Hunger Games Here and To Come

According to a blistering column by E.J. Dionne, recent Supreme Court cases could all be grouped under the title Rich v Poor, and you can guess who's been winning.  Others have also noted that the current Court is handing over the electoral system to the wealthy, though some of the richest aren't too happy about the attention it's bringing them.  One of the Kochs complained in the Wall Street Journal, which pretty much exists for complaints by the wealthy.  Josh Marshall has an ongoing series about the uber- rich who are amazingly sensitive to criticism if not to the suffering of others or their ongoing destruction of the planet.

The implications for politics suggests to Peter Bienart that mega-donors are now more important than the politicians themselves and ought to be covered by news media more assiduously.  Dionne goes further to pair the pro-wealthy Court decisions with their anti-poor (or everybody else) decisions to suggest we're becoming an oligarchy.  Update 4/18/14: And now according to a Princeton study it's official: the U.S. is an oligarchy.

But it may well be worse than that.  The enormous gap between the wealth of the wealthy and everybody else (that most recently got the full Bill Maher treatment) has been building for decades.  The disappearance of industrial jobs (closing of the steel mills etc.) in the late 70s was perhaps the first conspicuous indication.  Observers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Paul Krugman wrote about it in the 80s.  Cultural historian William Irwin Thompson took the long view, and saw that it could forecast the return of the Middle Ages.

Speaking of which, many apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic stories feature either a fairly stable feudal Middle Ages world of lords and serfs (The Hunger Games) or a Dark Ages organization of war lords and poor (from Shape of Things to Come to The Postman and the Mad Max movie series.)

There could hardly be worse societal preparation for the stresses of climate crisis effects than the current dive into oligarchy.  It might make money available for a few high profile projects in rich cities, for instance, but in general it is one of several current trends that make civilization even more vulnerable.  Food and water shortages are among the serious problems forecast by the latest UN report, as well as by many other studies.  As Elizabeth Kolbert writes of the report in the latest New Yorker: "Composed in a language that might be called High Committee, the report is nevertheless hair-raising. The I.P.C.C.’s list of potential warming-induced disasters—from ecological collapse to famine, flooding, and pestilence—reads like a riff on the ten plagues. Matching the terror is the collective shame of it. “Why should the world pay attention to this report?” the chairman of the I.P.C.C., Rajendra Pachauri, asked the day the update was released. Because “nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change.”

Though our media doesn't much say so, we've already seen food shortages and price spikes lead to political violence and chaos in various parts of the world, and very quickly.  Already a study has linked violence to climate crisis effects.

Add the penchant of the most politically active of the uber-wealthy to insist on ideology over even common sense, plus the fundamentalist dogmatism of their unwitting army, and the move back to the Middle Ages is a shockingly short one.

What stands between a Dark Ages anarchy and/or a Middle Ages system of lords who rule over a poor population by means of hired thugs (currently arming themselves) is the civilization that resides in the souls of our citizens.  And by civilization I mean not only enlightened, rational and practical evidence-based thinking and conscious valuing of diversity, but compassion, cooperation and empathy in everyday problem solving.

That the threat of falling into a new feudal Middle Ages or a new Dark Ages exists should be a cautionary tale to the young especially.  They need to be prepared to ward it off, to see the signs, to strengthen the consciousness and the values that may overcome it before it happens.