‘freedom.’

blackness will always demand to be known, even if it is not speaking. It cannot be categorized. It resides in irrepressible social choreographies. It can be denied. It can be sequestered, controlled, or brutalized, but it will not die. Blockades of rules and regulation can be constructed to thwart it, silence it or to put it ‘in its place.’ But blackness will eventually make itself known because it is somewhere deep in all of us. It is the crouching jaguar biding its time, a savage lesson to the big-game white hunter, to supremacy in any form, to whomever may seek its submission.

blackness is in everyone’s ancestry. The catechism of the mainstream co-opting and monetizing the unconventional is a denial of ancestry, a denial of polyamorous culture for the sake of the sterile and the puritanical. The monomaniacal adherence to monogamy, monotheism, monoculture, monopoly, to a monolithic, monochromatic, and mono-typical digital world is the ultimate objective, a utopian flatland, the Great Reset, the ideal of the Metaverse, the erasure of culture, not simply the ultimate dominance of Western modernity, but the complete structural capture and eradication of blackness.

 

Growth

The pursuit of growth, the acquisition of more, being determined to grow the ‘success’ of one’s life, whether driven by a sense of inadequacy or realizing most of one’s life is now in the past, chasing certainties in ever more precarious ways, is to never grow old, to remain a prisoner of the cultural definition of success and failure. 

Modern culture is entranced with growth. It’s an addiction that’s completely out of control even though we know the consequences are washing over us like the building tsunami that they are. The growth imperative saturates not only economics and our material aspirations, but also spirituality. 

The sanctity of growth is so pervasive that panic ensues when growth slows down, and especially when growth goes negative. I can’t help noticing my personal inclinations implicated here as well, how devoted I am in my later years to what I name as growth, to whom I can yet be, the deepening of perspective, spiritual comfort, a continuous expansion into an evolving comprehension of life and doing the personal work of becoming worthy of the attribution of human. It’s a combination of learning, knowing, faith and loosely held certainties. Most of all, it’s become an ongoing inquiry into the mysteries of time, duration, the currency of living, aging, and death.

What’s also required in the personal growth space is uncertainty, not only a realization of what little is known, but an accommodation to what little I personally know and how I cling to what I claim to know. It’s a realization that the comfort of certainty, though always appealing, is a false security and that a willingness to continuously parse threads of belief and knowing are the primary components of a sustained orientation to openness. As if I must always leave room in the attic for something new, while also continuously choosing among the certainties I have for what can be re-examined or discarded. And besides, if I was to use the Mahayana as a guiding philosophy, much of what I name as “personal” growth is actually an excavation of our true nature, a mining project to unearth our innermost pristine, indestructible nature.

In the culture at large, a critical corollary of continuous growth is certainty. The culture is steeped in certainty, perpetually reinforcing its mythologies as certainties, hardening now into hyper-polarized camps. Whenever that certainty is threatened, either by scientific data, human experience, faith or religious belief, the response is invariably to arrogantly re-assert the inviolability of the primary mission of culture, the prevailing Story, even though that very certainty is destroying us.    

All around us, there is also the multi-billion-dollar enterprise in the past 50 years, what we know as the Personal Growth Industry. And here, as in the culture at large, are the same elements of the acquisitive orientation. More is better. Stephen Jenkinson and Paul Kingsnorth have each written about the deeply entrenched and unquenchable desire for more. The capitalist impulse is widely present in the monetization of the inner frontiers as in any other sector. And even though the premises of the industry are less certain, there is inherent danger in becoming entrenched in certainties about something as uncertain, as uncharted, as the human psyche. This pitfall is just as dangerous in the world of human improvement as in any other.

Economic growth has always been a form of taking, but has only recently become accumulation for its own sake. The identical character applied to inner journeys is what Chogyam Trungpa coined as spiritual materialism. Exploring at the edges of our inner wilderness is where we are truly tested. We can fall into the same trap of arrogance, applying ever more appealing rationalizations of the mysteries of life for the sake of ego gratification, and if one is sufficiently enterprising, monetize the entire experience as if it’s the most natural exercise one could imagine. This is a form of enclosure, a utilitarian, albeit satisfying, capture of our inner commons in parallel to what we see in the physical commons. This materialist model does penetrate the personal growth industry and some of the results are about as appealing as a strip mall. Or we can approach that wilderness with humility, care and patience, relying on time-tested spiritual sciences. There is immense benefit in shedding light into dark corners, exploring motivations, unconscious beliefs and hidden certainties that cause untold suffering and are driving us to the abyss. 

I’m wondering if how we approach growth is related to how we approach death. The pursuit of growth, the acquisition of more, being determined to grow the ‘success’ of one’s life, to extend one’s relevance, being driven by a sense of inadequacy, or realizing most of one’s life is now in the past, chasing certainties in ever more precarious ways, is to never grow old, to remain a prisoner of the cultural definition of success and failure.  Can the religion of personal and spiritual growth become just another means of paving our own paradise? Yes it can. What are we, as an aging population, not seeing as we pick through the vast buffet of offerings, pursuing the life-extending benefits of personal growth practices while mortality whispers in our ears? Is it that we must relinquish any attachment to growth or that there is nothing aggrandizing about chasing youth at the expense of living in the present?

The theory of steady state economic activity represents death to any capitalist, and to all but a tiny coterie of economists. The catechism “grow or die” demands there be no limits, that the idea of limits violates one of the core myths of humanity—that it is our destiny to continue our ascent to universal abundance, leisure and harmony, i.e. the platonic ideal, the Metaverse, disconnected from either history or nature. Implicit to that ideology is that endings do not occur. Limits are anathema. Have you noticed how many science-fiction depictions of an idyllic future include some form of victory over death? Conquering the wilderness is our destiny. Obstacles are temporary setbacks to be transformed into opportunities to transcend limits, to re-make ourselves and thus continue to fuel the myth. 

Limits are for Luddites, who were, after all, the original adherents to the ideology of steady-state economics. And of course, they were vilified then and continue to be the symbol of ignorant backwardness in the face of anything new, especially the ideology, brought to us by our technology overlords, that everything new is good, including new methods of social control, new weapons or even genetic experimentation. Growth is always better. Limits are for suckers.

Death, being an undeniable and inevitable limit, becomes a failure requiring maximum effort to push it off-stage. The slowing of growth causes gnashing of teeth among mainstream economists, which are all tied to the market, which lives and dies at the altar of growth and the outsourcing of death. And even knowing we are all on the way to death cannot fully cleanse the failure from it. We’re always trying to overcome the impending final failure. We’re trying to grow out of it. Failing to live forever is somewhat assuaged by demonstrating how successful we are at fulfilling our desires for more, by amassing wealth for its own sake. He who dies with the most toys, wins. Accepting failure is to accept the end of growth. 

