103. Facing Limits

Note: This post is the one hundred and third in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.


"Hope you don't think users are the only abusers niggaz
Gettin high within the game
If you do then, how would you explain?
I'm ten years removed, still the vibe is in my veins
I got a hustler spirit, nigga period
Check out my hat yo, peep the way I wear it
Check out my swag' yo, I walk like a ballplayer
No matter where you go, you are what you are, a player
And you can try to change but that's just the top layer
Man, you was who you was 'fore you got here
Only God can judge me, so I'm gone
Either love me, or leave me alone"

From "Public Service Announcement" by Jay-Z

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"It all belongs to Caesar, It all belongs to Caesar
Go to the bank, Go to the bank
We're going down to Mexico
To get away from this culture
Go to the bank..."

from "Go to the Bank", by James¹

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I've been reading through the archives of Morris Berman's blog.

Writing this series of posts has led me into a habit of automatically classifying people as commercially or guardian minded (remarkably few people seem to manage to see both sides on a regular basis) and Berman is one of the clearest cut cases of a Guardian thinker I've come across. Whether he's decrying the building of a casino at Gettysburg (lack of respect for tradition), supporting efforts to take vengeance against the current U.S. elite (encouraging people to vote for Sarah Palin to speed up the collapse, for example), or recounting the loss of community in the face of a relentless self-interested thirst for more consumption, he is consistently singing from the Guardian songbook.

Berman is best known for a series of books on the decline of the American civilization, the most recent of which, "Why America Failed" traces the roots of America's cultural decline to its origins as a nation of 'hustlers' and the eventual takeover of the nation by commercial (hustling) interests.

Of course, there are lots of folks out there commenting on the decline of our civilization, and lamenting the commercial takeover of our communities. But it was one post in particular, that I wanted to mention here, the reason being that in this post Berman comes quite close to recounting some of the main points I've been circling here.

In this particular post, Berman likens humans to frogs:

"[In] An experiment with frogs some years ago ... [they] were wired up with electrodes in the pleasure center of the brain, and could stimulate that center–i.e., create a 'rush'–by pressing a metal bar. Not only did the frogs keep pressing the bar over and over again, but they didn’t stop even when their legs were cut off with a pair of shears."

Berman does allow that some of us frogs are a bit smarter than others:

"The first intelligent frog who comes to mind is the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, perhaps most famous for having been married to Margaret Mead. For Bateson, the issue was an ethical one. As he himself put it, 'the ethics of optima and the ethics of maxima are totally different ethical systems.' The ethics of maxima knows only one rule: more. More is better, in this scheme of things; words such as 'limits' or 'enough' are either foolish or meaningless. Clearly, the 'American Way of Life' is a system of maxima, of indefinite expansion."

Berman links the notion of respecting (or not) limits, with the goal of maximization vs. optimization, and from there, with the difference between individual and collective decision making:

"the economist Robert Frank, writing in the New York Times (12 July 2009), argues that 'traits that help individuals are harmful to larger groups. For instance,' he goes on,

'a mutation for larger antlers served the reproductive interests of an individual male elk, because it helped him prevail in battles with other males for access to mates. But as this mutation spread, it started an arms race that made life more hazardous for male elk over all. The antlers of male elk can now span five feet or more. And despite their utility in battle, they often become a fatal handicap when predators pursue males into dense woods.'"

The problem is that what was rational on the individual level was irrational on the collective level, thus leading to a systemic collapse.

We are thus led, quite naturally, from a consideration of optima vs. maxima to the question of individual vs. collective behavior."

Berman goes even further to note that democracy is a more tenuous method of transforming individual preferences into collective behaviour vs. dictatorship:

How, then, can excess be curbed in a free democratic system? For we can be sure that the intelligent frogs, who are really quite exceptional, are not going to be listened to, and certainly have no power to enforce their insights. True, there are certain countries–the Scandanavian nations come to mind–where for some reason the concentration of intelligent frogs is unusually high, resulting in decisions designed to protect the commons. But on a world scale, this is not very typical. More typical, and (sad to say) a model for most of Latin America, is the United States, where proposed “changes” are in fact cosmetic, and where the reality is business as usual. In the context of 306 million highly addicted frogs, the voices of the smart ones–Bateson, Frank, Posner, Hardin, et al.–aren’t going to have much impact or, truth be told, even get heard."

...

"Of course, authoritarian systems don’t have these problems, which is a good indicator of how things will probably develop. Under the name of 'harmony', for example, China regulates its citizens for what it perceives to be the common good. Hence the famous one-child policy, introduced in 1979, supposedly prevented more than 300 million births over the next 29 years in a country that was threatened by its own population density. In the case of the United States, the imposition of rules and limits on individual behavior to protect the commons is not, at present, a realistic prospect; the population is simply not having it, end of story. But how much longer before this freedom of choice is regarded as an impossible luxury?"

