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Earth, Climate, Dreams: Dialogues with Depth Psychologists in the Age of the Anthropocene

October 28, 2019

Earth, Climate, Dreams is a new book being launched at Gleebooks in Sydney, by Analyst and author Judith Pickering on the 16th November 2019.

See http://www.gleebooks.com.au/BookingRetrieve.aspx?ID=318994

The book is a series of interviews with a range of experienced Depth Psychologists (primarily of Jungian heritage) and discusses psycho-symbolic and social responses to the Anthropocene.

Apart from the obvious topics of climate change and ecological destruction, subjects discussed range from discussions of Pilgrimage, to the aspirations of Dr. Frankenstein, to the collapse of Mayan civilisation, to colony collapse disorder in bees, to the cultural complexes of capitalism, to systems theory, unconscious forces, communication with the world, and the uses of dreams to gain insight into the world.

The book argues strongly that we need to engage with our psychological processes to deal constructively with the changes we are facing – otherwise psychological inertia, denial or other processes of repression and hostility are likely to win out. We are facing an existential crisis, with grave psychological consequences. This book explores possible ways to move beyond these psychological limitations and barriers.

Depth psychology proves useful in this quest, because it tends to focus on neglected aspects of life and assumes that individual psychology is at least partly collective, and works through creativity, imagination and symbol production. Our psyches are already alive and part of nature.

Depth psychology continually deals with problems that the conscious ego cannot understand, so this is especially useful for facing the paradoxes, complexities and dilemmas of the Anthropocene.

Readers who are already familiar with those being interviewed, will realise that this is quite a formidable and well published group of people. There is a lot of valuable experience here, made available in an approachable format. The main interviewer, Bonnie Bright, is a deep listener and contributor to comprehensibility of the conversations.

I’m only going to give very brief tastings of the interviews to give a feel of what people talk about, because you really need to read the book to get the full depth of thought here.

The book starts with a short introduction, trying to explain the basic terms and their dynamics: myth, consciousness, unconscious processes, image, symbol, dreams, the Self, complexes, separation and so on. It also suggests that the ways these forms are presented in our lives are conditioned by, and respond to, capitalism and developmentalism, but can lead to creative political, or other action.

The first interview is with Jeffrey Kiehl, a climate scientist who took up analytic training in response to the problems of communicating climate science. He argues against one-sided approaches to climate change (such as the purely rational), suggesting we need to use multiple ways of understanding and relating to the world. He emphasises the importance of acknowledging painful feelings about climate change, which can cause people to space out when faced with the data. He introduces the idea that dreams can contain awareness which speaks to problems in the world, and help us face them.

Susan Rowland is an academic literary critic who primarily looks at human relationships to nature and the gods. She discusses how the imagination can be part of addressing, and connecting to, ecological crises. She brings up the question of the imaginary relationship between gender and nature, and particularly the way that nature has been connected to the “feminine” and can be treated violently in our culture, and how it could be treated differently elsewhere. She explores this possible arc of creative difference through the myth of Dionysus and the experience of being broken into parts.

Stephen Aizenstat is the founding president of the Pacifica Graduate Institute and has worked with the UN. As well as talking with CEOs and government bodies, Aiszenstat is frequently asked into schools where he finds students have a strong sense of the fragility of the world, and become more fragile and grief struck, because of that connection. He discusses ways of dream tending as remedy, emphasising the importance of encountering the dream beings rather than interpreting them. This allows the dreams to become a source of strength and illumination. As he says: “At night, when our eyes are closed, something else comes awake.”

Susannah Benson, researcher and past President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, discusses the importance of dreams and long-term dream groups. Taken over time, dreams provide a way of orienting ourselves in the world, somewhat like a GPS. She quotes a Buddhist text: “A dream is as much an immediate reality as is the waking state and it is even possible to see the world more clearly in our dreams than in our waking state.” Dream groups help provide different perspectives on the dreams and can deepen our modes of listening to the hidden parts of the self, because the group can help break through our habitual perceptions and interpretations, thus providing more creative responses to problems. 

Jerome Bernstein, analyst and author, started his path working with Native Americans, learning from them and gaining his first religious experience at a Hopi ceremony. This has given him a sense of what might be missing in a suicidally oriented technological society. He suggests that we have a co-evolutionary process with the world as a whole. This process could work with us, if we were prepared to listen and act in a reciprocal way with it, rather than try to dominate or fix it. Getting to this place, requires the cultivation of what he calls a “borderland psyche,” which appears to be appearing spontaneously, in some people, in response to the crisis.

Sally Gillespie a researcher engaged with climate action points to the emotional difficulties we have, as a culture, with conversations about climate change. Anxiety, dread, terror, hopelessness, guilt and so on, build up making it a loaded and complicated area – even without considering the complexities of the topic. However, it can be possible to have such conversations in groups, and acknowledge these feelings and the dreams around the conversations. Feelings can then develop and energy become available for connecting personal with collective knowledge and action.

Robert Romanyshyn, analyst and author, discusses the ideas which lead to his book on Victor Frankenstein, the Monster and the Shadows of Technology. He treats the story of Frankenstein as a cultural dream, which can be worked through in many ways. Looking at the story helps us to see what we have left behind and forgotten, and this provides a context for understanding where we are now. This context helps us see another truth of things, and may allow us to imagine the future in different ways, and make a new framework for understanding problems of technology and environment.

Erel Shalit, analyst and author, begins by talking about memory as the basis of civilisation and the problem of handing memory over to machines. He points out that we also want to forget, as when we are gripped by trauma and keep remembering the same unbearable thing.  But with the forgetting we lose history, and in an information rich world, we can choose the information which pleases us, and lose that which might keep us safe. He discusses the difficulty of maintaining a balance between machines which intensify human mastery and machines which become masters, or devices which distance us from trauma causing destructive acts of the kind regularly carried out in the Anthropocene.

Michael Conforti begins by discussing the reality of psyche and its processes, especially the move from primary to secondary narcissism. Secondary narcissism marks the beginning of a moral psyche, in which you gain pleasure by pleasing and helping others. Primary narcissism leads to environmental destruction, as everything pleasurable becomes addictive and unending, with no relationship to other beings. He suggests addiction is an attractor, as in chaos theory, in which everything comes to circle, including destruction of nature. The remedy involves more care about psyche and its unconscious awareness.

Jonathan Marshall a researcher and author, talks about complex systems theory and how psychological processes are related to ecological and political processes in the world, and spill over into them. Repression of the world equals repression of psyche. This similarity and connection can make it difficult to know whether a transformation will be successful or not. Acts and policies, tied into fantasies, can be good up to a point and, after that, quite harmful. Every restorative action in the world is experimental and, to be effective, may require revision and modification.

Veronica Goodchild, is an educator, analyst and author.  She talks about ways of relating to the earth through pilgrimage and spiritual practice through attending to our imaginal relationships to nature, through vision, image and dream. “Your own imagination is connecting, as I see it, to the imagination of nature.” Such practices have helped her deal with her grief about world destruction, and participate in the processes of regeneration, human and natural, and to help others through similar processes.

