TPOI and Postmodernism Filler 02
This continues where the previous long-ass post leaves off. Again, composting, needs critique, shop, pixels, etc.
15. High morality depends on accurate prophecy. You cannot judge the morality of an action unless you have some idea of what the consequences of the action will be. According to this point of view, an action cannot be good if it has evil results, and everyone has a moral obligation to try to foresee, as well as possible, what the results of various decisions will be.
Part of the reason that assaults on teaching science in school are so disturbing is that the anti-science advocates want to replace a thought-system that boasts a spectacular record of accurate prophecy with a thought-system whose record for accurate prophecy is absolutely wretched. The tension between religion and secularism has always been high in America, but that point in particular is one that science wins without exception. Religious practices may teach much morality, but it is undermined somewhat since the tools of religion, themselves, cannot usefully predict the future. Religion’s explanation of the world may be compelling and exciting narrative, but when it predicts the end of the world at a specific date and bases morality on apocalyptic assumptions, its explanations are all undermined. One of the severe problems that this guideline illustrates, then is the trouble with literally-interpreted mythic stories translated into modern minds: it can lead to completely irrational actions. If we continue to allow people to direct our future who believe that there is a point where the future ends and where everyone who doesn’t agree with them goes to eternal suffering, we will suffer long before the end of the future because these people’s moral judgment is stunted.
The first step in correcting this is to enforce more strictly the separation of religion and government. Governments must have accurate predictions to govern well, and religion cannot give the predictions that a government needs. A moral compass, a set of symbols, and a shared culture - it can give these things but it cannot give testable certainty, and that is what a government needs.
16. If you can't make people self-sufficient, your aid does more harm than good. This usually comes up in discussing problems of poverty or hunger, where temporary relief often postpones the disaster at the cost of making it much worse when it comes. It is not really an argument against helping, but an argument against half-way measures. Ghandi said the same thing in a more positive way: "If you give me a fish, I eat for a day; if you teach me to fish, I eat for a lifetime."
In 2003, Marc Reisner's A Dangerous Place was posthumously published. Its nonfiction half deals extensively with the Sacramento River delta and California's water supply. California's rainfall is weighted heavily towards the northern half of the state. California's agriculture, on the other hand, skews southwards (towards the Mediterranean clime). As a result, Southern California imports a lot of water. In the past, a lot of its water has come from the Colorado River. However, as development in Southern California and Arizona has increased, the Colorado (which defines the border between them) has had larger and larger demands placed upon it. The Colorado formerly ran down the California-Arizona border, through Mexico, and into the Gulf of California. The water drawn out of it has so severely depleted the Colorado that it no longer consistently reaches the Gulf. This means that Southern California's water demands have had to be satisfied from elsewhere.
The Los Angeles River is, in short, gone. So water comes from the next-nearest major source, the Sacramento and its watershed in the moist north of the state. This is a long way to push water, but it's cheaper than the massive desalinization that Southern California might otherwise be forced to. However, using the Sacramento for this purpose depends on the levees holding the Sacramento Delta together. The Sacramento Delta used to be extraordinarily rich agricultural land. During the Gold Rush, entrepreneurs drained land on the Delta and grew crops in it to sell to Bay Area miners. This required, though, the construction of levees to keep the river from soaking the land again. As the dried-out land was developed, topsoil loss occurred and it became necessary to build more and more levees to keep the land viable. In the end, the Sacramento River became a concrete-sheathed river flowing above the "normal" level of the landscape, the levees keeping megagallons flowing towards LA and off of the now-developed Delta land. California, just in case you'd forgotten, is Earthquake Country. Levees do not react any better to major earthquakes than they do to Category Five hurricanes. California is now in a state where, in the event of a major earthquake, it is overwhelmingly likely that the south of the state would revert to desertlike water availability almost instantly. California is overdue for a major earthquake. California’s levee system is a good example of a partial fixes that focuses on just one part of the system. It’s likely to, especially in the event of stress, throw the system out of balance, forcing it to adjust elsewhere to compensate - an adjustment that will, in this case, instantly render LA a terminally thirsty city.
Los Angeles is an example of a city built on false premises. It is not self-sufficient, and it is extremely vulnerable to disasters not just in its vicinity, but elsewhere. Constructing the infrastructure to make LA a viable city has been a long-term negative, and LA must be self-sufficient if it is to properly survive into the future. There are many such cities: LA is likely to persist because it’s one of the biggest next to Las Vegas. The first step in correcting this is to build communities with careful thought to local resources. There must be something compelling in the area in order to justify building a community where everything has to be imported. Designing communities with robust supply networks is essential, especially in light of the increased likelihood of global population relocation, scarcity of resources - especially transportation-essential ones - and rising energy prices.
17. There are no final answers. As Ken Boulding put it, "If all environments were stable, the well-adapted would simply take over the earth and the evolutionary process would stop. In a period of environmental change, however, it is the adaptable, not the well-adapted who survive." This applies to social systems as well as natural ones. In a time of rapid change, like the present, the best "solution" to a problem is often one that just keeps the problem under control while keeping as many options for the future as possible.
Turning to Jared Diamond’s Collapse again, one of the major factors in the collapse of societies is whether or not they are willing to relinquish values and practices that are harming their ability to survive. Many of the factors we’re discussing here rely on Americans doing just that: critically examining habits such as plastic overuse, oil dependency, and allowing themselves to be sedated by a fact-free media and discard those habits. One wishes one could assume that it will just happen - but it’s not easy for that to happen. People don’t like to upset comfortable habits that seem to be working out well. This is one of the preconditions for meaningful change, though - people must recognize that change is necessary. If this does not happen, complacency and a postmodern haze created by the forces distorting the free market, forces that also distort the “market” for information, will ensure that some token gestures are made and that indignation flares - and then everyone will take a nap and things will not actually be any better. It must be demonstrated to people, over and over, their personal stake in societal problems that may not be immediately visible.
The first step in correcting this, of course, is education. This is another problem with a relatively easy solution: sometimes all you have to do is tell people. Most of the time, though, you have to teach people, which is time-consuming and difficult and often futile when you attempt to teach people who have a vested interest in remaining blind to what you are attempting to teach. Still, the attempt must be made - and successes will accelerate success as people teach one another. Change is the only constant, and change is going to keep on accelerating. Hopefully we can prepare people for a bit of a shock.
18. Every solution creates new problems. The auto solved the horse-manure pollution problem and created an air pollution problem. Modern medicine brought us longer, healthier lives--and a population explosion that threatens to produce a global famine. Television brings us instant access to vital information and world events--and a mind-numbing barrage of banality and violence. And so on. The important thing is to try to anticipate the new problems and decide whether we prefer them to the problem we are currently trying to solve. Sometimes the "best" solution to one problem just creates a worse problem. There may even be no solution to the new problem. On the other hand, an apparently "inferior" solution to the original problem may be much better for the whole system in the long run.
