Wages of Sin

"The environmental hazards multiplied in the years after Singer closed," Granzen said. "As with other cities experiencing industrial decline in New Jersey -- such as Camden, Newark, Trenton and Patterson -- white-controlled political structures in the state turned to dumping hazardous and toxic wastes in cities like Elizabeth, which already had their own toxic legacies. The ethos of racial profiling that undermined the worth of nonwhite bodies was reflected in this environmental racism. The lives of nonwhites were seen as of lesser value."

The insidious forms of institutional racism that define America explode as societal death approaches. They express themselves in displays of racial violence. White vigilante groups, desperate to prevent further change, engage in the same use of indiscriminant lethal force practiced by police against unarmed people of color. The continued failure by government to reintegrate the working class back into the economy, to give people hope, dooms us all.

Plato begins "The Republic" by having Socrates go to the port at Piraeus, the most decadent spot in ancient Athens. It was filled with taverns and brothels. It was home to thieves, prostitutes, soldiers and armed gangs. Egyptian, Median, Germanic, Phoenician and Carthaginian sailors and other foreigners -- Athenians lumped them together as barbarians -- congregated along the seafront.

The port was also where the Athenian war fleet, made up of black trireme ships with bronze-sheathed rams on the prow, was stationed in rows of military boathouses. These warships helped turn Athens from a democratic city-state into an empire in the 5th century BC. And, as Plato and his pupil Aristotle understood, the building of empire, any empire, extinguishes democracy.

The Greek polis, or city-state, soon to be swallowed up by the Macedonian empire, was the nucleus that -- like early New England town halls in the United States -- made it possible for an individual to be a political being, to have agency and a voice. Empire requires a centralized, authoritarian government that has no use for the demos. Greek democracy, always a patriarchy, was with the rise of empire extinguished. Corruption and a lust for power defined the new ruling elites. The citizen, as in our system of "inverted totalitarianism," became irrelevant. As the Athenian general Thucydides noted, the tyranny that Athens imposed on the outer reaches of empire, it eventually imposed on itself. Athens, like the United States centuries later, was hollowed out from the inside by the corrosive force of empire. The brutal tools of control used initially in distant parts of the empire -- in our case militarized police, drones, suspension of civil liberties, wholesale surveillance and mass incarceration -- migrated back to the homeland. This is how most empires die. They commit suicide.

The loss of civic virtue, Plato wrote, left a population hypnotized by the illusions flickering on the wall of a cave. Such distorted images of reality -- our electronic hallucinations are beyond Plato's imagination -- fuel irrational beliefs and desires. They foster a visionless existence. Our images are skillfully manipulated by the elites to keep the population entertained and passive. Those who seek to question the illusions are, Socrates warned, usually attacked and killed by the mob, which does not want its comforting myths punctured. When reality is too painful to bear, a population does not seek freedom or truth; it becomes an accomplice to its own enslavement. Epicureanism, the reduction of life to the pursuit of fleeting individual pleasure, seduces the public. Cynicism rules. Distrust is everywhere. The community breaks down, and, as Plato writes, "all goes wrong when, starved for lack of anything good in their own lives, men turn to public affairs hoping to snatch from thence the happiness they hunger for. They set about fighting for power, and their internecine conflict ruins them and their country." This collapse creates a dream world "where men live fighting one another about elaborate shadows and quarreling for power, is if that were a great prize. ..."

At the end, death arrives as a relief.

We are no more immune to the forces of decay and death than were ancient Athens, ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, the Mayans, the Aztecs, Easter Island, Europe's feudal society of lords and serfs, and the monarchal empires in early 20th-century Europe. Human nature has not changed. We will react as those before us reacted when they faced collapse. We will be increasingly consumed by illusion. We will seek to stop time, to prevent change, to embrace magical thinking in a desperate effort to return to an idealized past. Many will suffer.

This time, collapse will be planetwide. There will be no new lands to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate, no new natural resources to plunder and exploit. Climate change will teach us a brutal lessen about hubris.

The wages of sin, as Paul writes in his Letter to the Romans, is death -- first moral and intellectual death and then physical death. The first, we already are experiencing. It would be reassuring to believe we could as a species avoid the second. But if human history is any guide, we are in for it. And the worse it gets, the more we seek to thwart change through magical thinking, the more our eventual extinction as a species is assured.