Thoughts about life with limits
The Art Of Decay
A recent article titled, Our three-decade recession, explores the idea that our myopic concern about current recessionary trends obscures and ignores the bigger, historical picture:
"The news media and the government are fixated on the fact that the U.S. economy may be headed into a recession – defined as two or more successive quarters of declining gross domestic product. The situation is actually much worse. By some measures of economic performance, the United States has been in a recession since 1975 – a recession in quality of life, or well-being."
I couldn't agree more, and this concept immediately brought to mind an illustration from one of my favorite books from my college days, Politics For Human Beings (Second Edition, Hummel and Isaak, Duxbury Press, 1980):
- image by Isaak
Politics For Human Beings defines politics as, "a social act through which human beings attempt to resolve the tension between human needs and social facts."
This definition is dissected into three individually defined sections; social act; needs; and social facts:
"A social act is a joint action by two or more people undertaken for similar reasons or with the same intention. It is political if the people involved are aware of a shared need and join in an arrangement to satisfy that need.
"Needs are what it
takes for
your body to be human and what it
takes for your head to feel human. They are physiological and
psychological requisites for human existence. The failure to satisfy
needs can result in death or in becoming less than
human – that is, in
illness or pathology of the mind and body."
[...]
"Social facts
are old social
acts that have become conditions. Social facts often frustrate human
needs. For example, although people set up a corporation to satisfy
their own needs and wants, as soon as their act becomes a condition, it
frustrates the needs of others who share more in the pollution than in
the profits created by the firm. Thus the social acts of one group of
people to satisfy their own needs often frustrate the fulfillment of
needs perceived by other groups. As soon as such tension between social
facts and human needs is perceived, political consciousness comes into
being."
It's important to point out that needs are complicated by values:
"Many people want more than they need. Values are what people want, whether they need it or not. Values include things such as refrigerators, new cars, glass-bead games, and chess sets; they include feelings such as love, revenge, joy, and pain; they include ideas such as freedom, order, truth, and salvation."
With the above referenced concepts in mind, Ralph Hummel and Robert Isaak describe the life cycle of political systems in temrs of creation, maintenance and decay:
"At the stage of creation, politics looks very cooperative. People look around for other people who share their human needs so they can cooperate in meeting these needs – even against the social facts of the political system in which they find themselves. That such a system already exists – in fact, most of us are born into existing systems -- indicates that, after the stage of creation, politics evolves to a second stage: maintenance. In the maintenance stage, politics shows the face of power and conflict. Now people seeking to create their own political solutions run up against older solutions of others who have an investment in the system. The power of social facts – existing institutions, existing people playing existing roles, existing values and attitudes – keeps many people in line. Many love it. To come up with new solutions means to overcome such social facts. Politics in the stage of maintenance takes on the face of power and conflict, hiding the cooperative efforts both of those attacking and of those defending social facts. Finally, political systems decay, and the defenders become more desperate while those insisting on new solutions go more and more on the attack. In the stage of decay, politics shows its face of violence and extends itself into revolution and war."
After digesting these perspectives, it became clear to me that virtually every interaction between and among human beings is political; from electoral politics to office politics; from friendships to courtships; from economics to science to art. Human primates are forever struggling to "resolve the tension between human needs and social facts".
Our three-decade recession focuses on the disconnect between GDP and GPI to illuminate what it calls a "33-year downturn in quality of life?".
Reading the preface of Politics for Human Beings, written circa 1980, accomplishes the same by means of comparison, then versus now:
"These are hard times for politics.
"Basic human needs go unsatisfied. We need jobs, homes, food, health, heat, and hope.
"What we get is unemployment, no mortgages, and high prices in the supermarket, in the hospital, and at the gas pump. The hopes of the late 1960s and early 1978s seem dead; hopes for living in comfort, for an end ot racism, for the opportunity to rise up the social and exonomic ladder; most of all, for a more humane politics satisfying human needs.
"And this is just at home.
"Abroad, nations and groups of nations struggle over scarce resources. Economic oil wars have begun. People still kill and are killed for land, for being right or righteous, for being in the way. During the middle fifties of this century, human beings have slaughtered a hundred million fellow human beings, and we seem determined to continue that record of achievement."
Sound familiar? The more things change, the more they essentially stay the same.
But this time around, we are facing natural limits to our economic, political and cultural mythology of infinite growth (social fact). We are navigating the far side of a long maintenance-peak phase devolving into decay.
The preface continues with an important observation (note the example of oil):
"What can an indivicual do?