So, just in this one post, Berman covers quite well one of the main areas that separates the guardian syndrome from the commercial one, the ability to deal with / impose limits. The commercial syndrome prioritizes individual competition which prevents collective (cooperative) decision making, which can work in an unlimited domain where maximization is the goal, but fails when faced by a limit because it becomes impossible to constrain individuals to respect the limits and to optimize rather than maximize, and to allocate shares within the limit rather than everyone just taking as much as they can.

And he raises an interesting question, if the citizens in a country face real limits, but would rather pretend those limits don't exist and will only elect politicians who act as if those limits don't exist, will democracy survive?



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¹As an aside, I was looking up the lyrics for the James song I referenced at the top of the post, and ended up at the song meanings entry for a different (but similarly themed) James song, "Lost a Friend (to the sea)" about a man trying to free a friend from living in the world of television and bring them back to reality. While there, I found one of those occasional nuggets of gold that one gets if you sift through enough of the mountains of dirt that make up most comment sections on the web, a comment from 'draven66':

"I logged onto facebook.com for the first time yesterday and realized that I have lost my friends to the sea. A sea of electronic lies, bloated materialism, and denial that hides their suspended disbelief that modern western lifestyles of decay are not only consuming them but everyone we kill under "foreign policy" to maintain this sick way of life. You've seen it before .. those tired sore smiles that say "I am hypnotized, and adequately, even willingly! desensitized, and sedated! Please don't let my suspicions be true, please just give me another hit. The worst part is when everyone can capture it fifty times a day, digitally. This life was made possible by FUTURE SHOP, keep on pretending you sad empty sheep, you are owned and cultivated and laughed at! GOD I feel so alone.

Nice song though."

Markers

As I write this post, one of the most read/most emailed/etc. posts at the world's most influential newspaper, The New York Times, is 'Losing Our Way' by Bob Herbert (his last column for the Times).

Says Herbert,

"The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely."

...

"This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”

G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.

Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.

New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed."

And reading the comments on the article, the most popular ones all share the same sentiments, if anything expressed with more despair and resignation. The highest rated comment, recommended by almost 2,000 readers, says,

"I am afraid that America's decline is permanent, hopeless, and goes beyond the current political climate which is, after all, only a reflection of the people."

I don't know, maybe people are always inclined to pessimism, or this is just a normal mood as a recession comes to an end, but it doesn't seem normal, or promising to me.

It would be nice if I could write this as a smug Canadian, happy that we weren't headed in the same direction, but I think anyone paying attention knows that with a right wing party likely to stay in power or even gain more power running on a platform of military spending, prison building, and corporate tax cuts, we seem eager to follow the Americans down the exact same road.

Living in a Material World...

Another one of those articles I just like to highlight as an indicator of where we're at these days.

The New York times writes about how

"The United Nations says that the world is facing the worst extinction crisis since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago, driven by a rising human population and spinoffs such as pollution, expanding cities and global warming."

The focus of the article is all about how this might harm the economy from the first line, "Losses of animal and plant species are an increasing economic threat" and all the way through:

"Apart from food production, less obvious sectors such as tourism, medicines or energy production with biofuels all depended upon nature and diversity of species.

"There is an economic opportunity here," said Finn Kateraas, a co-chair who works at the Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management, told Reuters. Protecting species can help safeguard long-term economic growth."

(emphasis added)

I think it says something that the only way people see of preventing humanity from wiping out a huge chunk of the other species we share the planet with is by appealing to our economic (material) self-interest rather than any concern with the survival of other species for their own sake.

Bad Combination

Yesterday, I was reading this post over at Chris' place about medical advances allowing us to regrow limbs. And today I ended up reading this editorial at the National Post* about the global conspiracy of scientists.

When we think about civilizations advancing or declining, we tend to imagine that all aspects of the civilization are moving in the same direction at the same time. But what I'm seeing is that, in our case, our technological capabilities are still racing ahead** but our social institutions for directing that technology are in decay. This is of course not a new combination (think Germany in the 20's and 30's for an obvious example) but it certainly doesn't seem like a good combination either.

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* they've always been crazy over at the NP, but it's been a while since I looked in over there and they've really gone completely looney-tunes)

** except for anything that requires a lot of energy - the provision of which being something we can't seem to figure out despite decades of trying. No flying cars any time soon.

With a Whimper

So, the latest round of political nonsense, well summarized here by The Economist, ends with the proroguing of Canadian parliament.

The thing that surprised me was to hear that the request Harper made of the Governor General - to shut down parliament rather than lose a confidence vote - was literally unprecedented in the history of parliamentary democracies. All those different parliamentary democracies out there, and all the hundreds of years they've been around and Stephen Harper is the first leader to cling to power so tightly, and respect tradition so little, that he would hide behind the Governor General instead of standing like a man to face a vote in the house.

I don't know whether to be impressed by such a long run of honourable behaviour by politicians, or to be saddened that it came to an end in this manner, at this time, in this place.

