Culture War
patrick brennan
September 2020
Image Courtesy of NEON
Thinking about the documentary Spaceship Earth, directed by Matt Wolf.
Going on just a few of the available facts, many of us may actually live to become unwilling personal eyewitnesses to the terminal episodes of what appears to already be a done deal. About 25 years ago, in a correspondence between two participants in a very, very small (maybe 30 people altogether) international network of unschooling parents & children, a French woman, who was then living in Guinea Bissau, wrote about the extraordinary musicians there, who played only “when there was enough food.”
“Without music there is no life.” Then again, without food… . The fragility of life as a whole, but especially the fragility of that so immunologically vulnerable species, homo sapiens (who can’t even drink the same water a dog can) is irrefutable & inevitable. There’s no going it alone, despite whatever used car free individualist Robinson Crusoe fantasy reruns Ayn Rand or Ronald Reagan may have sold people. Murray Bookchin began addressing some of the unnecessary threats to this often resilient, but nevertheless delicate, interdependency back in the 1950s. As his biographer Janet Biehl summarizes it,
Modern society is sending the developmental processes of natural evolution into reverse by polluting the air and water, by destroying topsoil and forests, by poisoning food with chemicals, and by promoting the hypertrophic growth of megacities, it was stripping nature of its complexity, “disassembling the biotic pyramid,” replacing a complex environment with a simpler one that will be able to sustain only simpler life-forms. If current trends continue, then, “the preconditions for advanced life will be irreparably damaged and the earth will prove to be incapable of supporting a viable, healthy human species.”
Imagination is fruit of the sun, whose energy, once modulated though photosynthesis, is consumed by, among others, some tentative, heterotrophic bipeds. There’s no way to separate the who of what we are, our dreams, conclusions & actions, from the resources & techniques that afford these animals—already bereft of warming fur or feathers, without claws or dangerous teeth, animals whose offspring take almost forever to develop independence & autonomy—their necessary safety & protection, which is to say, food, health, housing, relationship, even education (or some other means of deep learning).
“Will you fight for someone you don’t know?” The collective effort to develop & share these foundational necessities within U.S. society, recently spearheaded by the against-the-odds, Eugene Debs inspired, Neo-New Deal presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, was defeated by a decidedly hostile commercial news media (they’ll be with us here later too), a documented spike in the voting of well off suburbanites (many of whom seem to be newly disaffected Republicans) and the shadow of the country’s first African American ex-president & his party minions. Just add some pandemic & stir.
The conclusion reached is that “nothing will fundamentally change,” that it’s “necessary” that others be somehow hurt (so long as it’s not “me”, of course) in order for one to live well. Evidently, it’s believed necessary that the dreams of those unhoused, or, say, shot in the back seven times, should be indefinitely deferred so that real estate speculation, for example, or weapons manufacturing (absolutely!), may continue to thrive, all this during the sixth mass extinction in planetary experience with an extraordinarily accelerated melting of polar icecaps. Chinese hoaxes all, of course.
***
Spin back to 1967 San Francisco. Bohemia has sprouted a sort of countercultural critical mass, flush no less with the sensations of possibility & optimism that were accompanying the country’s’ second attempted Reconstruction. John Allen, of the same generation as Ornette & Cecil Taylor, is assembling a coterie of sparking, heterodox individuals, some as young as 17, resolving together to forge a collective of interdisciplinary scope, socially communitarian, simultaneously practicing arts, science, ecology, business. Allen continuously plays the incendiary spoke of the wheel throughout, charismatic, often dearly loved, constantly raising the ante of exploration for all. They form an experimental theater company, the Theater of All Possibilities. They study, explore, discover other skills they didn’t know they could even approach.
By 1969, San Francisco has started to wear thin, its ambience having already turned “too commercial.” The group manages to find some cheap land in New Mexico and establish the farm Synergia (fully aware, of course, of Buckminster Fuller & the aspirational scope of the Whole Earth Catalog). They learn construction and to farm sustainably. After some time, Allen finds all this “too successful” and proposes they now build an ocean worthy vessel from scratch. Of course, no one in the group has ever done such a thing before.
