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From Common Courage Press
Recent
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July
11, 2003
David
Lindorff
An Iraq War & Occupation Glossary
July
10, 2003
Ron
Jacobs
Dealing with the Devil: the Bloody
Profits of General Dynamics
Sean
Donahue
Bush and the Paramillitaries: Coddling Terrorists in Colombia
Yemi
Toure
Who Outted Bush in Afrika?
Robert
Jensen
Politics and Sustainability: an Interview
with Wes Jackson
Ali
Abunimah
US Leaves Injured Iraqis Untreated
Joanne
Mariner
Federal Courts, Not Military Commissions
Website
of the Day
Electronic Iraq
July
9, 2003
David
Lindorff
Is the Media Finally Turning on
Bush?
David
Krieger and Angela McCracken
10 Myths About Nuclear Weapons
Mickey
Z.
Why Speak Out?
Lee Sustar
The Great Medicare Fraud
John
Chuckman
The Worst Kind of Lie
Gary Leupp
"Pacifist" Japan and the Occupation of Iraq
Website
of the Day
Hail to the Thief:
Songs for the Bush Years
July
8, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Bully on the Bench: the Pathological
Dissents of Scalia
Alan
Maass
Nights of Fire and Rage in Benton Harbor
Chris
Floyd
Troubled Sleep: Getting Used to the American Gulag
Linda
S. Heard
America's Kangaroo Justice
Brian
Cloughley
They Tell Lies to Nodders
Charles
Sullivan
Bush the Christian?
Saul
Landau
The Intelligence Culture in the National Security Age
Website
of the Day
Occupation Watch
July
7, 2003
William
Blum
The Anti-Empire Report
Harvey
Wasserman
The Nuke with a Hole in Its Head
Ramzy
Baroud
Peace for All the Wrong Reasons
Simon
Jones
What Progressives Should Think About
Iran
Lesley
McCulloch
Fear, Pain and Shame in Aceh
Uri
Avnery
The Draw
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/3
July
4 / 6, 2003
Patrick
Cockburn
Dead on the Fourth of July
Frederick
Douglass
What is Freedom to a Slave?
Martha
Honey
Bush and Africa: Racism, Exploitation
and Neglect
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Rat in the Grain: Amstutz and
the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture
Standard
Schaefer
Rule by Fed: Anyone But Greenspan in 2004
Lenni Brenner
Jefferson is for Today
Elaine
Cassel
Fucking Furious on the Fourth
Ben Tripp
How Free Are We?
Wayne
Madsen
A Sad Independence Day
John Stanton
Happy Birthday, America! 227 Years of War
Jim
Lobe
Bush's Surreal AIDS Appointment
John Blair
Return to Marble Hill: Indiana's Rusting Nuke
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
Heavy Reckoning at Qaim
David Vest
Wake Up and Smell the Dynamite
Adam
Engel
Queer as Grass
Poets'
Basement
Christian, Witherup, Albert & St. Clair
Website
of the Weekend
The Lipstick Librarian
July
3, 2003
Patrick
W. Gavin
The Meaning of Gettysburg
Thomas
W. Croft
There Was a Reason They Called It the Casino Economy
David
Lindorff
Outlawing Subversives: Hong Kong
and the US
John
Chuckman
Lessons from the American Revolution
Jackson
Thoreau
New Far-Right Scheme: Impeach Supreme Court Justices
Stan
Goff
"Bring 'Em On?": a Former
Special Forces Soldier Responds to Bush's Invitation for Iraqis
to Attack US Troops
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/3
July 2, 2003
Diane
Christian
Good Killing and Bad Killing
Richard
Falk
After Iraq, Does UN War Prevention Have a Future?