Nancy Swift Furlotti discusses the religious and mythic culture of the Maya, detailing the stories of the Popol Vuh and their psychological meanings. She shows how Mayan religious and cultural practices had the side effects of destroying their ecology and hence society, despite the presence of warnings in their myths. Their temples are the biggest in the entire world in terms of mass, and the intensification of processes of building them appears to have cut off water supplies. This clearly has relevance for our own times, as we build the biggest temples of commerce ever seen while ignoring the effects on ecologies.

Bonnie Bright, the founder of Depth Insights, and interviewer for the book, is then interviewed by co-editor, Jonathan Marshall. She talks about colony collapse disorder in bees and uses this as an analogy to discuss “cultural collapse disorder” in humans. Both phenomena are vitally important. Without bees, food cropping will fail, and there will be further pressure on natural regeneration. While, if humans fail to bring their deeper symbolic experiences and inspirations back to others, then their culture begins to die, as it cannot deal with new challenges and becomes unable to relate to the changing natural world.

The final chapter contains a wide-ranging discussion between a number of the interviewees about the cultural complex and crises of capitalism during the Anthropocene. This discussion suggests some ways of dealing with the overwhelming grief and disorientation produced by facing into the destruction of the world by our own ways of living.

Some Pre-release Comments

“Depth psychologist Bonnie Bright and her colleagues help us understand that climate change is not just an environmental, economic, social or security challenge – although it is all of these – but a deeply psychological crisis that demands “a new psychological position and understanding.” A must-read for anyone wanting to better understand why we’re in our current mess and how to get out of it!”

Linda Buzzell, Co-Editor, Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind

“These interviews are, at one level, a fine tribute to Jung’s vision that the human psyche cannot be considered in isolation from the wider forces that govern life on Earth. But Bonnie Bright’s collection of dialogues also has a far more urgent relevance: the Anthropocene has now been unleashed and it remains an open question whether we can act in time to maintain a habitable planet. The answer will lie in a myriad of policy and behavioural decisions and underlying them all is the need for humankind to transform its notions of self-interest in the light of Earth consciousness. The interviews in this book are both signposts and beacons in that all-important journey.“

—Adrian Tait, Co-Founder, Climate Psychology Alliance

“Dreams open a portal to another way of seeing the world, offering access to the personal and collective unconscious. Dreams encourage the imagination to flourish. Sometimes, dreams can offer another way to approach seemingly insoluble problems. So this anthology arrives at the perfect moment, offering insights and inspiration in this time of climate chaos and global crisis, with contributions from leading thinkers in the field of depth psychology, science and education.“

—Mary-Jayne Rust, Co-Editor, Vital Signs: Psychological Responses to Ecological Crisis

“This work provides a unique perspective on the issue of climate disruption. Science has provided us with all the evidence necessary for immediate action, yet too little is being done too slowly to address this global threat. As Jung noted, in such times of deep disarray, perhaps we should ask the unconscious what to do. The dialogues in this work do just that. Here we are given an opportunity to listen to psyche’s concerns about our planet.”

—Jeffrey T. Kiehl. Participant in the book, Climate Scientist, Jungian Analyst, Author of Facing Climate Change: An Integrated Path to the Future

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Problems of Transition 05: The problem of pace and size

October 23, 2019

Follows on from: Energy Return on Energy Input

The Path to Transition

Full transition, with replication of all social activities and produce, may not be possible. We may not have enough non-ecologically destructive energy to make the equipment needed for the energy transformation because of EREI and the decline in safe fossil fuel consumption. The Transformation, particularly, may not be possible in a situation in which less developed countries are demanding the right to ‘develop’ living standards for their people which are equivalent to the living standards in the developed ‘West’ which are currently produced with huge levels of ecological destruction. Stopping this ‘catch up’ from happening is probably impossible without war or major catastrophe, even without coal power companies and government institutions, still trying to sell the developing world coal based energy, because they would rather destroy the world than wind down their businesses.

The situation is made worse because of the small amounts of truly renewable energy installations actually present in the world. By ‘truly renewable’, I mean energy which once burnt is not gone. (Yes, I am aware renenwable energy machinery is not renewable at the moment, only the sources such as wind, sun, hydro, geothermal heat, tidal action and so on; that is part of the problem and part of the reason the machines are needed). This means that we have an extraordinarily large scale transition to engage with; one that has only jut begun, even while expansion of fossil fuel usage, with its emissions and destruction, has increased.

The most recent figures from the IEA (2018 Key World Energy Statistics) suggest that the world’s primary energy supply is distributed by:

  • Oil 31.9%,
  • Coal at 27.1%,
  • Gas at 22.1%,
  • Biofuels and waste at 9.8%,
  • Nuclear at 4.9%
  • Hydro at 2.5% and
  • Everything else (solar, wind, geothermal) at 1.7%.

Clearly by far the majority of the world’s energy (over 80%, over 90% if you include biofuel and waste, which I would) comes from burning Greenhouse gas emitting fuels.

Despite the need for transition being clearly established since the late 1980s, with the Kyoto Protocol being declared in 1997 most societies have done very little to forward the transition. Indeed coal use rapidly increased after the Protocol was declared, making the challenge even greater than it would have been. The obstacles to successful transition are apparently huge.

As is repeatedly announced, the number of companies, or government instititions responsible for most of these greenhouse gases is small. 100 companies are responsible for about 70% of global emissions since 1988 and, possibly, over half the emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution. So, in theory, it should be possible to control this. The recent decline in coal usage in many countries is also helpful, but is probably not enough, especially given the refusal of fossil fuel companies to promote their products and promote confusion about climate change, its causes and likely consequences.

Conclusion of the part

The size and difficulty of the task of transition is enormous. Social relations and EREI are likely to make the task onerous at best, and maybe impossible without some change in social relations and aspirations. Political action is important, and the transformation almost certainly cannot be left to the private sector alone, as it has so far depended on ecological destruction and misleading hype.

The reality is that the transformation is not happening fast enough, and may not be able to occur fast enough, to stop tumultuous climate change from occuring. We can only try to restrain the tumult and prevent it getting even worse in the long term.

Difficulty of transition is increased by already failing infrastructure.

Later parts of this series will discuss
Drawdown
and problems with indivudal forms of renewable energy

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Problems of Transition 04: Energy Return on Energy Input

October 23, 2019

Follows on from Technology is Social

Energy Return on Energy Input (EREI)
Understanding this concept is fundamental to understanding what is possible with energy technology. Basically, any production of energy takes energy to make. In the fossil fuel world, the ratio of energy input to energy output has been said to be of the order of 1:100. Even today when it has become much harder to find and extract useable oil the ratio is still around 1:20 or more. Easy to access fields of fossil fuels, with little energy use, and little ecological destruction, will tend to be consumed first. There are inevitably declining returns on EREI from resources, and therefore declining availability of energy, without some massive new source of energy being discovered, and this does not happen that often.