"The purpose of this book os to put the individual back in the driver's seat of politics. Beginning with our own families, our needs for jobs and for a place to live, each one of us can still discover that circle of freedom within which we can act to satisfy our needs.
"The perimeter of that circle is made up of facts that appear beyond our control. Facts like Mom and Pop, who pay the bills and regulate our lives. Facts like a big employer moving out of town. Facts like banks deciding our neighborhood is too risky for home mortage loans. Facts like the decline of available oil for home heating.
"But note that only one of these four facts is a natural fact, the shrinking of oil reserves. The other three are social facts. Sical facts are arrangements between human beings to satisfy their needs. As such they may get in the way of satisfying our needs. But the most important truth about social facts is that they are of human origin. This means people like ourselves can unmake them."
While it is no doubt possible for us to unmake, rethink, rearrange and remake our present social facts into new social acts which could better suit our needs in line with more sustainable and equitable planetary living in the face of limits to growth, it remains to be seen if we're up to these enormous, daunting and multifaceted tasks.
Will we find such art in this phase of decay?
Or will we cling, stubborn and unrelenting, to our tragic, business-as-usual values?■
Limits To Foresight
David Suzuki, emeritus professor at the Sustainable Development Research Institute, has recently wondered "why can't we change direction" in the face of the numerous warning signs which point to serious future problems with our "life support system" (e.g. air, water, food, soil, energy, biodiversity, etcetera). He thinks the problem is that "humans have lost the vital skill of foresight":
"The human brain endowed us
with a massive memory, insatiable
curiosity, inventiveness, and an ability to think in abstracts. These
qualities more than compensated for our lack of physical and sensory
abilities. That brain created a notion of a future, even though the
only reality is the present and our memories of the past. And because
that brain invented a future, we recognised that we could affect that
future by what we do in the present. If we look ahead, we can see where
opportunities and dangers lie, and by following a deliberate path we
can avoid the hazards, while exploiting the opportunities. Foresight, I
believe, was one of the most important abilities that enabled us to
survive and flourish, and continues to underlie our explosive success
as a species."
[...]
"The need to look ahead and manoeuvre to exploit opportunities and
avoid threats continues to be just as critical in modern society. The
challenge is to find why we are rejecting foresight, why we can't see
what the real threats are that confront us."
There are many reasons why and I think they are already fairly well known.
Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, addressed this issue in his July 2, 2006 article, If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming:
"The brain is a beautifully
engineered get-out-of-the-way
machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose
way it should right now get. That's what brains did for several hundred
million years — and then, just a few million years ago, the
mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location
of dangers before they actually happened.
"Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain's
most stunning innovations, and we wouldn't have dental floss or 401(k)
plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of
development. The application that allows us to respond to visible
baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows
us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta
testing.
"We haven't quite gotten the knack of treating the future like the
present it will soon become because we've only been practicing for a
few million years. If global warming took out an eye every now and
then, OSHA would regulate it into nonexistence."
Gilbert also explored three other reasons why future threats to our life support system don't "trip the brain's alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed".
1) Human primates are obsessed with humanity. "We are social mammals whose brains are highly specialized for thinking about others." For this reason, we are more impressed and motivated by "intentional action" (directed by humans) than "natural accident" (caused by nature). "Global warming isn't trying to kill us, and that's a shame. If climate change had been visited on us by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation's top priority."
2) Seemingly abstract and natural threats to our life support system don't generally offend our sense of morality. "The fact is that if climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets."1
3) Like the parable of the boiling frog, the rate of change involving threats to our life support system is too slow to affect appropriate changes in our behavior. "Because we barely notice changes that happen gradually, we accept gradual changes that we would reject if they happened abruptly."
Hugh Wilson has described another set of important variables which fall under the rubric of Green Fatigue:
"Environmental campaigners worry that individuals see their actions as largely irrelevant when set against the enormity of global climate change. While famine appeals parade a simple, striking message – send a tenner, save a child – no such easy cause and effect exists for global warming. By contrast, the solutions to climate change seem hugely complex and controversial.
" 'The problems we face are of a magnitude no one has seen in at least two generations,' says Alex Steffen, the executive editor of WorldChanging, a website and book that promote innovative solutions for sustainable living. 'The scale of the actions people are being told to take by green consumerism groups and businesses, on the other hand, are so small as to seem meaningless. I think that more and more people see this widening gulf and lose hope.'