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Bush Administration: Causing Repetitive Stress
Justin
Podur
Uribe's Onslaught Across Colombia
Reuven
Kaviner
Prosecuting Ben-Artzi, the Refusenik
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/2
July
1, 2003
Sasan
Fayamanesh
Weapon of Choice: Nukes, Israel and
Iran
Elaine
Cassel
Sex and the Supreme Moralizer: Scalia
and the Sodomy Cops
Susan
Block
A Love Supreme: Our Assholes Belong
to Ourselves
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: No, No Bono
David Lindorff
Weapons in Search of a Name
Gary
Leupp
Occupation, Resistance and the Plight of the GIs
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/1
June
30, 2003
Karyn
Strickler
The Do-Nothings: an Exposé
of Progressive Politics in America
Col. Dan
Smith
The Occupation of Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire
Tim
Wise
Race and Destruction in Black and White
Neve Gordon
The Roadmap and the Wall
Chris
Floyd
The Revelation of St. George: "God Told Me to Strike Saddam"
Elaine
Cassel
Kentucky Woman
Uri
Avnery
Hope in Dark Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/30
Website
of the Day
Bush El Hombre
June
28 / 29, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
June
27, 2003
Jason
Leopold
CIA: Seven Months Prior to 9/11 Iraq
Posed No Threat to US
David
Vest
Supreme Silence: Bush's Bunker-Hunker
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
Cheney, Forgery and the CIA
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/26
Website
of the Day
John Kerry, Teresa Heinz & Ken Lay: The Politics of Hypocrisy
June
26, 2003
Sen.
Robert Byrd
The Road of Cover-Up is a Road to Ruin
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Instructed the CIA to Investigate
Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
Ambient Death in Palestine
Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
Elaine
Cassel
Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
CounterPunch
Wire
Musicians Unite Against Sweatshops
Sheldon
Hull
Squatting in Mansions
Ben Tripp
A Guide to Hating Almost Anyone
Uri
Avnery
The Best Show in Town
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
Ordinary Vistas:
The Photographs of Kurt Nimmo
June
25, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Buffalo Cops Wage War on Pedal Pushers
Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
David Lindorff
Indonesia's War on Journalists
Dan
Bacher
Butterflies and Farmworkers Confront USDA and Riot Cops
Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
Elaine
Cassel
"Ain't No Justice": Fed Judge Quits, Assails Sentencing
Guidelines
Bill Kauffman
My America vs. the Empire
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
You Are Being Watched:
Elevator Moods
June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
Holocaust Denial at the High Court
Roya
Monajem
A Message from Tehran: Is It Worth
It to Risk One's Life?
John
Chuckman
The Real Clash of Civilizations
David Lindorff
WMD Damage Control at the Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
Marc
Pritzke
Washington Lied: an Interview with
Ray McGovern
Conn
Hallinan
The Consistency of Sharon
Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
Edward
Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
June 20, 2003
Walter
Brasch
Down on Our Knees
Robert
Meeropol
The Son of the Rosenbergs on His Parents Death and Bush's America
Russell
Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Grannies and Baby Bells
Norman
Madarasz
Pierre Bourgault: the Life of a
Quebec Radical
Gary
Leupp
Bush on "Revisionist Historians"
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies
Marathon: the Finale
Hot Stories
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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|
July
12, 2003
Prometheus Revisited
The
Double Wall Before the Future
By ARTHUR MITZMAN
We are dancing on a volcano.
Narcisse Achille,
Comte de Salvandy (1830)
[Editors'
Note: We are delighted
to publish this essay by one of our favorite historians, Arthur
Mitzman. This is essay is the introduction
to Professor Mitzman's excellent new book, Prometheus
Revisited: The Quest for Global Justice in the 21st Century.
JSC/AC]
Visions of the future today are more likely to
be dystopian than utopian, closer to the horrors of George Orwell's
1984 and of the films Soylent Green and Clockwork
Orange than to the benign nineteenth-century optimism of
Robert Owen's New View of Society or Charles Fourier's
Nouveau Monde Amoureux. Indeed, we live in dangerous
times. Well before September 11, our world had become ecologically
and socially so unpredictable that a book titled Risk Society
had been written to describe it. Since then, there has been
increasing awareness at the highest levels of society of the
dangers we live in. But it is doubtful that such awareness will
improve matters without a powerful impulse for change from below.