The closer the EREI ratio gets to 1:1 or lower, the more the amount of energy used to produce energy gets to resemble the amount of energy produced. The smaller the ratio, the less energy is available for free action, or action that is not tied into energy production. If the ratio goes below 1:1, then energy is essentially being wasted to make energy.

That energy is being wasted and consumed in order to make energy, does not mean the system cannot continue for a while, making things worse. Energy ‘non-production’ can be supported by the taxpayer (as the State considers it important for national functioning); by weird financial schemes or straightforward Ponzi schemes in which more and more people are persuaded to put money into the ventures while return declines (as many people suggest is the actual dynamic behind fracking); by taking energy from a better functioning part of the system; by using cheaper energy such as slave labour; and by increasing unrepairable environmental destruction. Just as we can pursue declining fish stocks with more energy and ruthlessness until they are all gone, so we can pursue low EREI until we collapse. Money acts as an ersatz source of energy as it allows human focus and activity stripped from reality but, eventually, if it does not have some relationship to available energy, the currency will collapse. The point is such practices suck energy from the necessary transition, and eventually disrupt the society in a probably catastrophic way.

Renewable energies, and any potential ‘clean fossil fuels,’ have much lower EREI, than dirty fossil fuels. Most of the renewables are also intermittant, So we need more of them and more energy production, than we needed of fossil fuel energy supplies – and again that takes lots of free energy.

This lower EREI severely limits what can be done and unfortunately, we need a truly massive energy transformation in a time of apparent declining energy availability (and particularly low ecologically destructive energy) to produce machines with lower EREI, which makes transition harder.

Continues in Problems of Transition 05: The problem of pace and size

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Problems of Transition 03: Technology is social

October 23, 2019

Follows on from: Technology as Fantasy

Some of these problems talked about in the previous post, occur because technology is not neutral, it is born into being, and designed, within existing social relations, social struggles, ecological relations and so on. Technologies will almost always be designed, and modified, to try and maintain or intensify relations of social power, and distributions of wealth. In capitalism, for example, work tools are rarely designed to give people more simple leisure, and indeed leisure tools like the internet or mobile phone, can be used to extend work hours ‘voluntarily’. Any technology with potential, become sites of social struggle.

Technology involves social organisation

In the current world, social organisation and disorganisation exists before new technologies are introduced. Sometimes we can easily think of social relations and organisation as a form of technology. Armies of soldiers are a different form of technology, to collections of warriors. The discipline of Roman troops and troop formation, generally proved victorious over warrior bands, even though the basic physical technologies were not that much different; swords, spears, shields, armour, bows etc. The pyramids were primarily built through the organisation of human action; without that organisation, they could not have been made. Irrigation systems require co-ordination and distribution systems, which usually imply allocation of power and authority. These various systems may, in some cases be primarily religious, magical or astrological – so again magic is overtly part of the technologies application. Capitalism grew together with styles of organisation of factories, offices, labour, finance, expertise and so on. Office machines and factory machines also grew within these frameworks. Technology as a part of, or enabler of, social relations, is also deeply implicated in power relations and hierarchies, and the struggles within them.

To repeat; technology arrives into a situation in which social struggles, conflicts, failures, successes and so on already exist. The technology is designed by at least one faction in this set of complex social relations, and is inserted into them. It is not always possible to clearly demarcate a technology from the social relations and organisation that exist ‘around’ it and ‘through’ it. Technology is social from the beginning.

Maybe, in another world, it is possible the internet could have become a tool of democracy but, in this world, it was born in a period of increasingly neoliberal capitalism, and was transformed by the victors of that struggle into a commercial, data collecting set of business oligopolies. It was used in the political struggles of the world, to promote neoliberal ideologies, to win elections, to increase surveillance, to arrest dissidents, to destroy other States, to find new ways of manipulating people, and so on. Its potential to be a tool of democracy was destroyed by those who wished to use it to support their own power.

The same problem of the effect of established, or victorious, social relations is relevant for renewables. If renewables are established within social relationships which already depend on sacrificing ecologies for pofit, then it seems likely that renewables will be used to continue that sacrifice.

This is not an issue that can be answered in advance of research, However, continuing sacrifice does seem a problem.

Sacrifice of some for the good of all.

Research in India shows that people can have their land stripped away from them for corporate renewable installations (possibly through fraudulent contracts, or simply by ignoring the existing use). The installations can render the land desolate through the use of mass concrete stands. The removal of agriculture, can lead to massive unemployment and skill loss, because renewables only require a small, relatively unskilled labour force to maintain. Water, in short supply to begin with, can be taken from the public to keep the panels clear of dust. Attempts by local people to establish their own renewable networks, can be destroyed by people developing national grids, who demand local homemade grids be taken down, as they disrupt ‘proper’ grids.

Research in Australia implies that standard corporate development practices flourish, with top down imposition of energy farms (in a similar way to the way coal mines can be promoted) which alienates local people, prevents discussion of the potential problems of the development, prevents people discussing the contracts they might get for land-use, and leads to envy because some people get large payments, and others get nothing. Again, this can destroy local small town economies, because the levels of employment are less. As with the internet, democratic practices can be sacrificed for profitability.

Likewise, support for these top-down installations often seems to suggest that people’s relationship to the land which they feel they are protecting by objecting to the renewable projects, is irrelevant, when we precisely wish to maintain nurturing relationships to land and ecologies to allow transition. Strategies of development seem bound up with the idea of sacrificing people or ecologies for the developmental “benefit of all”, or perhaps the benefit of some. Renewables can take on this need to sacrifice others as easily as fossil fuels – although established power relations seem to make renewables easier to object to successfully. This idea of sacrifice may need modification, but how?

Capitalism and industrial society, have depended on destructive technologies

Capitalist economies have routinely profited from cheap energy, cheap resources (ignoring environmental effects), and cheap disposal of pollution, waste and used or superseded products. At the moment, most recycling is not true recycling, as people recently found out in Australia; much of the process involved companies being paid to collect waste and then paying third world countries to make it their problem with the recyclable produce often used as land fill. Money was made but little was recycled.

This reliance on cheap pollution and low monetary cost for ecological destruction, leads to the common point about such societies consuming more resources and producing more waste in a year than can be possibly regenerated in a year. Obviously the longer this goes on, the less can be regenerated and the more living capacity that is destroyed. Therefore, the problem intensifies.

Solar panel manufacturing in China, until recently, was driven by capitalist priorities, it was made with cheap dirty coal energy, paid low wages, and emitted harmful effluent pollution, killing rivers and possibly local people – although this latter point can be disputed. However, these cheap panels did drive cleaner manufacturers out of business.

Mess of information.

