Surplus Life

Statistics tell us that average lifespans in the developed world in 1820 stood at about 35 years of age. By 1900, average life expectancy had climbed to the late 40s. By 1955 it had reached into the upper 60s. And now, average life expectancy hovers at around 80 years of age.

This kind of data shows that humans historically lived under greater environmental stress, infection, and food insecurity. By the late 1800s petroleum had expanded materials applications and provided energy for electricity and transportation. By mid-twentieth century a revolution in chemistry had allowed petroleum to be the building block for any number of exotic chemicals used to feed crops and to kill bugs and weeds while petroleum powered the machines that applied them. At that point one resource was both a building block for the expanding application of synthetic materials and the primary means of locally utilized energy storage. This protean substance, petroleum, could power an automobile as well as constitute its building components. Applied to the various problems of feeding, housing, clothing, and medically treating humanity petroleum enhanced human health and life span. Any application of the harnessed energy of petroleum beyond this became merely a form of its worship coordinated by the centralized hierarchies that it enabled.

In a short period of time cheap energy made possible the smooth transportation of goods and waste disposal that supported a mass consumer society, which is itself an inverted psyche. Consumerism is a bubble of clean and healthy living that renders virtually opaque the mechanisms making it possible and their cost, that is, until ecology and environmentalism raked the muck. In a sense, it was an engine of fantasy that continually hid the realities that made it possible: branding, distribution, production, and resource extraction. This mystification is a centralized component of an aloof style of leisure living attuned to one's things more than to a world around oneself. At this point humans could live in a relationship as consumers with industries that produced consumer goods. Advertising promoted the identity of a consumer as a child in a dreamland of choice. Advertising achieved this by branding the memory of consumers, leaving them to stitch together a past through the consumer objects that it had promoted to them. Each object functioned as a fetish for various adolescent fantasies. This consumption model marked the end of freedom. Consumers now had choice. Cheap energy brought with it an intense consolidation of power, which became the trademark of modernity from the child's joystick to the president's launch button. Cheap energy makes humans no longer hunters and gatherers but consumers of the planet itself. Cheap energy allows a person and that person's society to leverage a power far greater than ever conceived over far greater of a world than ever imagined. That gallon of gas and that tempered glass allows even the least of us to fulfill the dreams of a Babylonian king. Modernity's foundation is petroleum. And petroleum is a proxy for the cheap and ubiquitously available energy source upon which it is founded. More importantly, this would be a first real departure from abject human labor trained under ideologies that affirm its necessity. But while narratives to feed the subjectivities of the enslaved take effort, the threat of harm and death upholding this lopsided social organization made the "cheap energy" of slavery inefficient by comparison to oil and the combustion engine.

The ability to unlock the energy in long chains of petroleum molecules is a type of praxis or knowledge in practice. Furthermore, we can consider praxis in the Sartrean sense of 'the negation of negation,' which perhaps better characterizes the types of knowledge in practice that we're discussing. These are the activities and the underlying knowledge for pushing back against environmental constraints and stressors that effectively disrupt a tranquil existence with the exigent need to address them. To characterize: a window in a home expresses a desire to be both in the world and to guard against its vicissitudes. A person may open or close that window to avoid facing negative weather conditions or to let in pleasant ones. That being said, without the material presence of petroleum, human praxis would fall back to any number of simpler energy sources, such as wood, grass, dung, and slave/animal labor. This hypothetical fall-back presupposes that no readily available source of energy remains for the using other than that which readily regenerates, either from the forest, from the plain, from the farm, or from the womb. Presuming this is the abject backdrop existing just behind the surface of our petroleum-based reality shows that the moral enlightenment characterized by the consumption motifs of our consumer society is simply window dressing to a greater concern writ in economic terms. Human society is an expression of the application of organizational complexity to address both the need to regulate an environment for people and to manage the subsequent effects of bringing people together in the artificial densities required to sustain the organizational complexity that manages societal reality. The term artificial densities' is an important consideration because, like the petroleum glut that allows modernity to hum along unperturbed, complex human organizations and the energy required to maintain them as coherent systems are artificial creations that exist within margins framed by negating conditions. In other words, complex organization and cheap energy are two manifestations of artificiality. Their artifice is that of  being a way to mediate a harsher reality, one with more present dangers, more risk, and less consistency.

