While the Horn of Africa endures some of the worst conditions, huge swathes of the continent experience chaos and deprivation in some degree. To understand the structural reasons for this, we must look at Africa’s cities. Sub-Saharan Africa is undergoing an urban transition of a kind unique in history. Though it is currently the world’s least urbanized region, with slightly less than half of its 1.4 billion people living in cities, that proportion is climbing rapidly, driven by phenomenal birth rates and migration from rural areas. In other parts of the world, starting with Britain in the 19th century, movement to cities was accompanied by the growth of manufacturing industries, providing jobs and helping to supply modern infrastructure. In Africa, however, this economic transformation has not yet taken place. Along with its increasingly dry and unpredictable climates, the greatest strain on Africa’s future comes from the simple fact that there is not enough formal employment for its rapidly growing numbers of young, urban people.

As Robert Rotberg has written, sub-Saharan Africa is “experiencing the most rapid population increases anywhere, ever”, such that “half of all the babies born on the planet between now and 2050” will be delivered in the region. African women begin having babies, on average, in their early 20s, meaning that generations compound faster than elsewhere. Thanks to improved medicine, more of those infants, and mothers, now survive.

The population statistics are far from reliable, but those collected by the World Bank at least give a sense of scale. On average, women in sub-Saharan Africa have 4.3 children each. In some countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and Chad, they have more than six each. Whereas, in 1975, Africa had half as many people as Europe, by the middle of this century it will have three times more, and the median African will still be in their mid-20s. This growth will be concentrated in urban Africa. The continent has 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-growing cities, and in the coming decades many of its urban centers will double or triple in size.

Many African cities display what appear to be impressive feats of development. Returning to the Horn of Africa, the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa is a case in point. Flush with Chinese and Emirati cash, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is razing much of the city’s historic core and replacing it with grand parks and museums, plazas, hotels and offices. The horizon blooms with skyscrapers and condominiums. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian state has for over two decades been seeking to foster an industrial revolution, directing investment towards factories, railways, housing, and an enormous hydroelectric plant in the form of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. For much of that time, economic growth has averaged an impressive 9% annually.

And yet, behind the glamorous projects and flattering statistics, prosperity remains scarce. Despite Ethiopia’s frighteningly low wages — Ethiopian textile workers earn half as much as those in Bangladesh — the country is struggling to follow East Asian countries along the manufacturing route to development. There is much more automation now, and complex supply chains allow firms to use African workers for discrete tasks, such as assembling components made elsewhere, which don’t add up to proper industries. This leaves few paths towards mass employment or higher-skilled, better-paying jobs.

The struggle to industrialize has grave consequences for political stability. Ethiopia has Africa’s second largest population (though estimates vary significantly), and drought-stricken rural areas are regularly on the verge of famine. Like many African countries, Ethiopia also has deep ethnic divisions, with the army struggling against violent uprisings in three different regions. Young men without hope of employment provide the recruiting pools for local militias, and for the bandit parties that kidnap travelers and employees of foreign businesses.

As for the shiny precincts of Addis Ababa, these cater to a relatively small middle class that works for the state or has managed to plug into the global service sector. Thousands of less fortunate residents have been forcibly evicted by Abiy’s schemes. Much of the property development in the city is highly speculative, and many projects are never finished. Urban development has been a source of conflict in the past. The previous government’s plans to expand Addis Ababa at the expense of farmers in the surrounding region were abandoned amid protests and violence.

Little wonder that so many Ethiopians, and Africans more generally, do not remain in the cities where they first arrive, but want to emigrate further afield. Thanks to modern media and communication, they know that people elsewhere have better lives and far higher wages, that there are routes for reaching those places, and that some emigrants actually make it. With Europe’s current asylum system, ambitious and determined young men especially have a good chance of being awarded work and residence rights, if they can just get there. But Europe is only the destination for a small percentage of Africa’s emigrants, most of whom move within the continent itself. For Ethiopians, another major migration route flows eastwards across the Red Sea, towards Saudi Arabia. It is a brutal journey along roads littered with decomposing corpses, and those who are not gunned down by Saudi border guards often face appalling exploitation within the Gulf kingdom itself. Millions of Ethiopians try their luck anyway.

Many of Africa’s swelling cities show similar patterns to Addis Ababa. Globalization has fractured these spaces, allowing small pockets to leap ahead and join the advanced industries of the 21st century, while leaving the rest with Chinese-made phones and consumer goods but few opportunities for training or employment. A large part of the continent’s wealth, such as it is, has come from primary resources like fossil fuels and metals, often extracted by foreign companies, creating small numbers of rich individuals rather than a large body of skilled wage earners. Well over half of urban residents in sub-Saharan Africa live in slums, lacking reliable access to clean water, sanitation, and other basic services. A still higher proportion earn their living in the informal economy, working as street vendors and casual laborers, smugglers and traders, their businesses and occupations unknown to the government.

