I had the metaphor of our society/country/world being somehow "addicted to oil" in my mind long before Bush made it respectable to talk about it. I first remember encountering the idea in the mid 70's and have an almost visual memory of reading it in one of the radical rags (In These Times, The Guardian, an occasional party organ) I read cover to cover in those days. Frankly, good neo-Marxist college student that I was, I found it rather silly, if entertaining to play with.
In the mid 90's, active more in 12 step programs than in politics, I couldn't help but play thought experiments with applying various concepts of recovery with the social metaphor. Mostly I got bogged down in how one might apply the metaphor in the first place. What could we possibly mean when we say that "we" are addicted to oil - if you really know something about how addiction works; and, even harder, what would the process of recovery look like. Being a believer in the steps, and in a frankly fundementalist view of the nature of the steps, I couldn't really get past what it would mean for a society/nation/country to "admit we were powerless" over oil and that "our lives had become unmanagable".
After 9/11 answering that question seemed easier, but then what about "came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to saniity" - and in the age of Bush would we even want to. Again I was stymied and mostly put the idea aside, only to have it made respectable when Bush used the phrase, with a gingoistic "foreign" added for obvious political reasons. And, of course, his speech was followed by a slew of articles listing twelve "steps" that would heal us. The problem for me was that none of these articles did more than list 12 things we could do, with an emphasis that varied according to the politics of the writer. None of them addressed the concepts of addiction, recovery or the steps in a way that related to the reality of those things. Remember, no step suggests not taking a drink or a drug. Rather the steps are a set of experiences and actions which lead to a personal transformation which stops us from wanting to take a drink in the first place. How would that apply to any society in a philosophical sense, much less to ours in terms of the way we lived our lives.
Beyond that, what's the point? Why would we want to even try? My answer is that while the "truth" of the metaphor is either beyond dispute or impossible to define, trying to think it through might give us a useful way to analyse what needs to be done. And, again, I've found myself playing with the idea off and on for the last couple years.
It quickly became apparent to me that I couldn't get very far without writing it down. I also found that my conclusions about where this train of thought lead me was largely what I thought anyway. This lead me to begin to think of it not as an exercise in trying to discover an unknown truth so much as a possible way to lead people to my own, raher radical ideas. I started writing a few times and never really got anywhere, in large part because I didn't know what audience I was writing for.
Which is all interesting to a site about electing Democratics because? Why don't you start your own blog about it?
Well, I think it might be interesting here because, well, it just might give us some insight into aspects of our culture we don't normally look at. And, more to the point, it might prove very interesting if it gives us a way - in the spaces opened up by pioneers like Bill McKibben and Al Gore - to talk convincingly and in a porgressive spirit about the issues involved - global warming, peak oil, war in the middle-east, the structure of our economy. In particular, could this be a way to begin to raise some of the politically impossible actions which need to be taken if we take current global warming science seriously, eg - gasoline taxes, mandated auto mileage, massive investment in solar and wind...
Obviously I wouldn't be writing this if I didn't think there was some potential value in doing so. Also obvious is that I'm talking about "framing" although I prefer to speak of it as narrative, of telling a story. And that is where I see potential value. If we take the exercise seriously and actually try to "apply" the steps, then we end up necessarily talking about the deep structures of our society. We will, for example, need to take "a searching and fearless moral inventory", "admit... our wrongs", and make "direct amends". Can you imagine where that might take us?
My feeling is that by "working" with the metaphor of addiction, and guided by the words of the steps, we might be able to tell a hopeful and, dare I say it, spiritual story which many Amercians may be more open to than dry policy statements and/or raw horror stories. But I honestly want some feedback on that before trying to go much farther. The only reason to do this is if it's useful, and that's where I can't go by myself. Indeed, for better or worse, following the logic of the steps seems to me to take us in directions which are much more radical than the general level of discussion here. I'm not bragging about that, one of my reasons for spending time here is to keep myself grounded in American realities without "slipping" into comfortable radical poses, and part of my test of this whole project is to see if it speaks at all to this community.
To do this project any credit it will need to extend over several diaries, even if I assume that for kossacks I won't need to fotenote every detail. Perhaps worst of all we'll need to spend time on defining addiction, recovery, the steps, etc., meaning that it takes a while to get to the juicy stuff. And even in "defining" a lot of what I'll be doing is probably more questions.
So let's start with a big one - what "we" are we talking about? Who is addicted? Is it an abstract America? the people who are citizens of the United States? is it the economy? is it the whole culture (and what does that mean)? or is it the world? Probably, at different times we will want to talk of all of those and other levels or structures I haven't mentioned. And have I right there lost half my readers?
Seriously, though, we could keep it as simple as saying that without oil the US (or world) economy would cease to function. That's clearly true, and probably how most Americans would think of it. But what if we look at the first step, which is not admitting that we are addicted to alcohol or drugs but rather
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.
Immediately it's a different set of questions - who is powerless, and what does powerless mean? Whose lives? And unmanageable in what sense. That's why 9/11 made such a difference in my thinking about this. It demonstrates in the most painful way how all aspects of our lives are entwined with oil and how unmanageable that is. And it's crucial to understand that unmanageable means just that - yes, George Bush has done unbelievable damage through mismanaging "our lives" (and/or we've done a terrible job through letting him); but the larger point is that our dependance on oil makes it impossible for anyone to manage "our lives" (our economy, world, society, take your pick how to talk about it) at all! We need to deal with this addiction or only worse will follow.
Powerless, however perfect all the puns it gives us, might be harder to define in this context. Of course, we're literally powerless without oil (or perhaps we need to talk about carbon energy sources?), and, of course, most people feel more or less powerless in relation to the whole vast oil economy, but, since the step is putting this in the context of an admission, we need to consider who is doing the admitting. In electoral terms we need to talk about majorities, and that is clearly part of it. In another sense we also need to look at particular elite communities that set the boundries of respectable discourse. In that sense I would say that we're probably talking about some kind of tipping point where conventional wisdom and electoral majorities converge. In a sad and tragic way Republican fear mongering and Bush's truly criminal mismanagement may have brought us closer to this tipping point than rational argument could have.
Remembering it's a metaphor, and thus unmeasurable, have we reached the type of cultural tipping point that we could speak of as having "taken the first step", of having made an admission of complete powerlessness and total unmanageability? By all measures - from the continuing war to the policy platforms of "serious" candidates to the discourse on TV and in the papers - I'd have to say "No". On the other hand there has been plenty of positive motion going on - climate change is broadly accepted, if the implications of current science are not understood; the war in Iraq is exposing the underside of our attempts to manage oil supplies; peak oil is in increasingly common usage, and their importance in the polls seem to be moving up.
If nothing else there is a growing awareness that our individual lives and the possiblities available to our society are more and more circumscribed by our transparent dependance on oil. I guess my first political question would then be - does consciously appealing to this growing awareness in terms of addiction make politcal sense. And I will end this diary with a tentative answer - that yes, it is a particularly effective way to tell a story people will understand and listen to which allows us to connect people's various and sundry energy related concerns without falling back on complex social theories people don't have time to hear. People can connect to the metaphor of addiction in a way they cannot to the concepts of economics or sociology. And it highlights the possibility of recovery, where social science is just dismal. Or so I'll argue when we get to the second step in my next diary.