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Can Mamdani and Friends Revive Socialism in America? Our Future Depends on It
To build a society that actually serves its people, it is necessary to recover a long-marginalized tradition that understands democracy not simply as the holding of elections but as a genuine way of life focused on fighting for the many rather than the privileged few.
Nov 02, 2025
More than a century ago, from a Berlin prison cell where she was confined for her uncompromising opposition to the slaughter of the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg warned, “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” Her diagnosis remains no less salient today.
In the United States, we long ago chose the path of barbarism. President Donald Trump and his enablers have proven major catalysts in hastening our descent, but they are symptoms as well as causes. The more thacompounding crises of our time, from ecological collapse to immense inequality to endless war, were hardly unforeseeable aberrations. They are the logical outgrowths of a capitalist system built on violent exploitation and rooted in the relentless pursuit of profits over people.
The unsustainable economic order that has defined our national life has corroded our democracy, eroded our shared sense of humanity, and propelled our institutions and our planet toward collapse. Today, we find ourselves perilously far down the highway leading to collective suicide. What the final autopsy will include—be it nuclear annihilation, climate catastrophe, AI-driven apocalypse, or all of the above—no one can yet be certain.
Yet fatalism is not a viable option. A different direction for the country and world remains possible, and Americans still can meet this moment and avert catastrophe. If we are to do so, Luxemburg’s prescription, socialism, remains our last, best hope.
Whether Mamdani wins or loses in November (and count on him winning), he has sparked the reawakening of a long-dormant American tradition of leftist politics.
That conviction animates the democratic socialist campaign of Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City. In a bleak political climate, he offers a rare spark of genuine hope. Yet his mass appeal has provoked a remarkable, if predictable, elite backlash. He’s faced Islamophobic smears, oligarch money, and backroom deals (efforts that, Mamdani observed, cost far more than the taxes he plans to impose to improve life in New York). Trump has unsurprisingly joined these efforts wholeheartedly, while the Democratic establishment has chosen the path of cowardice and silence, or at least equivocation.
The outrage over Mamdani is not only about the label “socialist.” Every American has heard the refrain: Socialism looks good on paper but doesn’t work in practice. The subtext, of course, is that capitalism does. And in a sense, it has. It has worked exactly as designed by concentrating obscene levels of wealth in the hands of a ruling class that deploys its fortune to further entrench its power. Especially since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, private capital has wielded untold influence over elections, drowning out ordinary voices in a flood of corporate money.
What makes Mamdani’s campaign so unsettling to those (all too literally) invested in this status quo is not merely his critique of capitalism but his insistence on genuine democracy. His platform rests on the simple assertion that, in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the world (as should be true everywhere across this nation), every person deserves basic dignity. And what undoubtedly unnerves the political establishment isn’t so much his “radical” agenda but the notion that politics should serve the many, not the privileged few, and that the promise of democracy could be transformed from mere rhetoric to reality.
Whether Mamdani wins or loses in November (and count on him winning), he has sparked the reawakening of a long-dormant American tradition of leftist politics. Reviving socialism in this country also requires reviving its history, recovering it from the hysteria of the Red Scare and the Cold War mentality of “better dead than red.” Socialism has long been a part of our national experience and democratic experiment. And if democracy is to survive in the 21st century, democratic socialism must be part of its future.
The Roots of American Socialism
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a wave of immigration brought millions of workers to the United States, many carrying the radical ideas then germinating in Europe. Yet such beliefs were hardly alien to this country.
The growth of labor unions and the rise of leftist politics were not foreign imports but emerged as a byproduct of the dire material circumstances of life under industrial capitalism in America.
By 1900, the US had become the world’s leading industrial power, surpassing its European rivals in manufacturing and, by 1913, producing nearly one-third of global industrial output, more than Britain, France, and Germany combined. That share would climb to nearly half of the global gross domestic product by the end of World War II. However, the immense accumulation of wealth was not shared with those whose labor made it possible. American workers endured intense poverty and precarity, while being subjected to grueling hours for meager pay. They saw few meaningful protections, and suffered the highest rate of industrial accidents in the world.