The author of Risk Society, Ulrich
Beck, has called the attack on the World Trade Center "the
Chernobyl of globalization," exposing "the false promise
of neoliberalism" just as the Ukrainian catastrophe of 1986
"undermined our faith in nuclear energy." Viewing the
shoddy privatized airline security as partly responsible for
the suicide bombings, Beck saw in the pictures of the World Trade
Center inferno "an as yet undecoded message: a state can
neoliberalise itself to death." He decried "the capitalist
fundamentalists' unswerving faith in the redeeming power of the
market" as "a dangerous illusion," and called
for a reinvigoration of the state. "We need," he  wrote, "to combine
economic integration with cosmopolitan politics. Human dignity,
cultural identity and otherness must be taken more seriously
in the future. Since September 11, the gulf between the world
of those who profit from globalization and the world of those
who feel threatened by it has been closed. Helping those who
have been excluded is no longer a humanitarian task. It is in
the west's own interest: the key to its security."
Note that Beck did not consider terrorism
to be the world's principal problem. Without denying its significance,
he realized, as did many other thinking people, that the dimensions
of the danger were being inflated by a U.S. government eager,
in September 2001, to rally an increasingly hostile public to
its support and to distract its citizens from the ecological
and social concerns underlying the growing protest movements
of the previous two years. As Paul Krugman has written, "at
least as far as domestic policy is concerned, the administration
views terrorism as another useful crisis." Beck understands
that the enormous risks we face at the beginning of the twenty-first
century have more to do with the ideological fundamentalism of
neoliberal capitalism than with that of Islamic terror networks.
In fact, there is a considerably greater danger to the world
in general and to American formal democracy in particular of
a prolonged and unnecessary state of war between the West and
Islam than of renewed terrorism.
Nonetheless, despite the Bush administration's
evident desire to parlay Americans' fear of new attacks into
a decades-long "war on terrorism" and the wish of its
more hawkish members to expand the war beyond Iraq, the chance
is great that European doves and Washington realists will prevail,
and that such expansion will not occur. In that case we return
to the problems flowing from global capitalism itself. Indeed,
just two months after the attacks on New York and Washington,
bipartisan support for Bush's domestic program was vanishing,
as congressional Democrats returned to the offensive against
the administration's handling of the economic crisis. These
problems are perhaps more serious than even Beck believes them
to be. For the ecological and social damage done to humankind
by the savage globalization of recent decades has long been noticed,
and had met with determined resistance well before the famous
"battle of Seattle." A glance at the record, however,
shows that this resistance has been of little avail.
In the autumn of 1998, "El Niño,"
a huge recurrent storm cycle whose violence, scientists said,
was exacerbated by environmental pollution, tormented the earth's
atmosphere, breeding storms and floods in Asia and Latin America,
leaving thousands of dead and millions of homeless people in
its wake. Less than two years later, scientists were appalled
to discover that global warming had melted a kilometer-wide gap
in the ice cap at the North Pole. Since this drastic worsening
of our ecological condition was known much earlier, the United
States had by then already agreed to the Kyoto protocol of 1997,
which pledged each nation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
by 7 percent in relation to their 1990 level, an agreement which
was revoked in 2001 by the accession to the U.S. presidency of
the world's most celebrated denier of man-made climate change.
Four months before that accession, however, on August 21, 2000,
the conservative Financial Times pointed out that, halfway
through the twenty-two-year period within which the nations of
the world had agreed to such limitations, the pace of industrial
growth had outstripped environmental measures to such a degree
that "a 30 per cent cut would now be needed to meet the
commitment" in the United States, and a 14 percent reduction
in Europe. The FT's editorialist described the prospects
for cutting back greenhouse gases as "dismal," and
warned that "if the danger of global warming is to be confronted
seriously, sustained and probably painful measures will be needed
over many decades." The same issue carried an article headlined
"Chile Chokes on Its Economic Growth."
Twenty one months later, the United Nations
World Food Programme warned that torrential rain in Nicaragua,
which left 1000 people homeless in Managua, heralded the return
of El Niño to the Western hemisphere in the second half
of 2002. At roughly the same time, meteorologists were establishing
an increase in Alaska's average temperature of seven degrees
over the previous three decades, and extreme heat, drought and
high winds in wooded areas of the West and Southwest United States
were creating enormous wildfires. Excoriating George W. Bush's
indifference to global warming, Bob Herbert, a New York Times
columnist, exclaimed: "We're speeding toward a wall and
the president is not only refusing to step on the brake, he's
accelerating."