"And if we're not all losing hope just yet, many of us are becoming increasingly cynical. To campaigners, that's not surprising. As Steffen suggests, businesses have turned environmentalism into a marketing strategy. A new term, 'green-washing', describes companies that paint a superficial green gloss on conventional business practices. When firms such as BP and Wal-Mart parade their environmentally friendly credentials, scepticism is not only inevitable, says Steffen, it's 'a necessary antidote'.
"At least the green lobby can count on celebrities to spread the message. Unfortunately, the message too often seems to be, 'do as I say, not as I do'. Celebrity is an intrinsically unsustainable condition. The reaction to the Live Earth concerts – which prompted as much debate on the carbon footprint of the A-listers who'd been chauffeured in for the occasion as the campaign they were there to endorse – showed the insidious spread of green fatigue."
Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society and editor of Skeptic magazine, has indirectly outlined another aspect of the limits to foresight in Why Smart People Believe Weird Things:
"[M]]ost of us most of the time come to our beliefs for a variety of reasons having little to do with empirical evidence and logical reasoning (that, presumably, smart people are better at employing). Rather, such variables as genetic predispositions, parental predilections, sibling influences, peer pressures, educational experiences, and life impressions all shape the personality preferences and emotional inclinations that, in conjunction with numerous social and cultural influences, lead us to make certain belief choices. Rarely do any of us sit down before a table of facts, weigh them pro and con, and choose the most logical and rational belief, regardless of what we previously believed. Instead, the facts of the world come to us through the colored filters of the theories, hypotheses, hunches, biases, and prejudices we have accumulated through our lifetime. We then sort through the body of data and select those most confirming what we already believe, and ignore or rationalize away those that are disconfirming."
Which naturally leads to my additions to this list; a) our depressing preoccupation with more-is-better happiness; b) our myth of infinite growth; and c) our belief that modern civilization is linear.
In America we are obsessed with happiness to the point of absurdity. It has been a dominant theme from "Accentuate The Positive" to "Don't Worry Be Happy". This preoccupation — I would go so far as to call it an addiction — informs and defines our notions of standards-of-living. We tend to believe that higher rates of consumption, which supposedly produce higher levels of happiness, produce higher standards of living. But higher rates of consumption are not strictly married to higher standards of living. In fact, the Happy Planet Index demonstrates that well-being does not have to be linked with high levels of consumption. But a culture steeped in the more-is-better brand of happiness will find it difficult to impossible to voluntarily live with less even though more is detrimental, unnecessary and counterproductive.
The idea that there are no real limits to growth is so pervasive that it is essentially taboo to suggest otherwise. The opening paragraph of a recent article highlights this stricture:
"Let us venture into a political no-go zone and say that, at some point in the not too distant future, there is a bitter pill that we will need to swallow — and we are getting just a foretaste with the current energy crisis. In a nutshell, our global growth-based economic model is fundamentally unsustainable."
We have an unwavering and unquestioning religious belief in the holy trinity of science, technology and markets. We believe this triumvirate will transcend the Earth's finite supply of natural resources and reverse, or at least effectively ameliorate, the unintended consequences and collateral damage borne of modern insatiable civilization.
This belief goes hand in hand with the science fiction premise that modern civilization continually progresses in linear fashion from a "primitive" stage of tribal hunter-gatherers, to an advanced and enlightened period of space colonizing transhumans, to other kinds of "maturity" beyond.
I do not think we are going to voluntarily abandon our faith in the aforementioned almighty trio, or the idea that we are destined for transmogrified star treks. These beliefs permeate the foresight we are able to muster and sustain, making it hard for us to think outside their overly optimistic boxes.
It would appear, contrary to Suzuki's suggestion that we have "lost the vital skill of foresight", that modern human foresight has profound limitations influenced by nature and nurture.
In addition to other evolutionary biases and constraints, the human primate isn't adept at recognizing and utilizing the kind of foresight necessary to change in accordance with potential future dangers to our life support system because the evolutionary adaptation is, relatively speaking, too new, only a few million years old.
And, regardless of our existing capacity for foresight, our socio-cultural, -psychological and -political environments teach us that we can and should carry on business as usual with no substantive, voluntary behavioral sea-change. As a result we tend to ignore the danger signs, if and when we perceive them. Not to mention the sheer immensity of the task at hand which overwhelms us to the point of apathy, denial and inaction.