Because capitalism depends on sales, information about technology and technological quality is primarily propagated through PR, advertising and hype. These factors tend to exaggerate the quality and capacity of developing technologies, in order to diminish the attractiveness of other available, or potentially available, technologies and attract sales. It certainly was routine in the software industry for programmers to declare that company sales staff would promise potential purchasers capacities the software could not deliver, which would lead to problems after installation.

The same problems occur both with renewables and clean fossil fuels. In particular clean fossil fuels never seem to have the deliverables they promise. The promises often seem to be attempts to lock in pollution, on the grounds that it might get better at some non-specified time in the future.

We also have the problems that corporations which depend on fossil fuels, and others, try to find the weaknesses or uncertainties in theories of climate change, and predictions of what is likely to happen. As we are trying to describe complex systems, such weaknesses will always be found. Sometimes this propaganda behaviour seems to have gone against the scientific advice that they accepted for their own business survival, as when they moved storage and processing facilities to higher ground. However, they have helped delay transition, promote the use of fossil fuels, and confused people as to what they are facing in order to continue to make sales and profit, rather than to wind-back, change, or profit from transition. In this sense, these corporations really do depend on destruction.

Capitalism, like many other systems, messes with information as part of its standard modes of operation. It disrupts the flow of accurate information which is necessary for its own survival.

Consequence.

Without some changes to social systems, the product which confuses people and distributes its costs and harms to the populace, rather than to the manufacturer, is likely to win out. This may be especially true in a period of rapid change, in which it is hard to compare quality and harms as they become more visible over a longer period.

Technology is social, not pure and abstractly technical

Continues in:

Problems of Transition 4: Energy Return on Energy Input

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Problems of Transition 02: Technology as Fantasy

October 23, 2019

Follows from Transformation to Renewable Energy: General Problems

Contemporary societies have social fantasies, or myths, about technologies, which may not be helpful to dealing with the reality of transition. The biggest problem, is that we all may be in the grip of these myths and fantasies without being aware of it. We can just assume the myth is common sense and that what we are saying is obvious. Obviously I am not going to be aware of all of these myths, and even if I was, I could still be captured by them.

One reason that fantasy is important is that we cannot see the future or predict the future completely accurately. Indeed, socially, we have a bad record at this. Books anticipating the future always fail in fundamental ways to predict exactly what will happen. Weather, economic and sports forecasting is difficult, and rarely always accurate. We now understand that this arises from the nature of complex systems. Trends can perhaps be predicted, but predicting specific events is hard, especially when the predictions change behaviour.

Therefore we have to imagine the future. Imagining is essential, and helpful, but it is never constrained by reality. So when we are talking about technological transition, we are engaging in imagining and fantasy. Often imagining has guiding principles which make the results seem socially acceptable, and these principles may not be correct.

Technology is either really good or bad.

In these fantasies, technologies are nearly always forces that bring either marked good or harm. There is a large proportion of the population that seems to believe technology can solve almost any problems without bringing any harms. This is rarely so, even if it is a common part of the sales techniques deployed around technologies. There are also others who think that transition to any new technology will inevitably bring disaster.

Technology is spontaneously generated when needed.

People, including economists, often talk as if, because a technology is needed or imagined, it will be developed, and it will be developed in time, and utilised as intended, with only the results expected. This is often not the case. We still do not have skies full of flying cars, we do not have bases on the Moon and Mars, but we do have climate change, which is a classic case of a known problem with technologies being ignored, because the technologies are profitable and useful and have been built into social relations, activities and hierarchies.

Technology has no real restrictions; it is magical.

There is another tendency for people to act as if technology was magical, and that because we can do one thing, or one device can be said to resemble another, then we will soon be able to do something else, which is actually difficult or impossible. Thus again, because we could travel to the Moon, we would soon have a Moon base, or we should soon be able to colonise the solar system, or travel to another star, or something. We might think computers resemble minds, so we should soon be able download individual minds into computers. We can in theory catch CO2 emissions from coal, therefore we will soon have emissions-free coal everywhere. Thorium is a good source of energy, therefore we will soon have functional Thorium reactors. Fusion is wonderful, therefore we will soon have fusion reactors. The list goes on. And the catch is that fantasy and imagining, or trying to do things which were previously ‘magical’, probably is important in developing new technology. The problem is that even if these things were possible, and I am not saying they are impossible, it does not mean they will happen now. There are other complexities to consider, including the social relations around the technology and current technology, the limited range of human attention and application, and the success of struggles for limited finance.

Technology can also be ‘magical’ in quite a literal sense, if we define magic as a way of changing human awareness, habit, focus and so on and producing ‘non-physical’ effects in the world. Technology can change the way people perceive things and think about things. For example, we can start thinking of minds in terms of computers (software and hardware), or we can start thinking of the cosmos in terms of clocks, or information processors. People can use imagined technologies to attempt to change our view of the world and our behaviour, as when they argue that clean cheap and quick nuclear energy is available, or clean coal will soon be available, or that renewable energy is already doing a large part of the energy work, and will easily be able to replace fossil fuels with no social change. Technology often seems to be part of a rhetoric of persuasion, used to change world views and actions, and to focus attention on particular parts of reality, often at the expense of others. You have nothing to fear from total computerised surveillance if you are good.

It seems easy for humans to relate to machines as if they were animate and intelligent, especially when the machines are unfamiliar; in which case their behaviour with those machines is also not purely rational. Humans give everything meaning, and use everything to try and make meaning for themselves and others, including technology, but as usual the meanings given may not be uniform throughout society, and may be a subject of struggle and disjunction. Meaning never exists by itself, so the meaning of a technology becomes tied into a web of meaning and contrasts in meaning. The technology can be made to support existing world views, even as it slowly changes them, and affects other meanings, actions and power relations. Magical/meaning warfare is not yet dead.

Unintended consequences disrupt our fantasies.

Then there is no necessity that the technologies would give the results which were intended or expected. Technologies often add complications to the task they were supposed to perform. They give people new opportunities for action and add complexities to life, and the results of those opportunities and complexities, can only rarely be predicted in detail. Even if the problems were predicted in detail, there is only a small chance many people will accept the prediction, over their fantasy. This unpredictability, can always be disruptive, in both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways.

For example, the Internet was predicted to bring a world of free information-literacy and democracy. However, as well as providing communication between people who would never have previously met, it has probably brought endless shopping, induced polarisation, distorted information, strengthened politics as a form of identity, provided echo chambers for any idea whatsoever, magnified fantasy, and given new forms of political manipulation and Donald Trump. It brought both (some) benefits and (many) harms, and its main harms were not expected by most analysts.

We might also expect (via the so called ‘Jevons Paradox’) that if clean coal or gas could be made to work, then we would burn more coal and gas, and cause more ecological disaster through the mining and transport of coal and gas.

Resolution of fantasy and imagined expectations is a problem.