Teaching themselves everything, including celestial navigation (knowledge not only beyond the looser latitudes of previous learning experiment, but here potentially of life or death impact), they build a ship they name Heraclitus and take it on the road, sailing the world, touring as a theater company, initiating international conferences of scientists, ecologists, avant garde artists & other thinkers.
Damn. How did they pay for all that?
It was, for sure, generally a lot less expensive to live on the fringes than it’s since become. All involved were European Americans, likely from middle class families. Some may have had good paying jobs that kicked into the kitty. Some of their personal networks may also have tapped into other sources of support. What they did do was operate as business entrepreneurs to support these initiatives. They hand built a hotel in Kathmandu. They opened an art gallery in London. They wove a network of diverse business activities around the globe.
Allen’s Faustian partner in all of this was a Texas multi-millionaire named Ed Bass, who supplied start up capital in return for a cut. Even though his was petroleum money, Bass, like Al Gore, also claimed some concern for ecology. As the group’s research into climate destabilzation deepened, Allen & compatriots evolved further into a notion of creating a closed loop biosphere in experiment toward developing an extraterrestrially exportable Earthlike living environment. The outer space fantasy seems to substitute for the likely far more real project of understanding more of just how this Earth behaves, contextualized within an even deeper practical question as to how we can all live.
Allen appreciated having found an investor willing to wait out the long term for any profit from such an experiment. Bass apparently hoped to benefit from derivative discoveries or technologies encountered along the way, as had already happened, for example, with NASA, the Department of “Defense” & other publicly funded research. Allen, however, was most interested in what could be learned regardless of whatever “success” achieved, each iteration then further informing the next.
What eventually ensues is the construction of the remarkably ambitious, two hundred million dollar Biosphere 2 (the title Biosphere 1 left to identify the terrestrial placenta we all inhabit) near Oracle, Arizona. Glass windowed geodesic structures enclose a multiplicity of environments — rainforest, desert, salt ocean, cultivatable land, hosting a carefully selected Noah’s Ark of fauna & flora from around the world, including a living coral reef. The design does not settle for the technocratic but aspires also to beauty, to tone as humanly perceived. The aesthetic is not estranged from the ethic.
The first round of experiment, envisioned to run in total for an entire century, would be to host eight human beings within this sealed off environment for two years. Everything — waste water, oxygen, carbon, biomass, etc. — were all to be recycled within this compass. Everybody & everything inside would subsist only on what was produced in this environment. This presented a tremendous wager.
In 1991, eight “Biospherians” — botanist, oceanographer, MD, etc., etc.— enter Biosphere 2 for the first two year stint just a bit after having presented a theater performance that rehearses nearly everything that could possibly go wrong. Throughout their residency, data of every measurable detail is immediately circulated to a mission control station just outside the complex, where Allen and others monitor the progress of the experiment.
Of course, things do go wrong, as had already been anticipated, the only questions remaining as to just what in particular that might be. A Biospherian injures her hand, having to exit briefly for surgery and afterwards imposing a greater work burden on the other seven while she recuperates. Truncated winter daylight restricts variety in food supply. A dangerous spike in CO2 fatigues and incites conflict as well as resentment toward Allen. Eventually, the pure closed system model has to be abandoned as oxygen is added to the biosphere from the outside, greatly relieving & lifting spirits for the occupants. They emerge after these two years apparently joyous nevertheless about their experience and accomplishment.
Outside, there is a business to run, always more money to raise. Media is invited to augment the public profile of the endeavor, at first feigning wonderment at its novelty, then descending toward the cynicism that seems to ever so reliably increase ratings & advertising revenue. Therefore, the project is now declared to be somehow fraudulent, a con job, an extravagant stunt, & a failed one at that. Allen just has to be some kind of untrustworthy cult leader. Talking head university scientists are invited to dub the project, for example, “trendy ecological entertainment” of no scientific or learning value whatsoever. Medicare for All in the U.S., as we all know, of course, would just be impossible, and so forth. Weapons of mass destruction! Weapons of mass destruction! You already know this drill. Talk about closed loops….