The United States has a long history with this factor, from automobiles to pest poisons to medicines. We hang on doggedly to the illusion that we can innovate our way out of anything. We can - but we will, inevitably, innovate our way into something else. Thalidomide, DDT, and the automobile are all examples of this. This is a logical consequence of technological advances: by definition, when we experiment with new technologies, we’re guessing, we’re doing something we’ve never done before, and so we are taking risks. We can prepare ourselves, and we should, but overall, we invite unanticipated consequences with every technological innovation. That’s fine as long as we can, as Diamond advises, soberly self-analyze and discover when our solutions become more troublesome than the problems they’re supposed to solve. If we don’t get a handle on this, we will continue both to innovate without precautions and to use technologies and practices that cause more trouble than they’re worth. This brings us around to population and global warming again: breeding madly was a great solution to the problem of high mortality, but in a time of low mortality, it leads to overpopulation and the attendant pressures.
The first step in correcting this is to examine as we innovate: our inventions’ consequences must be discovered and known, so that we can use them responsibly. We will continue to innovate: it’s what humans do, after all. However, we must engage with our responsibility to know what new problems we purchase with the solution to our old ones.
19. Sloppy systems are often better. Diverse, decentralized systems often seem disorganized and wasteful, but they are almost always more stable, flexible, and efficient than "neater" systems. In Boulding's terms (#17), highly adaptable systems look sloppy compared to systems that are well-adapted to a specific situation, but the sloppy-looking systems are the ones that will survive. In addition, systems which are loose enough to tolerate moderate fluctuations in things like population levels, food supply, or prices, are more efficient than systems which waste energy and resources on tighter controls.
Although military analogies are an obvious consideration here, any centralized or hierarchical system can suffer greatly when one of its critical points is disrupted. Robust systems tolerate failure of single points well and can continue to function in such situations. The example that comes to mind is the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of August 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. Due to the changes at the top of the FEMA hierarchy, FEMA responded with spectacular ineptness to the hurricane where a more robust system could have been useful even if the directors of FEMA were not. Disaster response of any kind is a good example of this principle: indeed, part of the robustness of the Internet is due to its design taking possible disaster into account.
California is currently overdue for a major earthquake. The first step in correcting the problem of hierarchy as it related to disasters might look like this: California’s director of emergency planning is currently attempting a scheme to distribute flashlights and whistles for disaster preparedness: these simple tools vastly increase the ability of ordinary people to be useful and safe in the event of a disaster, and depend on no hierarchy or central authority at all. Such measures are good examples of distributed systems that can adapt to major change well: if California were to experience a hurricane instead of an earthquake, flashlights and whistles would still be useful. Of course, it’s also possible that in the event of a major earthquake, a national government experiencing pressure from certain interests in the business community could demand that California lower its environmental and labor standards as a precondition of receiving federal disaster relief money.
20. Don't be fooled by system cycles. All negative feedback loops create oscillations--some large, some small. For some reason, many people are unable to deal with or believe in cyclical patterns, especially if the cycles are more than two or three years in length. If the economy has been growing steadily for the last four years, nearly everyone will be optimistic. They simply project their recent experience ahead into the future, forgetting that a recession becomes more likely the longer the boom continues. Similarly, everyone is gloomiest at the bottom of a recession, just when rapid growth is most likely.
In his movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore nicely deflates the idea that carbon dioxide levels are within normal cyclical levels by use of an enormous graph that he has to ascend onto an electric lift to illustrate properly. It’s a great use of images. On the other hand, coming around again to Jared Diamond, there are many examples of cultures who make assumptions based on seeing part of a cycle in the earth’s behavior and were devastated when the part of the cycle that they hadn’t planned for came about. Just as with the other guidelines that call on us to be aware of the systems that we are part of and manipulate, we must have a solid grasp of matters before we can hope to effectively change them - or even coexist with them. If we continue to misperceive cycles, we will continue to suffer the consequences of bad assumptions, especially in places like Los Angeles where most of the cycle is hostile.
The first step in correcting this, too, is education. The idea of carefully looking at cycles is familiar and easy to explain - it just has to be presented well. Gore’s presentation is very instructive, although he spends a fair amount of it demolishing the argument that what we’re seeing now is part of a normal cycle. With its careful dance among postmodern emotional appeals and modern evidence presentation, it presents a message that’s easy to digest and powerful once assimilated. Changing the way people think is very important to ensuring good futures: people must acquire good mental habits.
21. Remember the Golden Mean. When people face a serious problem, they tend to overvalue anything that helps solve it. They mobilize their energies and fight hard to solve the problem, and often keep right on going after the problem is solved and the solution is becoming a new problem. When most children died before their tenth birthdays, a high birth rate was essential for survival and societies developed powerful ways to encourage people to have large families. When the death rate is reduced, a high birth rate becomes a liability, but all those strong cultural forces keep right on encouraging large families, and it can take generations for people's attitudes to change.
Like the man who eats himself to death as an adult because he was always hungry as a child, people tend to forget that too much of something can be as bad as too little. They assume that if more of something is good a lot more must be better--but it often isn't. The trick is to recognize these situations and try to swing the pendulum back to the middle whenever it swings toward either extreme.
The Golden Mean issue also goes by the name “feedback delay.” In America, the feedback delay for issues that have to be addressed by government is about four years - the length of an electoral cycle. Systems sometimes fall apart if they don’t get feedback often enough or if they get it too often and are paralyzed by it. It can also happen when the system can’t act on the feedback it’s getting - when the feedback is delayed. Delaying or stopping feedback has a tendency to wreck previously functional systems. Although democracies are much more vital, this is one of the reasons that dictatorships and authoritarian governments are regarded as more “efficient:” they have a very short feedback delay because only the dictator or dictators need to be convinced that a problem exists and they will very shortly order action of some kind. Feedback delay is what frustrated the young Senator Gore, for instance, when he presented the evidence for global warming to his contemporaries: they were not yet responding to feedback that told them that the issue was important, and Gore’s voice alone was not enough to overcome the prevailing feedback message that nothing needed changing.
If we experience more problems with feedback delay and the Golden Mean problem, it will even further harm our ability to be participatory citizens of a democracy, an ability already greatly harmed by a news establishment that is more interested in advertisements and currying the favor of Washington elites than it is in news. The first step towards correcting this is to move towards vigorous public discourse again. This is part of why the world of web logs (“Blogistan,” as the political bloggers call it) is so encouraging: it has dramatically lowered the bar to entry for the public discourse, and more and more voices are entering the discussion. It has many flaws - but it’s a big step in the right direction, a world of political discussions where people are airing and debating their views with far fewer filters than doing so through newspapers or television.
22. Beware the empty compromise. There are also times when the middle ground is worse than either extreme. There's an old, old fable about an ass who starved to death halfway between two bales of hay because it couldn't make up its mind which one to eat first. Sometimes you just have to choose, because a compromise won't work. The only way to tell is to examine the entire system carefully and try to anticipate what the results of different decisions will be.
