Wages of Rebellion (6 page)

One of the most prescient portraits of our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s novel about a doomed whaling voyage,
Moby-Dick
. Melville paints our murderous obsessions, our hubris, our violent impulses, moral weakness, and inevitable self-destruction in his chronicle of the quest by a demented captain, Ahab, for the white whale. Melville, as William Shakespeare was for Elizabethan England and Fyodor Dostoyevsky for Czarist Russia, is America’s foremost oracle.

Melville’s radical book was poorly received when it appeared in 1851, and two years after publication, the unsold copies were lost in a fire in the publisher’s warehouse. Although more copies were printed, the novel never did sell out its first edition of 3,000 copies in Melville’s lifetime. Melville, unable to survive as a writer, took a job working with the US Custom Service in Manhattan.
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It would be some seventy years before the author and critic Carl Van Doren resurrected Melville, praising the originality and importance of
Moby-Dick
in his 1921 book
The American Novel.
¹¹
D. H. Lawrence in
Studies in Classic American Literature
concurred with Van Doren.
¹²
E. M. Forster called
Moby-Dick
a “prophetic song,” and the critic Lewis Mumford helped enshrine the book in the Western canon.
¹³
William Faulkner, who had a framed print of Rockwell Kent’s
Captain Ahab
in his living room, said
Moby-Dick
was the one book he wished he had written.
¹⁴
Edward Said drew parallels between Ahab’s quest and the folly of empire.
¹⁵
C.L.R. James wrote a brilliant study of empire, class, commercialism, and
Moby-Dick
, entitled
Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.
¹⁶
Contemporary social critics, such as Greg Grandin in
The Empire of Necessity
and Morris Berman in
Why America Failed
, have also turned to Melville to buttress their bleak vision of the voyage we have undertaken as a species.
¹⁷
In his book
Why Read
Moby-Dick? Nathaniel Philbrick writes, “Contained in the pages of
Moby-Dick
is nothing less than the genetic code of America.”
¹⁸

In the book, Melville gives shape to the United States in the form of the whaling ship the
Pequod
, named after the Indian tribe that was nearly exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship’s thirty-man crew—there were thirty states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel—is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby-Dick, which in a previous encounter dismembered one of Ahab’s legs.

Moby-Dick
is narrated in 1850 by Ishmael, a footloose sailor who signs on for a voyage on the
Pequod
with his new friend Queequeg, a tattooed harpooner from an island in the South Pacific. Queequeg, a self-professed cannibal who consults a small idol named Yojo, exhibits throughout the book a generosity and courage that Ishmael admires. The
Pequod
leaves Nantucket on a blustery, gray Christmas Day. Ahab, who remains hidden in his cabin until after the
Pequod
embarks, finally makes his appearance on deck after several days at sea, with his false ivory leg, carved from a sperm whale’s jaw. He incites the crew to hunt down and kill the enormous white whale.

When whales are first sighted near the southern tip of Africa, Ahab’s private and secret whaleboat crew, led by the mysterious Fedallah, suddenly appears from below the hold to take part in the hunt. As the
Pequod
rounds Africa and enters the Indian Ocean, the crew kill and
butcher the whales, then boil down the oil and blubber in a bloody process that Melville describes in detail. Meanwhile, Ahab remains obsessed with finding Moby-Dick and questions passing ships about the white whale. When the
Pequod
encounters the
Jeroboam
, a crazed prophet who calls himself Gabriel warns of destruction to all who hunt Moby-Dick.

Fedallah, who Ahab believes has the power of prophecy, predicts that Ahab will see two hearses before he dies. Mortal hands, Fedallah says, will not have made the first hearse. The second hearse will be made only from American wood. Fedallah predicts that Ahab will be killed by hemp, which Ahab interprets to mean he will die on land on the gallows.

As the ship approaches the equator Moby-Dick is sighted, and Ahab launches his whaleboat in pursuit. Moby-Dick smashes the boat. When the hunt resumes the next day, the whale is harpooned. The wounded whale again attacks Ahab’s whaleboat, and Fedallah is pulled into the sea and drowned. On the third day of the hunt, the crew sees Fedallah’s corpse, tangled in the harpoon line, lashed to the whale’s back. The white whale then rams the
Pequod
, and the ship sinks. The doomed ship and the white whale become the hearses—one made of American wood and the other not by mortal hands—foretold by Fedallah. The hemp harpoon line attached to Moby-Dick whips out of the boat and garrotes Ahab. The other whaleboats, along with the remaining ship’s crew, are sucked into the swirling vortex created by the shattered
Pequod
. Ishmael alone survives.

Ahab’s grievances in the novel are real. But his self-destructive fury ensures the
Pequod
’s fate. And those on the ship, on some level, know they are doomed—just as many of us know that a consumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitation of the earth, and the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed.