Good News For People Who Like Bad News

"‘Well sure as planets come
I know that they end
And if I'm here when that happens
Will you promise me this, my friend,
Please - Bury me with it!
I just don't need none of that Mad Max bulls**t"¹


Post Holiday book review #2: "Our Final Century"² by Martin Rees

For the last few years, I've had this gradually growing sense that the laws of probability are working against mankind and the continued existence of our current civilization.

While the capacity of the system which sustains us (the earth + all our inventions and institutions) to withstand damage is relatively static, our capacity to inflict large scale damage is growing rapidly (exponentially, arguably).

Looking back 200 years, the only real threats to our entire civilization were things like (natural) viral outbreaks, an object from outer space hitting the earth, or an enormous volcanic eruption - that is, the same threats we have always faced.

Those threats are still with us, but we now face added risks like nuclear annihilation and deliberately engineered viruses. On top of that, our growing integration and ever greater sophistication leave us more and more vulnerable to severe computer viruses, economic crises and any number of other threats.

The odds of any one of these things occurring (severely enough to threaten our civilization) are all very small. But as you keep adding more and more things which could potentially go wrong, the probability steadily rises.

So, what about the book? Rees' contention is that, because of the argument I just outlined, we are unlikely to survive to the end of the century. At least not unless we find a way to send life to other planets or we give up much of our freedom to a totalitarian government. Rees devotes chapters to the various threats we face such as biological agents and nuclear threats as well as more esoteric stuff like universe threatening physics experiments while throwing out various depressing thoughts such as the idea that in any field of science the most pessimistic and negative people tend to be the ones who know the most - i.e. the true experts.

But when I got to the end, to tell the truth, I found it a bit disappointing. The writing is clear and concise and not alarmist in tone at all but I think if you just spend five minutes and close your eyes and imagine all the things which could go catastrophically wrong with our entire world that couldn't have gone wrong one or two centuries ago, then you probably don't need to bother reading it, but maybe it's just me. Still, if you find bad news interesting, or you think what I wrote above is just a bunch of bs, or if you want to see it spelled out thoroughly in book form by someone with actual credibility, it's worth a read.

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For those of you who are skeptical that we only have one century left, here's a timely piece of news from the BBC, (brought to my attention by Doug and his dynamic drivel) which provides a great example of the kind of thing me and Rees are talking about.

According to the article, the amount of sunlight reaching the earth has dropped by 10 to 30% in the last few decades. The same amount is reaching the earth's outer atmosphere as ever, but it's not all finding it's way through to the ground.

The leading theory to explain why is that "tiny airborne particles of soot, ash, sulphur compounds and other pollutants" are both reflecting sunlight and 'thickening' clouds so that they reflect more sunlight as well.

Apparently, scientists have been surprised that the increase in greenhouse gases hasn't caused a greater rise in temperatures. But they figure that this loss of sunlight ('global dimming' as it is known) may be offsetting global warming to a large extent.

So it seems possible, perhaps even likely, that the only reason we haven't suffered either a painful cooling or warming so far is that our activities have caused two large impacts on our climate, and they just happened to cancel each other out to a fair extent. i.e. We were lucky.

Now we're not making too much progress on reducing our emission which cause global warming, but the pollutants which cause global dimming are more and more coming under control because they are the cause of the visible air pollution which prematurely kills off so many in our large cities (not to mention blocking out the sky).

But if the dimming effect recedes, we may end up facing a much more severe warming trend. From the article:

"We're going to be in a situation unless we act where the cooling pollutant is dropping off while the warming pollutant is going up.

"That means we'll get reducing cooling and increased heating at the same time and that's a problem for us," says Dr Cox.

Even the most pessimistic forecasts of global warming may now have to be drastically revised upwards.

That means a temperature rise of 10 degrees Celsius by 2100 could be on the cards, giving the UK a climate like that of North Africa, and rendering many parts of the world uninhabitable."

Final century? I wouldn't bet against it.


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¹Despite taking it's name from a song lyric, this site isn't really a good source for musical info (especially on anything current), but I have to take a moment to mention the album "Good News for People Who Like Bad News", by Modest Mouse which is probably the best thing I've heard in quite a while and (obviously) provided the title for this post as well as the quote at the top which is from track 6, 'Bury Me With It'.

²In North America, the book was given the title, The Sorcerers StoneOur Final Hour, but I don't see why you would replace the literal 'Final Century' which is what the book is about with a metaphorical 'Final Hour' which just sounds like the hyperbole that it is.

Random Thought For the Weekend

Maybe it's just me, but I think that when it's big news that your country's [proposed] Attorney General disavows torture, it may be time to take a step back and think about where your country is at and how it got there.

Overheard...

..at the bus stop this morning:

Homeless Guy: "I'm sorry, I can't remember, have I already asked you for money?"
Woman Waiting for Bus (amused): "Not today"