Author’s Note: As this year unlike any other grinds to a bleak close, I offer – in the spirit not of prophecy, but satiric thought-experiment – ‘alternate universe’ visions of the near future. And bear with me, dear reader, as I first appear to lose my mind…
“The extremely small fish that dwells in the centre of the universal sea nevertheless has the power to stop the largest ships,” — C.G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
The Echeneis Remora, a member of the mackerel family, itself exists in alternate universes: natural reality and supernatural legend. The reality is surreal enough, with the creature’s ability, courtesy of a “large, flat, oval-shaped sucker on top of the head in place of the dorsal fin,” to attach itself “to either a larger fish or to a ship’s bottom” and “in this wise” be “transported about the world.”
The description is Carl Jung’s, introducing an alchemical treatise praising the power of the fish – “little in length/mighty in strength” – “to hold back the proud vessels of the great Ocean sea.” (Echeneis = ‘ship-holding’, Remora = ‘hindrance.’) “Winds may blow,” Pliny the Elder marveled in his Natural History, “and storms may rage, and yet the Echeneis controls their fury, restrains their mighty force, and bids ships stand still in their career.” As two famous Romans found to their cost: Mark Antony, his flagship halted at a crucial moment of the Battle of Actium, handing victory to Octavius Caesar; and the mad Emperor Caius Caligula, forced back to port – indignant “such an obstacle as this should have impeded his progress” – where, the next day, he was assassinated.
Echeneis Remora engraving from Marcus Elieser Bloch’s 18th century “Ichthyologie ou Histoire Naturelle Generale et Particuliere des Poissons.”
For the alchemists, Jung wrote, this strange being – “smaller than small, greater than great” – symbolized “that extremely small thing in the vastness of the unconscious which is charged with such fateful significance.” Well, the ‘dimes’ on which history can turn are sometimes far smaller, like the viral microbe whose omnipresent, magnified image looms over us today – an invisible sphere, covered in ‘suckers,’ latching without warning not just to lungs but societies, economies, mighty ships of state…
The alchemists sought (to quote Jung’s treatise) to develop a “magnet of the wise” to “catch” the Remora before it could strike. Our modern world, alas, was not wise enough to build a global system of disease prevention, detection and control able to catch COVID-19. “As far as possible,” UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the virtual UN General Assembly on September 26, “we should aim to predict a pandemic almost as we forecast the weather, to see the thunderstorm in the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.” “We sometimes forget,” he added, that we only “face a virus,” a “small package of nucleic acid that simply replicates” and “is not even technically alive.” And:
…tragic as its consequences have been, it has been nothing like as destructive as other plagues – let alone the influenza of a century ago. It is absurd, in many ways outrageous, that this microscopic enemy should have routed the unity of the human race.
The ‘Emperor’ is indignant, but also right, that humanity (while hardly hitherto ‘united!’) faces far graver threats, both ‘sub-existential’ – e.g. deadlier diseases and ‘weaponized pestilence’ – and existential (climate breakdown caused by global warming and/or nuclear war). These levels are both distinct – while we can prepare for the former, prevention is the only cure for the latter – and related, intimately so in the case of coronaviruses and climate change. For while global warming has been caused by the ravages of military-industrial capitalism, pandemics are rendered more likely by the loss of biodiversity consequent on said ‘ravaging.’
Scheme of a coronavirus, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
As Vijay Kolinjivadi, from the Institute of Development Policy in the Netherlands, wrote early in this pandemic, “humans are harvesting the natural resources of the planet and plugging them into an industrial cycle which puts out various consumables…and a lot of waste.” As this “process depletes the natural ability of the environment to balance itself,” it generates both climate breakdown and new diseases: “The need for more natural resources has forced humans to encroach on various natural habitats and expose themselves to unknown pathogens,” making COVID-19 “a perfect example of how the way capitalism commodifies life to turn it into profit can directly endanger human life.” As famed primatologist Jane Goodall observed in June:
We have brought this on ourselves because of our absolute disrespect for animals and the environment. Our disrespect for wild animals and our disrespect for farmed animals has created this situation where disease can spill over to infect human beings. If we do not do things differently, we are finished. We cannot go on like this.
The virus, Kolinjivadi writes, has forced us to apply “an emergency brake on ‘business-as-usual’.” But will the reprieve lead to the kind of “cultural climate change…in our thinking and actions” urged by Muscogee ecologist Daniel R. Wildcat in his 2009 manifesto Red Alert! Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge? Will, in sum, our current nemesis – “those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads,” in the words of Indian activist-author Arundhati Roy – prove what she calls a “portal,” a “gateway between one world and the next?”
And what if, on the ‘other side’, we find a choice of paths to take?
THE ‘REMORA REVOLUTION’
2020 December: An obscure, anonymous group of ‘eco-alchemists,’ No Spectator Left, issues an on-line ‘Remora Communiqué,’ 40-plus verses of rough-cut doggerel by an unnamed dreamer claiming to have “heard the voice” of the ship-stopper speak, “slowly, all in silence,/To wake me from my sleep.” The ‘Remora’ – “I’m only as little/As you made the world” – offered no proposals or solutions, beyond urging ‘the crew’ to ‘mutiny,’ turn the ‘worldwide’ ship around.