This is another overtly political item in our times: the crop of Democrats elected in 2006 is addicted to empty compromises and thus unable to implement effective changes. They believe themselves to be compromising when in fact they are capitulating. This is forming a disturbing pattern that inhibits the supposed opposition from implementing any change at all. Of course, they’re hardly alone in seeking compromises that are worse than either position - this, too, is related to whether or not to teach science in the schools. Creationists who insist that teachers must “teach the controversy” advocate a compromise that is in fact a victory for them. Similarly, the “compromises” made during the 2002-2003 run-up to the Iraq war were empty of compromise: they imposed no real delay on the plans of the authors of the war.
The first step in correcting this problem is to learn to recognize situations in which we are being asked to declare that 2+2 =5 is a wise and prudent compromise between 2+2=4 and 2+2=6, who are clearly both extremists. A good place to practice recognizing this fallacy is the mainstream media: CNN, Fox, and MSNBC are all frequent perpetrators. Just like Frank Luntz advises in The Persuaders, the voices on TV are selling a point of view. Luntz, in fact, is a master of the false compromise - another postmodern pitfall that can result from taking perceptions and images more seriously than the facts that underlie them.
23. Don't be a boiled frog. Some systems are designed so that they can react to any change that is larger than a certain amount, but they can't respond to changes that are below that threshold. For example, if a frog is put in a pan of hot water, he will jump right out. But if he is put in a pan, of cool water and the water is then gradually heated up, the frog will happily sit there and let itself be cooked. As long as the change is slow enough, it doesn't trigger a response. Sometimes a country can use this tactic to defeat an enemy in a patient series of small steps. Each step weakens the opponent a little bit, but is "not worth going to war over" until finally the victim is too weak to resist an attack. (These are sometimes called "salami-slicing tactics". "Divide and conquer" is another version of the same thing.) While a healthy system shouldn't overreact to small changes, it has to be able to identify and respond to a series of small changes that will bring disaster if allowed to continue.
24. Watch out for thresholds. Most systems change pretty gradually. But some systems are designed to switch abruptly from one kind of behavior to a completely different kind. Sometimes this is a defense against the "boiled frog" problem. ("He's meek as a lamb until you push him too far. Then you'd better watch out!") In other cases, it's a way of avoiding "empty compromises" (#22). But most often it's because the system, or a subsystem of it, has exhausted its reserves for coping with some pressure on it. This can be disastrous if you are relying on a system that has seemed able to absorb a lot of abuse and it suddenly collapses as a result of something apparently trivial. Democracies, market economies, and natural ecosystems are all prone to behave in this way. They seem so sturdy that we can kick them around, interfere with subsystem after subsystem, increase the load more and more, and they will always bounce back. But we can never be sure which straw is going to break the camel's back.
Two sides of the same coin, these cautions against allowing “creeping normalcy” and about being blind to catalytic thresholds are valuable advice to those seeking to implement change. Creeping normalcy keeps people from easily noticing things like the retreat of the glaciers shown in An Inconvenient Truth, or from noticing that inflation is outpacing wages. Having historical perspective - and avoiding the postmodern trap of toxic ahistoricity - is crucial to successful change. If we watch the systems around us carefully and correctly interpret feedback, it’s possible to get a very good idea of how close we are to a catalytic change. Some changes are not susceptible to this - the generational changes in the machinic phylum that Manuel de Landa describes in War In The Age Of Intelligent Machines, for example, but many trends close to us can be studied and analyzed: inflation, crime rates, and standard of living.
The first step in correcting this is to make sure that we are watching the right spots and we’re measuring changes well. Knowledge of statistics is good for this: graphs can be, sadly, easily used to deceive. Gore’s graphs in An Inconvenient Truth, for instance, have come under fire from statisticians. However, in a larger sense, it’s important to note that we can predict radical change to some extent - and harness it. This is another education issue: a higher standard of education is essential an informed citizenry and lowering the cost to citizens of that education will get it to more of us. We must be able to understand the evidence before us, especially with complex things like change thresholds.
25. Competition is often cooperation in disguise. A chess player may push himself to the limit in his desire to defeat his opponent, and yet be very upset if he finds out that his opponent deliberately let him win. What appears to be a fierce competition on one level is actually part of a larger system in which both players cooperate in a ritual that gives both of them pleasure. Not "doing your best" is a violation of that cooperative agreement. Similarly, the competitions between two lawyers in a courtroom is an essential part of a larger process in which lawyers, judge, and jury cooperate in a search for just answers. Businesses cooperate to keep the economy running efficiently by competing with each other in the marketplace. Political parties cooperate in running a democracy by competing with each other at the polls. And so on.
How do you tell cooperative competition from destructive competition? In cooperative competition, the opponents are willing to fight by the rules and accept the outcome of a fair contest, even if it goes against them. One reason extremist or totalitarian movements are dangerous in a democracy is that they turn politics into destructive competition.
In the years since the Nixon presidency, a toxic trend of eliminationism has crept into politics. Once essential, bi-partisanship was famously described by Grover Norquist as “just another name for date rape.” Cooperative competition between our political parties has given way to one party throwing itself fully into the mode of destructive competition. The Democrats still frequently seem not to understand this - and neither do many in the media, who frequently give credence to outrageous statements made strictly for the purposes of destructive competition. This shift is part of why the 2000-present occupants of the White House have tended to sound more and more like Mafiosi, from Dick Cheney’s “Go fuck yourself” to Paul Wolfowitz’s snarling declaration that his political enemies would learn to fear him. This competitive attitude will, if unchecked, lead to the destruction of a political party that does not in some way stand against it.
The first step in correcting this is to notice that it is happening, then to fight for a return to cooperative competition, then to diversify the party system such that one party cannot so radically change the terms of discourse. The stratagem of destructive competition would not have worked nearly as well if the Republican Party were one party of nine, for instance. As well, this too illustrates the failure of the media to avoid the pitfalls of the postmodern world. Sy Hersh, one of the premier US investigative reporters, sighed in an interview “The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that’s the most glaring … what can be done to fix the situation? You’d have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives.” If we do not correct this, our ability to have a coherent national discourse on matters of import will continue to degrade.
26. Bad boundaries make bad governments. Unlike most cities, St. Louis is not part of a larger county. St. Louis County surrounds the city and keeps it from expanding its city limits. As a result, the communities in the county have become parasites on the city, using the city's commercial and cultural resources but contributing nothing toward the cost of maintaining them. As long as there is a boundary that splits the metropolitan area in half, and no government with authority over the whole area, the county will keep getting richer and the city will keep getting poorer until urban decay completely destroys it. Similar boundary problems afflict states, nations, ecosystems, and economic regions. As a general rule, the system with responsibility for a problem should include the entire problem area; authority must be congruent with responsibility, or the tragedy-of-the-commons problem (#27) results.
27. Beware the Tragedy of the Commons. A "commons" problem occurs when subsystems in a competitive relationship with each other are forced to act in ways that are destructive of the whole system. Usually, the source of the problem is the right of a subsystem to receive the whole benefit from using a resource while paying only a small part of the cost for it. The solution is either to divide the common resource up (not always possible) or limit access to it.