Enlightenment is the spiritual ideal toward which we ‘grow’. The actual attainment of enlightenment, however unlikely, is depicted as a shedding more than an accumulation. Even so, the ideal symbolizes the end of growth, the end of time, and even the end of death. In this time, to accept failure and the end of growth would be widely regarded as a diminishment. Yet it could also be seen as its own deepening into one’s sacred time, into the truth of one’s life, becoming a model of the acceptance of death and failure as operating principles of life. To fully accept the reality of limits and the life-giving property of uncertainty is to let go of the ethics of More, to transform the profane taking for its own sake into an ethic of giving for its own sake. To deepen into our age, to accept limits, regardless of chronological age, regardless of whether the culture deems that age to be ‘young’ or ‘old,’ is to enter the all-too-rare space of what Stephen Jenkinson would call becoming an elder, becoming an ancestor, he says, worth claiming.

Because it does not retreat from the passage of time and can look with an unflinching gaze at both failure and success, standing on holy ground between the two, elderhood conveys an honest perspective about growth, failure, human agency, limits, and death.

Transraciality

The decolonized body, the intrinsic expression of core relationship & connection, the energetic body of creative awareness, that metabolizes experience continuously without grasping or regret or shame, the expressive body of subjective integrity, is the transracial body.

Anyone taking a serious look at one’s own attitudes about race these days is bound to get into some uncomfortable territory. It’s often said that looking at privilege is not enough or maybe looking at history is not enough. But however we go, we will quickly discover that the story widens far beyond our initial impressions or personal experience. The previous post was a suggestion that a white body is much more than skin deep. Privilege and bias are carried deeply in our ontogenetics, our body imagery, development and movement, the fine tuning of our limbic systems, our internal radar where potential threats and opportunities are processed.

Whiteness isn’t likely to think it needs emancipation from privilege or supremacy any time soon. What we are seeing now is a full-throated backlash against the dismantling of systems of oppression which are essentially class-based. Racist tropes are being used to preserve them. So, on one hand, we can say whiteness is already ‘free’ in some respects while being simultaneously diverted from seeing the class structure of its own oppression. True emancipation must mean emancipation for all, but its connection with race is undeniable. Maybe liberation can be interpreted to indicate the collective beyond racial distinction. Inasmuch as there is a white body, a colonized body, a body conforming to ideology as much as biology, regardless of race/ethnicity, and if we are ready to acknowledge the full implications of it, then liberation is as good a word as any to refer to the deconstruction of systemic oppression, racial or otherwise.

The forces opposing the dismantling of oppression like to say the future of Western Civilization is in the balance, as if that defense overrides any other consideration. I tend to agree. And that’s precisely why we must persist in grinding away at the machinery of narratives, epistemologies and exclusionary tropes of modernity, separating the trash from the recyclable, as it were, the propaganda from the truth. We do that by examining the wide and deep effects of policies, ideologies, social practices. That examination process is what’s being called ‘woke.’ and of course it’s the agents of oppression that hold that term to ridicule.

What’s at stake in this conflict is who gets to decide the nature of truth. How do we avoid following the cycles of the past, ensuring our own collapse on an unprecedented, and possibly terminal, scale? I don’t intend to digress into the origins of Western civilization, but I am reminded that the philosophies, governance, social and mercantile structures of Western Civilization did arise at the edges of desert, spreading to Greece, Rome, northward and and westward from there.

Western (white) thought has brought us modernity, capitalism, systemic exploitation, racism on a global scale, religious oppression, the destruction of the natural world, climate change and is now doubling down on all of it. Among the many effects climate change brings us is the loss of arable land due to desertification as well as what are now also called deserts of the ocean, barren areas of increasing size no longer sustaining thriving ecologies. Dismantling racism is among the reallocation of resources we must accomplish, reclaiming the cognitive desert, before (western) civilization returns to its literal origin.

I previously suggested the cultured body, the colonized body is the objective view, entirely dependent on sustaining the separation of subject and object, perpetuating the Other as a means of cementing identity. Identity is a key feature of the ‘objectivity’ of the colonized body. And to the extent that we continue to think and act according to a reified ‘objective’ view, we sustain our separation from the world as a living, entirely integral, continuously emergent matrix of which we are a (small but powerful) part. As a sustaining principle of the objective view, identity has run its course. I might even say identity, particularly including but not at all limited to white identity, is now an obstacle to our continued survival.

The decolonized body, the intrinsic expression of core relationship/connection, the energetic body of creative awareness, the body that re-members, that metabolizes experience continuously, spontaneously, without grasping or regret or shame, the expressive body of subjective integrity, is the transracial body. This is not the multi-racial body, but something else. The transracial body is a matter of consciousness, not identity, and also not the property of any single race, ethnicity or ideology. The transracial body, a term offered by Bayo Akomolafe, is also not an activist. Transracial awareness, if it can be connected to Liz Koch’s core awareness, is not about doing. It’s also not even really about belonging in the sense it is normally meant.

Unless we are quite clear, the very word ‘belonging’ conjures a binary, defining boundaries, or easily slips into grasping at some distinction between us and them. We ask, to what do we belong? If we see the path as one of returning to subjectivity, then everything, the inanimate, the animate, events, people, thoughts, is us and we are all actors within us no matter what we do or who we are. In this sense, using the word belonging can become an intrinsically flawed linguistic trap. Cultivating the subjective view becomes the portal to the transracial view, collective liberation, belonging to the whole. 

Transracial awareness is not even really about being, not in any fixed sense. But it is about being-with, becoming-with. When we hear indigenous leaders speak, or anyone speaking from the ground of ancient wisdom, when the words resonate somewhere within us other than the thinking mind, when they strike us in the heart or at a level of deep and quiet intuition that still recognizes the truth, when it feels as though the words open up the very earth, it’s because they speak from the subjective view, from a deep and imperturbable (albeit troubled) love as well as an immense heartbreak. Such a person is not an activist in the conventional sense. The indigenous voice, the transracial voice is not the voice of activism as we generally know it. I wouldn’t even say the transracial voice, or the indigenous voice is post-activist in the sense that it is not occupied in opposition to something or someone Out There. 

The indigenous/transracial speaker is not a messenger. They are the message. The transracial voice, the voice of core awareness, is not a teacher or a communicator in any conventional sense. They are the teaching. But those of us who still see the world from the objective view, who still struggle with issues like helplessness, shame, guilt or solidarity, who seek ways to interrupt and dismantle the systemic inertia, those for whom the low-hanging fruit of self-comforting gestures feel discordant, stale and superficial, those of us who have not fully recovered from being captured, conditioned and colonized into objectivity, may regard our recovery as emergence into post-activism. 

The recovery of core awareness and emergence into transracial awareness is accessible to anyone. It is surely more difficult for some than for others to realize, but we don’t have to know our personal lineage or commune with an ancestral group to find it. There may well be right times for allyship or solidarity as we most often think of them. But from the recovery of intrinsic integrity arises an inherent solidarity in the form of recognition beyond color, beyond identity, a resonance with shared reality, shared trauma and shared power. It’s not a tribal thing. It’s a human thing. And your forebears may not have had it. But if they did, or however you discover your own version, the linkage is timeless, unbound by any territory, tribe or cosmology. It is always with us, albeit dormant, because it is our intrinsic nature. It is our birthright. It is what we are indebted to. It is the true seat of agency in this confused and corrupted world. 