2021 March: After a series of Peoples’ Assemblies convened to debate the Communiqué, a global ‘Remora Resistance’ is launched. One core demand was familiar from the wave of Extinction Rebellion protests cresting just as COVID broke: a root-&-branch rejection of (in Greta Thunberg’s words) the “fairy-tale of eternal economic growth.” That abolition, however, was now explicitly linked to two others: Global Zero nuclear weapons; and a post-War world.
Source: Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (https://wilpf.org/)
Scholars generally attribute this new synergy to three sources: the wide support for, but abject failure of, the call by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ for a ‘Global Ceasefire’ during the pandemic; the impact of the new UN ‘Nuclear Ban Treaty,’ opposed by only the ‘nuclear nine’ (US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea) and their 30-odd ‘Bomb-shelter’ allies; and the global surge of anti-racist protest – triggered by the ‘Black Lives Matter’ earthquake in the US – recasting the fight against global warming and war as a fight against white supremacy, patriarchal privilege and colonialism.
Strikingly, many ‘Resistance’ groups drew inspiration from the juxtaposition of ‘wealth’ to ‘illth’ in the work of the 19th century art critic, anti-imperialist, and radical environmentalist John Ruskin “There is no wealth but life,” Ruskin wrote in 1860, inspiring (among many others) a young South African lawyer, Mahatma Gandhi. For whatever reason – allowing, perhaps, the submerged meaning of ‘wealth’ as ‘health,’ well-being, to surface – Ruskin’s strange neologism seemed suddenly to fit the searing strangeness of the time…
Summer: The ‘mutiny’ begins. Many actions are both peaceful and legal, e.g. unprecedentedly widespread boycotts such as ‘Don’t Bank on the Bomb;’ others are illegally non-violent, e.g. mass-blockades of mines, power plants, pipelines, military bases, prisons, etc. Across the Americas, many blockades are led by indigenous activists, attracting large numbers to semi-permanent protest camps or ‘unsettlements.’
September: in Germany, the Green Party makes massive electoral gains, pledging – in its ‘Real World, Real Wealth’ platform – to build a post-capitalist, post-carbon economy based on cooperatives, public ownership, and a basic income scheme. The new, Green-led coalition rejects the basing of American nuclear weapons on German territory, calls for a demilitarized pan-European ‘human security space,’ and signs the Ban Treaty. The Sea Change in Germany – inspiring a Green Wave of victories across Europe and beyond – is now seen as the crucial accelerant in the rapid dissolution of the pre-COVID status quo.
Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey, 7 Feb 2019 (Senate Democrats, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
2022: The refusal of the Biden Administration to embrace a Green New Deal leads to paradigm-shifting victories in the mid-term elections for ‘Resistance’ candidates. An even more radical ‘Green-Red’ deal emerges, intimately linking ‘decarbonization’ with demilitarization: deep cuts in defense spending allowing the replacement of the Pentagon – opening the building to local community groups – with a ‘Green Peace Department’.
2023: The UN General Assembly convenes a ‘Green Peace Dividend’ Conference, at which over 150 states commit to follow Costa Rica’s example – set in 1948! – and abolish their armed forces, diverting all sums saved to socio-economic development. The Conference also backs Costa Rica’s call for the replacement of the Security Council by a ‘Human Security Council.’
2024 April/May: With NATO splitting into pro- and anti-nuclear camps – and a newly-independent Scotland bidding ‘British’ nuclear weapons an unfond farewell – the Alliance’s downsized Nuclear Planning Group approves a large-scale nuclear war-game in the ‘flash-point’ Baltic region. Russia responds to Operation Aggression-Defied (instantly dubbed Operation Omnicide) with Operation Now or Never (aka Way Too Clever). The result? Very nearly, real war, a mutual misreading of intent leading each side to ‘detect’ an imminent attack…
Had NATO still been ‘sleepwalking to the beat of the nuclear drum’ (as the powerful Congressional ‘Ban Caucus’ warned the White House) this may have been the ultimate ‘accident waiting to happen’. In the post-pandemic landscape, Germany was able to lead a series of public and private ‘interventions’ to defuse the crisis – or, in the words of a famous Der Spiegel editorial, ‘take the world off the table.’
Immense protests erupted, and a number of ‘nuclear numbrella’ governments – including ‘Anti-Ban Canada’ – collapsed. Millions of Russians, too, sent a ‘May Day for Peace,’ demanding a return to the ‘glasnost’ (openness) and ‘perestroika’ (restructuring) of the pro-democracy, anti-nuclear Gorbachev era. And in the US, the War Scare helps secure the nomination of a Green-Red Democratic nominee for the upcoming presidential election, an outcome blamed by Biden, in a shell-shocked resignation speech, on a ‘many-tentacled monster’: the ‘demilitarizing-postindustrial complex’.
German Greens (Die Gruenen) at the climate summit demonstration in Copenhagen on 12 December 2009.
