A Guest Analysis: The Human Ethic and the Gulf Oil Blowout

By Joseph Scalia III

For all the “change” rhetoric we hear from both sides of the bipartisan aisle, ultimately both sides desire a continuation of, or an improvement upon, those things that already exist in the social order, things which they conceive as most advantageous to them and their causes, regardless of who is hurt and regardless of the long-term dire consequences of their resistance to the very arduous work of true social change, of necessarily radical change.

It is not that no one within those socially reproduced Public Spaces does not desire the benefits of radical change, but most people are unwilling to look square in the face at the widespread and terribly inhumane consequences of our headlong social reproduction or, worse still, to look at the often “hidden” practices by which we maintain our privileges. It is enough to make this point even without enumerating the grave oppressions of millions around the globe, and instead by looking around us, close to home, at Louisiana’s relationship with the oil and gas industry, at how we “pretend” not to know things simply because we cannot bring ourselves to believe the obvious. We stay in denial, as a societal collective, disavowing the destruction we bring upon ourselves. We know that there is no “remedy[ing of] safety deficiencies” that can ensure that shallow or deep water drilling “[damage to] our waters and our coast … never recur.” Yet this wish to have one’s cake and eat it too is quoted from a June 5, 2010 Times-Picayune staff Editorial. Imagine if we keep drilling, and this does happen again!! The only way to guarantee that it won’t recur is to stop all drilling in the Gulf and the wetlands.

While it is obvious, once a fetishistic disavowal is relinquished, that we must stop all drilling, what happens to the economy of southern Louisiana, especially in the short-run, and to the lives – not just the “livelihoods,” as it is so often stated – of those dependent on drilling? While we cannot afford to drill any longer, they cannot afford the consequences of our stopping it, not in today’s society, with its habit of insouciance and denial at the brutality of sudden financial disenfranchisement for large numbers of people, indeed in this case, for a region.

Simply said, our social order does not operate with any ethic of the good of the all – a good which logically necessarily includes the environment – but rather with an ethic of “what is good for me.” By allowing the oil and gas industry to run free over our waters and our land, we have done grave damage to a vast, unique, and invaluable landscape on which we once relied. And the culture which depended on that landscape, indeed the peoples of that culture, are now endangered, like an endangered species. Corporate driven-ness calls such concerns, that are outside the aims of their financial gain, “externalities,” as dehumanizing as invoking “collateral damage” for the wartime killing of civilians who weren’t the target of the killing but whose deaths are deemed “tragically” necessary.

We must make a space for Really considering all parties, including the Earth upon which we rely, above and beyond the inertia of going along doing business as usual. We must look at what philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek calls the obscene supplement of the social and economic narratives by which we live, making space for the things not said, but which are the most crucial things to take into account. Then maybe, just maybe, we can find a way to rebuild southern Louisiana with a human ethic that does not sacrifice the good of the other for the good of the one.

Joseph Scalia III is Executive Director of Northern Rockies Psychoanalytic Institute, a Psya.D. candidate, in Psychoanalysis and Culture, at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, and a member of Groupe interdisciplinaire freudien de recherche et d'intervention clinique et culturelle (Gifric). Scalia is the most recent past-president of Montana Wilderness Association, where he founded its Environmental Ethics Committee, and is a former board member of the Coalition to Restore Coastal