Nowhere will the dramas of the African city play out on a larger scale than in Lagos, the Nigerian metropolis on the Atlantic coast. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country by far, and that population is growing rapidly, due to overtake the United States by 2050. Lagos is destined to become one of the world’s largest urban centers. It may eventually merge with coastal cities in four other countries, together forming, as Howard French puts it, “the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people”.

Nigeria has one of Africa’s leading economies, boasting the continent’s largest oil and gas reserves, as well as strengths in manufacturing, tech, finance and other services. Yet 90 million Nigerians are thought to live in extreme poverty. Likewise, Lagos is home to an impressive middle class of educated professionals and businesspeople, but the city cannot keep up with the sheer speed of its own growth. More than 1,000 new inhabitants arrive each day.

According to the Polish-Nigerian political scientist Remi Adekoya, the situation in cities like Lagos is worsened by the bad governance of Nigeria’s narrow political elite. There is, he told me, “huge frustration” and “a feeling of helplessness” among middle-class Nigerians, who are unable to leverage their resources to improve the country since they have “zero influence over the political system”.

One might think that a frustrated middle class combined with large numbers of underemployed young people would make Nigerian cities ripe for political unrest. But Adekoya says there are powerful factors working against such a possibility. One is simply repression. “They know that their governments are ruthless, and will not hesitate to send out soldiers on the streets to shoot at them,” he says. Another is religion, which plays an important role in the lives of most Africans, and can lead them to interpret inequality in terms of divine favor. Finally, there is the fear that political convulsions will lead to Nigeria — like Ethiopia and many other African nations composed of different groups ­­— “descending into ethnic-based civil war”.

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Instead, political disillusionment has encouraged what Adekoya calls “a form of escapism”, whereby middle-class people focus their energies on the private sphere. Many have opted for a more literal escape too. A large diaspora of talented Nigerians is making its mark overseas, in countries like Britain, where it has been notably successful in politics, business, the arts, and many other fields. Between 2017-2023, about 100,000 Nigerians departed to study in the UK. 75,000 nurses left Nigeria over the same period. Polls regularly report that 60-70% of young Nigerians are eager to relocate to other countries.

This is not just a problem for Nigeria, of course. Somewhere in the region of 70,000-100,000 trained professionals leave Africa each year. In Britain, we tend to discuss the morality of immigration rather myopically in terms of the value of openness, the merits of diversity and the benefits to our economy, rarely considering the cost to poorer countries of losing their most educated and ambitious young citizens. Yet there is surely a cost when a third of African scientists live outside the continent, when there are more Zimbabwean midwives in Britain than in Zimbabwe, and more Ethiopian physicians in Chicago than in Addis Ababa. The World Health Organization predicts that sub-Saharan Africa will face a deficit of 5.3 million health workers by 2050.

But as European governments struggle with rising anti-immigration sentiment, they are now most concerned with reducing the numbers that are coming to the continent illegally or to claim asylum. According to the current consensus, endorsed by Britain’s Labour government as well, this is best achieved by investing in Africa to address the conditions that spur migration, and to bribe African governments to act as an advance border control. In theory, this diplomatic approach can tie in with other European agendas in Africa, such as gaining access to natural resources, combating radical Islam and checking Chinese and Russian influence.

The British government last year pledged £84 million to address factors driving migration in North and East Africa, through a combination of skills programs and humanitarian aid. But the real champion of this African strategy is Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who has consistently pushed something called the Mattei Plan for Africa. A series of meetings with African leaders has resulted in a scheme for €5.5 billion of investment in energy, education, health and agriculture across more than a dozen African countries. Italy wants help stemming migration in the Mediterranean, while looking to benefit from African oil and gas.

This summer, the Mattei Plan was officially folded into EU policy, as Meloni staged a joint summit with European commission president Ursula von der Leyen in Rome. They announced funding for a railway in the Lobito Corridor, an area rich in strategic minerals that links Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. They also committed to debt relief and an undersea cable linking Europe with East Africa.

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But Europe’s stance is not quite as it appears. The key goals guiding the EU’s investment in Africa are “sustainable growth” and an “inclusive, green and digital” economic transformation. These are the same policy clichés preferred by most of the Western NGOs supporting development in the continent. The problem, as numerous African politicians and activists have pointed out, is that no other region has successfully developed its economy by green or sustainable means; they have all relied on the intensive use of fossil fuels to foster industrialization. There is as yet no proven path to development through renewables, let alone through digital technology, and the evidence in Africa is hardly promising so far. Almost half of Africans lack reliable electricity, while three quarters of those in rural areas have no internet access.

The grim truth is that European leaders and development agencies do not want Africa to turn into an even bigger China sitting just across the Mediterranean; a powerful industrialized region with over two billion people, placing enormous demands on the world’s resources and producing vast quantities of carbon emissions. Like infrastructure investments which facilitate the extraction of natural resources, contributions to “sustainable growth” in Africa are a cynical form of generosity. They really amount to paying Africans to remain poor.