When workers rose in collective opposition to those conditions, they faced not only the monopolistic corporations of the Gilded Age, but an entire political economy structured to preserve that system of inequality. Anti-competitive practices concentrated wealth to an extraordinary degree. The richest 10% of Americans then owned some 90% percent of national assets, with such wealth used to buy power through the co-optation of a state apparatus whose monopoly on violence was wielded against labor and in defense of capital. As Populist leader Mary Elizabeth Lease described the situation in 1900: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”
That was evident as early as 1877, when railroad workers launched a nationwide strike and federal troops spent weeks brutally suppressing it, killing more than 100 workers. Such violence ignited a surge of labor organizing, thanks particularly to the radically egalitarian Knights of Labor. Yet the Haymarket Affair of 1886—when a bomb set off at a May Day rally in Chicago provided a pretext for a bloody government crackdown—enabled the state to deepen its repression and stigmatize the labor movement by associating it with anarchism and extremism.
Still, the socialist left was able to reconstitute itself in the decades that followed under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs. He was drawn to socialism not through abstract theory but lived experience in the American Railway Union. There, as he recalled: “in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed. This was my first practical lesson in socialism, though wholly unaware that it was called by that name.”
In 1901, Debs helped found the Socialist Party of America. Over the next two decades, socialist candidates became mayors and congressional representatives, winning elections to local offices across the country. At its peak in 1912, Debs captured nearly a million votes, some 6% of the national total, while running as a third-party candidate for president (and again from prison in 1920). For a time, socialism became a visible, established part of American democracy.
“This War Is Not Our War”
Yet socialism faced its most formidable test during the First World War. Across Europe and the United States, many socialists opposed the conflict, arguing that it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” a framing that resonated with broad segments of the American public.
The socialist critique went deeper than class resentment. For decades, socialists were drawing a direct connection between capitalism’s parasitic exploitation of labor at home and its predatory expansion abroad. Writing during the late 19th-century era of high imperialism, as European powers carved up the globe in the name of national glory while showing brutal disregard for the lives of those they subjugated, progressive and socialist thinkers contended that imperialism was anything but a betrayal of capitalism’s logic.
Russian communist and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin called that moment “the monopoly stage of capitalism.” (Capitalists labeled it the cause of “civilization.”) While British economist John Hobson similarly maintained that empire served not the interests of the nation but of its elites who used the power of the state to secure the raw materials and new markets they needed for further economic expansion. “The governing purpose of modern imperialism,” he explained, “is not the diffusion of civilization, but the subjugation of peoples for the material gain of dominant interests.” That was “the economic taproot of imperialism.”
The centuries of imperialism that are returning home in the form of fascism can’t be dismantled without confronting the capitalism that has sustained it, and capitalism itself can’t be transformed without democratizing the economy it commands.
Similarly in the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois, a leading civil rights advocate, situated the war in the longer history of racial and colonial domination. He traced its origins to the “sinister traffic” in human beings that had left whole continents in a “state of helplessness which invites aggression and exploitation,” making the “rape of Africa” imaginable and therefore possible. War, he argued, was the continuation of empire by other means. “What do nations care about the cost of war,” he wrote, “if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?”
Others, like disability activist and socialist Helen Keller, a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, echoed such critiques. In 1916, she wrote: “Every modern war has had its root in exploitation. The Civil War was fought to decide whether the slaveholders of the South or the capitalists of the North should exploit the West. The Spanish-American War decided that the United States should exploit Cuba and the Philippines.” Of the First World War, she concluded, “the workers are not interested in the spoils; they will not get any of them anyway.”
Once Washington entered the war, it criminalized dissent through the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the same “emergency measure” that would be used, during future wars, to charge whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale. Socialists were among its first targets.
After a 1918 speech condemning the war, Debs himself would be imprisoned. “Let the wealth of a nation belong to all the people, and not just the millionaires,” he declared. “The ruling class has always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and have yourself slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world, you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war.” The call for a world “in which we produce for all and not for the profit of the few” remains as relevant as ever.
Socialism After the Scare
The Red Scare of 1919, followed by McCarthyism in the 1950s and the broader Cold War climate of hysteria and repression, effectively criminalized socialism, transforming it into a political taboo in the United States and driving it from mainstream American discourse. Yet, despite the ferocity of the anticommunist crusade, a number of prominent voices continued to defend socialism.
