we sit here near the diggings
in the forest, by our fire, and watch
the moon and planets and the shooting stars—
my sons ask, who are we?
drying apples picked from homestead trees
drying berries, curing meat,
shooting arrows at a bale of straw.
military jets head northeast, roaring, every dawn.
My sons ask, who are they?
WE SHALL SEE
WHO KNOWS
HOW TO BE
Bluejay screeches from a pine.
—Gary Snyder
Nihilism propagates as its keystone ideas that the universe is a random event and that existence is inherently meaningless. It takes little thought to discern that the words “random” and “meaningless” in the sentence above have nothing to latch onto. Nothing gives them sense, let alone empirical currency. Otherwise put, there exists no point of view from which the judgment “random universe” and “meaningless existence” can be made. Thus, nihilism is very simply… an error.
Yet nihilism is the dark matter of the dominant culture. We are in it, subject to it, infected by it. By any measure, nihilism enjoys tremendous success and is by far the ruling metaphysics of humanity. Which raises the question, How can an unsupportable view succeed so well? Nihilism succeeds through flattery: It flatters the human and the human falls for it. By doing away with all things higher, nihilism invites anthropos to be and act as apex subject. Nihilism seduces the human by harping on his vanity. “Vanity is the greatest seducer of reason,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. “When you are most convinced” that you are top gun “is when you are most under its spell,” he warned.
Indeed (as we see), the human has been conferred with power at every level. Power of life and death over all nonhumans and natural entities. Power over all geographical and now off-planet space. Power qua “knowledge” of ultimate ontology. Technological power to do anything, (re)make anything, denature anything, and overcome anything (including death). By profanating (desacralizing) the world and exalting the human, nihilism removes all barriers to the exercise and imagination of power. Empowered thus by nihilism, anthropos becomes constituted as exceptional, breaker of ecological limits, force-of-nature epoch maker, and the lifeform destined to longterm inhabitation of the universe as a population of trillions. Not even the sky’s the limit. The human becomes intoxicated with power. Ironically, the human has simply been overpowered by nihilism.
Nihilism erupted into historical self-consciousness in the 19th century with Schopenhauer’s gloomy pessimism about “meaningless existence” and Nietzsche’s diagnosis and watchword “God is dead.” We’d be led profoundly astray, however, if we define nihilism as atheism and think we “got it.” Let’s leave the question of religious belief aside for now and focus on what really matters: Nihilism pertains to this world which it strips of the sacred. By desacralizing the world—removing all higher sanction—nihilism grants full warrant of power to the human. By the same token, nihilism makes the human completely unaccountable, reckless, and incapable of reverence.
Sacredness is/means inviolability. In the absence of the sacred, to borrow author Jerry Mander’s expression, violability holds sway. Nihilism unleashes violence to occur or actively spurs it. If violence lies within “human nature” as potential (as some argue), nihilism actualizes it. For those disinclined toward violence, nihilism inhabits them as the viewpoint that violence is normal or natural or somehow to be expected. One way or another, nihilism rules and our world is ruled by violence.
Nihilism keeps nothing safe including human children whose inviolability—we’d be sorely deceived to think—would be sacrosanct stronghold. Human children not only suffer in an extraordinary variety of ways and in extraordinary numbers, but they also go almost completely unrecognized as a subjugated constituency—let alone a subjugated aspect of nature. Untold numbers of adults, hiddenly and openly, violate the being of children, and society tolerates it. What’s more, mainstream society as a whole violates children with bad food, polluted surroundings, psychoactive pharmaceuticals, screens, and “education” in the service of competition for social status. All the while, depriving children of the pristine natural world and the outdoors adventure, disdaining to honor their inherent love for nature. The violation of children and childhood is another acid victory of nihilism—taking away all things sacred and tying our hands behind our backs.
To repurpose words from eco-philosopher Freya Mathews, nihilism indoctrinates humanity into a “dark, self-indifferent, and intrinsically meaningless universe.” Nihilism divests existence of its steadfast mystery and it divests existents of their self-being. All becomes fleeting, vacant, and “nothing-but.” The jaded and cynical feeling-tone of nihilism cheapens life and life’s places, allowing them to be constructed as mundane, expendable, killable, usable, resurrect-able, fungible, and either morally inconsiderable or worthy of our utmost technical attention.