And yet, Meloni was surely right when she said at the recent summit in Rome, “Africa is the continent where our future is most at stake.” The Mediterranean and even the Sahara are no longer clear civilizational borders; millions of people in Europe now have family ties with Africa. Short of dramatically different immigration policies, or breakthroughs in automation that reduce demand for foreign labor, it is difficult to see how these connections will not continue to grow. Asylum systems will need to change if European governments are to address popular anger over porous borders and immigration. But Africa will soon have a larger working age population than India or China, and there will be plenty of economic interests clamoring to use that workforce on our own aging continent.

For Africa itself, the greatest challenge remains that of providing its burgeoning numbers of young people with livelihoods to meet their needs and ambitions — something which can only be accomplished within the continent’s new urban worlds. If it fails this challenge, then the pressure valve of emigration will not be enough to prevent growing political instability, an outcome that is already manifest in many African countries. Cities will be the engines of Africa’s transformation, or the ultimate symbols of its tragedy.

Joseph Schumpeter, who famously recognised that capitalism and innovation are intimately linked, wrote in 1942 that capitalism “never can be stationary”. It has to take risks and fund the most radical ideas because “creative destruction” is the driver of economic change. At the time of Schumpeter’s writing, America’s mid-century golden age, technologies were both the cause and consequence of the country’s massive industrial expansion. Everything from automobiles to consumer appliances to commercial air travel became part of everyday life. Through a technological feedback loop, prosperity was sustained for years.

But, with the exception of the brief computer and internet-fuelled boom at the turn of the millennium, US productivity has been in decline since the Seventies. This downward trend has occurred in spite of consistent increases in spending on research and development, the numbers of patents and PhDs conferred, and scientific articles published. For some economists, such as Robert Gordon, this is because our current technological developments are just inherently less conducive to growth and innovation than those that powered the last once-in-history boom of the second industrial revolution. The implications of Gordon’s analysis are that the days of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” are over: the technology of the future will be just more diversionary apps on marginally improved iPhones.

The potentially revolutionary technological breakthroughs, though, the stuff of the next great boom, are here for anyone who cares to look. Quite apart from the hype around Artificial General Intelligence, existing breakthroughs in modular construction, energy extraction, and nanotechnology could help realise the visions of futurist thinkers and presidential candidates alike. Even the clichéd trope of flying cars, invoked by Peter Thiel to lament the flailing state of American innovation, has found expression in prototypes of eVTOLs or “electrical vertical take-off and landing vehicles” that could bring us closer to Jetsons-like skylines. Many of the “nice things” of the future are already here. The problem is that they are not reaching Americans at an everyday level.

What explains this gap? Well, novelty and innovation are not the same thing. Unlike the former, the latter doesn’t simply happen once an invention is unveiled. As Schumpeter observed, it requires diffusion of breakthroughs across the economy, which is in turn reshaped by it. Research, development, and commercialisation phases were closely integrated in mid-century America. It was the heyday of the fabled corporate research lab, such as Bell Labs, RCA Laboratories and General Electric Research (GE), which helped to convert innovations for consumer markets. Corporations were willing to devote considerable resources to creating improved products which would bring greater profits, even if it meant waiting longer.

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But the wave of financialisation that swept American business starting in the Seventies and Eighties scrambled this system. Capital responded to heightened international competition, not by doubling down on technical investments to out-compete ascendant rivals in East Asia and Europe, but by selling off the very material and scientific infrastructure that formed the basis of an industrial economy. The new economic model prioritised financial returns over pioneering innovations: thus America was transformed into a “capital-light” entity of the neoliberal era. Corporate labs were closed and vertically integrated firms like GE were hollowed out. And though America still generated scientific research, particularly at universities, producing and harnessing innovations domestically became increasingly difficult.

And so began the process by which finance subsumed industry. While there had previously been a complementary relationship, a perverse dynamic of “uncreative destruction” now ensued. The drive toward material innovation that had once underpinned the industrial economy metastasised into a craze for noxious innovations in finance itself. Ever more complex financial products were created, and as a result the economy crashed in 2008.

As America divested its industries, Deng Xiaoping opened up China and provided a convenient market for low-end manufacturing. Indeed, “invent in California, make in China” was the new motto. Hoping to move from mere imitation to true innovation, China adopted precisely those principles which had gone out of fashion in the US. And its authoritarian leadership was able to execute a far more disciplined form of industrial capitalism, with hyper-focused, decades-long investment strategies that wouldn’t be possible in today’s Western economies. Even as Beijing joined the World Trade Organization in 1999 and formally accepted free trade principles, it continued to use a range of methods, such as subsidies, forced tech transfers, and manufacturing funds, for strategically important innovations like 5G and electric vehicles and batteries.

In America, capital became more averse to risky long-term investments. Businesses racked up short-term profits and hoarded the capital that should have been injecting back into the real economy. As a result, the US now has a “capital inertia” problem — it has abundant stores of accumulated capital (or a “savings glut”) that it can’t, or won’t, invest in large-scale projects such as re-industrialisation, automation, infrastructure, and energy development. This is the contradiction in American capitalism that holds back the next great wave of technological growth. It is the problem the next administration must attempt to solve: how to transition from capital inertia toward the capital intensity that characterised America’s industrial zenith.