In 1949, reflecting on a war that had claimed more than 60 million lives and brought us Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Albert Einstein argued that “the real source of evil” was capitalism itself. Humanity, he insisted, “is not condemned, because of its biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.” The alternative, he wrote, lay in “the establishment of a socialist economy,” with an education system meant to cultivate “a sense of responsibility for one’s fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success.”
Martin Luther King Jr. carried that struggle against capitalism, racism, and war forward. Building on the legacy of the Double-V campaign, he called for confronting the evils of white supremacy at home and imperialism abroad. In grappling with those intertwined injustices, he increasingly adopted a socialist analysis, even if he didn’t publicly claim the label. For King, there could be no half freedom or partial liberation: Political rights were hollow without economic justice and racial equality was impossible without class equality.
As he put it, you can “call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.” Rejecting the pernicious myth of capitalist self-reliance with biting clarity, he pointed out that “it’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
In his 1967 Riverside Church speech denouncing the American war in Vietnam, King made the connection clear. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” he warned, “is approaching spiritual death.” America, he added, needed a revolution of values, a shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” one. As long as “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights [are] considered more important than people,” he concluded, “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
A Better Country and World is Possible
The effort to discredit Zohran Mamdani and other Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib, who challenge entrenched power, is, of course, anything but new. It reflects an ongoing struggle over the meaning of democracy. To build a society that actually serves its people, it is necessary to recover a long-marginalized tradition that understands democracy not simply as the holding of elections but as a genuine way of life focused on fighting for the many rather than the privileged few. Mamdani and crew can’t be exceptions to the rule, if such a vision is ever to take root in this country.
In Donald Trump’s grim vision for and version of America, democratic institutions are decaying at a rapid pace, the military is being used to occupy cities with Democratic mayors, and tyranny is replacing the rule of law. Fascism has never triumphed without the assent of elites who fear the rise of the left more than dictatorship. Mussolini and Hitler did not take power in a vacuum; they were elevated by an elite democratic establishment that preferred an authoritarian order to the uncertainties of popular democracy.
The choice remains what it was a century ago: some version of socialism as the foundation for a renewed democracy or continued barbarism as the price of refusing it.
Meeting today’s crises requires more than piecemeal reform. It demands a reimagining of political life. The centuries of imperialism that are returning home in the form of fascism can’t be dismantled without confronting the capitalism that has sustained it, and capitalism itself can’t be transformed without democratizing the economy it commands.
This country once again stands at a crossroads. Capitalism has brought us to the edge of ecological, economic, and moral catastrophe. Today, the top 1% control more wealth than the bottom 93% of Americans combined, a trajectory that is simply unsustainable. The choice remains what it was a century ago: some version of socialism as the foundation for a renewed democracy or continued barbarism as the price of refusing it. The question is no longer whether socialism can work in America, but whether American democracy can survive without it.
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With Hurricane Melissa, Capitalism and Climate Chaos Bring Devastation to Jamaica
A system rooted in the exploitation of natural resources and labor in the name of corporate profits requires grotesque levels of inequality—all of which could be seen both before and after Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica.
Nov 02, 2025
Kingston buzzed with feverish preparations and anxious alerts in the days before Melissa, a powerful Category 5 hurricane, made landfall earlier this week on the island of Jamaica. Supermarkets and hardware stores endured the crush of customers scrambling to stockpile water, food, and other supplies while residents boarded up windows and cut away vulnerable branches from hulking mango trees.
Even for a Caribbean capital city that is no stranger to the perennial threat of hurricanes, the alarming forecasts about Melissa's steady approach and certain intensification put communities across the city on edge. Throughout the island, which has had its share of impacts from deadly tropical weather, including Hurricane Beryl just last year, there was a palpable feeling that Melissa might be a different kind of storm.
"All we can do is try to be prepared," said Kevin, a local handyman who lives in Portmore, an urban center on Kingston's outskirts. "We can only do so much to get ready for it. The rest is in God's hands."
Melissa made weather history as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes to ever make landfall. As it moved into Jamaica's southwestern coast, the storm's 185-mph sustained winds and sub-900 barometric pressure left meteorologists in awe and Jamaicans under the dark howling shadow of a monster churning over their heads. Yet, as horrifying as Melissa's fury was this week, its destructive strength follows a pattern that has become all too unsurprising on a planet subjected to entirely preventable climate chaos.