This issue is another major one, because it addresses a major power gradient in the world: corporations. Limited liability corporations are citizens of the United States and persons with 14th Amendment rights, according to our courts, but live longer than any citizen and cannot be effectively punished by the laws as they stand. They are richer than any human, behave without much regard for the law, and will outlive any vigilante who pursues them. This is a huge problem: because a corporation’s mission is to seek profit, it will do so without regard for other considerations in a manner we’d consider psychopathic in a human. Corporate personhood is an understatement: with equality under the law, a corporation is definitely more powerful than any human. Tied together with this is the increased ability of corporations to exploit any shared resource and inflict on us the tragedy of the commons.
The only real solution to a commons problem is to form a regulatory body, usually a government, to regulate use of the common resource. Much of the harm that the Republican Party has done to American politics and culture over the past three decades has resulted from the fact that the neoconservative and libertarian wing of the party firstly does not recognize the concept of the commons in any way, shape or form (that's what all their talk about privatization is about: eliminating any commons, anywhere); and secondly does not recognize the legitimate right of government to regulate the commons that do exist. These people want to privatize our air and water, and sell it back to us for a price. For them, the only valid function of government is to protect the property rights that allow them to own things, and charge for access to them.
Implicit in this analysis is the rule attributed to Kelvin: You can't control what you can't measure. That said, most people only value what they do measure. Corporations usually measure only profit, and work diligently to optimize it - indeed; they are criminally liable if they don’t. Most still don't measure (and don’t know how to measure) their environmental and social effects, so those factors get ignored in decision-making. Changing how the corporate system's metrics are reckoned is key to changing its entire structure. Of course, the Earth is reminding us that this is wrong-headed: nobody can possibly own the atmosphere and the oceans, unless we all do - and manage them accordingly. It's coming clear now that our very survival depends on creating institutions that are big enough and credible enough to handle this job.
Wherever you have some resource that's not regulated by markets or governments, people will always end up wandering into it and taking as much of it as they can carry away. Eventually, the use of the resource - a pasture, a forest, a watershed, could be anything - will be lost to everyone. The only solution to the tragedy of destroyed commons is to set up some kind of boundary around the resource that limits and allocates sharing, controls access, and manages it with an eye toward permanent sustainability. Most of us recognize that there needs to be some authority in charge -- one with a scale of influence large enough to fully control and sustain the common resource, and sufficient clout to enforce its will in the face of powerful people who may want to ignore the rules and take more than their fair share.
Over time, we've come to realize that oceans, arable land, aquifers and watersheds, and the entire atmosphere represent a global commons that every one of us depends on - as Jared Diamond puts it, the whole world is one polder behind a giant dyke, and no one can escape the consequences of the “dyke” breaking. At the same time, corporations roam the planet taking what they wants - just as they roamed America in the 20s - making unimaginable profits and creating irreversible damage (global warming, anyone?) because there's no one entity big and powerful enough to put a boundary around their activities and regulate their behavior. The Roaring 20s happened largely because the newly-emerging corporate order could profit handsomely by taking undue advantage of a virtually unregulated interstate commons. It had gotten to the point where the largest corporations, notoriously the railroads, were rich enough to bully state governments into giving them whatever they wanted, or threaten to go elsewhere -- a clear sign that business was now operating at a scale where state government wasn't big enough, strong enough, or organized to put a meaningful boundary around corporate behavior, necessitating a federal response. A federal response is no longer sufficient.
The first step in correcting this is to join forces with other governments to limit the power of corporations, strip corporations of personhood under the 14th Amendment, and create punishments that are meaningful when applied to corporations - a step beyond fines. Also, it would be very beneficial to return to the practice of granting only corporate charters that in some way served the public good, and not only charters that seek profit for stockholders: as we’ve noticed with other problems, those who already hold a wealth advantage can manipulate otherwise level playing fields, and corporations have historically been such an advantage-consolidating tool. Their influence must be muted and turned to productive ends.
28. Foresight always wins in the long run. Solutions to problems affecting complex systems usually take time. If we wait until the problem develops and then react to it, there may not be time for good solutions before a crisis point is reached. If we look ahead and anticipate a problem, however, we usually have more choices and a better chance of heading the problem off before it disrupts things. Waiting and reacting to problems means letting the system control us. Only by using foresight do we have a real chance to control the system; or: those who do not try to create the future they want must endure the future they get.
After examining this list of guidelines, at least two possible futures become clear. If we proceed with Business As Usual, we will almost certainly, like Rome, dominate briefly before crumbling. Our crumbling may be somewhat more dramatic than Rome’s - even if it doesn’t involve nuclear weapons, the collapse of America would result in a massive global disruption. America collapsing, in fact, isn’t even the worst-case scenario - it’s about halfway down the list. With more and more laws like the DMCA, the USA PATRIOT act, and the Military Commissions Act, the tattered remains of a republic cannot long persist without a sturdy thread to bind them together again. With increased militarism, increased dogmatism, and increased plutocracy, our economic vitality with wither and our culture will atrophy. Without changes - and even with some changes - America will, within my lifetime, become unrecognizable.
Of great hope, though, is America’s track record of innovation, creeping liberalism, and discipline in the face of popularly perceived crises. If we rework our economy for greater justice, trust our citizens with the freedom they deserve, and lead by example instead of by military force, we can once more become a nation that is great and not just powerful. The brightness in our future requires that we follow guidelines like Kauffman’s, be thoughtful citizens of a postmodern world, and not let ourselves fall into the pleasant traps that a postmodern nation can set for itself: all-consuming culture, valuing images over facts and senseless ahistoricity.
In the end, after examining these social problems and the way that our responses can create positive or negative futures, I want to emphasize, again, our agency and responsibility. On the macro level, when humans want something, they attain it - and pay the price of getting what they wanted, without regard to whether they knew the price when they set out to attain what they wanted. On the micro level, even if we residents of the postmodern world feel increasingly alienated from our institutions, the decisions we make matter. For all the flaws of postmodernism that Americans have embraced, there is also a great hope: everything can change. We can seize on the common threads that run through the problems facing us as a nation and as a world; our consumption’s impact on the world, the values we use to make decisions, and the tragedy of the commons, and react to them in a way that will minimize the chances of future disaster. This is a lesson that applies equally to me, my mother, and my grandmother: we all, like it or not, live in postmodern America.
Another part of why this is up is so that
spiceworms will tell me what happened to the fictional version of this he was working on, because I promised
circuit_four I'd show it, and in order that
kickachupacabra eviscerate it a little. Ooooh, ooh. Also I'm betting that
hemlock_martini wants to party with the phrase "machinic phylum."
I turned this in with a soundtrack, by the way - which took up a couple of pages of its own, explaining matters. I still need to find out if that went over well. I'm tempted to go through and add hyperlinks, but I cite my shit reasonably well and Google is just a right-click away on real browsers. One thing I didn't cite is that a big influence on this was seeing Sara Robinson do basically this essay but with different examples at Orcinus, a weblog that you ought to hie yerself towards frequently.