The US is only now stumbling toward a proper industrial policy in which innovations can theoretically be diffused en masse, but policymakers still have not rediscovered how to do it.

America’s efforts are hamstrung by the expectation that it should be the US government writing the checks, spending taxpayer dollars (or issuing endless tax credits), and by and large assuming the bulk of the fiscal burden, which can’t be sustained either fiscally or politically.

The federal government, then, has to devise bold new ways of restarting capital intensity. Public development and infrastructure banks, for example, could lighten the burden of risk for the financial sector: by directing and de-risking investments, these public-private institutions can be used to forcefully restimulate the financial industry out of its current atrophied condition. Such concentrations of capital could directly fund economic development, just like Alexander Hamilton’s creation of a national bank did in 1791. State contracts can employ firms to build the promised new cities or manufacturing facilities, restarting the virtuous circle of technological development. As the federal government facilitated the construction of canals, railroads, and highways in previous centuries, so too could it build the vertiports needed to host tomorrow’s flying cars, or at least the expanded energy grid needed to power electric vehicles.

In this scenario, through a reformed and revitalised capitalism that takes innovation seriously, Americans could begin to not just have “nice things” again, but also resilient infrastructure and industrial base. And in a century when both geopolitical competition with China and extreme weather events like Milton are set to intensify, the ability to build will be more than a necessity.

More than any other resource, Africa is starved of the energy it needs for economic development. This isn’t for lack of natural endowment. Africa possesses vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. But extracting those resources and using them for domestic development requires money, infrastructure, expertise and institutional capacity — which Africa’s poorest nations, especially in the sub-Sahara, sadly lack. One solution is partnering with foreign energy companies — until recently, mostly European and American firms — but that means that much of the domestically produced gas and oil is then exported rather than used for local development.

Yet beyond practical difficulties, in recent years an ideological force has also come to stymie potential development: the global political creed of Net Zero.

While the phrase is already associated with straitened living standards in the West, in the developing world Net Zero threatens to lock countries into perpetual underdevelopment. So far, it has mainly taken the form of Western countries limiting overseas fossil fuel investments. As early as 2014, one study found that the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the main US development finance institution, had started “to invest principally in solar, wind, and other low-emissions energy projects as part of the [Obama] administration’s effort to promote clean energy technology”.

Then, at the COP26 climate summit in 2021, the US and several European countries pledged to stop funding oil and gas projects in developing countries. The Biden administration has since gone even further, ordering a halt to investments in “carbon-intensive”, fossil fuel-based energy projects globally, and issuing new guidance for multilateral development banks such as the World Bank, “aimed at squeezing off fossil fuel financing except in certain circumstances”. The US also vowed to oppose all new coal- and oil-based projects, and to offer only “narrow support” for natural gas projects. Prior to that, the World Bank had already said it would no longer financially support oil and gas after 2019. Other international funding groups, such as the European Investment Bank, have started linking finance to climate adaptation and mitigation, curtailing or halting their funding of fossil fuel and even nuclear projects.

Meanwhile, across Africa, the Western climate-industrial complex, composed of NGOs and state development agencies, has started pouring vast amounts of money into wind and solar projects. And this combination of carrot and stick was a clear injunction to poor countries in Africa and around the world: if they want to develop, they have to do so in a “green” and “sustainable” manner. Advocates and policymakers started pushing the idea that this was totally feasible — that poor countries can generate all the energy they need from renewable sources, primarily wind and solar power. That, in other words, Africa can achieve Net Zero and industrialisation simultaneously. This claim is a delusional fantasy — and a dangerous one at that.

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As Vijaya Ramachandran and Seaver Wang of the Breakthrough Institute recently observed: “No matter what advocates and policymakers say, these cheap, renewables-only scenarios remain theoretical and unproven even for wealthy countries.” And it is obviously absurd to expect some of the world’s poorest countries to achieve in a short time what even the world’s most advanced countries have failed to do in a decade. Despite trillions spent on wind and solar, solar panels and wind turbines still deliver just over 3% of global energy, while fossil fuels still account for over 80% of the global energy mix — the same as three decades ago.

The fact is that fossil fuels remain the quickest and cheapest way to kickstart economic growth, as the Chinese miracle of the past three decades shows. Even though renewables (ideally in combination with nuclear energy, which is fully carbon-free) have a role to play in the development of Africa and other poor regions, many African countries have no choice but to rely on fossil fuels in the coming years (coal, oil and natural gas) if they want to raise living standards. It will, of course, initially mean higher emissions, though not significantly: were sub-Saharan Africa to triple its electricity consumption overnight using natural gas, it would add only 0.6% to global carbon emissions. But it will also mean fewer deaths from poverty, destitution and indoor pollution, which in turn will make African countries more resilient to the effects of climate change. Conversely, demands from rich-world advocates and policymakers for developing countries to abstain from using fossil fuels “are very likely to perpetuate the extreme poverty that many Africans face”, as Ramachandran and Wang write.