We too see the danger signs. The ecosystem is visibly disintegrating. Scientists from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) issued a report in 2013 warning that the oceans are changing even faster than anticipated and increasingly becoming inhospitable to life. The oceans have absorbed much of the excess carbon dioxide and heat from the atmosphere, and this absorption is rapidly
warming and acidifying ocean waters. This process is compounded, the report notes, by increased levels of deoxygenation from nutrient runoffs due to farming and climate change. The IPSO scientists call these effects—acidification, warming, and deoxygenation—a “deadly trio” that is causing changes in the seas unprecedented in the planet’s history. The scientists write that each of the earth’s previous five known mass extinctions was preceded by at least one part of the “deadly trio.”
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The sixth mass extinction of species has already begun, the first in some 66 million years.
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Speculators, meanwhile, have seized control of the global economy and the levers of political power. They have weakened and emasculated governments to serve their lust for profit. They have turned the press into courtiers, corrupted the courts, and hollowed out public institutions, including universities. They peddle spurious ideologies—neoliberal economics and globalization—to justify their rapacious looting and greed. They create grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge citizens into crippling forms of debt peonage. And they have been stealing staggering sums of public funds, such as the $65 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that have been unloaded each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash.
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They feed like parasites off of the state and the resources of the planet.

Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money. They are no different from the detested speculators who were hanged in the seventeenth century, when speculation was a capital offense.

The obscenity of their wealth is matched by their utter lack of concern for the growing numbers of the destitute. In early 2014, the world’s 200 richest people made $13.9 billion, in one day, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index.
²²
This hoarding of money by the elites, according to the ruling economic model, is supposed to make us all better off, but in
fact the opposite happens when wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations, as economist Thomas Piketty documents in his book
Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
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The rest of us have little or no influence over how we are governed, and our wages stagnate or decline. Underemployment and unemployment become chronic. Social services, from welfare to Social Security, are slashed in the name of austerity. Government, in the hands of speculators, is a protection racket for corporations and a small group of oligarchs. And the longer we play by their rules the more impoverished and oppressed we become.

Yet, like Ahab and his crew, we rationalize our collective madness. All calls for revolt, for halting the march toward economic, political, and environmental catastrophe, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, even with huge swaths of the country living in Depression-like conditions, we bow slavishly before the enticing illusion provided to us by our masters of limitless power, wealth, and technological prowess. The system, although it is killing us, is our religion.

Clive Hamilton, in his
Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change
, describes the dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is now virtually certain.”
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This obliteration of our “false hopes” requires not only intellectual knowledge but emotional knowledge. Intellectual knowledge is more easily attained. Emotional knowledge, which requires us to accept that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery, and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept the impending disaster, to attain the visceral understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality.

The crisis before us is the culmination of a 500-year global rampage of conquering, plundering, exploiting, and polluting the earth—as well as killing by Europeans and Euro-Americans of the indigenous communities that stood in their way. The technical and scientific forces that created unparalleled luxury and unrivaled military and economic power for a small, global elite are the forces that now doom us. Ceaseless economic
expansion and exploitation has become a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel—thirteen of the fourteen warmest years since weather record-keeping began over a century ago have occurred in the opening years of the twenty-first century—we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism.
²⁵

Anthropologists, including Joseph Tainter in
The Collapse of Complex Societies
, Charles Redman in
Human Impact on Ancient Environments
, and Ronald Wright in
A Short History of Progress
, have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to the breakdown of complex societies, which usually collapse not long after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity.
²⁶
“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote.
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The last days of any civilization, when populations are averting their eyes from the unpleasant realities before them, become carnivals of hedonism and folly. Rome went down like this. So did the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Men and women of stunning mediocrity and depravity assume political control. Today charlatans and hucksters hold forth on the airwaves, and intellectuals are ridiculed. Force and militarism, with their hypermasculine ethic, are celebrated. And the mania for hope requires the silencing of any truth that is not childishly optimistic.

The road to oblivion becomes, in the end, a narcotic reverie. The sexual, the tawdry, and the inane preoccupy public discourse. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Céline writes in
Castle to Castle
, “… when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! panties overboard!”
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Our major preoccupation is pleasure. Margaret Atwood, in her dystopian novel
Oryx and Crake
, observes that as a species “we’re doomed by hope.”
²⁹
The mantra is to be positive, to be happy. This mania for optimism—for happiness—leads to fantasy being mistaken for reality. Reality is dismissed when it is unpleasant.

“We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real,” Daniel Boorstin writes in
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
. “We have become eager accessories in the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”
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Culture and literacy, in the final stage of decline, are replaced with noisy diversions, elaborate public spectacle, and empty clichés. The Roman statesman Cicero inveighed against the ancient equivalent of this degeneration and, for his honesty, was hunted down and murdered. His severed head and right hand, which had written the Philippics, were nailed onto the speaker’s platform in the Forum. Fulvia, the wife of Mark Antony, reportedly spat on the severed head, placed it on her knees, opened its mouth, and pierced the tongue with hairpins.
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The crowd roared its approval. Cicero, the crowd was assured, would never speak or write again.