On a gloomy day ..

Increasing poverty, disease, and instability in many parts of the world, decreasing resources to support the one-sided prosperity of the industrialized world, major global threats such as climate change and possible technological disasters - none of these is likely to vanish because of some scientific breakthrough. Technological optimists assume that some unforeseeable invention will appear in time to solve every problem we face. Their more detailed projections look disturbingly like the well-known S. Harris cartoon in which a mathematician's blackboard proof contains a step labeled “then a miracle occurs.” Humanity, it must be admitted, has pulled off a good many miracles. But the challenges we face are so grave that it would be foolhardy to count on them in every instance.

It does not require any sophisticated social theory to grasp these threats. It makes only short-term economic sense to continue to expend a finite resource and create conditions that in just a few decades will measurably depress world productivity.

Yet we do nothing. The need for change may be obvious, but the culture of our age makes the obvious choice seem intolerably painful. Our insatiable demand for control of our lives, the enriched privation that demands to be fed with more and more goods - these feed a spiral of self-destructive consumption. Afraid we are nothing, we want everything. Severed from the ways in which we make ourselves, confronting our own creative power as an alien force that ceaselessly threatens to overwhelm our identities, we are driven to construct worlds of our own in which we can maintain the fragile illusion that we are independent beings.

So we use whatever comes to hand. Our DVD players, designer clothes, iphones, computers, framed diplomas, CD racks, SUVs, on and on . They give pleasure, but they multiply incessantly because they are also the fragments we shore against the ruins of our common life. This endless hunger feeds the equally endless rapacity of constant economic growth. And the dread of our self-made isolation, the emotional impoverishment of our culture and the resigned belief in our own powerlessness will not change no matter how rational capitalist production becomes or how fair we make international trade.

We seem to be at an impasse. Changes in the political landscape is a mirage or the imposition of a fragmentary understanding of human activity that is mistaken for the whole. We are left with well-meaning democratic society, valuable and perhaps even essential within its limits, but unable to deliver us from the hunger at its heart, from the discontents Freud claimed were the price of civilization. A more human as well as a more equitable life: one in which we recognize ourselves in others, no longer afraid of the transformations of our mutual creativity or driven to construct a world of commodities in which to shelter from the world of commodity production, in which we might live more fully instead of living within ideas of life —have we no path there?