Forestalling development in the name of Western middle-class luxury beliefs, themselves a product of affluence built on fossil fuel consumption, is not only immoral. It’s also a form of ideological imperialism, as the continent’s leaders have made clear to those willing to listen. In 2021, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni wrote a scathing article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Solar and Wind Force Poverty on Africa”, arguing that “Africa can’t sacrifice its future prosperity for Western climate goals” and that “Africans have a right to use reliable, cheap energy, and doing so doesn’t prevent the development of the continent’s renewables”.

Last year, the Senegalese President and former President of the African Union, Macky Sall, went further, saying that “Africa must be able to exploit its large gas reserves for another 20 or 30 years to further its development and provide access to electricity to the 600 million people who are still deprived. It would be unfair to stop us.” Yemi Osinbajo, former Vice-President of Nigeria, made the same argument: “Limiting the development of fossil fuel projects and, in particular, natural gas projects would have a profoundly negative impact on Africa.”

This isn’t just rhetoric — the African rebellion against the demands of the West has already taken material form with several new energy projects, established with or without the West’s support. For instance, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline is intended to transport crude oil from Uganda’s oil fields to the Port of Tanga on Tanzania’s eastern coast, where it will then be sold onwards to world markets. The project’s opponents include the US-based Climate Accountability Institute, France’s Friends of the Earth, and the European Parliament, who say that it will breach global emissions targets. And many Western banks — including Standard Chartered Bank, HSBC, Barclays and major French lenders — have publicly said they won’t support it.

But the governments of Uganda and Tanzania say they intend to move forward with the project regardless, arguing that they can’t afford not to exploit their natural resources while the world still runs on fossil fuels. Across the continent, part of the reason for the pushbacks is that they know that, if necessary, they can turn to an alternative superpower for funding: the China National Offshore Oil Corporation is one of the main investors in the Uganda-Tanzania pipeline. Meanwhile, other African countries — Algeria, Nigeria, Mauritania, Senegal and others — are pursuing or considering new energy projects, mostly in the field of natural gas, a relatively clean fossil fuel which could provide “transitional energy”. Several countries are also exploring nuclear energy, despite multilateral development banks’ refusal to support nuclear power plants.

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The good news for Africa is that the tide has started to change in the West as well, even if for purely selfish reasons. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Europe’s decision to decouple from Russian gas have sent EU countries scouring the world for alternative supplies of gas — and Africa is the obvious choice. It has 13% of global gas reserves, only slightly less than the Middle East, and 7% of the world’s oil, as well as vast renewable energy potential. “Africa may be the answer to Europe’s immediate gas problem and its longer-term carbon one,” according to The Economist. And this is probably why, in March, the World Bank announced that it would be supporting the development of Mozambique’s massive natural gas resources, signalling an important shift in the institution’s policy.

Ultimately, we should be grateful to Africa for resisting the dangerous and inhuman ideology of Net Zero, arrogantly imposed by the West upon a world that no longer trusts them. The next step, however, is ensuring that Africa’s resources are employed first and foremost to promote the development of Africa itself, rather than to perpetuate their plundering — be it from the West, China or anyone else.

The Western way of life that flowed out of Texas came to take oil for granted. At any time when supply was abundant, few stopped to think about its production. For consumers, oil life was a practically easy life. It was as if, as the Italian novelist Italo Calvino wrote in his short story ‘The Petrol Pump’, energy was “unconditionally and endlessly at your service”. But that notion rested on a colossal illusion given that producing oil took place in a world of destructive chaos. It was no easy thing to extract the sun’s energy from finite organic matter trapped on the seabed for millions of years before there was any form of human life.

Wildcatters like Higgins understood this reality. For them, oil invoked dreads far removed from the chimerical promise of modernity. Since it bent cosmic time, oil could not be trusted. As one witness to a later gusher mused: “Whenever you punch a hole so deep into the ground that oil pops out, Hades come with it. And the more oil, the more Hades.” This equation of oil with Hades contained multiple meanings. At its simplest, it mythically rendered the origins of oil in the underworld of the dead. In blowing away the river that separates the world of the living from the world of the dead, oil accelerated the temporal vanity of all mortal aspiration.

In Pennsylvania and Texas, long-standing rural settlements became fleetingly rich oil towns and then, when the oil fields were depleted, wastelands. Oil encouraged the wildcatters to speculate with borrowed capital against the arbitrary whims of geology and the market power of Standard Oil, inevitably risking their own financial and moral ruin. Since oil wells were highly combustible, drilling for oil also summoned Hades conceived as the Christian inferno of Hell. For many of the wildcatters, to bring Hades into play was to invite the End Times both as the Day of Judgement and the final consummation of the world in fire. To take a verse from Proverbs 27, it constituted a world where: “Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes are men are never satisfied.”

