If businesses and States, do not reduce GreenHouse Gas (GHG) emissions, and do not stop destroying ecologies, then it is possible that the only way of keeping completely wild weather in check will be through geoengineering (GE).
GE is engineering the ecology and climate itself, to lessen climate change. The most usual projected method is to reflect solar radiation back into space, through the release of reflective particulate matter high in the atmosphere, or through mirrors in space etc…. I doubt huge mirrors in space will be used as they are too expensive and they may move out of orbit.
The problems with GE should be obvious.
Ecologies and climates are complex systems.
If we can’t alter complex human systems, to prevent climate change, what hope do we have of changing the world’s own complex systems and their multitude of interactions in a controllable or beneficial manner? We also have to somehow control human reactions to make it work. For example – no increasing emissions because we are now ‘safe’ etc.
It is impossible to predict exactly what will occur when we start GE.
It has been suggested that some areas will loose or gain rainfall dramatically. Some areas may lose plant cover etc.
If we leave it too late then the Earth’s weather patterns may have changed so much, that we have nothing to work with in terms of predicting effects, and little ability to tell the effects of GE from climate change chaos.
It is possible that some business and nation states would attempt GE independently with no co-ordination. This could have deeply difficult results.
Some nations may protest about their losses, and there will be losses from either climate change or GE, and we may not be able to tell the difference.
Nations may accuse other nations of conducting climate war against them. They could conceivably be right. This is likely to produce international tensions, and interfere in the governance and application of GE.
As GE by itself does not reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions, the planet’s oceans will continue to absorb CO2, and become more acidic. This may kill much plankton and other marine life. Ocean Death would be a major ecological calamity.
To understand what GE we should perform, we need accurate computer models. We have good computer models of global weather systems, but not yet good enough. Once we start interfering, then there is no baseline, we no-longer know ‘for sure’ whether we are doing the right things or not. This can possibly be overcome by intensive research projects working with models and their prediction capacity – but again we are working with complex systems and human political factors. There could also be large numbers of others factors we won’t know about until they hit us.
if we suffer a world economic set back or a world war, then the GE would probably stop and, unless we had reduced emissions considerably, then we would likely experience an even more rapid climate change, as the controls would be released.
GE is a really bad idea. However, if we do not push for action now to reduce fossil fuel and other emissions, we may have to try it.
The book essentially argues that our ways of approaching complex and uncertain problems is likely to generate even more problems, because of psychological programming (or perhaps human nature – I’m not going to assume these problems are universal). Non-work lives do not help either, as we have a lot of interconnecting and interrupting problems to face even when we are not at work, and this takes away lack of urgency from around the problems and piles on the pressure. There is no space for slow thinking or contemplation. Our issues get worse.
The five psycho-social problems involve
Simplification
Rightness
Agreement
Control
Ego protection
So lets look at what this involves….
Simplification: Using simple and repetitive stories
Humans tend to live by simple stories, which fit into a standard narrative frame. These stories can help bond us together, because they are, or become, shared. However, simple stories narrow focus and freeze creativity….
It is common that we use repetitive stories to give ourselves an interpretations of events, without bothering to check if they are true…. We may see people in specific (and repeated) roles, such as being unhelpful, hostile, or even evil. We may see ourselves as perpetually failing, or suffering, or triumphing, and add more examples to ‘illustrate’ our stories. We turn fragments of ‘evidence’ into a familiar story, or plug them into familiar stories, and that often seems like its enough. Without any check whatsoever if the story is true… We may not even know what we are doing.
We don’t look for new solutions or new information, because we feel we ‘know’ what happened, because of the story we tell ourselves. Not only is our story likely to be wrong, because the world is complex, but it is likely to shape what we perceive and what we ignore. It is also likely to replace complex interactional causality, with linear causality, to make the explanation easy. People are also likely to give a story a beginning and an end, when in complex systems beginnings and endings may never be clear.
The simplicity of stories tends to mean that we feel it is ok to simplify the world. We don’t have to look for unexpected connections, or unexpected causalities, unintentional consequences and so on – all of which are features of normal life in complex systems.