Allen, whatever his personal limitations may or may not have been, has to navigate the collisions among paradigms. He & his collaborators are outliers. His conception is not what academics, or hedge fund managers, or media pundits are trained to recognize or accept. Notions such as work democracy, or performance art, not to mention what artists consider to be experiment, or that any interested member of a society, & not just the certified & licensed, has a valid right to ask questions & pursue research, can find no legitimate role within their permissible worldviews, most especially if commingled in any way with something as technocratically sacrosanct as scientific exploration.
Meanwhile, Bass, who as a near billionaire, should be enjoying the impunity of a master of the universe, seems to become rattled by the media circus, the complaints of academic scientists, & who knows what else. Allen tries to control the public narrative, understandably, perhaps appearing evasive, even testy, among the growing conflicts with Bass, scientists & the media. It seems, however, that, after the two years, everything has landed on its feet, at least for the time being.
This is not to be. At some point, without warning, armed marshals descend upon the complex, permanently evicting Allen & several other key collaborators. Bass has suddenly replaced the Synergians with one of the future wannabe horsemen of the apocalypse, who was at that time still being groomed for that role, but here fresh out of that finishing school that has supplied much of the elite cabinets of Presidents Clinton & Obama: Goldman Sachs.
Enter, believe it or not, Steve Bannon, of all people, well ahead of his fake news exploits with Breitbart News, or his period as Buddy #1 to His Orange Majesty, his promulgation of the nefarious fictions of white supremacy in the interest of some “cleansing” global war, or his recent arrest for fraudulently diverting funds ostensibly raised (along with that notorious architect of voter suppression Kris Kobach) for that wall contra México toward his own personal uses.
Bannon is recorded gloating after the takeover, true to the zero sum machismo of Wall Street, about having “kicked John Allen’s ass.” He orders the records and data gathered over that crucial two years destroyed as if they were racing to shred some trove of incriminating documents. We never do learn why the level of carbon dioxide suddenly flared up in Biosphere 2. I’m still curious about that & would like to know. Who knows what other learning, & potential learning, an apex of 20 years of work by Allen & his circle, is lost.
***
Now, a lawyer might likely argue, with a shrug, that all this is perfectly fine, totally legal. These documents were the property of a corporation in some way owned & controlled by Ed Bass and they could do whatever they pleased with them. End of story.
Rule of law, however, has a lot to answer for here. Whatever justice law may manage to foster, law is also the English kings’ eviction (through the violence of royally financed foreign mercenaries) of British farmers from their common lands in order both to privatize them into individual real estate holdings and institute what’s now accepted as that sacred social relation known as private property. This was legal, by the way, because the kings & Parliament already owned the law. Virginia’s colonial government declared impoverished English workers chattel property without their consent even before that same administrative institution later on invented racism by melanin coding slavery, all accomplished through legislation. Totally legal. What’s the problem? And what was it that the U.S. Supreme court had to say about Dred Scott’s personhood? That was legal too, and so are the juries that have exonerated lynchers & police murders of unarmed people. Why are most of those detained by the U.S. prison industrial complex, each at the cost of a private university tuition, poor? Go ask your civics teacher, that is, if there are any left.
So, whose data & records were these? Who created them? Whom could they have benefitted? They certainly were the work of Allen’s team, not at all the work of Bass, or of Bannon, or their henchmen. As knowledge, they arguably could belong to a commons, to everybody, not exclusively to Bannon, or to Bass. Yet the law apparently reserved to them the theft implicit in this destruction. There is some mention in the film that all of this could be construed as illegal, but the marshals, the necessary agents of potential violence here, did not in the least dissent. And, once the stuff is gone, it’s gone. The damage has turned irredeemably moot. You want to hire a pricey lawyer to fight over that? Sure, go ahead. Be Free to Choose. Thanks, Milton.
What might to a lawyer seem a simple, open & shut property dispute disguises the cultural war being waged against almost everything the Synergians are and represent. The disguise cloaks itself in the same dangerous hypersimplification that Bookchin warned about, but here it’s a phony reduction of human relations to exclusively that of buyer & seller, to property owners versus those without property, to a worldview that enforces fungibly conceived product as more real than any unreifiable, engaged process, thereby faithfully abiding by Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum that “There is no alternative” (no wonder she so loved Augusto Pinochet).