The wildcatters’ treks westward with this kind of consciousness became part of a potent cultural American imaginary around the temporal instability of oil and its elemental power to poison the earth and corrupt human beings. Three stories told over the course of 20th-century America are particularly revealing: Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, the 1956 film Giant, and CBS’s original Dallas show which began in 1978. Each mediates on oil’s demonic power. Linked as they are by the initials JR for a protagonist, they build on each other to form a saga about the afterlife of Spindletop.

The never-ending search for oil and the risk of fire when it is found constantly always encroaches on the sanctity of the land. In Oil!, wildcatter J. Arnold Ross lies to acquire a goat-ranch on which to drill for oil in a place called Paradise in California. He wants to pass on the oil empire he builds to his son Bunny; at the novel’s end the Paradise wells have gone up in flames. In Giant, the old-moneyed Bick Benedict initially renounces the wealth drilling on his ranch would bring. After he surrenders, he insists, that “all this oil around here hasn’t made a lot of difference. We live pretty much the way we always have.” But he speaks lounging in a new swimming pool and behind him the once pristine terrain has been transformed by hundreds of oil derricks. Dallas, meanwhile, persistently returns to the tension between Ewing Oil, the family business, and Southfork, the cattle ranch where the warring Ewings live. The patriarch, Jock Ewing, owns Ewing Oil. His wife, Miss Ellie, owns Southfork. In one of the show’s finest episodes, a heartbroken Miss Ellie chooses to end her father’s prohibition on drilling for oil on Southfork in order to save Ewing Oil from bankruptcy.

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For individuals to touch oil in these stories is to live in spiritual danger. In Oil! those ranchers offered leases for drilling on their lands find “their frail human nature … subjected to a strain greater than it was made for”. J. Arnold Ross dies in exile in Europe when the real-world Teapot dome scandal — in which President Warren Harding’s Interior Secretary handed out leases on land that had been naval oil reserves to two oil companies for bribes — catches up with him.

In Giant, wildcatter Jett Rink is played by James Dean over the last months of his life with a doomed, unearthly beauty. An oil-saturated Jett declaims after his gusher goes up: “You all thought old Spindletop… was all the oil there was didn’t you. But I’m here to tell you it ain’t. … I’m a rich un.” He becomes the richest man in Texas. But he is last seen fallen to the ground drunk in an empty hall where there was supposed to be a banquet to celebrate the dedication of the Jett Rink airport.

Under the guise of a soap opera, Dallas created the darkest mythology about oil’s ruinous power. All the principal characters live with the demon of Ewing Oil and one way or another they are all destroyed by it. On the surface, there is a duality between two brothers, the elder — JR — who is evil, and the younger — Bobby — who is good. But while Bobby is a much better family man than JR, the closer Bobby gets to oil the more the fraternal polarity falls away. In what was Dallas’s best season, the competition between the brothers for control of the company after Jock’s death simultaneously corrupts Bobby’s character and reveals the ambition behind his righteousness, costing him his marriage.

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Oil ultimately destroys the Ewings as a family and eventually it consumes Ewing Oil itself. The Ewing men go to the brink and pull back only for the cycle to start again more hopelessly. The oil past always has more pull for the Ewings than the oil present. As the show constantly reminds the viewer, Jock Ewing founded Ewing Oil as a wildcatter in the Thirties. When the show starts, Jock is newly retired, and JR is running the company after, as JR once puts it, “the sudden devaluation of the Ewing dollar”: the world where the US must import huge quantities of oil. Jock is glorified as a symbol of a lost past, “the kind of man who made Texas great”. JR is a charismatic anti-hero, constantly improvising as much abroad as at home. JR’s eyes always want more. His ways court disaster for Ewing Oil. But for a while they just as regularly rescue it.

The tide decisively turns against the Ewings in the tenth season, set against the backdrop of the 1986 oil price crash, which devastated the Texas oil industry. JR manoeuvres to blow up Saudi fields to force up prices. When the blowback endangers all the Ewings, Miss Ellie tells her sons that Ewing Oil should have died with their father. Not for the first time, Bobby tries to get out. His wife Pam is proud he has put his “whole house in order”. But oil time has accelerated well beyond Bobby’s belated moral epiphanies. Before Bobby can sell his Ewing Oil shares, the Justice Department announces an investigation into JR’s Middle Eastern ventures. In the ‘Fall of the House of Ewing’, the Justice Department closes down Ewing Oil, and the assets of the once wildcatting company are bought by the show’s fictional oil major, whose CEO has long plotted to bring the Ewings to heel.

This storyline should have served as an endpoint (late Dallas became an unwatchable mess). In symbolic terms, Dallas turned the legacy of Spindletop to dust at the hands of hubris, power, and contingent circumstances in a style recognisable from any Greek tragedy. The fact it was an oil story made for a global audience of energy-unaware oil consumers who scarcely noticed the undercurrents to what they were watching is perhaps its own commentary on western consumers’ relationship to the material basis of their way of life.