What is a White Body?

Just as external ecologies have been transformed, disrupted, or wiped out altogether, our internal ecologies have been tamed, altered and subjugated to conform to ideology (and the dominant narrative) rather than biology.

Most of the conversation (if we could even call it that) about race in America centers on identity, the most superficial designation. Then we talk about whiteness and blackness, imagining characteristics of those identities, drawing ever finer distinctions between ethnicities, behaviors, modes of thought, rituals, treating them as if they’re intrinsic–ontogenetic. When we speak of yet another proposition– white bodies– the conversation hardly ever touches the truth. Whiteness is a construct, nothing quite as fixed as it seems. We’re talking about conditioned bodies, bodies manufactured by culture. 

Part of what white-skinned people have been conditioned to become–at least in America and most likely everywhere else– starting more than a handful of centuries ago, along with scientific materialism and the supremacy of epistemology over ontogenetics, relies on subjugating intrinsic wildness. Just as external ecologies have been transformed, disrupted, or wiped out altogether, our internal ecologies have been tamed, altered and subjugated to conform to ideology rather than biology. Manifesting whiteness in the world, the expression of whiteness, has become, with the rise of colonialism, capitalism and Puritanical Protestantism, the exercise of that supremacy over every form of wilderness, including land, people and especially the untamed within. Whiteness is trained since birth to be the face of modernity in that body, as a body. It’s almost entirely unconscious because we have so few (and rapidly disappearing) alternative models. 

By inference, there is also a corresponding Black body, not necessarily the intrinsic Black body or the indigenous body, but the black and white bodies undergoing perpetual remodeling by the culture, the culture whose structures and hierarchies of authority and validity seek a monoculture of conformity to the essential structure of the slave ship and the plantation.

White skinned bodies have been cultured by modernity to hold, move, express or deny themselves in particular ways, forging psycho-emotional armor, all of it entangling the prevailing definitions of authenticity, dominance and power relations, somatizing the source code, if you will, defining the internal relations, rationalizations and compartmentalization necessary to maintain the social structure. Likewise, black (and other ethnic) bodies are also cultured to aspire to that model of whiteness, entrained to a different source code (locking them outside the ramparts of white supremacy and privilege) to disconnect and so far as possible immunize themselves from the legacy of their own trauma (in the same ways white-skinned people are conditioned to immunize themselves from the trauma of racism and genocide), the experience of forced submission and every possible form of loss, passed down through many generations—to aspire to transcendence and at the same time to internalize the submission.

This is the systemic duplicity of whiteness that continues to be visited upon non-white people (with police as the enforcement arm), sustaining the presumption to define and hold an aspirational standard which is then, by a thousand cuts, rendered unattainable. In psychology this would be the classical definition of schizogenesis. The cultured body, regardless of color, conforms to different social expectations, behaviors, responses, modes of expression, movements, postures and even patterns of attention to make its way in the world. The character of that entire assemblage is conditioned in a multitude of subtle and not so subtle ways in schools, the workplace, by the institutions of governance, in the hallways, C-suites and interior spaces that define law, public character and acceptable social behavior. 

Liz Koch describes the cultured body (regardless of race) as the balletic pose, the military stance or, I might add, the hyper-tensive image of the tightly wound gym rat whose abdominals scream defensive aggression, as the body modeling power over. An image that springs to mind is all the CEOs of the oil majors standing side by side with their right hands raised as they take an oath before testifying to Congress (this week!), the disembodiment of the tucked-in gut, insulated by the protective paunch, the shallow breathing, the clenched jaw and the taut pelvic floor. We know they’re going to lie. They know they’re going to lie. And they fully expect to get away with it, just as they have for decades. There will not be an ounce of authenticity to it. That’s patriarchy. That’s whiteness. 

Along the way, those expectations and behaviors become conditioned in the flesh, even from childhood, as boys are taught to ‘be a man’ and girls are subtly steered away from authentic expression. These patterns become embedded in the character and communication within the physical structure itself. They are reflected in the windings and asymmetries of physiology and movement. The history is in the flesh, in neuro-muscular patterns, conditioned sensitivities and in the storms of neuro-transmitter release. The body tells the tale. The body speaks its mind. We are consciousness as structure. These patterns form the corral of embodied modernity, the colonized body expressing and perpetuating itself in qualitative patterns of attention, what we notice, the creeping (and creepy) narcissism of what we feel and what we do with all of it. 

There’s a great deal I agree with about Liz Koch’s understanding of whiteness in the body, but I think the historical context could be expanded, going back to the 15th-16th centuries or even earlier: the extreme greed cloaked in religiosity, Church-sanctioned genocide for the glory of God’s Kingdom, the integral nature of capitalism, racism and the Church. The denial of the flesh and mostly the denial of the feminine, the ascent of rationality, the glorification of abstract thought, intellect, and the separation from nature are all included. The roots of whiteness run deep, even into the conformities of the microbiome, what we regard as legitimate sources of knowledge, how we understand human development, what we define as sanity. They also run deeply into the flesh, into our bones, our diverted, co-opted and contorted values entrained and reified by the state, fueling the disparities and polarities of our time, now even threatening our very fertility. 

Chimerica

In America, the chimera is no longer a quiescent aberration, a deep and nagging sense of unfulfilled ideals weighing down every initiative attempting to bring those ideals closer to reality. America has become the chimera to its people, to other nations, to the planet itself.

The chimera is a mythical creature depicted in dozens of ancient cultures. It typically is a combination of characteristics of multiple animals, like a scorpion’s tail with a porcupine’s dangerous quills–and maybe bat wings. It could be part eagle, part leopard or a multi-headed beast as described in the Book of Revelations. It might be combination lion and goat or a fire-breathing dragon with a snake’s head at the end of its tail. It might even have tentacles like an octopus. The mythological horse, Pegasus, one of the most widely known mythic creatures, ridden by Bellerephon, battled and defeated a chimera. The Buddhist garuda is a chimera.

The point is, they are all fantastic, dazzling, imaginative and implausible. And scary. They are monsters, wild, contradictory in their visual character and confounding in their implications. Are they wise or dangerous? What is the message they bring with their presence? Do they bring any comfort? Is their sole purpose to comfort the afflicted or–you know, like journalists doing their jobs, afflict the comfortable? Is there any shred of benevolence in them or is their only function to shock and confuse us, to remind us of the depth, complexity and the power of the unseen, the omnipresent and occasionally explosive contradictions humans carry: our capacity for strength, perseverance and nobility, courage and righteousness contrasted with bursts of violence in all its many forms, always carrying a subliminal threat of a poisonous sting, or our capacity for monstrous hypocrisy and fraud?