"This is actually a complete catastrophe, and it’s really quite terrifying," Jamaican-British climate activist Mikaela Loach told Democracy Now! "And it also makes me quite angry that it doesn’t have to be this way. This has been caused by the climate crisis, by fossil fuel companies. I think it’s important that we’re not just devastated and sad about this, but also that we are angry and direct that anger towards the people who are responsible."
While Hurricane Melissa may be called a natural disaster, the conditions that make super storms like Melissa possible are anything but natural. As Loach and just about every climate scientist on Earth point out, the unprecedented warmth of ocean waters act like fuel for tropical cyclones, supercharging them to the point that Melissa was able to double its wind speeds in under 24 hours. Such rapid hurricane intensification is almost unheard of and is the result of unnaturally warm seawater that extends deep below the surface – water temperatures that are themselves directly linked to the fossil fuel industry and an economic system built around its carbon emissions.
That system, rooted in the exploitation of natural resources and labor in the name of corporate profits, also requires grotesque levels of inequality, which could be seen both before and after Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica.
It was, of course, the wealthiest of communities that enjoyed the means and resources to prepare and weather the storm. From the gated communities of New Kingston where residents quickly summoned workers to close their built-in storm shutters and fuel up generator tanks to the high-end hotels and office buildings outfitted with hurricane-proof glass, there stood one end of Jamaican society girding for Melissa's wrath. On the other end, representing a much larger portion of the Jamaican people, were the poor and working-class communities with far fewer means to prepare for the tempest. From Kingston and beyond, this included thousands of Jamaicans living in ramshackle housing, with corrugated tin roofs that turned into propeller blades thrown into the air by 130-mph wind gusts. It included the fishing villages of Port Royal and other coastal areas, scrambling to shore up boats and flee inland away from the devastating storm surge. It included the shanty neighborhoods on the edge of waterways and canals, prone to severe flooding, as well as hillside hamlets perched along the steep slopes of Jamaica's Blue Mountains that were swept away by dangerous landslides. Then there are the many rural areas that are likely to remain without power and communications for many weeks, along with the farming communities whose crops have been wiped out by the storm.
All of these people were placed in the path of a storm whose destructive power was exacerbated by the climate emergency of the corporate elite and wealthy nations whose profit-obsessed industries have turbocharged the Caribbean's hurricane season.
Just a few days removed from Melissa's torrent of deadly rainfall and winds, the extent of damage and fatalities are yet to be known. In the western parishes of the island where the eyewall of Melissa came ashore, entire communities have been cut off from civilization, unreachable by destroyed telecommunications networks and roads that have been washed away. Many of these communities, lying near the southern coast from 60 to 120 miles west of Kingston, are dealing with widespread structural failure, including flattened homes and roofs sheared off many buildings. In addition to relief operations being mobilized by the Jamaican government, efforts are under way among residents on the east side of the island to gather and transport donated supplies to communities that bore the brunt of Melissa. And the urgency is building for those communities as the shock and hunger have set in, along with reports of looting, i.e., acts of basic human survival. While staying alive in the coming days and weeks is the preoccupation for survivors in these hard-hit areas, the daunting months of clean-up and rebuilding ahead compounds the crippling hardship they are carrying right now.
Back in Kingston, the economic and infrastructural disparities seen in the lead-up to the storm persist in its aftermath. While more than 70 percent of the island remains without electricity, some of the wealthiest parts of Kingston – those that were armed with generators and thus suffered less than a few hours or minutes without lights in their homes – seem to be among the first communities with restored grid power. On the other hand, many neighborhoods within the poorer sections of Kingston continue to have no power and, in many cases, no running water.
Such is the nature of capitalism and its attendant regime of climate disasters, bringing the devastation of extreme weather patterns – induced by the excessive greenhouse gas emissions of rich nations – upon the people of smaller nations who are the least responsible for global climate changes. The disparate impacts are felt on a global scale and at the local level among classes within affected regions.
Disasters like Hurricane Melissa have historically been used by business interests to remake entire cities into free-market dystopias, displacing poorer communities to make way for investment opportunities. The market vultures of what author and activist Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism may soon be circling Jamaica, poised to prey upon the storm's victims and profit from the wreckage.