One way to get out of this harmful simplicity, is to see if we can tell multiple stories, change people’s roles in the story etc… tell the story from other people’s point of view (as our views of any complex system are likely to be different). We can add things which might seem irrelevant. We can wonder how the story or the simplification could be wrong. The more stories we can tell the more we might notice or imagine.
We may not be able to avoid simple stories, and simplifications, but we don’t have to believe them, and we can expand the range of possible events we consider, or even just change the story…..
A simple story in a complex world is probably wrong.
Rightness
We often think something is correct because it feels right, and assume we are right most of the time, or again we may get carried away by the story. We seek data that confirms our rightness, rather than our wrongness, and we tend to reinforce this attitude by ignoring areas in which we are uncertain – It is other people who are wrong and need teaching, rather than ourselves who need to learn.
Being right has similar problems to reducing things to simple stories, it causes us to ignore things which may be going on. It can also cause us to make situations worse, as we ignore data that is telling us we are wrong, when we cannot be. People thinking they are inevitably right, are dangerous.
If you feel certain about something then ask questions, anyway….
Agreement
Agreement is not inherently bad, but Humans tend to agree with people who they identify with too quickly. If everyone has the same bias, then an agreement can just reinforce that bias, and again stop exploration. Agreement gives us a sense of belonging in the chaos, and thus reassurance we are right, or that it is not just our fault if everything goes wrong. On the other hand, people may disagree with people they identify with as outgroup, as quickly as they agree with those defined as ingroup. As usual this process removes information from people.
Try disagreeing to expand our sense of the problem.
Control
Complex systems are very hard to control, or to master. They slip out of our hands or our machines. Yet in modern societies, its generally expected that leaders be in control, so leaders can insist on simple targets which are actually distractions from the real job. They can assume that because some practice has worked before, it will automatically work again.
Leadership in complex systems involves letting go and allowing things to happen, in the best way that seems to be possible.
We cannot control many outcomes, but we can influence, conditions, events and what is emerging – having a direction rather than a fixed destination. We can experiment, without knowing what will happen in advance.
Ego protection
We can’t avoid egos, because we cannot perceive or understand everything; we simplify, we try to fit in and be part of the ingroup, we try to control our lives, random events and other people, and so on. In a sense, our sense of self is unreal or dependent on what we think others will want or observe, and we try to protect it from attack from others, and attack from the world. We try and protect our reputations, and our group membership and respect, rather than reacting to the world as it is, and so on. Protecting our ego is to some extent trying to enforce the past, and not react to the present, or our present position.
Summary
The problem is that complexity is not simple. It is not possible to know everything relevant about a complex system, although we might model it well enough for short term purposes.
Our habits of:
Isolating simple parts of reality and giving them prominence, and linking everything together through standard stories which we use as detailed interpretative maps of reality
Of insisting that we are right, and know everything important
Of reinforcing our rightness by agreement, so that understanding becomes a group activity tied into identity, which reinforces the processes of not looking for alternatives or exceptions
Of trying to control and force the system to behave in particular ways, and being upset when there are unintended and disruptive consequences,
Of trying to not risk our status, and keep in well with those people in our ingroup
All increase the tendency to ignore reality and make it personally and socially acceptable, so we tend not to deal with complexity, or life, very well. As a result, we can head towards some kind of destruction.
Realising these 5 processes are mind traps, not mind virtues, helps us to undo them and get more perception and information. This can be thought of as a negative process. Lowering the influence of the mind traps won’t ensure you can deal with complexity, but it will help. It’s a basic first step.
Another problem occurs when we have political movements which get trapped in these processes, and we ignore the world’s complexity and attempt to suppress that complexity. This may work for a while, but the long term prospects are not good. As I’ve said before, in an organisation which reinforces the mind traps with a punitive hierarchy, punishing people for not agreeing with the organisation’s stories, their rightness and demands for control, then the upper layers of the organisation will have very little idea of what is going on, as people will make sure they don’t tell those people anything which will get them punished, and the whole organisation becomes a mind-trap.
This is why some generals make sure they talk to the troops in an informal and safe situation, to find out what is really happening; to get new stories, new information, and stories of failure of control and action. They avoid their officers telling them what those officers think the general wants to hear.
