Just as I=PAT serves as a handy, if problematic, formula for thinking about the causes of environmental impact, so I think there is a similar formula underlying tragedies like the massacre at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. It goes something like this:
Hate + Technology + Distress = Carnage/Chaos
or, C=HTD.
In other words:
1. Take an ideology that promotes hatred (homophobia, anti-westernism, anti-liberalism, xenophobic nationalism, religious fundamentalism, white supremacism, fascism, et al.).
2. Add a technology that magnifies possibilities for enacting that hatred (AR-15s, AK-47s, explosives, nuclear bombs, mass/instant/spectacular media, et al.).
3. Throw in mental illness, psychological distress, sociopathy, and/or testosterone overload. (Given the masculinism of most of the mass murder we’ve ever seen, the third letter could probably just be a “T.”)
4. Wait for them to mix and ignite.
The question is: How can we eradicate, or at least significantly diminish, ideologies that promote hatred, technologies that magnify the potential for taking that hatred out on others, and mental illness (esp. among young men)?
If we took a certain reality-TV star’s ideas seriously, the world community should probably take steps to wall off those parts of the world in which these three factors are found in abundance — at least until they take steps to prevent those things from spreading and mixing. If so, the U.S. would be one of those places. (But its military products are spread around the world, so to the extent that the U.S. is a global imperial force, as its critics believe, the wall would fail.)
The alternative to a wall is something more like a wave, a force that gets around, beneath, and through walls. Specifically, I’d say, the best alternative in instances like these is a fierce, determined, empathic love for the afflicted in all their forms. The afflicted show up on all sides of such an event: those attacked (in this case Orlando’s LGBTQ community); those murdered, and their families and loved ones; and those behind the hatred and murder — a number that extends far beyond the tortured mind of Omar Mateen.
This wave or force is akin to what Gandhi called Satyagraha, or truth-force — which takes conviction, deliberation, and insistence.
Liberalism is not very good with conviction. What it tends to lack is the joy of a vision of a better world that takes sufficient account of the deficiencies of the current one, but that is committed enough to transform them into something qualitatively different.
Here’s what I mean by that.
One of the problems with calling this an incident of “radical Islamism” is that this obfuscates the war that is brewing in the world — which we’re only seeing the tip of — between liberalism (or something like it) and an array of global fundamentalisms. The latter include not only IS/Daesh, but variations of Wahhabism, America’s radical Christian militias, Russia’s Duginists and anti-liberal Eurasianists, and other fear-based, ultra-conservative movements, all of which have more to gain from allying with each other than not.
These movements take liberalism to be their enemy not just because liberalism threatens to erode their values, but also because it has seemingly become globally triumphant. Liberalism has the weapons. It produces them. With its mouth it speaks of tolerance, and with its arms gives out candy (Hollywood movies, hope for the glitz of a western lifestyle). But behind its back it makes and sells weapons and pads the wallets of their makers.
This picture of liberalism may be dubious, but it is held to by many of those opposed to America’s and the West’s global dominance, its apparent hegemony in global economics, lifestyle and entertainment (perceived as its propaganda wing), and its policies and weaponry. And there’s something to the critique of liberalism as being morally vacuous. Its tight relationship with capitalism and militarism make it look particularly odious, at least to those on the wrong side of the guns and the money.
But liberalism also allows for the conditions in which alternatives can grow — alternatives among which one finds the multi-colored, rainbow coalitions of activists for rights and for justice. (The rainbows raised or projected in tribute to the victims are on my mind.)
Here’s where those working for ecologically minded alternatives have a choice to make. Like those on the right and the hard (economistic) left, we can opt for fearful, conspiratorial visions of a world in decline, where the only valid step is one that attacks the system to make it crumble all the sooner.
Or we can opt for joy. (Or what Bill Chaloupka once called, in reply to Hardt and Negri’s neo-communist vision, the irrepressible lightness and joy of being green.)
A pagan friend of mine writes eloquently:
“The very idea that Omar Mateen was offended by seeing two men kissing – offended to the point of undertaking the utterly selfish crime he has in Orlando’s Pulse – is unforgivable, and the act itself belongs nowhere else than in the detritus of history. The idea that there is a god who welcomes and encourages such ridiculousness is itself ridiculous and only underscores the infantile reification that saddles our brief experiment and terrestrial evolution. Such a god, I dare say it, is not great!
“The beauty of love, of youth enjoying, of everyone enjoying, of the holy, holy, holy speck of the cosmos on which we live, of concord when it exists and is achievable, of art and music, of discovery and expanse, and of growth and maturity is the pagan celebration.”
I agree. The attack on a nightclub or a concert is an attack on joy. Environmentalism sometimes traffics in joylessness — an asceticism of the body and a frequently misanthropic constrictiveness of the soul.
The alternative, at its best, is not just a fuzzy, nature-loving placidity. Rather, it is more like what Latin Americans call buen vivir, the lived practice of an eco-communitarianism that works for change locally, regionally, and globally, and that aims for the pleasures of a life well lived. It’s this vision that loosely motivates much of the world’s growing green left — the climate justice movement, the global solidarity movement, Naomi Klein’s broad-based social movement, Paul Hawken’s “blessed unrest,” the World Social Forum’s “another world,” the “movement of movements.” Unlike the environmentalism of atomized western activists, buen vivir is joyful because it maintains connections with communities that still remember what a life well lived is, or was.
(It’s true that indigenous societies in Bolivia, Ecuador, or wherever can be socially conservative. Rural communities tend to get that way; urban communities tend toward the other end. But cities and countryside have coexisted for centuries, and can learn to do that again.)
The response to tragedies like the massacre in a gay nightclub in Orlando, like the response to global ecocide, needs to be a response rooted in the joy of a world that generates joy of its own accord. From a place where we share in that joy, we can also feel the pain and fragility of things, and act deliberately to soften that pain in the afflicted. Then it grows.