15. High morality depends on accurate prophecy. You cannot judge the morality of an action unless you have some idea of what the consequences of the action will be. According to this point of view, an action cannot be good if it has evil results, and everyone has a moral obligation to try to foresee, as well as possible, what the results of various decisions will be.
Part of the reason that assaults on teaching science in school are so disturbing is that the anti-science advocates want to replace a thought-system that boasts a spectacular record of accurate prophecy with a thought-system whose record for accurate prophecy is absolutely wretched. The tension between religion and secularism has always been high in America, but that point in particular is one that science wins without exception. Religious practices may teach much morality, but it is undermined somewhat since the tools of religion, themselves, cannot usefully predict the future. Religion’s explanation of the world may be compelling and exciting narrative, but when it predicts the end of the world at a specific date and bases morality on apocalyptic assumptions, its explanations are all undermined. One of the severe problems that this guideline illustrates, then is the trouble with literally-interpreted mythic stories translated into modern minds: it can lead to completely irrational actions. If we continue to allow people to direct our future who believe that there is a point where the future ends and where everyone who doesn’t agree with them goes to eternal suffering, we will suffer long before the end of the future because these people’s moral judgment is stunted.
The first step in correcting this is to enforce more strictly the separation of religion and government. Governments must have accurate predictions to govern well, and religion cannot give the predictions that a government needs. A moral compass, a set of symbols, and a shared culture - it can give these things but it cannot give testable certainty, and that is what a government needs.
16. If you can't make people self-sufficient, your aid does more harm than good. This usually comes up in discussing problems of poverty or hunger, where temporary relief often postpones the disaster at the cost of making it much worse when it comes. It is not really an argument against helping, but an argument against half-way measures. Ghandi said the same thing in a more positive way: "If you give me a fish, I eat for a day; if you teach me to fish, I eat for a lifetime."
In 2003, Marc Reisner's A Dangerous Place was posthumously published. Its nonfiction half deals extensively with the Sacramento River delta and California's water supply. California's rainfall is weighted heavily towards the northern half of the state. California's agriculture, on the other hand, skews southwards (towards the Mediterranean clime). As a result, Southern California imports a lot of water. In the past, a lot of its water has come from the Colorado River. However, as development in Southern California and Arizona has increased, the Colorado (which defines the border between them) has had larger and larger demands placed upon it. The Colorado formerly ran down the California-Arizona border, through Mexico, and into the Gulf of California. The water drawn out of it has so severely depleted the Colorado that it no longer consistently reaches the Gulf. This means that Southern California's water demands have had to be satisfied from elsewhere.
The Los Angeles River is, in short, gone. So water comes from the next-nearest major source, the Sacramento and its watershed in the moist north of the state. This is a long way to push water, but it's cheaper than the massive desalinization that Southern California might otherwise be forced to. However, using the Sacramento for this purpose depends on the levees holding the Sacramento Delta together. The Sacramento Delta used to be extraordinarily rich agricultural land. During the Gold Rush, entrepreneurs drained land on the Delta and grew crops in it to sell to Bay Area miners. This required, though, the construction of levees to keep the river from soaking the land again. As the dried-out land was developed, topsoil loss occurred and it became necessary to build more and more levees to keep the land viable. In the end, the Sacramento River became a concrete-sheathed river flowing above the "normal" level of the landscape, the levees keeping megagallons flowing towards LA and off of the now-developed Delta land. California, just in case you'd forgotten, is Earthquake Country. Levees do not react any better to major earthquakes than they do to Category Five hurricanes. California is now in a state where, in the event of a major earthquake, it is overwhelmingly likely that the south of the state would revert to desertlike water availability almost instantly. California is overdue for a major earthquake. California’s levee system is a good example of a partial fixes that focuses on just one part of the system. It’s likely to, especially in the event of stress, throw the system out of balance, forcing it to adjust elsewhere to compensate - an adjustment that will, in this case, instantly render LA a terminally thirsty city.
Los Angeles is an example of a city built on false premises. It is not self-sufficient, and it is extremely vulnerable to disasters not just in its vicinity, but elsewhere. Constructing the infrastructure to make LA a viable city has been a long-term negative, and LA must be self-sufficient if it is to properly survive into the future. There are many such cities: LA is likely to persist because it’s one of the biggest next to Las Vegas. The first step in correcting this is to build communities with careful thought to local resources. There must be something compelling in the area in order to justify building a community where everything has to be imported. Designing communities with robust supply networks is essential, especially in light of the increased likelihood of global population relocation, scarcity of resources - especially transportation-essential ones - and rising energy prices.
17. There are no final answers. As Ken Boulding put it, "If all environments were stable, the well-adapted would simply take over the earth and the evolutionary process would stop. In a period of environmental change, however, it is the adaptable, not the well-adapted who survive." This applies to social systems as well as natural ones. In a time of rapid change, like the present, the best "solution" to a problem is often one that just keeps the problem under control while keeping as many options for the future as possible.
Turning to Jared Diamond’s Collapse again, one of the major factors in the collapse of societies is whether or not they are willing to relinquish values and practices that are harming their ability to survive. Many of the factors we’re discussing here rely on Americans doing just that: critically examining habits such as plastic overuse, oil dependency, and allowing themselves to be sedated by a fact-free media and discard those habits. One wishes one could assume that it will just happen - but it’s not easy for that to happen. People don’t like to upset comfortable habits that seem to be working out well. This is one of the preconditions for meaningful change, though - people must recognize that change is necessary. If this does not happen, complacency and a postmodern haze created by the forces distorting the free market, forces that also distort the “market” for information, will ensure that some token gestures are made and that indignation flares - and then everyone will take a nap and things will not actually be any better. It must be demonstrated to people, over and over, their personal stake in societal problems that may not be immediately visible.
The first step in correcting this, of course, is education. This is another problem with a relatively easy solution: sometimes all you have to do is tell people. Most of the time, though, you have to teach people, which is time-consuming and difficult and often futile when you attempt to teach people who have a vested interest in remaining blind to what you are attempting to teach. Still, the attempt must be made - and successes will accelerate success as people teach one another. Change is the only constant, and change is going to keep on accelerating. Hopefully we can prepare people for a bit of a shock.
18. Every solution creates new problems. The auto solved the horse-manure pollution problem and created an air pollution problem. Modern medicine brought us longer, healthier lives--and a population explosion that threatens to produce a global famine. Television brings us instant access to vital information and world events--and a mind-numbing barrage of banality and violence. And so on. The important thing is to try to anticipate the new problems and decide whether we prefer them to the problem we are currently trying to solve. Sometimes the "best" solution to one problem just creates a worse problem. There may even be no solution to the new problem. On the other hand, an apparently "inferior" solution to the original problem may be much better for the whole system in the long run.
