Millions
not directly affected by the fires have endured choking clouds of
smoke that have smothered vast areas of the country for weeks at a
time. Experiencing a landscape shrouded in fog, or hushed by the soft
fall of snowflakes, can evoke a sense of the beauty and wonder of
nature. The smoke, and the falls of ash that have at times
accompanied it, bring something very different. A silence that is
stultifying rather than peaceful. A dulling of the landscape that
suspends the mind in anxious awareness of the disasters unfolding
across the horizon. Can we look at a sunset now without that feeling
of muffled dread seeping quietly into our bones – a feeling of
being menaced by an alien and malign force, the extremes of which may
threaten our very existence on earth?
Disasters
of this scale have frequently proved to be turning points in politics
and society. The horror they bring shakes society to the core –
unsettling our sense of self and our understanding of our place in
the world.
The
1755 Lisbon earthquake is perhaps the most dramatic example. The
earthquake struck on All Saints’ Day, at a time when many thousands
of Lisbon’s majority Catholic population were packed into the
city’s churches and cathedrals. Many of the earthquake’s
estimated 60,000 victims were killed when the roofs of these
buildings collapsed. Others were killed in fires that raged through
the city in the following days, most caused by candles burning in the
churches. Still more were drowned by the tsunami that struck the
harbour where survivors of the earthquake had sought refuge.
The
earthquake provoked a crisis of belief that helped spur on the
Enlightenment. If death and destruction on this scale could be
unleashed on the pious Catholics of Lisbon, then what faith could be
maintained in a benevolent God? Over subsequent decades, the
authority of the Catholic church and associated institutions of
feudalism were increasingly called into question by a new generation
of thinkers seeking to shift society and culture onto a more
rational, scientific foundation. The French Revolution, beginning in
1789, ushered in a new age of optimism about the capacity of
humanity, utilising the insights of philosophers and scientists, to
build a just and sustainable social order.
Those
hopes, however, were betrayed by a rising bourgeois class committed
to replacing the religious despotism of feudalism with the despotism
of the capitalist market. Over the subsequent two centuries,
capitalism spread to every corner of the world. A minority gained
untold wealth – more than any feudal king or queen could ever have
dreamed of – through their exploitation of the world’s workers
and the poor. And as their system has grown and spread, so too has
the scale of its destructiveness. The science and technology that to
enlightenment thinkers promised a society of genuine “liberty,
equality and fraternity” are, in the hands of the capitalist class
of today, increasingly just the tools for the plundering of earth’s
natural and human resources in the name of profit.
Nowhere
is the basic destructiveness of capitalism more apparent than in the
case of climate change. And nowhere is the intellectual bankruptcy
and moral depravity of our rulers more apparent than in their
response to it. Australia’s current conflagration is far from being
an unexpected “natural” event like the Lisbon earthquake.
Scientists have been sounding the alarm about the increasing risk of
bushfires driven by hotter and drier summers for decades. The
equation is simple: the more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse
gases we pump into the atmosphere, the more we’ll face disasters
like the one we’re currently experiencing. The fires that have laid
waste to so much of south-eastern Australia over the past weeks and
months are but a portent of the horrors that await us if we fail to
make drastic cuts to emissions starting now.
How
can we explain the fact that, with the country burning around them,
our political leaders continue to act as if we can go on with the
“business as usual” of Australia’s fossil fuel economy? At
every turn in this disaster our Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has
attempted to downplay the scale of destruction, and to deflect any
attempt to link it to the need for more serious action on climate
change. At the height of the disaster, with homes and lives under
immediate threat across a vast area of the country, he observed that
the fires were happening “against the backdrop of” a test cricket
match between Australia and New Zealand and claimed people suffering
through the disaster might “be inspired by the great feats of our
cricketers from both sides of the Tasman”.
It’s
as if the clock of the Enlightenment is being wound-back. Instead of
listening to scientists, Morrison channels the talking points of the
“high priests” of conservatism in the Murdoch Press. Instead of
anything resembling a rational, scientific assessment of what caused
the fires, and what we might do to prevent future fire disasters, we
get fairytales – that the whole thing is the fault of the Greens,
or that the fires are just a normal part of Australia’s “natural
cycle”.
Morrison’s
coalition colleague and former National Party leader Barnaby Joyce
went furthest down this path in a rambling video message he recorded
on Christmas eve. In it, he says he recognises the climate is
changing, but denies the government can, or should, do anything about
it. Rather, he says, “we’ve got to acknowledge… there’s a
higher authority that’s beyond our comprehension – right up there
in the sky – and unless we understand that it’s got to be
respected, then we’re just fools, we’re going to get nailed.”
This, incidentally, is essentially the same argument made by the
Catholic authorities of Europe in the aftermath of the Lisbon
earthquake in an attempt to defend their power against the progress
of Enlightenment thought.
Some
have suggested that Morrison’s apparent lack of concern about the
bushfires is related to his evangelical Pentecostal faith. If your
world-view includes a belief in the coming “end of days” in which
the whole world and all its sinners will perish while the faithful
few ascend to heaven, why would you worry too much about some
bushfires? This, however, can’t be sustained. Morrison’s actual
religion isn’t so much Pentecostalism as it is the fundamentalism
of free market capitalism. His true lord isn’t Joyce’s “higher
authority in the sky” but the all-too-worldly, tangible and grubby
authority of the “almighty dollar”. The guiding light in
Morrison’s world is the light of capitalist profit – and it’s
on the altar of profit, not religion, that Australia’s future is
currently being sacrificed.
The
unfolding bushfire catastrophe, like the Lisbon earthquake, should
help spur a movement to finally rid ourselves of the capitalist
despotism that is driving us to our doom. Signs, so far, are hopeful.
The anger felt by millions of Australians against Morrison and his
fellow coal-fondling conservatives is palpable. We have to recognise,
though, that we’re in for a long and hard fight. We may, perhaps,
force Morrison to step down. This would be an important victory.
Waiting in the wings, however, is a long line of fellow “believers”
ready to take over the reins. Unfortunately for us, this also
includes the opposition Labor Party, who in the aftermath of the 2019
federal election have striven to prove themselves to be just as
faithful servants of the fossil fuel barons as the Liberals.
We
can harbour no illusions. Our current rulers, in Australia and around
the world, will be more than prepared to watch us burn if they can
just reserve for themselves a “heavenly realm” in which their
profits and power are maintained. This is the new dark age towards
which we’re headed, one in which ordinary people are forced to fend
for themselves amid mounting environmental and social catastrophe,
while the rich turn a blind eye to the problem, retreat into
fortified enclaves or threaten violence against anyone daring to
challenge their rule.
If
we want to avoid that fate, nothing short of revolution will suffice.
Against the power of the fossil fuel addicted capitalist class and
their political servants, we need to mobilise the power of workers,
students and the oppressed. Against a society run in the interests of
the profits of the wealthy few, we need a society that serves all its
people. To do this we need masses on the streets. We need to protest,
occupy and strike until the entire system cracks and crumbles around
us, and out of the rubble we can build something better in its place.
This
is the one hope emerging from the catastrophe we are living through
today: that when historians look back on the events of the coming
decade, they will record that “let them watch cricket” became,
for the Australian revolution, what “let them eat cake” was for
the French.
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