Complex society and energy are two material features of humanity. They feature prominently in the constitution of any civilization. As noted above, the abundance of cheap energy allows for a greater complexity and diversity of human societies. Without this source of energy the society that existed because of it disappears.

But let us begin to think of these aspects of modernity and of complex society that mark the workings of historical civilizations as a dream sequence, a special condition of human thinking and acting that is inwardly focused, which mystifies the grand design as well as the hierarchy that administers it. The layering of specialized roles, habits of work and thought, and niches of specialized praxis often bear directly upon the maintenance of this artificial system. On the whole, they don't reflect that selfish praxis of self-survival. The praxis that allowed humanity to directly interface with a recalcitrant world and to come to terms with the costs and benefits of this activity, which became the basis for modifications of this praxis, new rules for its application, and the hopefully, subsequent prosperity of those who practiced it is the ground level of what one would call culture. In those present situations under those exigent conditions where it is practiced is survival. And the force relations between the motives of people and a recalcitrant world to be motivated effected a moral narrative about both the costs of wish fulfillment and the painful necessities of comfortable living. Culture is a time-oriented praxis in that it has one foot in a ritualized memorialization of the past in order that it may find continuity with a future. The brute present becomes, at best, merely a stagehand to the 'performance' of culture for the sake of existential continuity, i.e., survival. So, a well-oiled, a well-practiced use of knowledge, attendant tools, body postures, and clearly demarcated beginnings and ends to action effectively mediate one's relationship to a world, which is both a bane to one's mental sense of security and a boon for the methods employed to counteract these threats. While a world out there presents itself as capricious and often threatening weather patterns it offers signs, preludes to their occurrence. Furthermore, the very materials used to fend off these environmental assaults are freely available in this environment.

At this moment, let me stop speaking in abstract language to address a phenomenon that we all have experienced, hesitance. What keeps a person from working on a car or committing to riding a bike more often? Hesitance. One character of this hesitance is a threat of failure or of struggle. To the bike rider, purchasing the right bike and more importantly shifting one's perception of the effort needed to pedal places and navigate traffic effectively are a component of overcoming this hesitancy and finding agency. The same can go for working on a car. If one has successfully completed a task while working on a car one is more likely to continue working on that car if required. Often, the only barrier to action is a sense of frustration or impotency in the face of a problem that should be addressed but the path to addressing remains unknown. It begins as a mental block and is overcome as a mental process. But the one difference between these two activities and surviving a blizzard is the sense of imminent danger in the latter. But in modernity, the new problems that spawn are of a type familiar to the person struggling to survive. Each must frame the problem as surmountable, each must begin to take steps to surmount it, and each must learn a course of action to take when future similar problems occur. The outcome of this is a means of mediating crisis and managing change. Mediation is an important mental condition where one has a sense of agency because one knows how to perform tasks to address what ever change or crisis befalls one.

I could go down this rabbit hole indefinitely, but I do consider that these activities that we categorize under 'survival' or 'system maintenance' are universal. All of humanity does its own version of this continuously throughout its life. And life, life is yet another coincidence of environment, which is the persistent companion of this mind. The abject description of human activity as a process of survival is to show that awareness of one's existence is a preserve carved out of the time afforded by applying one's praxis in ways to stave off the existential threats. That is the animal description in us all, that mammalian desire to exist, to ambulate, to procreate, and to achieve homeostatic conditions. Like animals, we make homes. Like animals, we commingle our urogenital openings to exchange genetic material. Like animals, we are born, develop, age, and die. This haunted symbolic world we use to describe these things, to categorize them, to make sense of them is the praxis of an overbuilt mind. It must chatter along, gnashing and gnawing eternally like the rodent's incisors. Humanity walks about the world with a potential bomb on its shoulders.