Just as a footnote, it seems to me that talking of complex adaptive systems is a story which helps confuse people. It implies that the systems will adapt to whatever we might do, or that they will adapt to support us. This is simply not necessarily true. Systems can adapt to be hostile to any of the life forms that currently occupy them – especially if those life forms continually disrupt the system.
This is a set of quotations and arguments from George Monbiot, with an occasional paraphrase. Monbiot is easily the most important journalist who writes on climate change, power and economics, and his work is well worth your perusal, and hopefully this will help. If there are copyright issues, please let me know and I will remove this.
Monbiot. Photo from the Guardian
Summary
Complex Systems can change quickly to a new state of equilibrium – events cascade and reinforce the change – this is what the global eco-system, Gaia if you like, is facing.
The media is engaged in distraction, and blame shifting, partly this could be because the situation is frightening, and partly because we are ruled by a plutocracy that resists change, or awareness of change.
Plutocracy may lead to avoidance even in the powers that be. this can be summarised by the idea of “learning to live with” climate or Covid. This “living with” usually seems to mean ignoring the problem, invoking magic, blaming the relatively powerless, and not learning at all.
Plutocracy leads to confusion, even when governments try to do something, as they also try and support the plutocracy that is causing the problems. For instance, they avoid stopping new fossil fuel development, or removing regulations that support fossil fuel companies.
Much of the technology promoted and imagined as helpful is magical as well. It may not even exist, but will still solve our problems. Carbon Credits and biofuels are good examples of technology which is supposed to help, but which may make the problems worse.
On top of everything else we have a world food crisis. The food system is complex, but has the kind of structure which indicates it is likely to collapse altogether if there is much stress.
Finally we quickly look at a few solutions: basically supporting democracy against plutocracy and getting rid of climate debt to free poorer countries to deal with their own climate crises.
Complexity and mess of information
[Complexity is important, as I keep hammering] Monbiot writes that people who study complex systems have discovered that they behave in consistent ways. It doesn’t matter whether the system is a banking network, a nation state, a rainforest or an Antarctic ice shelf; its behaviour follows certain mathematical rules. In normal conditions, the system regulates itself, maintaining a state of equilibrium. It can absorb stress up to a certain point. But as stress escalates, these same properties start transmitting shocks through the network. [The system] suddenly flips: a small disturbance can tip the entire system over its critical threshold, whereupon it collapses, suddenly and unstoppably. It passes a tipping point, then falls into a new state of equilibrium, which is often impossible to reverse.
If the nodes behave in a variety of [different] ways, and their links to each other are weak, the system is likely to be resilient. If certain nodes become dominant, start to behave in similar ways and are strongly connected, the system is likely to be fragile. [This happened leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, in banking].
Human civilisation relies on the current equilibrium states. But, all over the world, crucial systems appear to be approaching their tipping points. If one system crashes, it is likely to drag others down, triggering a cascade of chaos known as systemic environmental collapse. This is what happened during previous mass extinctions.
[One] way of telling whether [the complex system] is approaching a tipping point [is that its] outputs begin to flicker. The closer to its critical threshold it comes, the wilder the fluctuations. What we’ve seen this year is a great global flickering, as Earth systems begin to break down. The heat domes over the western seaboard of North America; the massive fires there, in Siberia and around the Mediterranean; the lethal floods in Germany, Belgium, China, Sierra Leone – these are the signals that, in climatic morse code, spell “mayday”.
[However, our media are not talking about the problems. They engage in distraction and the pursuit of ratings] Tune in to almost any radio station, at any time, and you can hear the frenetic distraction at work. While around the world wildfires rage, floods sweep cars from the streets and crops shrivel, you will hear a debate about whether to sit down or stand up while pulling on your socks, or a discussion about charcuterie boards for dogs. I’m not making up these examples: I stumbled across them while flicking between channels on days of climate disaster.
Most political news is nothing but court gossip: who’s in, who’s out, who said what to whom. It studiously avoids what lies beneath: the dark money, the corruption, the shift of power away from the democratic sphere, the gathering environmental collapse that makes a nonsense of its obsessions.