In fact, climate capitalists are already watching post-Melissa Jamaica as a test case for bond markets. The Jamaican government was recently issued a $150-million "catastrophe bond" which appears set for a full payout to partially cover rebuilding efforts. These bonds may offer a temporary solution for climate-vulnerable countries but, as property insurers have increasingly pulled out of high-risk areas in the path of extreme weather and natural disasters, it seems likely that U.S. and European investors will become more reluctant to buy in to catastrophe bonds for hurricane-prone areas like Jamaica as such disasters inevitably become more common. In any event, the damage from Melissa will total far more than $150 million and Jamaica will need to take on more debt from global financial institutions to rebuild roads and infrastructure. This includes the more standard World Bank loans which have traditionally kept countries like Jamaica under the neocolonial boot of wealthy nations, with loans conditioned on exploitative trade policies, privatization, and gutted public services within poorer, indebted countries.
So, while Jamaica and Hurricane Melissa fade from headlines over the next week or so, the destructive forces of capitalism and Mother Nature's vengeance will continue to collide over the island.
Who’s to Blame? Political Action, Personal Accountability, and Human Nature
We are more likely to advance human dignity and ecological sustainability if we focus less on “Why are those people so bad?” and more on “What forces shaped this outcome?”
Oct 26, 2025
A version of this essay was presented at the Taos Community of Love service on October 19, 2025.
I know this isn’t a conventional church service, but I would like to start with scripture:
“The moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted.”
That’s not really scripture but rather a sentence from An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity, the 2022 book I wrote with Wes Jackson, cofounder of The Land Institute and an early innovator in regenerative agriculture. Even though we weren’t divinely inspired, I think it’s worth repeating:
The moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted.
That’s not a nihilistic rejection of morality. Wes and I agree that human actions can and should strive to reflect moral principles and that we need a deeper conversation about those principles and actions, now more than ever. We simply suggest that when talking politics, especially about the multiple cascading ecological crises that we face, more humility all around would be helpful.
If we are to create just and sustainable societies, we must contend with geographic and biological determinism, which is a way of saying we must be clear about how we got here and face harsh realities about what lies ahead.
Let me illustrate this another way, with a story I heard from Wes, which he heard from his friend Wendell Berry. In a small town, a guy who was not known for his sophistication or intellectual ability—what some might call “the village idiot”—came upon two men digging a large hole. “What you doing?” he asked. “Obviously, we’re digging a hole,” they replied. “Why you digging that hole?” The answer: “It’s where we’re going to bury all the sons-of-bitches in this town.” The man’s response: “Who’s going to cover them up?”
That story hints at my approach to the question in the title of this talk: Who’s to blame? We should be careful, remembering that many traditions advise humility, such as “Let they who are without sin cast the first stone” (John 8:7). “There but for the grace of God go I”—or, for those of us who aren’t believers, “There but for luck or fate go I”—is a good touchstone when we are tempted to claim we are certain that we know better or act more ethically than others.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before going further with “who,” let’s be clear about “what.” Blame for what?
Today, I mean “blame for everything that is going wrong these days,” and there’s a lot going really wrong. Our species is doing a lousy job of designing and maintaining large-scale societies that are consistent with basic human dignity and a sustainable long-term human presence on the planet.
The immediate objection might be the use of “our species,” given that not every member of the species has contributed to those problems or has the same power to influence outcomes. Some small-scale societies in human history have been consistent with dignity and sustainability. Some people in today’s large-scale societies work to further those goals. More on this later, but for now, please remember our scripture: The moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted.
Today I would like to work my way through three different levels of analysis about blame, rooted in my radical feminist, left politics and ecological understanding.
One place to lay blame would be the individuals who make decisions that predictably lead to human suffering and ecological degradation. That would include politicians who pursue policies that maintain wealth inequality and reject funding basic services necessary for a minimally decent life. That would include corporate CEOs who put profit before the health of ecosystems on which our lives depend. This approach assumes that our troubles are the product either of especially bad people making decisions or of generally good people making bad decisions, whether out of ignorance, greed, or both.
But as a good leftist, I know we should go beyond individuals and blame systems that reward those kinds of policies, such as capitalism and nationalism, tainted by racism and sexism. If we were to throw out the bums—that is, the politicians and executives we believe are making bad decisions—without changing the systems of illegitimate authority and the ideologies of dominance, the new bums running things would respond to the same incentives to produce the same problems.