The United States has a long history with this factor, from automobiles to pest poisons to medicines. We hang on doggedly to the illusion that we can innovate our way out of anything. We can - but we will, inevitably, innovate our way into something else. Thalidomide, DDT, and the automobile are all examples of this. This is a logical consequence of technological advances: by definition, when we experiment with new technologies, we’re guessing, we’re doing something we’ve never done before, and so we are taking risks. We can prepare ourselves, and we should, but overall, we invite unanticipated consequences with every technological innovation. That’s fine as long as we can, as Diamond advises, soberly self-analyze and discover when our solutions become more troublesome than the problems they’re supposed to solve. If we don’t get a handle on this, we will continue both to innovate without precautions and to use technologies and practices that cause more trouble than they’re worth. This brings us around to population and global warming again: breeding madly was a great solution to the problem of high mortality, but in a time of low mortality, it leads to overpopulation and the attendant pressures.
The first step in correcting this is to examine as we innovate: our inventions’ consequences must be discovered and known, so that we can use them responsibly. We will continue to innovate: it’s what humans do, after all. However, we must engage with our responsibility to know what new problems we purchase with the solution to our old ones.
19. Sloppy systems are often better. Diverse, decentralized systems often seem disorganized and wasteful, but they are almost always more stable, flexible, and efficient than "neater" systems. In Boulding's terms (#17), highly adaptable systems look sloppy compared to systems that are well-adapted to a specific situation, but the sloppy-looking systems are the ones that will survive. In addition, systems which are loose enough to tolerate moderate fluctuations in things like population levels, food supply, or prices, are more efficient than systems which waste energy and resources on tighter controls.
Although military analogies are an obvious consideration here, any centralized or hierarchical system can suffer greatly when one of its critical points is disrupted. Robust systems tolerate failure of single points well and can continue to function in such situations. The example that comes to mind is the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of August 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. Due to the changes at the top of the FEMA hierarchy, FEMA responded with spectacular ineptness to the hurricane where a more robust system could have been useful even if the directors of FEMA were not. Disaster response of any kind is a good example of this principle: indeed, part of the robustness of the Internet is due to its design taking possible disaster into account.
California is currently overdue for a major earthquake. The first step in correcting the problem of hierarchy as it related to disasters might look like this: California’s director of emergency planning is currently attempting a scheme to distribute flashlights and whistles for disaster preparedness: these simple tools vastly increase the ability of ordinary people to be useful and safe in the event of a disaster, and depend on no hierarchy or central authority at all. Such measures are good examples of distributed systems that can adapt to major change well: if California were to experience a hurricane instead of an earthquake, flashlights and whistles would still be useful. Of course, it’s also possible that in the event of a major earthquake, a national government experiencing pressure from certain interests in the business community could demand that California lower its environmental and labor standards as a precondition of receiving federal disaster relief money.
20. Don't be fooled by system cycles. All negative feedback loops create oscillations--some large, some small. For some reason, many people are unable to deal with or believe in cyclical patterns, especially if the cycles are more than two or three years in length. If the economy has been growing steadily for the last four years, nearly everyone will be optimistic. They simply project their recent experience ahead into the future, forgetting that a recession becomes more likely the longer the boom continues. Similarly, everyone is gloomiest at the bottom of a recession, just when rapid growth is most likely.
In his movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore nicely deflates the idea that carbon dioxide levels are within normal cyclical levels by use of an enormous graph that he has to ascend onto an electric lift to illustrate properly. It’s a great use of images. On the other hand, coming around again to Jared Diamond, there are many examples of cultures who make assumptions based on seeing part of a cycle in the earth’s behavior and were devastated when the part of the cycle that they hadn’t planned for came about. Just as with the other guidelines that call on us to be aware of the systems that we are part of and manipulate, we must have a solid grasp of matters before we can hope to effectively change them - or even coexist with them. If we continue to misperceive cycles, we will continue to suffer the consequences of bad assumptions, especially in places like Los Angeles where most of the cycle is hostile.
The first step in correcting this, too, is education. The idea of carefully looking at cycles is familiar and easy to explain - it just has to be presented well. Gore’s presentation is very instructive, although he spends a fair amount of it demolishing the argument that what we’re seeing now is part of a normal cycle. With its careful dance among postmodern emotional appeals and modern evidence presentation, it presents a message that’s easy to digest and powerful once assimilated. Changing the way people think is very important to ensuring good futures: people must acquire good mental habits.
21. Remember the Golden Mean. When people face a serious problem, they tend to overvalue anything that helps solve it. They mobilize their energies and fight hard to solve the problem, and often keep right on going after the problem is solved and the solution is becoming a new problem. When most children died before their tenth birthdays, a high birth rate was essential for survival and societies developed powerful ways to encourage people to have large families. When the death rate is reduced, a high birth rate becomes a liability, but all those strong cultural forces keep right on encouraging large families, and it can take generations for people's attitudes to change.
Like the man who eats himself to death as an adult because he was always hungry as a child, people tend to forget that too much of something can be as bad as too little. They assume that if more of something is good a lot more must be better--but it often isn't. The trick is to recognize these situations and try to swing the pendulum back to the middle whenever it swings toward either extreme.
The Golden Mean issue also goes by the name “feedback delay.” In America, the feedback delay for issues that have to be addressed by government is about four years - the length of an electoral cycle. Systems sometimes fall apart if they don’t get feedback often enough or if they get it too often and are paralyzed by it. It can also happen when the system can’t act on the feedback it’s getting - when the feedback is delayed. Delaying or stopping feedback has a tendency to wreck previously functional systems. Although democracies are much more vital, this is one of the reasons that dictatorships and authoritarian governments are regarded as more “efficient:” they have a very short feedback delay because only the dictator or dictators need to be convinced that a problem exists and they will very shortly order action of some kind. Feedback delay is what frustrated the young Senator Gore, for instance, when he presented the evidence for global warming to his contemporaries: they were not yet responding to feedback that told them that the issue was important, and Gore’s voice alone was not enough to overcome the prevailing feedback message that nothing needed changing.
If we experience more problems with feedback delay and the Golden Mean problem, it will even further harm our ability to be participatory citizens of a democracy, an ability already greatly harmed by a news establishment that is more interested in advertisements and currying the favor of Washington elites than it is in news. The first step towards correcting this is to move towards vigorous public discourse again. This is part of why the world of web logs (“Blogistan,” as the political bloggers call it) is so encouraging: it has dramatically lowered the bar to entry for the public discourse, and more and more voices are entering the discussion. It has many flaws - but it’s a big step in the right direction, a world of political discussions where people are airing and debating their views with far fewer filters than doing so through newspapers or television.
22. Beware the empty compromise. There are also times when the middle ground is worse than either extreme. There's an old, old fable about an ass who starved to death halfway between two bales of hay because it couldn't make up its mind which one to eat first. Sometimes you just have to choose, because a compromise won't work. The only way to tell is to examine the entire system carefully and try to anticipate what the results of different decisions will be.