Since America is turning so many different faces to the world simultaneously, reflecting the conflicts raging within, exhibiting the sharp divisions, the social and economic decline, the descent into warring spasms of rhetorical gas, rising brinksmanship, burning its way through saplings of truth on the forest floor, scorching its way through the previously armored but suddenly vulnerable old-growth giants of science and evidence-based reality, snapping the stinging tail of backlash, transforming social discourse into a cacophony of Babel, America is now a chimera. In America, the chimera is no longer a quiescent aberration, a deep and nagging sense of unfulfilled ideals weighing down every initiative attempting to bring those ideals closer to reality. America has become the chimera to its people, to other nations, to the planet itself. Which of its animistic tendencies and talents will manifest next? Which will dominate and determine not only our own future but the future of the wider world?

Attempting to reconcile its most aggressive and nurturing energies, America’s foundation of democratic ideals, its aspirations toward egalitarianism, its shining successes with its belligerence, hubris, rhetorical duplicity, its blistering and bloody failures, the contrast between forging a new role for governance on behalf of all people versus a zero-sum economic regime tilted entirely toward wealth at the expense of all else, the radical divide has never been deeper or louder or more obvious. The multi-headed beast is tearing itself apart as it is beset with challenges as never before, at moments showing exemplary generosity, at others breathing fire at friends, foes and its own people, struggling to sustain a facade of competence, solvency, invincibility, economic dominance, unity and political relevance.

The term Chimerica was originally coined (unwittingly?) to refer to the mutual economic dependence between China and America in matters of trade and global finance. It was not intended to refer to a monster whose diverse capacities would keep us guessing which of its demonic energies might next be unleashed. While China’s dependence on America may be declining, bringing the Chimerican condition to a close, we’re witnessing an American transformation into a chimeric version of itself which is an increasing threat to the safety of all. Deliberately prolonging the pandemic, guns and gun violence, economic disparity, racism, a barely functioning justice system (whose legitimacy is falling like sand through our fingers), the surveillance state, remote control warfare, and above all, climate misinformation, disinformation and denial—these are the multivariant threats Chimerica has become.

With regard to China itself, the economic, political, territorial and ideological divergence is deepening. The sabres barely remain in their scabbards. I’m not an apologist for China. The regimentation, uniformity and compliance required of Chinese citizens is becoming increasingly intrusive and pervasive. The limits on individuality and free expression are closing in. What China has done to the Uyghurs is a testament that there are no limits to their willingness to destroy divergence.

The strategy, depth and manner of Chinese economic hegemony throughout Asia and in the developing world, their relentless pursuit of their own self-interest regardless of any principle other than to extend and deepen that influence are unprecedented. And at home, for generations now, the Party has instilled an intense nationalism and pride throughout the nation. Picture the way Americans were acting throughout the world not long after WWII, feeling our oats in obnoxious and overbearing displays throughout the world. That’s China now, only more intense, with a more enlightened and strategic vision, careful, but determined to overcome any obstruction.

What I have never heard admitted by any American pundit or historian is a name for what’s happening here. It’s not mere opposition to America per se. It’s de-westernization, a de-linking from the western idea of modernity, from western economic influence, from western finance determining the rules of the game, from western ideas of self-determination (its own form of economic hegemony). While the United States has 700 military bases throughout the world, China has diplomats, technicians, engineers, development banks, consultants and political strategists blanketing Asia, South America & Africa.

China is embedding itself in 1000 different places, building massive infrastructure projects, cleverly currying favor and dependence, and conveying the message that the time of Western determination of the rules is over. Modernity in the image of the West is over. Not that that in itself is a good thing. It’s colonization in a different form. It’s still the Perpetual Growth Imperative, just not defined by Wall Street. Economic hegemony is undergoing a shift from West to East. China is so far ahead of the United States in this regard, it’s making the United States look like its feet are embedded in cement.

The original meaning of Chimerica may be on its death bed. I’m not really suggesting that economic negotiation and mutual dependency are already a thing of the past. But de-coupling is surely underway. De-westernization is taking hold in the world, promoted and financed by China, and among the biggest factors turning America into a multi-headed, multi-species, unpredictable, fire breathing dragon of its own, and getting backed into an economic corner. With all its might, the United States is no longer Pegasus. It’s much more likely to be using Pegasus to spy on you. The hollowness of “We’re number One,” is only going to become increasingly obvious. What happens when something that dangerous feels threatened?

The options are narrowing. There will come a time when China, determining the time, the place and the way it will assert itself, will take steps the US government will regard as aggressive. The United States will be tested. It will talk about safety. It will say the ‘American Way of Life’ is not negotiable or that ‘commitments’ to our ‘friends’ are not negotiable. But in Chimerica, the difference between war and peace is already blurring as industrial espionage, cyber warfare, disinformation campaigns and self serving social media become more intense, amoral and the stakes continue to rise. So also the distinction between safe and unsafe will get so muddy as to become indefinable. The chimera is America’s shadow. Because we are ignoring the world, forgotten our ideals and not lived up to our promise, China is going to bring out the beast in us.

The Inner Commons

Fortunately, attention is not a commodity to be plundered like a vein of raw material. It’s a renewable resource whose value never diminishes. The domain of the inner commons is where precious resources may be buried but not tarnished.

I’ve long thought we should all be compensated by social media for our contributions to their bottom line. Considering they regard my digital activity as a commodity to be harvested, I thought I deserved a kickback, or royalty, if you prefer. But alas, I never got one.

I thought it might be difficult, but disconnecting from sources of distraction to follow wherever my inner process might lead me was far more important; as we all know so well, it’s also necessary. Even more than necessary, with the distractions intensifying and the algorithms ever more refined as they reach into my amygdala or give me shots of dopamine, the act of unhooking has practically become an act of sedition.

Fortunately, attention is not a commodity to be plundered like a vein of raw material. It’s a renewable resource whose value never diminishes. We have the capacity to regenerate and explore the intangible wilds, connecting to the depth of existence, anticipating the unknown, a birthright of being human, where all we are and all we know becomes a springboard to all we can imagine. Deliberate acts of renewal sustain our imagination and creativity.  

Neglecting to swim in the sublime inner worlds of feeling and imagination generates distorted, disconnected, and addictive behaviors. Just as going into the enveloping silence of wilderness reveals an abundance so often ignored, or worse, never known, so descending into silence reclaims the inner wilderness. The domain of the inner commons is where precious resources may be buried but not tarnished. Continuously regenerating a capacity for uncluttered presence sustains our access to the vital wholeness and emergent nature of life.

If you think about it, competition for our attention has been ongoing forever but has only recently accelerated in reach and sophistication. The Catholic Church may have been the original multi-national corporation, as Dara Malloy calls it in The Globalizating of God, seeking broad and lifelong influence upon an individual psyche. Its function was (and remains) to define spirituality in its own image, to define religious thought, faith and ritual, to deny other manifestations of spirituality, to literally own God and influence how we focus our attention in all relations. The Church was the original wave of what is now called modernity. The Pope himself was the one who carved up the New World and decided which monarchs would receive the spoils. That enterprise presumed itself the zero-point of knowledge and morphed into the multitude of manifestations defining the vertical integration of attention and consumer behavior. The marginalization and extinction of outlying traditions was a cornerstone of empire and foretold the dominance of religion and its hegemonic designs on the inner terrain we continue to see today.