Nihilism is thus coeval with violence. Among many forms of violence, war has been nonstop since civilization’s ascent, when nihilism began its slow-motion advent toward consensus reality. In a profanated world everything comes up for grabs. The institutionalization of militarism becomes inevitable.
War is the thing that everyone prefers to be happening somewhere else—never closer than one’s newsfeed—revealing that in the deep humus of the collective human psyche lie grave misgivings about nihilism and how it cheapens life. Still, nihilism wins the day because the existence of the military and the administration of war have come to be taken-for-granted—deemed necessary or inevitable. That’s the kind of thing John Stuart Mill had in mind when he spoke of “the deep slumber of decided opinion.”
For millennia, war has been historical switchman, redirecting the tracks of city-states, empires, and today nation-states as cascades of takeovers for annexing territory and acquiring resources. Through the conquests of the nihilist warring human, the large-scale loss of life and destruction of nature have always followed, repeatedly. A warring way of life loosed by the desacralizing metaphysics of nihilism has come to define the human condition. Instead of resigning to our lot, we might urgently ponder the question of whether the human condition reflects who we really are.
In his book Capital Hates Everyone, critical theorist Maurizio Lazzarato argues that the military and war are the foundation of capitalism. He shows the many ways in which militarism is folded into society—the economy, high-tech industry, and social relations. As a central example, the United States military, he notes, “is the greatest, richest, and most innovative entrepreneur that capitalism has ever known.” Silicon Valley (which more or less runs the world) was the offshoot of “the war machine and military financing,” Lazzarato reminds. Today, Silicon Valley has come around to lavishly returning the favor.
What’s more, with the skyrocketing growth of the military machine worldwide, the production of its kazillion parts is stitched into, and distributed throughout, the entire manufacturing and mining sectors of the economy. Some argue that we might as well call the economy, the military economy, within which countless so-called jobs are at stake. Unsurprisingly, wars are favored by the establishment for “growing the economy,” one, by intensifying production across the board, and two, for supporting employment in all sectors. Further, militarism is implanted within the status quo as the ideology of cutthroat competition so dear to capitalism. And for militarism to be effective (given how few people in their right minds want to die or kill in battle), it must draw emotional energy from hatred—nihilism’s most acrid flavor of violence.
Whether as taxpayer money or money made out of thin air (or both), enormous funds are siphoned from governments to corporate contractors to build the military (a killing) machine. The global military commands immense amounts of land, money, people, equipment, installations, satellites, technology, and energy. If the global military were a nation-state, it would have the fourth largest carbon footprint worldwide. The military wields decisive influence, and its commanders-in-chief, geopolitical strategists, and R&D intelligentsia enjoy priestly stature. Lazzarato’ s argument that the military and war are the sine qua non of capitalism deserves concerted attention. If Lazzarato is right, we do not live in epoch Anthropocene, but in the time of triumph of the global military megamachine. All contemporary political drivel about “security” barely fools anyone about just how unsafe we are, living with the material-ideological monstrosity of militarism that keeps growing and growing and growing.
Let’s engage in a thought experiment that may shed more light on the matter. Picture the global military technosphere—all the firearms, ammunition, grenades, knives, drones, missiles, nuclear warheads, chemicals, vehicles, aircraft, sea bases, military airports, warships, submarines, tanks, buildings, computers, uniforms, boots, helmets, and miscellaneous gear. Picture all of it from all countries. Now turn it into a big pile of stuff. Stack it. Make sure the base is large enough, so it doesn’t topple over and ruin the thought experiment. How high would it go? (A question for Claude I suppose.) What’s the point of this imaginary exercise? What a waste. What a monument to nihilism.
What Lazzarato’s analysis fails to grapple with in any depth is that militarism emerged as an indispensable arm of dominating nature. And even before nature could be dominated, it had to be construed, by nihilism, as lacking inherent standing. The field of nature must first be fabricated as vacant before it can be assaulted and plundered. European settler-colonialists called the New World “empty” because they saw nothing there. Stripping self-meaning from nature is ground zero. Then, nature can be assigned meaning by and for the human—and done to “as needed.” Social stratification is built upon this nihilist paradigm because exploiting and destroying nature needs exploitable and dispensable people. Classes of people are produced to do the dirty, dangerous, mind numbing, PTSD inducing, cruel, and backbreaking work. As well as the dying in battle.