That’s where most good leftists stop, with a conviction that changing economic, political, and cultural systems is the ticket. That’s where I once stopped, when I was a good leftist. Perhaps because as I have grown older I have become less dependent on unfounded hope, I have tried to face the intractable nature of our problems and try to understand the larger forces that shape our world: geography and biology. We have to grapple with determinism to understand the past and the present, and to give us a shot at a future.
Determinism is a dirty word in many circles, in part out of fear that it undermines a sense of responsibility and autonomy. If people think our collective fate is locked in by forces beyond their control, why bother trying to change things? I take up this question in a new book coming out next year, This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning, but for now I’ll offer a quick response. I think that if we ignore those larger forces, we’re doomed to fail. The reason to move beyond blaming individuals and systems is not to avoid our political and moral obligations but to come to grips with the world we live in and the kind of animal we are. Ignoring aspects of reality that are inconvenient for our ideology is not a winning strategy.
We all have ideas about how to contribute to a better world, but no one knows which ideas will prove most important.
First, geographic or environmental determinism, the idea that a society’s cultural, political, and economic development is determined by its geography, climate, and environmental conditions. Starting with a 2020 article, I have been asking a simple question: If we accept—as we should—the anti-racist principle that there are no known biologically based differences in intellectual, psychological, or moral attributes between human populations, then why are human cultures in different places so different? Unless one argues that the differences are the product of supernatural forces, such as a God or gods, the only plausible explanation is geography, climate, and environmental conditions. We are one species, and there are no significant genetic differences beyond superficial physical characteristics such as skin color and hair texture (and, in some cases, susceptibility to disease based on ancestors’ region of origin). Therefore, there’s no reason that humans would have created such different cultures around the world except for differences in landscapes that shaped their evolutionary history. No one doubts that about food and clothing—people in tropical rainforests don’t eat or dress like people in the Arctic because of different geographies. Is there any reason that the forces that shape food and clothing choices would not shape other aspects of culture, such as moral and political systems?
Second, biological determinism. Wes Jackson has long suggested that it’s important to understand life on Earth as “the scramble for energy-rich carbon,” reminding us that every organism, including Homo sapiens, evolves to maximize its ability to acquire and use energy. We need to accept that we are animals, not Animals+. By that, I mean that as animals we are of course different from other creatures (as all creatures are different from one another) but that we are not ontologically special, even though our cognitive and linguistic capacities are unique. The claim of specialness leads people to think of our species as Animals with a capital A, with an extra special plus, whether that status comes from God or evolution. But we are ordinary animals, engaging in the scramble for energy-rich carbon like all others. We have the capacity to curb the drive to maximize energy extraction, of course, especially once we understand the negative effects on us and the ecosystems on which we depend. But the evidence indicates that it’s not easy to stop scrambling. What Wes and I called “the temptations of dense energy” are powerful.
My point is simple: If we care about humans and nature, we should try to understand human nature. Some say that true human nature is compassionate and collaborative. Others say that human nature is greedy and self-interested. Obviously, human nature includes all these traits. Throughout time and across societies, humans have acted on all these aspects of our nature. Asserting that some traits are our “real” nature and other traits are somehow secondary is dangerous—all are part of human nature, of the way we really are. We can try to devise social institutions and practices to foster behaviors we think are positive and inhibit those we think are negative, but that requires understanding human nature, not ignoring it.
A side note: Today I’m not going to weigh in on free will, one of the oldest and most contentious debates in philosophy. Whatever one’s position on that question, we can acknowledge the role of geographic and biological determinism in setting the parameters that we operate within.
Let me be clear: I am not suggesting we give up on judgment. “Judge not lest ye be judged” (Matthew 7:1) reminds us to avoid hypocrisy. But living in community requires us to make judgments about all kinds of things, including the ethical principles that animate our actions. As we make and enforce rules for decent behavior, however, it is important not to be judgmental, to claim that we have captured the moral high ground. Perhaps it’s best if we stop asking, "Who’s to blame?” We are more likely to advance human dignity and ecological sustainability if we focus less on “Why are those people so bad?” and more on “What forces shaped this outcome?” We can make that shift and still demand of each other accountability and answerability—accepting the consequences of our actions and doing our best to explain why we took those actions. But we can do it without arrogance.