The simple act of turning off the cacophony of modernity to focus our reverence and awe on anything other than patriarchal monotheism is now a battleground. Institutional religion remains central to that conflict as a symbol (and instrument) of coloniality and exclusivity. In its most radically conservative forms, Christian Nationalism, the ‘originalism’ of Wahabbist Islam, even among ultranationalist Buddhists, it is the status quo, it is business as usual. It promotes an increasingly tortured tribal definition of prayer as devout and uncritical submission to (male) authoritarian hierarchy.

On the other hand, prayer and ritual have been part of how humans inhabited the world in all times and places we know, though it’s much more than mere submission, supplication or asking for personal favors. Prayer is invariably attended by silence, at least implicitly. It resounds with silence regardless of whatever sound, rejoicing or lamentation, may (or may not) accompany it. Supplication and prayer are all infused with stillness, a return to the primordial womb of creation. If modernity is all about doing, then prayer is a recovery of being. Prayer is an act of love, especially self-love. It leads us into the realm of paradox and movement, uncertainty and inquiry. It’s an act of reclamation and connection, bringing us closer to earth and closer to the deity, to the unity of each, whether mythological or material.

In its loosest definition, prayer is a catchword for humility, surrender, devotion and wholeness. It is an affirmation of belonging, reminding us of our place. Prayer can be a sensory adventure into hidden realms of nature, our nature. Laughter is prayer. Joy is prayer, by which we reach beyond ourselves, not to remind ourselves of a presumed personal relationship with an omniscient and omnipotent force, but to re-embed ourselves in relationship, in belonging with. It’s a perpetual doorway to the unseen. To pray is to open your heart and get out of your mind, whether nourished by ancient history, last week or this moment. It’s an invocation of the gifts of ancestors who continue to deliver their wisdom in a continuous release seeping into the soil of culture.

Rituals of allegiance and submission have become the objective of corporate presence in every aspect of life nowadays, to substitute for what once was an immediately accessible connection with our spiritual home. While churches turn increasingly into corporations, corporations have turned into churches. Instead of allegiance to a deity, we now declare fealty to brands, products, to the ubiquitous presence and seduction of ritual consumption, now framed as delivering all the same benefits we once received through family or community ritual practices restoring connection, wholeness and renewal.

This is the tragedy of the inner frontier. Such values are now associated not with places or group practices or the most intimate sanctum of mind, but with products. Patriotism substitutes for spirituality with America as the product. Starbucks is the ubiquitous church of the caramel soy latte. The supermarket houses myriad distortions of our primary connection to the true source of nourishment. Amazon has become the god of all gods, greater than Odin, Ares, Esu or Tutankhamen. Thou shalt have no other gods before me! Kneel!

(So, if you’re an agnostic, where do you go for a cup of coffee? Where do you buy a book or…….anything?)

In some quarters, the formalized practice of prayer or any of the common forms of mindfulness are being coopted as instruments of control. No wonder church attendance is declining so rapidly. There are also fewer blessings, offerings or sanctifications and a poverty of rituals grounding secular life in any ecumenical framework. Certain cultures or sects remaining true to such values, in which protecting the inheritance of overtly mystical practices in which God is immediate and personal, are deemed foreign, extreme or even dangerous. We need reminding that the nature of our god becomes the nature of our world. And it is these very disagreements about the nature of the deity, who owns it and how we use our attention to connect with wholeness which are hastening the collapse already upon us.

When our actions in the world are founded on devotion to a zero-sum lie, they become either rough, halting or tenuous. If we can face how disconnected personal and collective actions have become, we find ourselves circling around the truth of our brokenness–how truly heartbroken so many of us have become in this time of loss. Getting on our knees, figuratively or actually, may not be the (only) answer. But how do we imagine our actions can be entirely divorced from our beliefs about God, a supreme being, Pachamama, InterBeing, the Most Merciful One, ineffable spaciousness without beginning or end–or whatever its name may be? Which of your actions would you argue can be separate from any of that?

If we lived your lives connected to the inner wild while remaining connected to the outer world, how would that look? Or feel? Sitting with this question, I cannot help but see many of the expressions of devotion all around me as more bewildered and confused surrender, more disempowerment than prayer, most likely salved by another ritual visit to one of the new churches of our broken world.

Re-inhabiting the inner wilderness may not heal a broken heart, but it’s a start. It would surely remind us there’s so much more to lose, and to save.

The Easy and the Impossible

But honestly, tell me you can look into the eyes of stranger or even someone you know intimately without having this experience. Maybe not all the time, but with rising frequency. What do you see? A desperate search for signposts or guidance or truth or any modicum of trust?

My ex-wife used to say sex was either easy or impossible. There was no in-between. That was quite a declaration coming from a sex-therapist who helped people work through buried assumptions and emotional obstacles to healthy sexual relationships. I’m thinking the same principle applies to writing. It’s either real or it wanders off into strange and strained territory to become something else, like a mannequin, needing more and more layers of make-up to appear real, when actually, contrivance can never replace the spark of life. Even so, breaking through contrivance to live in reality requires more than a wish.

So it is with living nowadays as well, apparently. As the unraveling around us continues, the despair deepening and the warnings arising from diverse quarters, I spend another restless night processing the turbulence of the day in dreams, sensations, and images. I awaken without words to frame new (or ongoing) feelings, rising with aches and pains, old and new. I, like everyone else I suppose, continue to ride the rising tide of challenge and increasingly complex and fraught sense-making going on everywhere. In fact, it seems we’re all being continuously triggered and probably don’t even realize how vulnerable we’ve become.

I can’t look at anything anymore, food or energy prices, the tsunami of waste, the latest manifestations of systemic racism, nihilistic political agendas, vacuous declarations of so-called experts on cable TV, the creeping security state, looming mass evictions, the arrogance of empire giving oxygen to old tropes, the economic puppet show, the building wave of global (and domestic) refugees, the deepening divide over vaccination and especially the accelerating frequency of extreme weather events without looking at everything. Earth has a fever—we are all under its sway —and our behavior is approaching delirium.

I am unable to keep the blinders on or act unaffected. More and more comes packed into less and less, such that even the smallest encounters, like a simple hello, are loaded with import. If I applied the original adage to my current circumstance, I’d have to say with civic dialogue descending into chaos and governance hanging by a thread, with most everything we take for granted in upheaval, that life is approaching impossible. And it’s impossible to look away. If there is an answer, it’s to meet our vulnerabilities with unflagging courage, not retreat into a cocoon of falsehoods, to permit ourselves to be exposed, just as any sex therapist would suggest, remembering that hastily following impulses is a dangerous path and that love is stronger than fear.