A blind spot looms large before Lazzarato’s vision of “capitalist hierarchies” as comprised solely of categories of humans—labor, race, and gender. Following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, who called nature “raw materials” to which labor adds value, most leftist thinking fails to incorporate nonhumans and nature into the hierarchical stratification that capitalism creates. Through this failure, the Left puts an unforgivable stamp of approval on the domination of nonhuman nature—by excluding the latter, ontologically, from the hierarchy. Yet the exploitation of humans themselves cannot be superseded without understanding its raison d-être: all wealth comes from the natural world, and subjugated classes of people are a means of getting it. “Class wars and wars of race and gender,” writes Lazzarato, “are the founding characteristic of capitalism.” Well, they are not. The war on the Earth is the founding characteristic of empire, of which the most recent manifestation is capitalism (allied with nation-state).
Militarism has been intrinsic to the domination of nature as engine of conquest and defense of territory. War is how loot, today “resources,” are procured by killing one’s own people and “the enemy.” Conquest has always yielded bonanzas from the nonhuman realm, a realm ideationally primed for conquest by its reduction to nothing. Thus nihilism, the metaphysics that champions the nothingness of existence, bundles together the silencing of nature’s voice (nihilation), the subjugation of nature (annihilation), the military machine (means of annihilation), and social stratification (relations of domination). In combined force, these coalesce into a suffering-filled zeitgeist turned-conventional, a poor-world making machine, whose underlying metaphysics is the profanation of existence and the desecration of nature.
War is a broader phenomenon than its conception as military campaigns to annex land and marine territories. The expression the war on nature is no metaphor. War is waged through extractive enterprises (for example, industrial fishing, forestry, and mining) that destroy natural places and kill and displace nonhuman beings. But conventionally, extractive operations are deemed as work, masking work’s warring face. Social historian Lewis Mumford was onto civilization’s Janus-faced work-war nexus as double capture of the natural world. He noted how, for example, in early Mesopotamia and Egypt, the labor and military “megamachines”—composed of coerced masses of men—were often interchangeable. From its early days, civilization produced masses of men to extract from nature and masses of men to conquer nature; depending on circumstance, sometimes the same manpower could do either—work the mines or go to battle. Always the bottom line is what can be gotten from nature.
Then as now, war is the operative motif for wresting from the natural world what it can be forced to yield. Industrial agriculture is warfare on the land, and its main ammunition of fertilizers and pesticides are products of military research and originally weapons of war and extermination. Donald Trump’s recent executive order protecting the production of the herbicide glyphosate (Agent Orange, toxic chemical, carcinogen) together with the production of phosphorus (indispensable for many military products) rehearses the linkage between warring on nature (including human body) and warring on humans. Industrial fishing is warfare on marine creatures and their habitats, via technological gigantism and high-tech gear (some of it repurposed from military tech), which is so indiscriminate a form of mass killing that it recalls massacring civilians (“bycatch”) alongside the targeted. Industrial animal agriculture applies methods akin to torture to animal bodies to make them bigger-faster and more productive of babies-eggs-milk-meat, inseminating them by force and violating them with methods such as electro-ejaculation to extract their semen. Farm animal life is turned into a spectacle of cruelty and perversity, which, in denying itself to be exactly that, turns humans into mindless eaters of products of vile operations.
This is how nihilism works: First it nihilates beings and then it annihilates them, while in the process producing a corrupted civilization invested in militarism as if it’s normal or natural, its citizens indoctrinated to participate in warring on one another and warring on nature, with the entire regime premised on nihilism’s groundless move of profanating existence. War is a key site of human debasement and nature vandalism, and it is omnipresent. “Anyone who awakens is delivered into a world of war. Living as a sleepwalker is more convenient.” However inconvenient it may be, we must awaken to the endless wars around us and their one nihilist taste. It can help to remember that none of us is safe—eventually war is bound to come home as it already has for others. But deeper inspiration than (warranted) fear is found in love. We who love this planet, love life, and are astonished at the splendour of existence, let us rise up against war.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my husband Rob Patzig for feedback on an earlier draft. Thank you also to Ryan D. Hurd for reconnecting me with Gary Snyder’s poetry. And deep appreciation to the coeditors of Earth Tongues, Joe Gray, Taylor Hood, and Patrick Curry.
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