This is another overtly political item in our times: the crop of Democrats elected in 2006 is addicted to empty compromises and thus unable to implement effective changes. They believe themselves to be compromising when in fact they are capitulating. This is forming a disturbing pattern that inhibits the supposed opposition from implementing any change at all. Of course, they’re hardly alone in seeking compromises that are worse than either position - this, too, is related to whether or not to teach science in the schools. Creationists who insist that teachers must “teach the controversy” advocate a compromise that is in fact a victory for them. Similarly, the “compromises” made during the 2002-2003 run-up to the Iraq war were empty of compromise: they imposed no real delay on the plans of the authors of the war.
The first step in correcting this problem is to learn to recognize situations in which we are being asked to declare that 2+2 =5 is a wise and prudent compromise between 2+2=4 and 2+2=6, who are clearly both extremists. A good place to practice recognizing this fallacy is the mainstream media: CNN, Fox, and MSNBC are all frequent perpetrators. Just like Frank Luntz advises in The Persuaders, the voices on TV are selling a point of view. Luntz, in fact, is a master of the false compromise - another postmodern pitfall that can result from taking perceptions and images more seriously than the facts that underlie them.
23. Don't be a boiled frog. Some systems are designed so that they can react to any change that is larger than a certain amount, but they can't respond to changes that are below that threshold. For example, if a frog is put in a pan of hot water, he will jump right out. But if he is put in a pan, of cool water and the water is then gradually heated up, the frog will happily sit there and let itself be cooked. As long as the change is slow enough, it doesn't trigger a response. Sometimes a country can use this tactic to defeat an enemy in a patient series of small steps. Each step weakens the opponent a little bit, but is "not worth going to war over" until finally the victim is too weak to resist an attack. (These are sometimes called "salami-slicing tactics". "Divide and conquer" is another version of the same thing.) While a healthy system shouldn't overreact to small changes, it has to be able to identify and respond to a series of small changes that will bring disaster if allowed to continue.
24. Watch out for thresholds. Most systems change pretty gradually. But some systems are designed to switch abruptly from one kind of behavior to a completely different kind. Sometimes this is a defense against the "boiled frog" problem. ("He's meek as a lamb until you push him too far. Then you'd better watch out!") In other cases, it's a way of avoiding "empty compromises" (#22). But most often it's because the system, or a subsystem of it, has exhausted its reserves for coping with some pressure on it. This can be disastrous if you are relying on a system that has seemed able to absorb a lot of abuse and it suddenly collapses as a result of something apparently trivial. Democracies, market economies, and natural ecosystems are all prone to behave in this way. They seem so sturdy that we can kick them around, interfere with subsystem after subsystem, increase the load more and more, and they will always bounce back. But we can never be sure which straw is going to break the camel's back.
Two sides of the same coin, these cautions against allowing “creeping normalcy” and about being blind to catalytic thresholds are valuable advice to those seeking to implement change. Creeping normalcy keeps people from easily noticing things like the retreat of the glaciers shown in An Inconvenient Truth, or from noticing that inflation is outpacing wages. Having historical perspective - and avoiding the postmodern trap of toxic ahistoricity - is crucial to successful change. If we watch the systems around us carefully and correctly interpret feedback, it’s possible to get a very good idea of how close we are to a catalytic change. Some changes are not susceptible to this - the generational changes in the machinic phylum that Manuel de Landa describes in War In The Age Of Intelligent Machines, for example, but many trends close to us can be studied and analyzed: inflation, crime rates, and standard of living.
The first step in correcting this is to make sure that we are watching the right spots and we’re measuring changes well. Knowledge of statistics is good for this: graphs can be, sadly, easily used to deceive. Gore’s graphs in An Inconvenient Truth, for instance, have come under fire from statisticians. However, in a larger sense, it’s important to note that we can predict radical change to some extent - and harness it. This is another education issue: a higher standard of education is essential an informed citizenry and lowering the cost to citizens of that education will get it to more of us. We must be able to understand the evidence before us, especially with complex things like change thresholds.
25. Competition is often cooperation in disguise. A chess player may push himself to the limit in his desire to defeat his opponent, and yet be very upset if he finds out that his opponent deliberately let him win. What appears to be a fierce competition on one level is actually part of a larger system in which both players cooperate in a ritual that gives both of them pleasure. Not "doing your best" is a violation of that cooperative agreement. Similarly, the competitions between two lawyers in a courtroom is an essential part of a larger process in which lawyers, judge, and jury cooperate in a search for just answers. Businesses cooperate to keep the economy running efficiently by competing with each other in the marketplace. Political parties cooperate in running a democracy by competing with each other at the polls. And so on.
How do you tell cooperative competition from destructive competition? In cooperative competition, the opponents are willing to fight by the rules and accept the outcome of a fair contest, even if it goes against them. One reason extremist or totalitarian movements are dangerous in a democracy is that they turn politics into destructive competition.
In the years since the Nixon presidency, a toxic trend of eliminationism has crept into politics. Once essential, bi-partisanship was famously described by Grover Norquist as “just another name for date rape.” Cooperative competition between our political parties has given way to one party throwing itself fully into the mode of destructive competition. The Democrats still frequently seem not to understand this - and neither do many in the media, who frequently give credence to outrageous statements made strictly for the purposes of destructive competition. This shift is part of why the 2000-present occupants of the White House have tended to sound more and more like Mafiosi, from Dick Cheney’s “Go fuck yourself” to Paul Wolfowitz’s snarling declaration that his political enemies would learn to fear him. This competitive attitude will, if unchecked, lead to the destruction of a political party that does not in some way stand against it.
The first step in correcting this is to notice that it is happening, then to fight for a return to cooperative competition, then to diversify the party system such that one party cannot so radically change the terms of discourse. The stratagem of destructive competition would not have worked nearly as well if the Republican Party were one party of nine, for instance. As well, this too illustrates the failure of the media to avoid the pitfalls of the postmodern world. Sy Hersh, one of the premier US investigative reporters, sighed in an interview “The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that’s the most glaring … what can be done to fix the situation? You’d have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives.” If we do not correct this, our ability to have a coherent national discourse on matters of import will continue to degrade.
26. Bad boundaries make bad governments. Unlike most cities, St. Louis is not part of a larger county. St. Louis County surrounds the city and keeps it from expanding its city limits. As a result, the communities in the county have become parasites on the city, using the city's commercial and cultural resources but contributing nothing toward the cost of maintaining them. As long as there is a boundary that splits the metropolitan area in half, and no government with authority over the whole area, the county will keep getting richer and the city will keep getting poorer until urban decay completely destroys it. Similar boundary problems afflict states, nations, ecosystems, and economic regions. As a general rule, the system with responsibility for a problem should include the entire problem area; authority must be congruent with responsibility, or the tragedy-of-the-commons problem (#27) results.
27. Beware the Tragedy of the Commons. A "commons" problem occurs when subsystems in a competitive relationship with each other are forced to act in ways that are destructive of the whole system. Usually, the source of the problem is the right of a subsystem to receive the whole benefit from using a resource while paying only a small part of the cost for it. The solution is either to divide the common resource up (not always possible) or limit access to it.