But honestly, tell me you can look into the eyes of stranger or even someone you know intimately without having this experience. Maybe not all the time, but with rising frequency. What do you see? A desperate search for signposts or guidance or truth or any modicum of trust? Knowing we’re all undergoing a something in common, everywhere from your bedroom to your community to every place beyond, we are thirsting for the sparks of life breaking through the mirrors, the robotic or performative nonsense, and we are drawn to them instantly.

Amidst all the talk and the growing awareness of our predicament, I wonder if what I am feeling (and seeing) is the true nature of collapse. I can’t imagine how you are metabolizing this ongoing trauma overtaking us, but it’s become a pandemic in its own right. Not only are our primal rhythms under assault, but water cycles, growing seasons, the jet stream, soil viability, ocean currents, all are wavering and fueling increasing damage and desperate grasping for stability. All the boundaries that define us, most of which are enactments of coloniality, are blurring in a storm of converging data from biology, neuroscience, psychology, and spirituality, not to mention political ecology.

We are trying to birth ourselves into an as-yet-undefined world beyond right and wrong—or at least we’d better be– because nearly everything previously defined by the sham religion of modernity as right and wrong is part of the prison in which we are all held. Right and wrong are being brutalized, stripped of meaning, contorted, ignored, rendered inert by capitalism and the nation-state, shuttled off to a state-run home for advanced cases of moral equivocation. No wonder the maps are blurring and there’s extreme behavior all around us.

Are we seeking something new or are we reclaiming something as old as earth itself? Are we diverging of converging–or both? As a white person living in a (formerly?) white dominated world built on the bones and ashes of non-white cultures, where do I look for guidance? The world I grew up in, when the polarities seemed clear, when it was easy to say which side I was on, is dissolving. How we think, how easily we are triggered, the default psychic frameworks we relied upon are under reconstruction. Justice and injustice. Racism and so-called equality. Authoritarianism and so-called democracy. Sexism and so-called gender equity. Even war and peace wear rhetorical masks mocking their convergence. We can’t not notice that virtually every principle we once thought clear, activism, the definitions of problems and especially solutions all exist within the framework of modernity now under challenge. That template, with its innate violence, exclusion and systems of control, arbitrarily drawn international borders, sacred systems of law, language, commerce, faith, ritual violence and spirituality is just not working anymore.

Where are the signs of life coming from? Who knows better than anyone about the malignant appeal and tenacious grip of modernity? Who stands in starkest contrast to whiteness as the standard of humanity? Who embodies the visceral legacy of enslavement, throwing white privilege into high relief, and gives voice to the necessity of becoming a fugitive from the hegemonies of western culture? What happens to our bodies as conflict rises, as we perceive deeper layers of conditioning, peering past the constrictions of cultural and linguistic structures to a multi-colored coat of a new way? Even if I declare a tenuous independence, that my body is not for sale, to be occupied or even subtly directed, that my body cannot be taken or its treasures plumbed as just another profit center, I don’t yet fully know what that means. I only know that going deeper into the sensations of change with a willingness to notice and feel everything is required.

Very little is easy anymore, not even hello, but we have yet to arrive at a new functional baseline. But one thing is crystal clear: the impossibility of modernity, which has taken 500 years to realize, externalizes more and more and offers only faux benefits increasingly removed from lived experience. Quo bene, as they say. Who still benefits from that ongoing construction? Only a vanishingly small minority.

Afghanistan

Sometimes they say the dharma is not pretty
which means that one day you will know
maybe many lives from now
that lock and load is not the road
to our survival.

As the long-overdue departure from Afghanistan approaches, here’s something I wrote 16 years ago upon the loss of 2000 American soldiers there:

The ones who cannot stand to weep

are the ones who say that I must keep

my mouth shut when I penetrate their spin

while they bring comfort to the enemy within.

They say a citizen must ignore the bureaucratic fuel of war

the official juggernaut of Right exercised under cover of night

twisted to their purpose

out of sight.

I have to wonder how they hide as the storm of conflict roils inside

that must be silenced lest the voices bare

their fantasies of greed and fear so empty of the urge to free

themselves for any nobler purpose than extinction.

 

I am not your enemy I say I am your mirror with this scarred half of me

the missing leg below my knee the plates inside my skull

I’m not quite here and yet aware with halting gait and forever stare

searching for my lost parts anywhere I can find them.

I look into a stranger’s eyes and ask if I am known.

He asks if I am somehow lost and then my cover’s blown.

I try to tell him of the cost that makes me but a rumor now

of the man that has been lost.

 

The past will not leave me be and the future can’t come too soon.

The doctors say that I’m all right that I can live a normal life

but they can’t see what I have seen and cannot see me now.

 

Rockets blast my dreams each night and a python tightens

round my chest robbing me of sober rest.

A life digested. Sweet sleep if I can get some.

 

I’m sorry to disturb you from your reverie but a soldier’s bleeding in the streets.

He is my brother or your son or a sister loved by everyone.

They are my nation fallen.

 

Each day’s supply of coffins flown in silence to some distant home

When you close your eyes at night you never see the fading light 

of lives undone. They come from Idaho or Montana from Texas and Looze-iana

their dreams pumped with your sad fiction

the vice of economic conscription.

How many more will have to fly before the chaff of falsehood

separates from the truth that made them.

 

Sister Cindy Sheehan tore through your carpet of rhetorical bombs

broke through the frosted glass of pious platitudes echoing through

the mighty marbled bunkers of government

Her fighting vehicle was not made by Bradley her ammunition not in

short supply her simple question pierced the armor of official aplomb.

Why?

 

From that day more eyes were peeled to see your naked lies revealed

A million more converted to the truth that cannot be diverted.

You can take the nation into your storm of oedipal complaint

without reason or restraint but you cannot hide

from Jesus on your shoulder. And now no matter where you turn

sound bites.

 

Sometimes they say the dharma is not pretty

which means that one day you will know

maybe many lives from now

that lock and load is not the road

to our survival.

State of Excess: I

If there were a single place, a petri dish of the fatally hedonistic culture of extraction, consumption, and the gaping wound of interrupted reciprocity, sustained by an illusion of abundance, it might be found among the Gulf States of the Middle East. Qatar is one of these.

The extractive economy is a daring game of chicken we’re playing with ourselves. It’s always been a necessary part of our micro-reality, but only recently have we reached a scale of malignant self-destruction doing irreversible damage to the living environment. We take it for granted as an indispensable feature of modernity. The term ‘climate’ should rightly include extraction among its many references. If applied to the whole of life, climate is not solely about atmospheric or oceanic conditions or the many thousands of other biological effects; it is also about our external and internal worlds reflecting each other. The climate of earth is collapsing. And we are collapsing with it.

If we trace the acceleration of the global warming effect, the loss of ice, acidifying oceans, the threats to food chains, the Sixth Great Extinction, wild tantrums of weather now commonplace, all are paralleled by massive concentration of wealth, the degradation of civil discourse, attacks on science, the corruption of democratic norms, the influence of dark money in politics, feudalization of the economy, spiritual malaise, the destruction of capital in all its forms and the ever-intensifying jockeying to secure vital natural resources. It is a hollowing. Earth as an object of hostile takeover. None of us can truly breathe anymore.