Meanwhile, we have discovered another
reason for choking. In the course of recent years, one food scandal
after another has rocked the European continent, most of them
the result of profit-oriented applications of industrial technologies
to agriculture. Europeans discovered that Mad Cow Disease, transmittable
to humans, resulted from feeding the carcasses of dead bovines
to living ones, so as to increase their weight and profitability
-- practice long widespread in the United States as well. Genetically
modified foods and beef with hormone additives, pushed by agro-industry
as a panacea for food shortages and blandly accepted in the United
States, encountered import prohibitions in environmentally aware
European nations, which consider genetically modified organisms
an incalculable danger to all forms of life.
Outside Europe, from the summer of 1997
on, financial and equity markets crashed in distant places, creating
new hordes of paupers and unemployed among those nations considered
only a year earlier the "tigers" of the world economy;
three years later, recovery was still distant in many Asian countries.
The effects of these crashes were echoed in Russia and South
America, stimulating concern among Euro-American elites that,
despite the windfall profits of recent decades, their belief
in unregulated circulation of capital and commodities as the
path to salubrious, unceasing growth might be at least partly
responsible for the economic malaise. In Europe itself, starkly
contrasting with such profits, unemployment climbed above 10
percent, while real hourly wages in the United States and Europe
continued a decline that had begun around 1975, creating an ever
sharper division between rich and poor. At the moment I write
(June 2002), the United States seems to be dragging much of the
world into prolonged recession.
Whether or not the economic malaise deepens,
the ecological problem is bound to worsen. And in either case,
large numbers of wageworkers, small shopkeepers, farmers, and
unemployed will continue to be trapped in a downward trajectory
that engenders bitterness against the propertied minority receiving
unprecedented salaries and dividends. In Europe, the struggle
against this widening gulf between the wealth of the top and
the insecurity and misery of the rest has been going on since
the mid-nineties. From 1995 on, in key nations of the European
Union, "downsized" employees, their income, status,
and hopes diminished by corporations competing for investments
and by governments privatizing to cut budget deficits, reacted
angrily to being treated as industrial waste. Accused (by establishment
spokesmen) of an archaic, corporatist mentality, they first demonstrated
their militant opposition to privatizations and welfare cuts
during the French strikes of December 1995. Innovative, radically
democratic trade unions, supported by a revitalized Green movement
and by movements of artists and intellectuals recently organized
to help immigrants without papers and fellow citizens without
jobs or homes, parlayed popular hostility to proposed "reforms"
of pensions and social security into a month-long general strike
of government workers, a strike that paralyzed the Gaullist regime
and led to its downfall eighteen months later. That denouement
paralleled the voting out of office of governments committed
to supporting conservative capitalism in Germany, Italy, England,
and Belgium. In the French-German heart of the European Union,
red-green coalitions were empowered by the electorate to reduce
unemployment by governmental stimulus of the economy, redistribute
wealth, and end the worst abuses of the environment.
Humankind thus, tardily, appeared to
react against environmental and economic disasters triggered
by the gospel of progress. Bringing them to an end, however,
was to be no simple matter, as the incapacity of the new regimes
to curb the fetishism of growth at any price, to lessen unemployment,
and to curtail neoliberal greed demonstrated. The fact that
the social-democratic regimes which took over the reins of power
in a large part of Europe were unable to break with the neoliberal
policies of their predecessors suggests that the swelling opposition
to global capitalism needs to discuss radically new perspectives,
ones that the Left -- including the Left which since the sixties
has called itself "new" -- has been too timid or too
trapped in traditional ideologies to formulate.
Coming after a century of unheard-of
violence and social transformation, the incapacity to change
free-market policies -- even of governments born of popular disgust
with neoliberalism -- has profound roots in the ideologies and
mentalities through which Western societies have conceptualized
nature, progress, and themselves since the Renaissance. Closely
tied to such self-conceptualizations, the problems of impending
ecological catastrophe and social-economic malaise loom before
us as a double wall blocking the future, noxious waste products
of the unsustainable productivity created by instrumental reason
in the last century and a half.
