‘Postmodern thought’ (if the phrase is not already a contradiction) consists in the intellectual licentiousness permitted by taking cognitive relativism and causal over-determination to be the only two permissible explanations of things. A more responsible and reflective attitude sees cognitive relativism and causal over-determination as, simultaneously, factors and constraints that must be taken into account in the search either for truth, or at least for the most stable and robust account that can be given of a subject matter. But to regard them as all of the story leads to mistakes or – more usually – nonsense.
Over-determination is a particularly interesting phenomenon as it besets efforts to arrive at explanations in the social sciences. It is the reason – to take three not too random examples – why historians can disagree, why understanding other people is an art rather than a science, and why politics is necessary. It certainly means that one cannot nominate single culprits for the world’s present discontents: too many factors, too many layers of history, too many conflicting rights and wrongs jostle in the claustrophobic space of explanations for that.
And yet: in the heaving crowd of causes one can pick out a few tall malefactors, ubiquitous and malevolent, diffusing noxious, maddening, riot-provoking odours as they dart about to spread their evil. One is mentioned so often that the curse of its putatively holy name can be given momentary rest here. Another is mentioned far too infrequently, though frequently still. It is the black, toxic, planet-sickening ooze on which the world is so utterly drunk that it has become insane – lusting for the ghastly poison because burning it belches out wealth, and wealth means power and influence. A dithyramb beckons invitingly on this subject, saying: power struts itself in armaments and armies, big buildings, motorcades, visiting heads of state, motorways lined with flags, all the show and pomp which from time to time feels that it needs a war or a massacre or two to sustain itself, and to keep hold on the power that leads so often to abuse of power.
The stuff in question is of course oil (and let us add gas to the equation too), and it is why the world is hostage to (a) the lust for it in the huge economies that consume oceans of it daily in the mad rage of their thirst – think USA, China – and who buy it from (b) countries run by questionable regimes – the Saudi, Iranian, Russian, some Central-Asian regimes – where disturbing human rights records, dictatorships, sometimes bullies and zealots, are the suppliers, paid by each of us in the oil-consuming economies every day of our lives so that they can variously and according to taste buy weapons, flog or stone adultresses, fund jihadi-producing madrassas, threaten the world with more conflict, and generally keep world affairs inflamed.
If there were a sudden outbreak of rationality in the world, or at least in our parts of it, the major Western economies would turn their attention, on something like a total war footing, to finding alternative sources of energy – a massive effort to harness clean renewables and to find other technological solutions, to break dependence on oil and therefore on the parts of the world it comes from. Think what would happen to those regions if no one wanted oil any more. Try to imagine what the world might become if cheap clean home-grown sources of energy quickly became available to the major economies, and they no longer needed endlessly to consume the poison from those places, corrupting themselves in the process.
Is there really no chance of ending the oil lust? People will say this is not a ‘realistic’ option because we are far too heavily invested in it. The oil companies with their hundreds of billions of dollars committed to oil wells, refineries, fleets of tankers, scores of thousands of petrol stations: they do not want the world to cease being addicted to oil, and it would be surprising if they did not use their muscle to ensure that politics plays along. So we are each of us hostage to someone else’s determination to keep making profits, at whatever cost of war, terrorism, and other charming spin-offs – not to mention the catastrophic effect on the environment, where the black poison does its other destructive work.
Would genuine and sensible alternatives only become realistic if oil becomes too costly to extract? Sunni Saudi Arabia would probably try not to let oil become too expensive if only to limit Shi’ite Iran’s income, but not even Saudi’s oil-taps are limitless in their power to control world energy prices. As we see in connection with problems over oil prospectors wishing to explore Antarctica, the cost of finding and extracting the stuff will play its part. But we are still some way from being forced by money (only money) considerations – forget war, forget deaths, forget the environment: only money will force the change – to seek alternatives to oil.
Two questions press. What is our answer to this vast weight of inertia and vested interest that keeps us all victims of the black evil? And: I wonder what the cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars would have funded in the way of research into alternative energy sources?