One more thing that I’m more aware of as I have aged: Explaining in detail why things happen is really hard. That’s obvious, but easy to forget. We can work to identify forces at work in the world and, when possible, change social structures to deal with those forces. But our attempts at understanding human affairs will always be incomplete and inadequate. We will never come up with laws of human behavior as we have laws of physics. Theories in the social sciences will never have the explanatory power of theories in the core sciences. Our explanations of history are, at best, educated guesses. Complexity—in the world around us and inside our own heads, complexity beyond our comprehension—means that the certainty we seek is unattainable, another reminder of the need for humility.
But in the absence of certainty, we still must act. In the struggle for human dignity and ecological sustainability, we make our best guesses at the strategies and tactics likely to be most effective. I’m not suggesting that we stop taking those choices seriously, only that when we think we are right, we should remember that the moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted.
Let me speak more personally. When I was younger, I was quick to tell others what strategies they should embrace and what tactics they should use. Today, I’m less sure I have the right answers, or sometimes any viable answers at all. Even if I had answers that I was convinced are correct, I would be careful about lecturing others.
None of this means that individuals should not be accountable for their decisions, or that social systems are irrelevant to outcomes. I think I’d make a better president than the current occupant of the White House. I think there is no decent human future if we can’t transcend capitalism. But I don’t think I could solve most of our problems, nor do I think democratic socialism could. I think we are up against human nature. Geographic determinism helps us explain how we got here, and biological determinism helps us understand why it will be hard to escape the traps we built for ourselves.
Throughout history there have been, of course, many societies with ways of living that were consistent with a long-term human presence. For 95% of Homo sapiens history, and 99% of the genus Homo history, we were gathers and hunters who lived in relatively egalitarian societies and did comparatively little permanent damage to ecosystems. But after the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, the steady increase in the human population and hierarchical systems forever changed that.
Today 8 billion humans live in high-energy and high-technology societies. No society in human history has ever had a blueprint for how 8 billion people can live in such a world. No society has developed lifeways that can sustain 8 billion people at the current aggregate level of consumption. The best of human social arrangements—those that have produced some measure of dignity and sustainability—never had to scale up to 8 billion, and there’s no reason to think that’s possible.
I’ll close with one assessment I feel confident about: The only human future I can imagine is “fewer and less”: fewer people consuming less energy and stuff. To deal with the temptations of dense energy, we need to agree to limits. I don’t know any politician or political activist in the mainstream saying that. I have never heard anyone on the right say that. And most of my comrades on the left either avoid the question or explicitly reject that answer. Across the political spectrum, most people are betting that miracle technologies, beyond anything we can imagine, will make it possible for humanity to continue its present course, what Wes has long called “technological fundamentalism.” But relying on miracles doesn’t have a great track record, and fundamentalism is always a dead end.
Summing up, what I’m not arguing: Nothing I’ve said here should be taken as rejecting the need for political organizing today. Resisting the current regime in the United States is essential, because people are suffering and ecological damage is being magnified. The threats to democracy are real, and action to defend political freedom is important. Whatever disagreements I have with my comrades or more moderate folks are relatively unimportant in the face of deepening government repression and emboldened reactionary movements.
Summing up, what I am arguing: In the short term, we can ask who’s to blame for policy decisions that make things worse and apply pressure that leads to what we hope will be better decisions. In the longer term, we can identify the weaknesses in social systems and advocate for what we hope will be better systems. But if we are to create just and sustainable societies, we must contend with geographic and biological determinism, which is a way of saying we must be clear about how we got here and face harsh realities about what lies ahead.
Along with the immediate emergency there is an ongoing emergency. We should face the short-term threats to justice and democracy today that come from a specific political formation and the long-term crises that threaten democracy permanently. Nothing I’ve said requires us to ignore the fact that a Trump-defined MAGA Republican Party is dangerous on many levels.
But to emphasize, one more time: The moral high ground is a dangerous place to stand, even when it’s warranted, because collectively we face hard choices that have no easy solutions and may not have solutions at all. We all have ideas about how to contribute to a better world, but no one knows which ideas will prove most important. Our best bet is to support each other in any efforts based on a commitment to dignity and sustainability.
As we do that, we should remember the 1970 poster for the first Earth Day and a cartoon the following year, in which Walt Kelly’s Pogo offered a hard truth about ecological crises: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
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