Environmentally, our spoliation of the
earth's resources and our poisoning of air, earth, and water
may have led us to a point of no return. The results of a social
order founded on technological hubris and on individual and collective
avarice are already being felt: the steady destruction of the
earth's rain forests by huge lumber and agricultural combines,
the acid rain denuding woodlands throughout Europe, and the warming
trend which, if unreversed, will probably lead to the inundation
of the earth's coastal areas and the death or homelessness of
hundreds of millions of people by the middle of the present century.
In the enormous land mass of the former Soviet Union, nuclear
and other varieties of pollution have diminished life expectancy
by ten years in the last generation, proof that the state capitalist
rape of nature can be as traumatic as the private capitalist
variety.
A recent quantitative study of our relationship
to our biological environment-the 2002 Living Planet Report of
the World Wildlife Fund-underscores our perilous condition. The
report states that a continuation of humankind's current pillaging
of the earth's natural resources will lead, by the year 2030,
to an unavoidable decline in human welfare, as measured by average
life expectancy, educational level, and world economic product.
The report measures our "ecological footprint" by
calculating the land area required to sustain consumption of
the total human population at current levels. This averages about
2.3 hectares for each of the six billion people on the planet.
The "biological capacity" of the earth, however-the
level of exploitation consistent with replenishment of resources-is
equal to just 1.9 hectares per person. Having passed the point
of sustainable use of resources in the 1980s, we now consume
annually about 20 percent more of the earth's biological capacity
than we restore, and given current trends we will be consuming
about 50 percent more by the year 2050. The report indicates
that the ecological footprint is much deeper in North America
and Europe-9.6 and 5 hectares per person respectively-than in
Asia and Africa, where the use of resources is estimated at 1.4
hectares per person.
Politically, the danger of fueling a
world economy on unsustainable energy resources is perhaps more
immediate than the ecological hazard. The more affluent societies
have enjoyed a free lunch until now on the basis of fossil fuel
supplies -- oil, gas, and coal -- which, apart from their destructive
effects on air, land, and water, will be largely exhausted before
the end of this century. In the case of oil, given the steady
decline in the discovery of new reserves, educated predictions
are that output will peak between 2004 and 2008, a peak that
will be followed by declining production and a rapid rise in
the price of oil-based fuel; the latter will drastically increase
the cost of transporting persons and goods. We have already
seen the violent reactions from auto-addicted Europeans and Americans
to sudden increases in gas pump prices. The Report of the
National Energy Policy Development Group, signed by the American
vice-president and most of the cabinet in May 2001, blandly forecasted
an increase in U.S. energy needs of 32 percent in the next two
decades. While they indicated where they hoped to procure it
(in part, the Caspian Sea), the authors mentioned neither the
probable rapid increase in the price of oil nor the political
turmoil this was likely to create toward the end of George W.
Bush's present term of office. But it is not unreasonable to
speculate that the military adventurism in central Asia and the
Middle East of an American government headed by oil barons may
be motivated by more than the hunt for an elusive gang of terrorists.
Socially and economically, the global
expansion of capitalist markets has been fueled by the development
of an information technology that makes most traditional production
jobs as well as many third sector employments obsolete. In the
1990s neoliberal globalization combined with computerization
led to two equally dangerous phenomena. One was a runaway speculation
in financial capital and technology shares which, though slowing
down for a presumed "soft landing" in 2000, dangerously
destabilized the world economy. Starting with the summer of 1999,
European commentators expressed repeated fears of a world crash
equivalent to that of 1929. The other was a redistribution of
world income in favor of the 20 percent of the world's population
which possessed either capital or the high-level education in
the manipulation of abstractions that is necessary for information
technology. For the majority of ordinary mortals, particularly
in those large parts of our planet where modernization and industrialization
have replaced religious notions of a hereafter with the tangible
prospect of ever-increasing material welfare, the recent downturn
in expectations has had a serious impact on self-esteem and identity.