Some are therefore “more equal than others” in such a “free” exchange. If you don’t like it, you are always “free” to take a walk (unless, of course, arrested later as a vagrant and treated to the 13th amendment, but that’s yet another story…).
The Synergians had the vision, the skill, the determination, the creativity, to realize Biosphere 2, but they didn’t have that kind of money. Bass didn’t have the vision, the skill, the determination or the creativity, but he did have the money, and with it, the legal right to shut it down and destroy it all. Now, one could argue that this was just a personal issue, that the rich guy was just fed up with the quirky shenanigans of these bohemian-like weirdos and had just had enough, but this also ignores the very real imbalance of power in play.
To his credit, however, Bass didn’t quite go so far as to demolish Biosphere 2 itself (I mean, just think of the potential value of all that real estate). It was eventually donated to the University of Arizona, who now decides what happens there. But, the botanist who initially lived there for those key two years, who cultivated each plant, knowing their names & intimate personal histories, she would now be classified as a trespasser rather than as a relative.
Bannon’s career before & after this incident clarifies the war being waged. It’s a war against a way of being, against not just just what the Synergians were doing, but against how they organized themselves to do it. As with Keats’ Negative Capability, holistic comprehension has to be experimentally developed from the inside out, from within a whole, thereby necessarily traversing the paradox that one can never know, much less comprehend, everything involved, an epistemological divergence that had to drive at least some of the skeptical scientists, as well nearly all of the media hacks, right up the wall. The persons & names might change, but the opposition remains consistent.
For Bannon, & all those who are willing to sacrifice all else for fast, private profit (read: plausibly deniable coercive power), the simplification of their operating model disdains organic complexity, whether that be biological, conceptual, or social — too hard to control, too expensive, too inefficient — exactly the sorts of complexities the initial Biosphere 2 team was learning about and nurturing. This demonstrates a weed’s eye view holding a climax forest in contempt.
From this perspective, the enemy to destroy looks a lot like group solidarity, thinking outside the box, eschewing the unnecessary impediments of habitual category or convention, cross fertilization, open ended experimentation, making mistakes, asking questions, imagination, play, cooperation, healthy skepticism, discovery, self determination, inter-species respect, fun, gratuitous difficulty, non-violence, conceptual independence, expanding thresholds, sharing, perpetual curiosity, new syntheses, care, wonderment, conscious interdependency, beauty when not shackled to a sales pitch, & quite a bit more.
That kind of symbiotic/synergistically construed power, where even individually weak components can mutually reinforce each other toward an optimal synthetic strength, requires personal commitment and some “paying of dues,” maybe even some humility & empathy, prices inimical to the reductionist, gated community fantasy of an unimpeded, air conditioned superhighway across the South Bronx toward an unaccountable, quick, & well alienated buck. However, destroying the organic sources of life, or masses of human lives, not being their own property, and therefore not their problem, continue to remain perfectly acceptable externalized costs, so long as one comes out “winner,” whatever that’s going to mean for any mortal after a while.
***
There’s yet another layer of irony in this story. The Synergians themselves identified in the film as both capitalist and proudly organized as a corporation. Now, there’s a range of meanings to these terms, and, from their displayed stories & behavior, there’s no indication of any taste or attraction to sweatshop labor capitalism, hostile takeover capitalism, soak people through debt credit card mortgage medical bills payday lender student loan capitalism, disaster capitalism, property flipping gentrification capitalism, incarceration capitalism, fictitious value capitalism, monopoly capitalism, war & murder capitalism, under the thumb held hostage colonialist capitalism, or even racial capitalism as a whole. Obviously, they were each individually willing to work hard themselves and not instead underpay someone else to do it.
It appears rather that they were attempting to operate in an economically self-sustaining manner so that they themselves could avoid being owned, that is to say, that they could maintain control over what they were doing. In this regard, it seems reasonable that they’d consider launching free enterprise ventures as the best available means of support for the bulk of their activities, most of which weren’t ever going to generate any money anyway. This can be understood as, in effect, a scaled up version of an artist’s survival day gig — and certainly, no government would be rushing to fund projects like these (although a Green New Deal WPA that experimental might be worth seriously considering). But, who knows, maybe there was some desire somewhere to earn more in an hour or two at others’ expense than many do in a lifetime. This isn’t entirely or explicitly clear.