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But whatever the force of destruction at work, there is no suggestion in any of these stories of 20th-century Americana that oil can simply be renounced. In Oil! the idealistic Bunny never repudiates his father nor doubts that “this is an oil age”. The novel ends in a cemetery in Paradise. Sinclair allows himself the hope that “men can find some way to chain the black and cruel demon” that “roams the earth”, but he has just described the new derricks that are being built to replace the burnt-out ones.

Dallas goes further, suggesting that JR’s ways are a necessary evil for the age of affluence it portrays. In the show’s final episode, a drunken JR wanders around an empty Southfork. An It’s-a-Wonderful-Life-style figure appears to show him a world where he was not born: Ewing Oil has collapsed a few years after Jock’s retirement, leading Jock to suicide and then Miss Ellie to her grave. Yet this does not redeem JR: in the show’s last scene, JR appears to have turned Jock’s old gun on himself, rendering him the final casualty of all the grief Ewing Oil has caused.

Westerners living lives far removed from the realities of the oil industry are now much more used to the idea of the commodity as a destructive force than those watching Dallas in its prime. Today, climate change and the last decades of geopolitical turbulence around energy have given an urgent charge to the idea that oil is a force from Hades threatening the End Times. Yet Sinclair’s vision of resealing the boundary between Earth and Hades by bringing oil to heel requires sacrifices that many of us living the life oil allows don’t want to contemplate. Indeed, to wish Spindletop away as a wrong turn would be to wish ourselves away: it is the rise of oil as an energy source that has made it possible for there to be so many of us alive in the world today.

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These paradoxes are at work in the American novelist Cormac McCarthy’s work. In his masterpiece Blood Meridian — published in 1985 — McCarthy told a story about scalp hunting across the Texas-Mexico border in the mid-19th century, making Texas a site of cyclical cosmic time. The first wildcatters easily fit into McCarthy’s mythology. Indeed, one could perhaps read the novel’s epilogue, where a man is “progressing over the plains” making holes in the ground “striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there”, as the start of a wildcatting quest.

But in his post-apocalyptic novel The Road­ — published in 2006 — cyclical time has ended: everything is sinking into oblivion. The cause of the ecological cataclysm is unspecified. But a story of oil in its last twilight is palpable. In the opening, a father awakens from a dream where he and his son have been lost in the depths of a cave until they reach “a black and ancient lake”. On their journey south, the man and the boy use an “oil company roadmap” as a guide. The man has them search for gasoline to light their lamp. At one early stop, they first find “the odour of gas only a rumour” and then, desperate, return to decanter dregs from plastic oil bottles. Later, what they find is “years old. But it was gasoline and it would burn”. It is their oil-lit lamp that allows them to discover the largest store of food they encounter.

In The Road, it is as if all oil time is compressed from oil’s origins to its first use to its necessity to its reconstruction of the American landscape to its depletion and ecological hazard. Before his demise, the man sees the boy “looking back at him from some unimaginable future”. That place appears to be an oilless world. During the man’s last night, the light comes not from the lamp but a candle borne by the boy. To the man, “old dreams encroached upon the waking world”. With his death, oil and its stories might be said to pass into the silence “of things ceasing to be”.

In the last paragraph, the authorial voice changes. We are transported to an organically alive world. Here, the maps are the “patterns” on the back of trout swimming in mountain streams, and they are “maps of the world in its becoming”. But something old still has its purchase. The patterns are also “Maps and Mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again”. It’s an ending that appears unwilling to privilege either optimism or pessimism: an ending perhaps from a place where the cosmic stakes of the age of oil can’t quite be contemplated.

Cybele’s sidekick and her priests are just one example of the castrated divinities, and mortal men, who appear throughout history and culture, from the sun-god Osiris in ancient Egypt to Freud’s more metaphorical “castration anxiety”. And this figure — and fear — lurks even in the modern world.

A rash of “trend” pieces has sought to encourage men to sterilise themselves — even, in one case, filming the actual surgery. Along with stories about chemicals destroying sperm counts and laboratories creating embryos without sperm, it’s no wonder some men might feel a little paranoid — all the more so since the vasectomy “trend” is clearly manufactured by a PR agency. It’s not strictly castration, but the two are routinely conflated in the popular mind. And this perception is expressed in increasingly colourful terms: for example, Tucker Carlson’s recent documentary, The End of Men, featured plenty of chaps who seem certain that something like a campaign to persuade men to self-castrate is at least metaphorically under way.

These same men often rail against a perceived feminine culture that stifles masculine vigour via mechanisms such as safetyism, victim culture and hatred of hierarchy. And with women now a majority in sectors such college admissions, journalism, teaching and HR, and even scaling the heights of the US military-industrial complex, it could indeed be that this increasingly palpable presence is changing public life in ways that are less than congenial to at least some men.

But the meanings of the castration complex are, well, complex. This most brutal un-manning has carried many meanings in different times and places. Xenophon writes about eunuchs as guards in ancient Persian harems, while the theme of (forcible) sexual continence was echoed in the early Christian era by Justin Martyr, who approvingly recounts a young man’s petition to a Roman prefect for permission to be castrated, so as to prove that Christians were as sexually chaste as they claimed to be. The Byzantine empire prized them as generals, because their lack of progeny meant they had no complicated ties to rival aristocratic families.