November: The ‘Red-Green Dems’ sweep to power in the White House, retaining control of both chambers of Congress. Reaching out to the Russian Resistance, President-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pledges an era of “American glasnost and perestroika.” Her first act in office, she announces, will be signing the Ban Treaty: in Hiroshima.
2025: A Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) is held in Berlin, 35 years after the CSCE ‘Charter of Paris for a New Europe’ pledged to build a demilitarized, nuclear-weapon-free region. Russia, led by a fragile new reformist government, expresses delight at being invited back into a ‘Common European Home,’ while the US stresses the need for Europe to not only make peace with itself but belated amends (and reparations) for centuries of ‘illth gotten gains’ around the globe.
The Berlin Charter, unanimously adopted on November 11, opens by declaring: “The war against the world is now ending. Graced with this last of last chances, we now have no choice: but to live.”
LOST MOMENT, LOST WORLD
The alternative ‘near future’ is, alas, easier to imagine – and quicker to sketch. Given the existential stakes, it may also be a ‘history’ that can only be written beforehand…
2021 March: Despite its wildfire spread, the ‘Remora Communiqué’ immediately proved contentious, particularly with regard to the kind of ‘resistance’ now required. To most, a spectrum of legal and illegal non-violent actions seemed the best way to heed the call to “make love to Mutiny;” to an at-first-small minority, the call to “go overboard, throw overboard/This plaguey, illthy Bounty!” implied a more ‘violent disagreement’ with the ‘authorized violences’ of the established order.
The question of ‘synergizing’ the climate justice and anti-nuclear movements also proved divisive. Appeals abounded – and won the day – to keep all eyes on the Prize of Carbon Zero, undistracted by the ‘blast-from-the-past’ return of the nuclear Specter.
Photo by David Sedlecký, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Summer-Autumn: Anger at the palpable inadequacies and engrained hypocrisies of ‘fairy-tale friendly’ Green Recovery Plans boils over in dozens of countries. Post-COVID car-addiction – and the manic construction of new ‘roads to hell’ – proves a key focus of protest, as a storm-surge of accidents and air-pollution starts again to claim vast numbers of (mainly young) lives. Chants of ‘You Never Stopped the Ship for Us’ and ‘Stop Trafficking Human Lives!’ echo across thousands of intersections – and ‘death-sentenced’ countryside – barricaded and blocked by school-striking youth. Incredibly, new airports and runways also continue to get the ‘green light,’ triggering similar sights and sounds of disruptive fury…
In Germany, high hopes of a Green-led government are dashed as the party’s main potential partners, the Social Democrats, retreat to a distinctly right-of-center ‘center’. Green support is also hit by a massive stock market ‘crash,’ two weeks before polling-day, and low turn-out among young voters, many rejecting the ‘charade,’ whatever the color scheme, of ‘representative democracy’.
2022: The ‘Year of Mutiny Mayhem and Martyrs.’ As graphic, daily evidence of climate breakdown burns and storms its way across the globe, the Resistance takes more desperate, sometimes literally self-destructive, forms. In the grimmest example, with hunger sharply on the rise across the world (including in the richest countries), and with millions feeling ‘starved’ of help and hope, large-scale hunger strikes break out…
Members of NATO Ministers of Defense and of Foreign Affairs meet at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium 14 Oct. 2010. (DOD photo by U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Jerry Morrison, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
2023: By mid-year, confronting the latest abysmal data on global warming, a broad coalition of Resistance groups announces it will be forced to ‘declare defeat’ in 12 months’ time unless a ‘Life Saving’ Green-Red New Deal is adopted. To concentrate minds, cells of activists issue stark threats to kill…themselves! “Given that humanity is hell-bent on committing suicide,” one typical ‘threat’ reads, “we are prepared to personally enact that common future…”
2024: On the clear blue morning of April 1 – largely unreported, and barely protested – a ‘lockstep’ NATO begins its largest-ever nuclear war game, along the tripwire Baltic borders of Russia. Moscow responds with an equally grandiose ‘live fire’ spectacular. The result? Almost immediately, actual atomic fire, radically escalating…
CODA
“The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth wrote: “late and soon,”:
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
Wordsworth exerted a decisive influence on Ruskin, who espoused what we now call ‘degrowth economics’ in part to make wealth real – and common – again, but also to ‘regrow’ a world ‘laid waste’ by our ‘powers.’ And while it’s true, as Seamus Heaney once despaired, that “no poem ever stopped a tank,” the arts can help start movements no tanks can hope to stop. (Though nuclear weapons can!) Yes, we should ‘listen to the science’ when seeking to respond effectively to crises: especially when the science tells us that “what we cannot prepare for, we must prevent.”
But there is an art to being human – and to surviving – too.
Note: This article has been corrected to remove reference to the OSCE as having commissioned the Road to the Charter of Paris report. In fact, the report was commissioned by the OSCE Network of Think Tanks and Academic Institutions, an independent network of institutions researching on various aspects of relevance to the OSCE.
Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University and member of Peace Quest Cape Breton and the Canadian Pugwash Group. He may be reached here.