Game as their strategy was to play with fire like this, this particularly heartless sort of fire doesn’t play. It knows only fight fire with fire, burn or be burned. The normal, pressure-for-bad predatory tendencies of capitalism swooped in to chew up & spit out the Biosphere 2 project as blithely as it would any ordinary family running behind on its rent.
What this unsympathetic fault line renders most acute is that supporting worthwhile activities that improve, or potentially improve, quality of life, in other words, enhance what’s real in a person’s experience, seems nearly impossible unless somebody with excess power can manage to extract some kind of fungible advantage out of it. That means that children, art, learning, the shared pleasures of community, meaning, justice, caring for the small, mutual support, restoring ecosystems, etc. either have to be for sale or else stomped out (if not starved out) by that ever so impartially fair invisible hand of the market.
The wealthiest country in human history, the country with the most means & potential, can’t seem to even begin to figure this out, no matter how many good ideas are circulated. And, what’s more, so many in the U.S. not only accept this, but actually defend this, as normal, as so unassailable that it’s even worth murdering people in Iraq, Vietnam, Latin America or Minneapolis for, a dysfunction so self-sustaining that it’s nearly staring us all at suicide. What does that tell us?
That Allen’s team got as far as it did under these kinds of terms almost paints a sort of heroes’ story reaching toward Coyote’s theft of flame, at least, that is, until the Icarus effect sets in. Then again, a business plan that, at best, might be able to promise technical means only for the likes of Charles Koch or Jeff Bezos to piss all over everyone else before they run off to a lunar bioshpere, may be better fed to the piranhas after all.
So, what might we do (if fortunate enough) once fed & physically secure? Well, for one thing, we can fruit, we can flower. Sciences & arts grow, of course, from imagination (science, even mathematics, exercises verified, or at least potentially verifiable, acts of imagination — you can just ask Einstein about that). But, here we are, as ever, outside the ken of instrumental rationality, still having to rattle that tin cup in some kind of way while budgets for militarist bullying continue to get kissed from behind. The Synergians’ anti-entropic impetus identifies one among many thousands of responses to this predicament, but this is one that, at least for a minute, managed to play out the theater of all possibilities on a far bigger stage than most.
***
Bass & Bannon may well have starved out an extraordinarily broad in scope, unique human experiment, successfully heading off thereby any possibilities for large scale impact on the part of Allen’s synergists, but they didn’t destroy the actual people, their visions, or their community, most of whom are still alive, most of whom, having since downsized their scale and attention to the local at Synergia, are still together after 50 years of active collaboration, a lifetime’s triumphant accomplishment that can be neither bought nor stolen.
Director Matt Wolf applies conventional documentary procedures with great aplomb to a distinctly unconventional story that’s maybe even stranger than a lot of fiction. He deftly sustains that what-could-come-next tension in a way that augments the emotional impact and meaning of the narrative. It also shouldn’t by ignored that it was Wolf who had the sensibility & sensitivity to recognize the still important & relevant stories that he’s made available to viewers. This is an important contribution.
The film’s trailer might lead a viewer to expect some sort of reality TV spectacle. Don’t be fooled by that. The film is excellent & not at all petty. One hears instead a great deal of the story in the participants’ own words with all the tone that resonates the genuine value it carries.
People young enough to have grown up & lived always under the shadow of the seeming absoluteness of neoliberalism can find plenty of reason to justifiably blame earlier generations for the precarities they’ve inherited. Spaceship Earth, however, shows that visionary activity, much of which is still fresh with contemporary potential, has never really been absent, even if it has been repeatedly outgunned.
patrick brennan coordinates ensembles, composes & plays the alto saxophone, pursuing a contrarian and independent musical path within the Blues Continuum toward the evolution of a distinct musical language that explores multidirectional thinking, organization, time, sound, line & rhythm. Recordings include terraphonia (Creative Sources), muhheankuntuk (Clean Feed), which way what, and Sudani (deep dish).
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