If there were a single place, a petri dish of the fatally hedonistic culture of extraction, consumption, disconnection and the gaping wound of interrupted reciprocity, sustained by an illusion of abundance, it might be found among the Gulf States of the Middle East. Qatar is one of these, perhaps second only to the United Arab Emirates for a standard of living supported entirely by extraction yet deeply insulated from the consequences. Qatar is a parable of earth.

The citizens of Qatar are not oblivious to the issues. Popular sentiment clearly acknowledges the primacy of global warming, the causal relations between fossil fuels, pollution and climate change. They are acutely aware of urban congestion and resource management. Even though government officials, academics and civil society share a consensus that something must be done (not only about the traffic!), personal lifestyle adjustments hold limited appeal. Qatar produces 7000 tons of trash daily. Yet no recycling program, no matter how expertly designed or promoted, can mitigate the emissions from local plants producing 20,000 tons of cement every day. Such a functional disconnect is the definition of un-sustainability. In this semi-constitutional absolute monarchy, ruled by a single family for nearly 200 years, the Emir, Abdullah bin Hamad Al Tahni, has the last word. There are no democratic mechanisms to shift policy as far or as fast as it must go.

The marvel of climate change can be reduced to numbers, but they don’t—and can’t—plumb the depths of the flawed outlook, the psychological mechanisms of denial, except perhaps by applying an analogy of autoimmunity. We are attacking ourselves. The sensual appeal of lifestyles are so comfortable that the thought of any substantive shift in priorities never reaches critical mass. In Qatar as much as anywhere, an inexorable series of self-destructive and irreversible decisions are being made. They are now accompanied by promises to change, failure to change, the cycle repeating with rising guilt followed by self-deception and dissociation. These are the behaviors of an addict. Not all of humanity is addicted, but the addicted are leading the rest of us into the abyss.

Qatar is small. Its total area is only three times greater Mumbai or half the size of Vermont; or, if you prefer, seven times the size of greater London. The amount of arable land per capita is a vanishingly small .005 hectares. The population, having grown 400% since 2000, is still less than three million, but only 12% are citizens. The remaining 88% are foreign workers, largely from South Asia, including hundreds of thousands of unskilled and skilled labourers who came to participate in the promise of Qatar’s selection as the site for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The influx of expats is the reason 70% of the population is between the ages of 25-54 and the reason Qatar has the highest ratio of men to women in that age group in the world, 5:1. But perhaps there’s another reason. In this small group of patriarchal states, restrictions on women’s behavior and movement and the absence of laws clearly criminalizing domestic violence are driving women from these countries altogether.

Qatar is living a schizophrenic culture of extremes—at a precarious edge between the inevitable consequences of extraction and the countervailing abundance it provides.  There is world-leading prosperity, the fourth-highest per capita income behind only Macau, Luxembourg and Singapore. There is high growth, and to the degree possible with average summer temperatures exceeding 40ºC, an illusion of separation from the elements, from anything remotely related to the lived experience or diversity of a jungle, a coral reef or a wooded mountain.

It’s also a tourist destination of mega-theme parks and giant shopping malls, man-made islands and a soon-to-be opened aqua resort with underwater hotel suites. It is known for its architectural design and cultural beauty, and as the leading financial service center of the Middle East. Qatar boasts world-class universities, sports venues, a highly educated technocratic class and its own stunning collection of ancient and modern Islamic Art. The unemployment rate is a microscopic 0.08%. Even though it imports most of its food, it has reclaimed thousands of hectares of desert through irrigation schemes to produce hothouse crops.

L’Essence de Vie

The impact of less than three million people on the global condition may be miniscule, yet the impact of Qatar is far greater than its small numbers would suggest because of extreme energy inefficiency. How is that irrigation supported? Qatar has near-zero surface water and less than 100mm/y in rainfall, 80% of which runs off into the sea. Natural renewable water resources have been estimated at 71m3/per year per capita, far below the water poverty line of 1000m3/y/ca.

Ninety-nine percent of municipal water is produced by energy-intensive conventional thermal desalination. Qataris use 500 liters of water per day per capita (132 gal/d), twice the global average. The water coming out of the tap, the water for washing $2B worth of cars (more than one for every two people) every day, the water for swimming, water for the fountains, the landscaping, the reflecting pools, the water for wudu (ritual cleansing), every bit of water used in Qatar including most of what is used to grow food is also bringing the Persian Gulf closer to becoming a dead zone. And even though Qatar claims the tap water is safe for drinking, most everyone drinks only bottled water.

Sixty percent of all global capacity for extracting fresh water from the ocean is in the Gulf States. There are over 1000 desalination plants ringing the Gulf from Kuwait to Saudi Arabia, from Bahrain to the UAE and Oman. As demand continues to rise, new and larger ones are constantly being built. Together they are impacting the salinity of the Persian Gulf, releasing hyper-saline water with chlorines into an ocean that already has a 25% higher saline content than the average ocean. By 2050, the salinity of the Gulf will be more than twice that of either the Red Sea or the Mediterranean.

Desalination plants also release sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in quantities exceeding international standards. The Persian Gulf is already a shallow sea, averaging less than 50m deep. Combined with a high evaporation rate, insufficient freshwater replenishment and multiple sources of dumping such as animal farms, sewage, oil spills, industrial outfalls and fertilizer factories, along with desalination along the entire coast, not to mention the millions of gallons of oil deliberately released by Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, the Gulf is slowly becoming a dead sea. Algal blooms known as the Red Tide, generated by heat and an influx of nutrients from anthropogenic sources, are reducing oxygen content, killing fish and intermittently forcing temporary shutdowns of desalination in some areas.

In recognition of the precarity of water resources, Qatar is building five mega-reservoirs, intending to store emergency supplies according to estimated demand in 2036. They will likely convert the surface of these reservoirs to floating solar installations, further dropping overall carbon emissions. But alas, only a drop in that bucket.

Climate, Energy & The Environment

Qatar has the highest per capita CO2 emissions of any nation except Kuwait, again, partly because of extremely inefficient consumption. Emission levels also reflect the extremely low natural biocapacity of the nation to produce the basics of survival, yet the population is entirely divorced from the costs. Water is free. Energy is free. Education and health care are free. Only one nation, Iceland, uses more energy per capita than Qatar, though Iceland’s energy is 90% geothermal, which delivers 4-5 times the energy of fossil fuels.

Qatar’s wealth derives from the third-largest proven natural gas reserves in the world (25 trillion cubic meters), mostly offshore, providing 85% of its national revenues. It also has 15 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and is a major exporter of petrochemicals and fertilizers. Unfortunately, Qatar considers natural gas to be “clean energy.” In fact, it’s only half as dirty as coal and emits as much as 10x more carbon than some forms of biomass—of which Qatar has none.