The series continues in:

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Problems of Transition to Renewable Energy 01: General Problems

October 21, 2019

This post is part of a short series on the problems of transition to renewable energy. It repeats and develops some earlier posts on this blog.

As the original post kept growing, I have decided to split it up into five shorter posts.

In this series of posts, I will deal with a set of general technological and social problems which are relevant to energy transition, before going into the problems of other necessary strategies (such as drawdown), and the problem with particular ‘renewable energies’.

Introduction: Fossil Fuels; virtues and problems

Fossil fuels are the most efficient sources of energy ever developed. Modern capitalist society is built on cheap fossil fuels (and steel making and plastics, which originate with the use of fossil fuels). Modern society may be said to depend on cheap fossil fuels.

Fossil Fuels are also amongst the most destructive forms of energy developed. They poison people and other creatures, they destroy functional ecologies, they are prone to disaster (leakage and spills, have vulnerability to acts of violence, coal seams can catch alight easily and be very difficult, or even impossible, to put out, etc), they can destroy water supplies, and they generate climate turmoil. All these various destructions mount up and get worse the more fuels are ‘mined’ and burnt.

Fossil Fuels are also finite and in decline. Although some say the end of fossil fuels is still a long way off, such fuels appear to be getting harder to find and utilise – hence the development and use of fracking, tar sands, open cut coal mines and other techniques. Fossil fuels nowadays produce more ecological devastation than they used to, through these new modes of extraction.

Fossil fuels have to be replaced if we are to save contemporary civilisations from ecological and energy collapse, and yet they have been essential to modern social organisation, function, social power relations and energy. This is the fundamental problem of contemporary life.

The further posts in this series follow this post:

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Reflections on the ‘Deep State’

October 20, 2019

The idea behind the term “Deep State” is important, but the term, as is currently used, seems to function as a propaganda device to justify pro-corporate factions in their struggle against any curtailment of corporate power, or corporate ability to distribute costs to the public, often in the context of climate change. For the idea to regain its use, we might have to replace it with some other term such as the “factional State”

Definition and basic Propaganda Functions

Wikipedia gives the following, apparently unattributed, definition of the Deep State:

a hybrid association of government elements and parts of top-level industry and finance that is effectively able to govern the…. [Nation] without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.

While this definition gives the impression that the State is a monolithic unity (when it is not unified but full of conflict, as the term ‘factional state’ suggests), it is important to recognise that, in the US and much of the Western World, one of the main drivers of the ‘deep state’ is the commercial sector (“top-level industry and finance”), as the current propaganda use of the terms tends to ignore this part of the definition altogether.

This definition and the propaganda usage, both ignore the different types of power (including military power), and their different ways of operating. (Not to mention the relationship between power and incompetence). This again, serves an ideological function because it makes the State the only form of power, as well as the single and simple oppresive power which needs to be curtailed. In particular, usage ignores the power of wealth, and the way it can operate against freedom, and control most of the other sources of power. It also deletes the idea that ‘the people’ can use, and have used, the State to benefit themselves (even if this involves struggles with other factions).

The role of commerce in the State, and in power relations, is perhaps being ignored because the Right want to get rid of any regulation of corporations, or rules that help protect citizens from corporations. This certainly seems to be one of President Trumps most consistent aims – other than when he thinks he can curtail international trade, for America’s benefit.

In this context, it is also notable that the ‘Libertarian Right’ is always vitally keen on cutting government spending which benefits (or could benefit) ordinary citizens, but generally has little energy to agitate for cuts to military spending, perhaps because most of that spending is subsidy of large parts of the corporate sector.

The pro-corporate propagandists probably also do not want the commercial sector to be held responsible for any wars held to capture or defend oil, labour and markets for US business, which was pereviously quite a well known idea. It seems unlikely that the propagandists do not recognise that increased military spending, such as the massive increases boasted of by Trump, is likely a prelude to the actual use of the material in war or threat of war. However, they certainly behave as if they do not recognise this.

Some of the Possible Factions in the Factional State

The “factional State” idea suggests multiple forces are involved in the State, not only pro-corporate forces, or malicious hidden actors, are at work, and we don’t have to assume all corporations have exactly the same interests and are completely unified, either. Some forms of possible factions include bureaucrats in various departments, pro-science factions, foreign affairs, intelligence, military, economic and political party factions. Not all of which are intrinsically harmful.

The State depends for continuity on bureaucrats who try to maintain that continuity while protecting their place in the State. These bureaucrats may tend to try to protect the State and the nation from mad, or overly-idealistic, kings or emperors. This is why the Roman State survived so long after madness and incompetence seemed the hallmark of rulers. In an extreme form, this illustrates the ‘Yes Minster’ theory of the State, in which the civil service obstructs both politicians’ fantasy, and their good ideas.

As part of this State faction, there may be dedicated public servants who try and stop corporations from poisoning, or otherwise maltreating normal citizens, and are thus also identified as enemies of business, and who need to be removed. This faction might also represent what we might call, the “green State,” the “humanitarian State” or the “useful State.”

There are also other public servants who favour the pro-corporate line, and who welcome the possibility of making transition into much higher paid jobs in the private sector, while using contacts to influence State action. Again the point is that the State is factional, and a site of struggle between factions. The State is not unified or uniform.

At one time there might have been somsething we could call techno-scientific factions in the State. These were composed of the people who made sure there was money for State-useful research that was unlikely to be done by the private sector, or done properly by the private sector. They also advised on energy, water, satellites, disease control, and what we call ‘infrastructure’. They would also try and persuade the State to keep the infrastructure functional. Again, it is improbable there would be complete unity here. Medical experts, Physics experts and others would compete for finance, priority and influence.

There are also the diplomats and foreign affairs people who might try and keep relationships with other States concentionally ‘functional’ despite the rantings of local politicians who would happily insult other rulers or threaten war to raise local support. Again, it seems probable that some of these people would recommend support for different other States, different levels of support for other States, different levels of military threat (either way) and different forms of covert action. There would only rarely be unity.

Intelligence people would try and find out what other States where actually doing and sometimes undermine those efforts to keep things “smooth.” It is not hard to imagine them trying to undermine dissent in the State itself and support establishment politics, but that is an uncertain field. During the cold war, it seems to be well documented that in the West intelligence agencies kept a “strong eye” on left wing politicians and dissenters, and it seems doubtful they have changed.

It seems highly probable that the English-speaking State’s economic experts have been largely captured by pro-corporate, pro-free market, pro-development, pro-growth forces. This is a rare moment of unity. These theories seem more or less unchallengable, although there is some dispute between more humanitarian factions and more stringent ‘sacrifice the poor and workers’ factions. This also seems to have been well documented. Such economism may be resisted outside the State, but it seems usually to be popular with establishment politicians as it provides justification for the increase of corporate wealth and power.

