The Aesthetics of Collapse

The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons

As I mentioned in my last post, from the point of view of Buddhist teachings we are living in an age that suffers from five degenerations. On the other hand, we are also living through one of the most peaceful periods in human history. It is demonstrable through numbers.

Genghis Khan lived in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. In the year 1200 C.E. there were an estimated 360 million people on the planet. It is estimated that Genghis Khan’s armies killed 40 million of those people, one out of every 9 people. That is demographically shocking. In the first quarter of the 20th century, an estimate 45 million people were killed in various wars, etc, at a time when there were 2 billion people on the planet. By contrast, we just hit the 25 year mark for the 21st century, and we humans have only murdered 4.5 million or so of each other since the year 2000, and we are now at 8.2 billion or so.

Another interesting fact is that the decreased lethality of warfare seems to be tied to the development of nuclear weapons. Since the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945, a horrendous policy error by Truman, there has been a precipitous decline in the scale of wars and the kinds of wars nations are willing to fight with one another. This seems to be an unintended benefit of the Manhattan Project, started to beat the Nazis in development of nuclear weapons.

Despite this seemingly positive trend, we are living in an era of widespread environmental destruction. We are destroying our environment at an alarming rate, and there is no sign of this letting up, and we are unable to discontinue the behavior causing this destruction.

We feel collapse in the air. We are observing the collapse of insect populations, the collapse of bird populations, and the collapse of fisheries around the world. When the right wing is in power, the left turns to millenarianism. When the left wing is in power, the right wing turns apocalyptical. Meanwhile, unable to change, unwilling to change, we are fouling the only planet we live on. The 80 years of relative peace in the world since 1945 has allowed humans the leisure to extract the maximum amount of natural resources. Our populations have spread into jungles and forests, which releases new diseases and disrupts the ecosystem everywhere all at once. AIDS, SARS. COVID, Lyme, etc., are all examples of this. Our population is consuming for housing the very land we should use to feed ourselves. Our air, water, soil, and even the tissues of our bodies, down to the tiniest cell, are polluted by the decades of reckless, unfettered, petrochemical extraction and plastics manufacture.

The myth of the tragedy of the commons is the key driving force behind the extractive economics we presently term “neoliberalism.” This myths finds a home in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, where he clearly articulates the aesthetic driving collapse:

He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. No body can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, when did they begin to be his? when he digested? or when he eat? or when he boiled? or when he brought them home? or when he picked them up? and it is plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction between them and common: that added something to them more than nature, the common mother of all, had done; and so they became his private right.¹

This argument, which appears to be an argument from law and economics, is in fact an argument from aesthetics. The aesthetics of ownership, entitlement, and domination are quite different than the aesthetics of mutuality, generosity, and cooperation.

Capitalism has been driven by Locke’s aesthetic since the 18th century. The logic of primitive accumulation, the enclosure of the commons, is at the heart of what we now term neoliberalism. Now our bodies, our very DNA, the proteins that make up life are subjects of primitive accumulation and humans beings, men and women, are slowly being replaced in the process of human reproduction with the introduction of IVF technology.

The Buddhist response to this is simple. Nāgārjuna states in the Ratnavali:

This “I” and “mine”
are ultimately false. 
Why? These two do not occur
 when the true nature of things is understood. 

The aesthetic driving neoliberalism stems from statements such this:

God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience. The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being.²

Locke is only one example. The aesthetics of collapse are predicated on a belief in human domination of the world and all it contains. Such beliefs can only result in the complete exhaustion the planet. The belief in human domination ultimately comes from the view of “I” and “mine.”

Unless we refuse this aesthetic of collapse, the belief in human exceptionalism and the belief that value (property) is created through labor used in the appropriation of commonly held resources, I am afraid there is little hope for human civilization on this planet. The only way we can prevent this is by understanding dependent origination, selflessness, and emptiness and putting them into practice everyday.

I have no idea how or when true civilizational collapse will present itself to us. My instinct is that it will be slow, that we will be like frogs in a pot of water slowly heated to a boil. By the time we realize that we should jump out, it will be too late. But there is no where for us to jump. The idea that we are going colonize the stars is an immature fantasy. We need to take care of this place. It is already getting a bit late for that. But plant a garden anyway.

1. Locke, John; Macpherson, C. B.. Second Treatise of Government (Hackett Classics) (p. 19). (Function). Kindle Edition.

2. Locke, John; Macpherson, C. B.. Second Treatise of Government (Hackett Classics) (p. 18). (Function). Kindle Edition.