The government, in concert with twenty-two members of the Pan-Arab League, intends to diversify its energy base. This is a progressive plan, but it’s been slow to develop. There was no renewable energy base as recently as 2015. The current goal is to reach 20% renewables by 2030. This is not solely out of environmental concern, but part of a drive to save its natural gas for export instead of domestic consumption. A huge solar installation, Siraj-1 (700MW, 10 sq. km), is slated for commissioning in August 2021 and will be used in part to power a ‘carbon neutral’ World Cup. Siraj-1 will produce the cheapest utility-scale solar energy in the world. On the other hand, dust driven by desert winds will likely make it the most difficult solar plant to keep clean and operational at peak capacity.

Qatar’s obligation to the UNFCCC and the Paris Accords was, as with all other nations, to submit Intended National Defined Contribution statements declaring a commitment to sustainable practices, education, research and implementation of improved technologies to reduce emissions. The fact that 10% of its land area is no more than one meter above sea level, that 18% is no more than five meters above sea level and that 96% of the population lives in that zone is a stark reminder of Qatar’s vulnerability to sea level rise.

Nevertheless, the music continues, and even more loudly. As with so many other signatories to the Paris Accords, specific emissions targets were never declared, and all intentions were entirely voluntary and subject to change to any time. While they are demonstrating a commitment to mitigation and adaptation, the key statements in the INDC, virtually identical to similar statements of other nations, provide loopholes to choose development over environmental concerns at any time.

The Unmasking Continues

Covid is a warning shot, a harbinger of things to come. If we imagine our response to the pandemic as a practice run for future crises, we are doing rather poorly.

Covid has been referred to as a portal, a re-boot, a mirror, a hoax, a metaphor of everything good, bad or ugly about capitalism and modernity. There’s not really much daylight between many of these interpretations. Another comprehensive and enduring metaphor is that we’re in the midst of an unmasking, which is the definition of apocalypse-a removal of the veils obscuring a clear view of the present reality. As the pretense of stability fractures, we encounter a storm of feeling and response. And as the Delta variant now sweeps through nations, ignoring borders, class and threatening to ignore vaccines, we must ask again what is being revealed.

There are those who believe we will regain momentum on some imagined trajectory to normalcy, reinstating the familiar rules and laws of commerce, that all hierarchies and differential privileges will be retained, boundaries and binaries we take for granted (or don’t even notice) will be restored, the eternal rules of economic gravity will be reinstated, upon which we can return to the serious business of inequality, denial, extraction and ecocide.

Covid is a test. The presumption that modernity can manage it all, the ideologies of sustainability, ‘freedom,’ medicine, the engines of mass communication, public relations, mainstream journalism, public health, the entire narrative of progress, the veneer of corporate social responsibility, equality, even the fantasy of mass spiritual awakening, all of these lie bleeding on the sidewalk, unmasked in a quickening drama of collapse. The airwaves and social media are filled with hollow discourses, dissociation, sophisticated ego-driven delusional schemes by which we entertain ourselves and by which huge sums and resources flow to a minuscule number of individuals, increasingly tired systems of indoctrination, dominance and control. The structures of the dominant paradigm are trembling and the costs some are willing to pay to prop up the game is bleeding into savagery. The empire has no clothes.

Covid is intensifying and accelerating the dialectic. The protestations of those who most closely believe in God’s plan are reaching the level of medieval religious hysteria. Which part of God’s plan is at work here? On the other hand, the media/corporate/public health/medical axis has been desperate to assert control of the narrative, that Covid was an accident (do we really know that?), that following a few basic guidelines will manage and contain the spread of the virus, and primarily that the virus is an enemy to be battled through vaccines, responsible behavior and will be solved by following scientifically validated protocols. Many are drawn to the hygienically rational (unbiased?) legally protected pronouncements from the inner sanctums of Big Pharma.

We are moving so far beyond all of this.

Shunyamurti, 2013:

Is it just that every narrative circles hopelessly around its own apocalyptic core, like the moth spiraling toward the flame? Is the Word no longer God? [Now words eclipse the Word], until the words all begin to implode into nonsense and face us with the falseness of their meanings, the labyrinth of delirious signifiers that have created a sound barrier between consciousness and Truth. 

Driving all of the above is the 40-year advance of the oligarchic agenda promoted by political parties, think tanks, organized religion and mass media attempting to cleanse national security, foreign policy, civil rights, law enforcement, medicine, higher education and the nation state of all but true believers. We are witnessing deepening cracks in the dominant narratives. The timid voices of integrity and credibility are now making space for bad actors to use vast political and media resources to drive sophisticated messaging to trigger fear and anger: bifurcation for its own sake, promoting versions of reality serving their personal, corporate, financial and political benefit. Collective psychosis, brought to you by the neofascist international crime syndicate

The stock market is an apropos example illustrating the increasingly threadbare fabric of economics and culture. We say the market is not the real economy, but such pronouncements don’t penetrate the bastions of the linguistic managers. The message perpetrated by central banks, five or six major investment banks and politicians of both parties is that everything is (or will be) OK. Yet the financial benefits of monetary policies meant to prop up and maintain the facade of growth and prosperity do not reach 80% of the population. It’s mostly gaslighting to protect the investor class. Mainstream economists are trying their best to convince us that risk is diminishing while the moral hazard in the largely opaque shadow markets increases month by month and the remaining measures to sustain the unsustainable shrink to a perilous few. This is a deadly game of musical chairs. The music is getting louder and the song is nearing its end.

Covid is a slowly unfolding series of shocks, revealing the trauma of conventional rationalism upon the collective consciousness. What is unmasked is the spiritual monoculture modernity has become–down to the vacuous micro-level pseudo-authoritative presentations in social media and TV, the tone of voice, the appearance, the time (or character)-limited delivery of information, the rapid segues from ‘bad’ news to ‘good’ news, the sequestration of subjects, the appeal to only a single level of comprehension. This is a continuation of progressive disembodiment that began very early in our lives. It is incremental developmental trauma.

You can avoid reality. But you can’t avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.—Ayn Rand

The combination of manufactured distrust of government combined with actual lying to the public by the government has inflicted cumulative trauma ever since at least the origins of the CIA (and likely well before). The effects of that trauma on civic trust is reaching its apotheosis in the spreading cracks in consensus reality, all of which is producing a culture in which, as James Kunstler has said, ‘anything goes and nothing matters.’

Covid is a warning. If we imagine our response to the pandemic as a practice run for future crises, we are doing rather poorly. Trump’s response to the pandemic in the US will be one huge reason for our failure. And the failure to investigate and prosecute Trump’s response will be another. We have resistance to sharing vaccine technology and we do not have mechanisms to make sure all nations, regardless of economic status, can be included in a global response. We don’t have a public conversation about the long-term trajectory for vaccine research or the implementation of practices that will reduce the likelihood of another virus emerging in the future. Capitalism is proving inadequate to deal with these long-term issues because it’s so focused on short term private profit. In fact, we might even say that capitalism has brought us the virus in the first place. How do we imagine capitalism is the solution to a problem it created?

How is that mask going to ripped off?