Politicians are another faction in the State. Long standing politicians, in particular, will have built up alliances with other long standing actors in the State (including other politicians), they may even have selected them. Politicians are likely to have relationships with those who finance them, and will fight to support the interest of these financers and the interests of commercial power in general. This is one of the powers of wealth; representatives can be bought. Politicians can also be run by ideology, and may have little experience in the day to say running of the State, so the Nation and the State may be harmed by their actions. Ultimately, politicians can seem to be able to force the State to behave as they wish. The Government, or even the President, can declare war against the advice of foreign affairs, intelligence, military and treasury. The government can change relatively successful economic policies against advice. The government can ignore scientific advice to favour their backers as with climate change. And the government can direct offices to find information which matches with political ideology, but does not match with reality, and the departments be left to sort out the mess.

The existence of different factions does not mean there cannot be alliances between them which work against one side of the political faction, but these are likely to be opposed by other alliances. And it is rare for any political party to hold the support of much more than 55% of the population, and thus even those who claim an overwhelming mandate should accept the presence of opposition and be willing to try and justify their position by ‘facts,’ persuasion, and acceptance of advice from others, rather than aim for total victory and destruction of opposition (which could be considered tyranny).

Destruction of Continuity by Ideology: More use of the ‘Deep State’ idea

It seems to be becoming more and more common for Politicians and governments to deploy a version of the American system whereby the heads of departments and high level advisors are political appointees with prime loyalty to the incoming President or government (ie one group of politicians), rather than loyalty to the State or nation iself. These appointments break continuity, break knowledge, break experience, break up convention, break up resistance to stupidity and ideology, and establish the relative dominance of the political factions for the time they are in power.

The Trump transition was apparently remarkable for its lack of interest in what the State actually did for the US and non-corporate citizens (See Michael Lewis). This seems to have been part of an ideological drive to demolish the ‘useful’ State while keeping the oppressive state. President Trump, while erratic, is fairly coherent on his project of support for parts of the corporate sector, via tax cuts, increased military spending, and reduction of red tape and restrictions on corporate victimisation of ordinary people. He especially seems to desire to cut back controls on pollution and environmental despoliation, and I have frequently seen this portrayed as part of Trump’s fight against the Deep State, who are supposedly against business (another reason why the propagandists want commercial input into the state not to be mentioned). This is probably why he gets such huge support from the Republican Party despite his levels of random incompetence. Indeed a competent, well connected and popular President might be the pro-corporate state’s nightmare.

It is useful to the Right to suggest that people are hostile to Trump, not because of his incompetence or tyrannical moves, but because of Deep State plotting. By a careful use of the term “deep state”, it can be implied that attempts to hold Trump responsible to the consitution and for his acts, are profoundly undemocratic. They can also imply that the reason Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted, was not because Republicans could find no coherent evidence against her despite years of trying, but because she was protected by secret elites. The State must be made evil to justify its cutback and promotion of unregulated corporate abuse.

Secondly, the term reinforces the attempt to ignore experts who give scientific reports that disagree with Politicians’ ideology; the reports can be dismissed as just the deep state working against people.

Another part of the propagandist use is to suggest that wars are brought about the intelligence agencies, controlling the President through misleading information – hence it does not have to be a concern that it is widely reported that President Trump ignores this information. However, it is also clear that Intelligence agencies may not always want war. This was demonstrated during the build up to Bush Jr’s Iraq war. It perhaps depended on the media you read at the time, but it was pretty obvious the US and British Agencies were leaking profusely, trying to give people the information they needed to see through the Republican media lie machine and its reports of “weapons of mass destruction”. The Agencies were warning about the likely spread of war to other countries and its destabilising consequences. All of which happened as predicted. They appeared not to want to be blamed for the disaster they thought the war would be. However, they were completely unable to control the President or his ‘war machine’.

[I also remember reading but cannot remember were, so this might be rubbish, that Bush Jr and friends also ignored the advice of the military not to go into Iraq.] They definitely, and completely, ignored the military’s contingency plans for what they should do after victory. In fact they seemed not to have any plans for what to do after victory.

Later the Republicans somehow seem to have managed to lay the blame for the war on the Intelligence agencies rather than on themselves, perhaps because the media naturally tends towards that party or because intelligence agencies make for easy villains. The idea of the Deep State was part of their avoidance of responsibility. They used the term to try and convince people that the Right was not a party of war, or at least not worse than the other side, so they could be tolerated despite the mess they got the world into.

Interestingly, during the time that the Arab Spring looked successful, many Republicans seemed to be claiming that the war in Iraq had worked and their decision was justified. The point is that it seems far more likely that Republican politicians won the struggle within the Factional State, and were mistaken in their anticipation of the results and course of the war, rather than they were taken in by secretive actors within the State.

Summary

The State is not unified, it is a site of struggle between different factions, and that often includes struggles with the ruling politicians and their supporters (particularly financing supporters) – who find this resistance annoying. Supressing the conflicts and distinctions between factions, amounts (in the current day) to supporting the corporate-military State at the expense of everyone else.

Comparison between Deep State theory (DS) and Factional State theory (FS):

1: DS) The state is monolithic and unified

Vs

FS) The State is a site of struggle involving many factions

*

2: DS) The State is bad (unless it supports the Corporate sector)

Vs

FS) Whether the State is useful or not, depends on the results of struggle between factions.

*

3: DS) There is only one source of oppressive power; the State.

Vs.

FS) There are many forms of power. Whether they are oppressive or not depends on how the power is wielded, and often who by. The State is not the only oppressive force.

*

4: DS) The state is only responsible to itself

Vs.

FS) The State is potentially responsible to many factions, including the political faction

*

5: DS) The State always ignores the views of the people

Vs.

FS) The State can ignore the views of the people, but it does not have to. It is likely to respond more speedily to the views of the ruling class (in the US this is the Corporate class), but it can be used to curtail the acts of the rulers – this may lead to it being attacked by the rulers and their representatives, and those they manage to persuade.

*

6: DS) The Deep State is to blame when ‘our’ policies do not work, or our view of reality seems not to deliver the results we would like.

Vs

FS) The States is a complex system, within other complex systems. It is natural for results of policies and actions to be partly unexpected. This does not have to be explained by resistance alone. Neither will eliminating the State mean that a political party’s vision of reality is correct, and only good things will result.

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Political Rhetoric

October 17, 2019

Rhetorical tropes which are used to support, or which end up supporting, the Right in the USA

1) Both Sides are equally bad. [Therefore the Republicans are not that bad.]

2) The Republican president is vulnerable to the Deep State. [Therefore any attempt to impeach the current President for corruption is anti-democratic, and a deep state conspiracy. ]

3) America has done bad things in the past. [Therefore, what we, or the President, are doing now is not that bad really. Certainly we should be even handed about this, and excuse ourselves from any particular responsibility (see 1)]

4) Always talk about foreign policy and wars, because the parties are quite similar here. Never talk about domestic issues (other than guns), such as: wages, work security, work safety, distribution of income, or health. That way, point 1 is reinforced again

5) The left is to blame for whatever goes wrong. Everything is ok, when the Right governs, even while it is collapsing.
Eg: By questioning us the Democrats are responsible for everything bad that happens while they are questioning us, because they break morale. [Therefore they are the bad people. Everyone should just be quiet – unless they are criticising democrats]

6) Science is a left-wing political conspiracy, [unless it is sponsored by the corporate sector, and boosts profit, and even then its risky.]