In light of all of this, I think the not-too-distant future is going to be a difficult adapt-as-we-go process. A shocking, revolutionary era of disorderly and painful change which will not require foresight as much as tolerance, flexibility, patience, humility, community and compassion.■
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1) It should be noted that even when the morality of such issues does affect us we often cope using denial. George Marshall has described this dynamic on his excellent blog, ClimateDenial.org:
"The large majority of people, whilst noting that climate change is a serious issue, will admit to never talking about it in their daily life. They are managing the problem by actively excluding it from what sociologists call their ‘norms of attention’. Ironically this strategy mimics a common social response to human rights abuses: when asked, people admit that they heard the screams in the night or they noticed that people had disappeared, but, through a socially negotiated compact, they never discussed what they know to be happening with each other."
Which reminds me of Derrick Jensen:
"We don't think about them [problems like anthropogenic threats to our life support system], because they are too horrific to comprehend. They are too foreboding and ominous to stomach. They are, in effect, unspeakable."
And:
"In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves."
Life In The Rubber Room
In its radio version, This American Life, in collaboration with Radio Diaries, recently featured a segment titled Rubber Room (from the Human Resources episode broadcast the week of February 29, 2008 through March 2, 2008).
The Rubber Room explores experiences shared by teachers who have been put on probation by the New York City Board of Education and banished to "reassignment centers" – so-called "Rubber Rooms" – as a form of punishment for various infractions of school policy.
The segment focuses on the stories of several teachers but I was particularly impressed by the perceptive eloquence of a woman named Grace:
"When I did go to the so
called 'reassignment center', you
walk into a typical city office, almost like a welfare office,
food stamp office, people walking around, trying to look busy, not
making
eye contact. And you start thinking, 'where are you?' "
[...]
"...[Y]ou had the black corner. You had the Hispanic corner.
You had the few white people that were scared to death. And so you have
to
make a quick decision, 'cause everybody else is sort of looking [at]
you, sizing you up. 'Oh, where do I go?' "
[...]
"You have people that are in denial. You have people that are
angry. You have people that have shut down. You have people that
have introverted into not even speaking, they just come in and exist."
[...]
"You don't want to make eye contact. There have been a lot of
fights. The dumbest stuff. Someone went into the refrigerator and stole
someone's butter. There have been arguments over paper. Over someone
stealing someone's pen."
[...]
"It's a prison type of culture. If you go out of your comfort
zone then people will mess with you. Let's say if I were to go to the
white area and decide, 'I want their chair and stuff.' The people there
are going to look out for their chairs. And so there will be a
confrontation. You want to be very careful not to step on anybody's
space. Because space seems to be the last control. That's the last
thing that they have control over."
Other teachers talked about the humiliation and powerlessness of their situation; they were at the mercy of a set of external variables over which they had no control and no one was going to help them.
I couldn't help thinking that the Rubber Room might be a micro-sign of macro-things to come.
In the not-so-United States we-the-people are increasingly atomized and steeped in denial. We are desperately grasping at delusional straws believing our current way of life can continue forever. And we are working overtime to convince ourselves that race, gender and class don't matter.
But the only constant in life is change and our rapacious, unsustainable way of life will not, by definition, continue forever. And, as a result, I have to wonder if our future may be influenced more by our differences than our similarities. I think it's quite plausible that as limits to growth become more pronounced we will discover increasingly uncomfortable truths about our nature.
That's not to paint a monolithic face on such events and consequences. The Rubber Rooms do inspire, for example, some positive manifestations of self-organization under trying circumstances. Some teachers would organize classes amongst themselves to study subjects of interest and to learn new things. Clearly progress can be made and we can get along and come together to work toward common goals.
But, ultimately, we are primates. High-order primates to be sure but primates nonetheless. And in spite of our wishful thinking to the contrary, human nature is not politically correct.
I want to believe we will evolve to a point where hierarchies of race, gender and class don't shape our culture and define our lives but I think such times lie far in the future, if they ever arrive at all.
As we navigate the Rubber Rooms of overpopulation and limits to growth, and as we realize there are no quick fixes or silver bullets, I tend to believe we will see our reflection in the words of Richard Duncan:
"There's no absolute reason why we couldn't live in material sufficiency on this planet for millions of years. But prudence isn't our forte. 'Even our success becomes failure.' And, in a way, it's not our fault. Long ago Natural Selection dealt us a bad hand—we're sexually prolific, tribal, short-term and self-centered. And after thousands of years of trying, Culture hasn't changed that. And there is no sign that She will."■
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The Rubber Room segment of This American Life was inspired by the work-in-progress documentary film, The Rubber Room.
I highly recommend watching the trailer and supporting the film.
Both documentaries – This American Life's Rubber Room and the Rubber Room film – are revealing, fascinating and thought provoking.