And if castration anxiety is rearing its head again, the underlying driver today may be more technology than ideology. When Freud described the “castration complex”, he was living through an age that saw perhaps the most drastic ever displacement of brute physical strength: an overwhelmingly male attribute. Thanks to technology, as Marx observes in Das Kapital, a male labour force could increasingly be replaced in factories with a less physically strong one comprising cheaper women and children.

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Virgins get more done

By Mary Harrington

Perhaps the fear Freud describes as universal was more historically specific than he thought. Strikingly, the first wave of industrialisation in Russia, from the 18th century onward, also saw the emergence of the first castration cult since antiquity. Calling themselves the Skoptsy — the “Castrated Ones” — this heretical Christian sect conducted religious services reminiscent of the rites of Cybele, while adherents of both sexes amputated all visible primary sex characteristics.

Since the Skoptsy were stamped out by Stalin in the early 20th century, the digital age has replaced the industrial one. In turn, this has arguably accelerated the obsolescence not just of men, but of biological sex, as an ever-growing swathe of work is now knowledge-based and thus equally open to both sexes, while more and more of us socialise in a disembodied way online. And in this context, the interactions of both sexes are long on talking and short on physical violence. Online, that is, both men and women are forced to socialise in a feminine key.

More than two millennia ago, the castrated figure of Attis was used by poets to convey ambivalence about masculine sexuality. For Catullus, Attis is driven to self-castration by Veneris nimio odio, “an excessive loathing of sex”. Ovid, meanwhile, characterises Attis along similar lines — except in this account, Attis is punished for seeking full adult sexuality. In his Metamorphoses, Attis promises Cybele that he’ll remain a boy — but when he breaks this by making love to a nymph, she drives him mad and he self-castrates.

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Peter Thiel on the dangers of progress

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So as the digital transition forces ever more social interaction into a disembodied, “post-gender” mode, perhaps it makes sense that we’re dusting off Attis and Cybele again. When all our social lives are virtual-only, how is any of us to make sense of our relationship to normal human sexuality?

As our technology lurches into the new and unsettling terrain of AI and biotechnology, echoes of the Skoptsy and the rites of Cybele are once again being heard — along with an increasingly tormented relation to normal human desire and procreation. The “nullo” subculture, for example, seek to “nullify” all visible sex characteristics: icons include the Japanese artist Mao Sugiyama, who cooked and served his penis and testicles for a paying private banquet in 2012, garnished with (what else?) button mushrooms.

Clinics now offer “Nullification” cosmetic surgeries as a “gender-expansive” option. And if you don’t want to pay for bespoke junk, the internet will provide: earlier this year, a basement flat in Finsbury Park was raided and several men arrested, following discovery that a man known as “The Eunuch Maker” was livestreaming consensual male castrations for a paying audience and promoting the events via Twitter.

According to some corners of the weird internet, this isn’t a disaster but our post-human future coming into view. The notorious, pseudonymous 2018 Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper argues that “technocapital” is an accelerating, self-replicating, and increasingly autonomous process to bring about an ultimate victory of the feminine over the masculine principle, with “a return back to the ocean, back to a sexless, genderless slime swarmachine”.

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Middle-aged women don't want sex

By Mary Harrington

And while this is unlikely to be literally true, the more respectable WEF-funded futurists are also now wondering now whether runaway technology could bring about the end of humanity (at least, of most of it). Yuval Noah Harari recently warned that because “the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology” such as bioengineering and AI, we may end up with a situation where “we just don’t need the vast majority of the population”. While this future is less luridly rendered than Gender Acceleration’s “sexless, genderless slime swarmachine”, a scenario in which the human majority is dismissed as functionally irrelevant biomass is every bit as dystopian.

But even if escalating uncertainty about runaway technology were driving a few men to film their own neutering, whether on TikTok or the dark web, we probably shouldn’t jump from this to predicting the abolition of sex. We should take seriously the pathological symptoms accompanying our turbulent times — but only as pathological symptoms. Reports of men’s demise are as greatly exaggerated as progressive claims that we can somehow do without sex dimorphism.

And this is because conditions for a dreaded (or heralded) triumph of the technofeminine are very unevenly distributed. For one thing, most women have beloved male partners, relatives, friends and children, and most well-adjusted people of either sexes are revolted by the idea of one sex achieving total victory over the other.

And even those so online they’re immune to ordinary reality-checks may, in due course, be confronted by a more visceral one, should the world grow more unsettled. Throughout history, it’s usually been men who have defended order (and their loved ones), sometimes at great risk to their own safety. And the decades since the turn of the millennium have seen two international financial crises, terrorist attacks, a return of great-power politics, a global pandemic and rocketing inflation. This rolling crisis shows no signs of abating. And only peaceful and prosperous societies have the luxury of pretending we can do without brute force as a guarantor of peace and order.