7) Global warming is an example of science in action. Scientists just say there is global warming because they get grants for saying that.

8) Disagreeing with a scientific consensus shows true independent thinking. Disagreeing with the free market ‘consensus’ [which does not exist in economics] shows lunacy.

9) The Constitution allows the Right to do whatever they like, because they are Right….

10) The Left want to warp the consitution and take away your rights.

11) The left are politically correct, latte drinking, socialist, feminazi, whimps who would boldly take your guns and freedom away.

12) The Left would persecute Religious people [by objecting to religious people discriminating against others.]

13) Listening to women talk about sexual assault, leads to innocent men being persecuted and so women should be ignored [they are viscious irrational harridans to begin with].

14) People who identify as Lefist should be shot – Oh we are not being serious, the left just can’t take a joke.

15) To keep you safe we have to prevent leftists from propagating socialist propaganda like global warming. They are unAmerican at best.

16) We must reluctantly support Nazis and white-supremacist rights to free speech. Because free speech is sacred.

17) The lack of support you hear from ordinary non-shouty people, indicates they support us.

18) Helping poor people is interfering government at its worse. Helping rich people makes everyone prosperous.

19) Private charity is good. [It keeps the poor acknowledging their place and dependency.]

20) No Good, Christian, Conservative, free market loving, Anglo, gender secure, hetrosexual person would ever stoop to using identity politics. That is a leftist trick to divide us.

21) Hilary Clinton is a criminal. [All round, general purpose response to anything – despite Clinton being investigated by hostile Republicans almost continually, and never being successfully prosecuted for anything.]

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Naturalising Politics II

October 13, 2019

Living with Catastrophe made a series of interesting objections and comments to the last post, so let me see if i can respond

First let me state as clearly as I can, what I understand to be Living with Catastrophe‘s main objections. This makes it clear if I’m reading wrong.

  1. Real Politics is ruthless, and people know this. That is why they do not participate in it.
  2. Politics is to be avoided because it cannnot achieve the things people hope to get from it.
  3. Marshall’s definition is too broad. If we accept it, the dead do politics, and people cannot be out of politics.
  4. Aristotle is an unreliable ally for promoting a liberatory or environmental politics.
  5. Politics is about achieving goals, particulary adminstrative goals.
  6. Politics usually flouders in its attempts to achieve other kinds of goals.
  7. Skepticism about the source of values for politics. People can often gain consensus over what they don’t want, but split over what they do want.
  8. Politics suppresses living with moral uncertainty, and we should conscientiously object to it.

Second let me restate my position.

In everyday life humans are constantly trying to work with others, organise work and celebration with others, organise conflict with others, trying to get the better of others, trying to persuade others, trying to threaten others, trying to flatter others, trying to help others, trying to discover the truth of a situation, trying to hide the truth, trying to frame the truth in a way which suits us, or trying to make the good life with others.

These processes go on in the family, in the village, in the city, in the company, in the University, in the State, and in World wide organisations. Not everyone is allowed or encouraged to participate at every level (that exclusion, or inclusion, is part of the politics involved).

While the politics of the State may look different, have different modes of enforcement, and have different effects from the politics of the home or the workplace, they all use similar kinds of processes. Just as the poetry of Shakespeare and my own prose are both language, and can be analysed as langauge, thought, communication, story-telling etc, however different they are.

The classic Western family was often seen as being ruled by a ‘prince’ with absolute legal authority over its members. In reality he may have been advised by his wife or eldest son, or his wife, or mother, may have really ruled, but it was often seen as a State in miniture, and this point was frequently made by monarchists.

1) Rather than ruthlessness being the mark of State politics alone, it may be that the most successful players in any kind of politics are the most ruthless. However, this is not always the case, and even if it was, does not mean that politics has to invoke ruthlessness.

I do, paranoically, suggest that the separation of politics from daily life is a political technique, perhaps ruthlessly, encouraged by neoliberalism, which aims to make ‘the market’ (or really corporate power) the dominant and non challengable part of human life and politics – and supposedly better than other parts of human life, because it is described as ‘non-political’. Hayek even proposes that the democratic state be prohibted from dealing with commerce in any way restrictively.

In the libertarian forms of neoliberalism, every human action and production becomes reduced to trade, and mutual decision making becomes an impingment on liberty, especially when it interferes with trade. For them the ideal forms of evil organisation are the State or the Trade Union (and people must be encouraged to have no hope in the State or unions), and the truly good form is the company – where you get told what to do unless you own and control it. The obvious idea here is that ordinary people are all individuals, and should never act together. Libertarians rarely seem to have the same strength of objection to the wealthy or business people acting together – perhaps because they realise this would affect the political effectiveness of these people, and the force of capitalism.

Neoliberals don’t want to remind us, or they want to keep us ignorant, of the scale and success of peaceful popular movements against corporate power. For example, the environmental movement in the 60s and 70s. I read yesterday, that 20 million Americans joined protests for the first Earth Day. Who knows that nowadays? Who nowadays is allowed to think anything other than that environmentalism is a minor, non-mainstream, interest? How did people in the US raise up against flaming poisonous rivers, and deadly work conditions, and temporarily succeed? Partly because they knew that politics was part of daily life. “The personal is political.” Any ethical decision making that involves others, involves politics.

The Right realised this was a problem in the early 1970s, what they called the “Crisis of Democracy.” Hell Workers! Women!, non-Anglos!, Prisoners! where would it end? The dominant elites might have to share power, if this went on. Power would be diffuse. Depoliticising daily life was one of the solutions to their problem. Ironically, Nixon helped this anti-political rhetoric, through Watergate, and through violating people’s political norms of behaviour. You can’t trust government. Even if it might be nice to have someone of Nixon’s principles in office nowadays….

Over and over again I’ve heard people say things like all politicians are corrupt, they only in it for themselves, you wouldn’t want to be in politics etc… I’ve heard people say politicians all lie or are all the same as an excuse for staying with those who seem to be lying more. It is now pretty much orthodoxy to leave the State to the wealthy, and assume nothing can be done to make things better. So yes I think the absence of politics from daily life is an important trope, and a trope which affects our ability to control our lives, or make the good life.

2) The fact that politics does not always work, in the family, in the village, in the state etc, seems to me, to be largely irrelevant to the argument about it originating in daily life or being more widespread than is usually thought. I’m not sure that many human activities achieve what people hope to get from them. I don’t really transform the world by thinking about it. Most art is crap and will be forgotten or thrown out. Doctors do not heal everyone, and in some cases likley damage people even more. Many families will be unhappy despite the best efforts of those involved. Failure and unintended consequences are normal, and we should recognise this, if we want to engage with life.

