Why The Greens Should Watch Adam Curtis

Soul Destroying: The classical ecological paradigm regards a state of equilibrium as Nature's "default setting".  Adam Curtis's latest series of documentaries argues that our faith in "the balance of nature" is in fact a manifestation of our own inability to meaningfully disturb the equilibrium of the political and economic machinery in which we are enmeshed. Finding ourselves unable to beat the machines, we appear to be trying to join them.

ADAM CURTIS makes television programmes that challenge our understanding of the world. To call this puckish fifty-five-year-old’s productions documentaries scarcely does them justice. Curtis ransacks his BBC employers’ visual archives for his trademark rapid-fire imagery, and makes free with both classical and popular music for his films’ evocative soundtracks. Elucidated and enhanced by these sensory onslaughts, Curtis’ ideas strike hard and sink deep in the minds of his viewers.

His latest offering, a three-part series entitled All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace should be compulsory viewing for every member of the Greens’ caucus and party.

They won’t enjoy it, but I’m confident it would do them a world of good.

Because the second part of Curtis’s trilogy, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts”, interrogates and then radically deconstructs one of the central tenets of the green belief system, that: left to themselves, all ecosystems tend towards a state of equilibrium.

It’s the idea which underpins the entire environmental movement. Stripped of the notion that some mysterious natural force somehow keeps all things in balance, the prospect of the human species abandoning its destructive behaviour – and thereby earning itself a “sustainable” niche in Mother Nature’s steady state – becomes a chimera.

Curtis’s challenge to the original ecological paradigm forms just one part of a much broader critique of the way in which men and women of the twentieth and twenty-First centuries have attempted to empty human behaviour of its moral and political dynamism by applying to it the soulless logic of mechanical systems.

At first blush, this would appear to have little or nothing to do with green ideology. Surely the logic of the machine is precisely what greens are fighting against?

What Curtis demonstrates, however, is that the stereotype of the “luddite” green is almost entirely mistaken. By a series of daring conceptual leaps, Curtis links the right-wing libertarianism and extreme individualism of the tea-partiers’ guru, Ayn Rand, with the “turn on, tune in and drop out” libertarianism of the Californian hippies.

The link? Cybernetics.

Cybernetics and systems theory gave rise to the notion that computers could not only free capitalism from the regulatory chains of the social-democratic herd, but that they would make possible a world in which human-beings and the natural world “did their own thing” in perfect harmony.

The curious title of Curtis’s series is taken from a poem by the celebrated 60’s poet, Richard Brautigan. He wrote of:

a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Curtis challenges the superficial radicalism of Brautigan’s hippie vision by drawing on the very real experiences of those who took the systems theory utopians like Buckminster Fuller at their word and established communes of networked, non-hierarchical, self-organising individuals held in equilibrium by the self-correcting influence of “feedback loops”.

What brought these communes to their bitter, often violent, ends was that their anti-political ethos, far from eliminating coercion and exploitation, actually ended up facilitating it. By forbidding majority decision-making and the formation of factions (evil manifestations of the despised practice of politics) all the communards had done was draft a bully’s charter.

Because all human (and natural) systems are dynamic and subject to constant challenge and response, the question of agency is inescapable. Moral and political decisions cannot be magically excised from our social and economic environment unless – and this is the whole point of Curtis’s series – we are willing to regard ourselves as nothing more than amoral bio-machines.

The conflict within the New Zealand Greens, which Sue Bradford has written about with considerable passion of late, carries alarming echoes of Curtis’s critique. The Greens’ prohibition against faction-forming, and their distaste for majority decision-making, sound remarkably similar to the rules of those dysfunctional Californian communes.

Add to this their newfound willingness to become just another “responsible” component in the political circuitry of capitalism, and Sue’s concerns are readily understood.

That’s why Russel Norman, Metiria Turei and their colleagues should invest three hours in watching Curtis’s remarkable trilogy.

It will remind them of what they once had – and are at mortal risk of losing.

The insight that it’s only our ability to make moral decisions that makes us human.

And that there’s absolutely nothing “natural” about it.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 17 June 2011.