The path to nowhere

There’s obviously meaning to human existence, but it eludes us. We fashion utopias. In the Greek lexicon, utopia means nowhere, imagined places, happy destinations perceived differently through different cultural lenses. Medieval Europeans relied mostly on Christian faith until 1600-1750. Then philosophers imagined something different. Rather than divine intercession to save the faithful, men of the Enlightenment relied on Greek science and telescopes to imagine an orderly universe operating according to natural law—law created by God, but left to man to discover. Adherence to natural law would assure man’s entry into God’s kingdom on Earth.

Around 1800, kings and nobility supported by the church fell to revolutionary market classes inspired by the Enlightenment. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government proclaimed the free market and private property to be natural law, the old testament to current marketeers. More recently, F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom provided a new testament, which elevates commodifying the planet and its creatures in order to enrich oneself at the expense of others among its highest virtues. Donald Trump exemplifies those virtues made flesh to his political disciples in Congress.

But the neoliberal utopia fares badly in the face of global warming and ecological implosion. It assures man’s demise, rather than his salvation. We need a more thoughtful path to nowhere, one that addresses the green apocalypse on the horizon. Otherwise, in the words of John Donne, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls …”

DAVID SIXBEY

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