This issue is another major one, because it addresses a major power gradient in the world: corporations. Limited liability corporations are citizens of the United States and persons with 14th Amendment rights, according to our courts, but live longer than any citizen and cannot be effectively punished by the laws as they stand. They are richer than any human, behave without much regard for the law, and will outlive any vigilante who pursues them. This is a huge problem: because a corporation’s mission is to seek profit, it will do so without regard for other considerations in a manner we’d consider psychopathic in a human. Corporate personhood is an understatement: with equality under the law, a corporation is definitely more powerful than any human. Tied together with this is the increased ability of corporations to exploit any shared resource and inflict on us the tragedy of the commons.
The only real solution to a commons problem is to form a regulatory body, usually a government, to regulate use of the common resource. Much of the harm that the Republican Party has done to American politics and culture over the past three decades has resulted from the fact that the neoconservative and libertarian wing of the party firstly does not recognize the concept of the commons in any way, shape or form (that's what all their talk about privatization is about: eliminating any commons, anywhere); and secondly does not recognize the legitimate right of government to regulate the commons that do exist. These people want to privatize our air and water, and sell it back to us for a price. For them, the only valid function of government is to protect the property rights that allow them to own things, and charge for access to them.
Implicit in this analysis is the rule attributed to Kelvin: You can't control what you can't measure. That said, most people only value what they do measure. Corporations usually measure only profit, and work diligently to optimize it - indeed; they are criminally liable if they don’t. Most still don't measure (and don’t know how to measure) their environmental and social effects, so those factors get ignored in decision-making. Changing how the corporate system's metrics are reckoned is key to changing its entire structure. Of course, the Earth is reminding us that this is wrong-headed: nobody can possibly own the atmosphere and the oceans, unless we all do - and manage them accordingly. It's coming clear now that our very survival depends on creating institutions that are big enough and credible enough to handle this job.
Wherever you have some resource that's not regulated by markets or governments, people will always end up wandering into it and taking as much of it as they can carry away. Eventually, the use of the resource - a pasture, a forest, a watershed, could be anything - will be lost to everyone. The only solution to the tragedy of destroyed commons is to set up some kind of boundary around the resource that limits and allocates sharing, controls access, and manages it with an eye toward permanent sustainability. Most of us recognize that there needs to be some authority in charge -- one with a scale of influence large enough to fully control and sustain the common resource, and sufficient clout to enforce its will in the face of powerful people who may want to ignore the rules and take more than their fair share.
Over time, we've come to realize that oceans, arable land, aquifers and watersheds, and the entire atmosphere represent a global commons that every one of us depends on - as Jared Diamond puts it, the whole world is one polder behind a giant dyke, and no one can escape the consequences of the “dyke” breaking. At the same time, corporations roam the planet taking what they wants - just as they roamed America in the 20s - making unimaginable profits and creating irreversible damage (global warming, anyone?) because there's no one entity big and powerful enough to put a boundary around their activities and regulate their behavior. The Roaring 20s happened largely because the newly-emerging corporate order could profit handsomely by taking undue advantage of a virtually unregulated interstate commons. It had gotten to the point where the largest corporations, notoriously the railroads, were rich enough to bully state governments into giving them whatever they wanted, or threaten to go elsewhere -- a clear sign that business was now operating at a scale where state government wasn't big enough, strong enough, or organized to put a meaningful boundary around corporate behavior, necessitating a federal response. A federal response is no longer sufficient.
The first step in correcting this is to join forces with other governments to limit the power of corporations, strip corporations of personhood under the 14th Amendment, and create punishments that are meaningful when applied to corporations - a step beyond fines. Also, it would be very beneficial to return to the practice of granting only corporate charters that in some way served the public good, and not only charters that seek profit for stockholders: as we’ve noticed with other problems, those who already hold a wealth advantage can manipulate otherwise level playing fields, and corporations have historically been such an advantage-consolidating tool. Their influence must be muted and turned to productive ends.
28. Foresight always wins in the long run. Solutions to problems affecting complex systems usually take time. If we wait until the problem develops and then react to it, there may not be time for good solutions before a crisis point is reached. If we look ahead and anticipate a problem, however, we usually have more choices and a better chance of heading the problem off before it disrupts things. Waiting and reacting to problems means letting the system control us. Only by using foresight do we have a real chance to control the system; or: those who do not try to create the future they want must endure the future they get.
After examining this list of guidelines, at least two possible futures become clear. If we proceed with Business As Usual, we will almost certainly, like Rome, dominate briefly before crumbling. Our crumbling may be somewhat more dramatic than Rome’s - even if it doesn’t involve nuclear weapons, the collapse of America would result in a massive global disruption. America collapsing, in fact, isn’t even the worst-case scenario - it’s about halfway down the list. With more and more laws like the DMCA, the USA PATRIOT act, and the Military Commissions Act, the tattered remains of a republic cannot long persist without a sturdy thread to bind them together again. With increased militarism, increased dogmatism, and increased plutocracy, our economic vitality with wither and our culture will atrophy. Without changes - and even with some changes - America will, within my lifetime, become unrecognizable.
Of great hope, though, is America’s track record of innovation, creeping liberalism, and discipline in the face of popularly perceived crises. If we rework our economy for greater justice, trust our citizens with the freedom they deserve, and lead by example instead of by military force, we can once more become a nation that is great and not just powerful. The brightness in our future requires that we follow guidelines like Kauffman’s, be thoughtful citizens of a postmodern world, and not let ourselves fall into the pleasant traps that a postmodern nation can set for itself: all-consuming culture, valuing images over facts and senseless ahistoricity.
In the end, after examining these social problems and the way that our responses can create positive or negative futures, I want to emphasize, again, our agency and responsibility. On the macro level, when humans want something, they attain it - and pay the price of getting what they wanted, without regard to whether they knew the price when they set out to attain what they wanted. On the micro level, even if we residents of the postmodern world feel increasingly alienated from our institutions, the decisions we make matter. For all the flaws of postmodernism that Americans have embraced, there is also a great hope: everything can change. We can seize on the common threads that run through the problems facing us as a nation and as a world; our consumption’s impact on the world, the values we use to make decisions, and the tragedy of the commons, and react to them in a way that will minimize the chances of future disaster. This is a lesson that applies equally to me, my mother, and my grandmother: we all, like it or not, live in postmodern America.
Another part of why this is up is so that
spiceworms will tell me what happened to the fictional version of this he was working on, because I promised
circuit_four I'd show it, and in order that
kickachupacabra eviscerate it a little. Ooooh, ooh. Also I'm betting that
hemlock_martini wants to party with the phrase "machinic phylum."
I turned this in with a soundtrack, by the way - which took up a couple of pages of its own, explaining matters. I still need to find out if that went over well. I'm tempted to go through and add hyperlinks, but I cite my shit reasonably well and Google is just a right-click away on real browsers. One thing I didn't cite is that a big influence on this was seeing Sara Robinson do basically this essay but with different examples at Orcinus, a weblog that you ought to hie yerself towards frequently.