NO EXIT (for some)

The planet as some would have us believe is at breaking point. This growing fixation towards highlighting the crisis, which “will” unfold, leads us to believe that it is a case of change or be changed. That this perhaps is our penance for a century of revolutionary progression and decadence. Various civilisations have been at breaking point throughout history, always at the edge of progression or demise, and now we are no different. Although this time the scale is not national but global. Or is it?

Governments talk of global initiatives and treaties at hyped up summits in which pens are waved and ego’s feathered. But what change is there? And what is the incentive? Does it stem from a deep belief in doing what is right, a moral stirring centred within concepts of justice and morality, or in the preservation of self? The decision is not moral, it is rational; whether it is ethical is neither here nor there. The choice is made out of wants and perhaps needs. Concepts of ethics and immorality are banded about but they are afterthoughts, labels in current trends of thinking, dictated by cultural perceptions.



A supposed step up from national to global politics embodies ideals of a community, a community that spans the globe and seeks to inhabit it indefinitely. But from where did this concept of unity spring? Countries in power will preserve resources all over the globe in the name of ethics but come the time when flooding makes refugees of millions they will discard them and make safe what resource is left in whatever country is ripe for ethical protection in the name of national interest under the guise of global interest.

Concerning environmental policies it is interesting to observe that the global scale of the matter is in fact only a discursive method of power and self national interest to infuse the “choice” of the individual to be self controlling. The very fact that the individual has been informed to have the choice to not use the plastic bag is a form of self-control, which is to establish the safeness of the nation state under the discursive “interest” of the global environment.

Whilst it could be said that the global community has been driven to its limit and that it is in a state of no exit, in reality it is but the concept of the global community which is in a state of no exit. There never was or is a global community, its supposed members soon welcoming a revert back into an open nationalistic thinking.

Bibliography:

M. Foucault (1980) Power/Knowledge

D. Harvey (2004) Neo-Liberalism and the Restoration of Class Power, Program in Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center