It has been hundreds of years since an adult generation in the
Euro-American heartland of "progress" realistically
expected a harder, instead of an easier, life for its children.
These worsening, seemingly insoluble,
ecological and social problems result from the persistence of
institutions and ideologies that have become totally inadequate
to our situation. I am convinced that if we cannot question,
or at least consider modifying, these institutions and ideologies,
we are going to vanish like sparrows flying into a jetliner.
It is, in other words, imperative that we step back and take
a longer perspective on the course of human history as well as
on the resources for changing that course. More than the post-September
11 threats of war and terrorism, the crises of environmental
decay and economic malaise that I shall discuss in this book
cast a shadow on the future of humanity, leading many of us into
an unreal kind of living for the moment, an almost psychotic
egoism. How we arrived at this dark passage and how we might
get beyond it are the themes of this book.
While I am aware that we are in desperate
straits and am apprehensive about the future, I nonetheless am
convinced that the most powerful "realism" today is
the utopian imagination. The forces we have created and that
currently shape our thinking about the future have a contradictory
character. When applied in appropriate dosage they can cure rather
than kill. Think of the mix of social and individual forces at
work in the creation of modern society. Historians, anthropologists,
and sociologists understand the dependence of healthy individuality
on strong social settings that encourage it, as evidenced in
the first flowering of classical culture in the Greek polis,
or in its later blooming in the Italian Renaissance. In the modern
world, the hypertrophy of individualism unleashed by ideologies
that have abandoned the social nexus has produced anomic criminality
as well as the avarice and financial power of the superwealthy,
but in a more humane social context, modern individualism could
also find expression in the sonnets of Shakespeare, the operas
of Mozart, the novels of Zola, and the art of Picasso. Similarly,
the social impulse is maleficent only when it loses sight of
individual needs. If it has led to the creation of totalitarian
empires, bureaucratic tyrannies, the techno-corporate monstrosities
of contemporary capitalism, and the opposed terrorisms of Western
and Eastern fundamentalisms, it has also powered revolutions
demanding social justice for oppressed masses. At a more local
scale, social bonding may have created lynch mobs and pogroms,
but it also nurtured neighborhood friendships, romantic love,
idealistic brother bands in art and politics, and communal self-help.
The Western cultural tradition has for
nearly three millennia evoked these opposed potentialities --
the dark sides of human existence as well as the cures for present
and future ills -- in the figure of the Greek god Prometheus.
The importance of the myth of Prometheus has increased rather
than decreased in the modern era, epitomizing the innovative
economic and social force of modernity expressed by most ideologies
of the last two centuries. Other myths, sometimes competing with
and sometimes supplementing the Promethean one, have of course
also served as seedbeds of modern ideologies. Individuals and
groups in contemporary society continue to believe in the salvationist
myth of Christ. Others revere the devotion to aesthetic perfection
associated with the myths of Orpheus and Apollo, or the demonic
productivity of Faust or the intoxicated descent into instinctual
life associated with Dionysos. Insofar as the Promethean ethos
is a myth of heroic creation and sacrifice, however, I believe
it has been the principal inspiration of the continual transformations
of our world, the dominant myth of the modern age. In Freudian
terms, it has defined the principal link between rational ego,
moral will, and instinctual impulse in our world, for the better
in the democratic revolutions to which we are the heirs, for
the worse in the catastrophic scenarios to which uncontrolled
nationalism and industrialism, by-products of those revolutions,
led in the twentieth century. The complexities of the Promethean
tradition are the complexities of the contemporary world; the
faces of modern Prometheanism are as multiple and contradictory
as those of modernity itself.
This book, in contrast to the prevailing
interpretation of Prometheanism, has as its point of departure
a vision of the Titan God that may nurture hope rather than terror
of the future.
Arthur Mitzman
is emeritus professor of modern history at the University of
Amsterdam. His previous books include The Iron Cage: An Historical
Interpretation of Max Weber and Michelet, Historian: Rebirth
and Romanticism in Nineteenth-Century France. He can be reached
at: mitzman@counterpunch.org
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