I would suggest, that the more self-destructive the culture, the more deletarious unintended consequences are likely to be the case. Climate change is a great example of what seems to be an unintended consequences of particular modes of social organisation and their politics.

3) I don’t think that I am making too broad a definition of politics at all, that’s partly why I went back to Aristotle, because it seems to me, that he didn’t think it too broad either. The same kind of skills are deployed in the family as are needed to be employed in the village, in the township and so on, to make decisions, to organise people, to work and celebrate or whatever. If the idea is to make self-government unnatural, then you have to make this kind of thing either seem minor, or disconnected from the State.

Dead people are important for politics. They may not participate, but they are used politically, and set traditions. The supposedly positive legacy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher is constantly reaserted in order to justify what the right is doing now, and to make it part of general common sense. These legacies may be used in quite contradictory ways. For example, Boris Johnson may use Thatcher’s opposition to climate change to attempt to ‘prove’ that Extinction Rebellion is irrelevant to modern politics.Other people may point to Thatcher’s later recantations of climate change activism, on the grounds that solutions being proposed are non-capitalist, and thus that nothing political should be done. Likewise the activities of a dead parent, grandparent or whatever, may be used to set the tone for the life of members of a family, and encourage them to maintain or increase their status with respect to others.

So while everything is politics, we are being kept out of the central forms of politics, by the denial that everything is political. Nowadays, we don’t influence what counts as justice, or what is ethics… While we are alive, most of us are engaged in politics – to requote Aristotle, we are zoon politicon.

5) All human action and interaction can be reduced to the achieving of goals if we want to. Consequently, if that is our definition of politics then, indeed, everything is politics.

6) Again, that people do not succeed in politics all the time, is not an argument against humans engaging in politics most of the time. Success is never a measure of something occuring, and of course we live with moral uncertainty, and all other kinds of uncertainty, that still does not mean we don’t engage in politics with each other whether we object to those politics or not. Indeed, I would suggest that certainty of action and solution, is probably the hallmark of a politics which will fail to produce beneficial results for most people.

7) The origins of the values which shape political goals, can be many… but nevertheless parts of those values will be shaped by the political process, by interaction and our capacity to persuade people of the virtue of those values and the actions associated with them. We may also use the statement of values to separate us off from other groups, and to creat conflict, in which we are the virtuous, and they are evil. Separation may well be as important to humans as co-opertation, and may indeed work together with co-operation, in that we often seem to co-operate better when we co-operate against some other group.

8) i don’t think there is any particular reason why politics should suppress uncertainty, and moral uncertainty. I think it would be a better politics. But I also think that is true of daily life. People in families often seem sacrifice other members of the family on the altars of moral certainty – but that can probably happen more easily, with a certain type of righteous politics within the family.

4) I’ll talk about Aristotle later… but let me start by saying I don’t have to accept all of Aristotle to accept that some of what he wrote seems insightful.

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Naturalising Politics

October 10, 2019

The Forbes article which attempts to flatter and dismiss Thunberg, and which I have discussed here and here, relies for its effect, on the asumption that politics has a bad reputation.

In my more paranoid moments, I suspect that some of this reputation is deliberately manufactured and aims to weaken people’s desire to participate in formal politics by persuading them that politics is only about power, enforcement, deception and dishonesty. Who would want to be political in that case?

Such a cultivated attitude reinforces the power of those who do participate, and particularly those who participate shamelessly.

However, such a vision of politics seems limited and inacurate.

For me, politics is what humans engage in when they attempt to decide upon, or achieve, an aim which involves or effects other people.

Politics necessarily happens all the time because we live with other people, and people acting together can be much more effective than individuals acting alone (most of the time). Indeed to live harmoniously with others, we have to learn how to negotiate and compromise and get them onside as best we can.

This is a view with considerable antiquity. As is well known Aristotle wrote that

“animals that live politically are those that have any kind of activity in common, which is not true of all gregarious animals,”

and

“humans are by nature political animals [or political life forms, Zoon politikon]. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a Polity, is either above humanity, or below it.”

Aristotle appears to argue, that people cannot perform their natural functions apart from the polity, since they are not self-sufficient. Thus, the Polity (my way of translating polis, usually translated as ‘state’ or ‘city state’ or even ‘social organisation’) comes into existence to enable human life. He takes a more or less anthropological position that:

The polity is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually.

This is because we build our function, abilities and capacities through our relationships to others. Households and individuals do not exist by themselves.

For the whole must necessarily be prior to the part… [as] all things are defined by their function and capacity, so that when they are no longer able to perform their function [within the whole] they must not be said to be the same things

In other words, humans develop their capacities and virtues in relationship to other humans within already existing modes of organisation. We come into being amidst creative others (this is I think important to Aristotle’s idea of humanity, and is in any case always important to recognise). The polity is, therefore, the way humans can come to craft a good and human life the best way they can. The Polity is necessary to make a better polity.

We can also hope that those capacities and virtues crafted within the crafting of the Polity, can perhaps extend outwards to the land, and other life forms. Again, because environments change and relationships between different groups or different polities change, the work of making the good polity is never ending. It never reaches permanent stability or perfection. The polity is likely to face new challenges and new problems, which it has to face creatively.

Taking this idea of politics seriously, politics can be seen to involve idea generation, persuasion, co-operation, competition, decision making, allocating responsibility, allocating authority, overcoming entrenched and no longer useful authority, gaining ability, gaining virtue, rewarding virtue, rewarding beneficial aspiration, and so on.

Politics is essential for joint-human activity, but it need not mean “power over,” or constant dishonesty – an anarchist, communitarian, politics is possible, even if it is precarious. Indeed we might well define a politics which only requires power over and dishonesty as defining a bad polity, which is headed for disaster and requires reformation.

Despite the Forbes article, Thunberg, for example, is almost certainly not playing power and dominance games but is involved in trying reform the current polity, craft the best possible polity, and to continue survival. However, because of this, she is involved in politics, and being made part of power and dominance struggles, by those who are engaged in such struggles and attempting to preserve a disastrous polity. That is probably why she is being so roundly abused. This is supposed to make her less effective, but because of her response to the abuse, it only makes her more effective, and acts as an exemplar for how to behave (virtue) for those who support her.

Some of those engaged in this kind of established abuse politics, are pretending that they are not political, because, in their politics, doing nothing to challenge the processes of destruction is supposed to seem normal.

Please note that I’m not defining politics so that it has to be successful, or result in any firm control over the world (I’m not sure about Aristotles’ opinion on this). The best we can hope for is influence, or effect on the world – working with the world, perhaps – and then check events as they occur to see if we are getting the results we anticipated. This is the nature of the world.

However, uncertainty does not mean you can escape living with politics, or entirely escape having a diffuse effect on the world. Politics is part of human, and humane, life.

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