This distraction has taken up things like anti-litter campaigns [shifting the packaging industry’s deliberate creation of waste onto consumers] personal carbon footprint [instead of industry footprint, again shifting responsibility to relatively low emitters]. The oil companies didn’t stop there. The most extreme example I’ve seen was a 2019 speech by the chief executive of the oil company Shell, Ben van Beurden. He instructed us to “eat seasonally and recycle more”, and publicly berated his chauffeur for buying a punnet of strawberries in January. [In other words, none of the problems were apparently related to his company’s business. It was the general public, that was the problem. Wealthy polluters have to be protected from anyone doing anything about the pollution they emit.]
[Personally the question arises is this avoidance because of climate change being a scary “turn off” and they fear audiences will go elsewhere, is it because the media is owned by the same class of people as those who profit from climate change, who don’t want people to get the idea that people could have power over the corporate sector, or is it because there is always a corporately sponsored think tank which can point to something optimistic or to the evil consequences of doing something?].
Plutocracy
[We live in plutocracies, and its sometimes pretty overt] The Sunday Times [recently] reported that people who have donated at least £250,000 to the Conservative party have been invited to join an “advisory board”, with special access to the prime minister, cabinet ministers and senior government advisers. They have used this access to lobby for changes in government policy. The 14 identified members of the group have a combined wealth of at least £30bn, and have donated £22m to the Conservatives. The group and its agenda had hitherto been kept secret.
We have also been told that the Conservative party is helping its donors to apply for key government positions.
The interests of the very rich are not the same as the interests of the nation. We should never forget what the billionaire stockbroker Peter Hargreaves, who donated £3.2m to one of the leave campaigns, said about Brexit: “We will get out there and we will become incredibly successful because we will be insecure again. And insecurity is fantastic.”
[The real] power is oligarchic capital, [and that bends the way that we respond and the ways that the corporate media reports the crises]
Plutocracy leads to UK Water Crisis
[Monbiot suggests that] Absence, [and lack of action from government,] is what the party donors paid for.
[R]ecent prime ministers and their governments have prepared us for none of the great predicaments we face. They have looked the other way as the water companies failed to commission any new reservoirs since they were privatised in 1989, and allowed astonishing volumes of that precious commodity we call treated drinking water – 2.4bn litres a day on current estimates – to leak away. It’s a carelessness so grand that it feels like a metaphor. Instead of forcing them to stop these leaks, the government has allowed these corporations to pump the rivers dry: the living world, as ever, is the buffer that must absorb failure and greed.
So determined is the government to absent itself from decision-making that it cannot even institute a hosepipe ban: it must feebly ask the water companies to do so. Most, with an interest in ensuring their metered customers use as much as possible, have so far refused. Nor have the companies been obliged to upgrade their sewage treatment works. The combination of over-abstraction and sewage dumping is devastating. The water in the upper reaches of some of our chalk streams – remarkable ecosystems that are almost unique to England – now consists of nothing but sewage outflows and road run-off. During this long period of regulatory absence, the privatised water firms have piped £72bn in dividends into the accounts of their shareholders.
To [plutocrats], the duty of care is an abomination. Ten years ago next month, Liz Truss launched Britannia Unchained,… [that blamed] everything going wrong in the UK to “a diminished work ethic and a culture of excuses”. Of her four co-authors, three – Priti Patel, Kwasi Kwarteng and Dominic Raab – are frontbenchers in the current government… They blamed inequality and the lack of social mobility in this country not on the patrimonial spiral of wealth accumulation and the resultant rentier economy, but on “laziness”. Citing no meaningful evidence, they maintained that “once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world”.
[And to return to a previous point;] When governments are contractually incapable of solving their people’s problems, only one option remains: turning us against each other [giving them a distraction].
Magic and Avoidance
[Avoidance is common in plutocracy, as the plutocrats are part of the problem.] We have a new term for doing nothing: “learning to live with”. Learning to live with Covid means abandoning testing, isolation and wearing masks in public places. Living with it, dying from it, what’s the difference? The same applies to climate breakdown.
[With climate] our primary effort should still be to decarbonise our economies, to prevent even worse impacts. We also need to brace ourselves for the heating [and resultant weather] that’s now unavoidable.
[However,] government policy is to wish away these problems [and shift responsibility on to ordinary people] Doubtless we’ll soon be told we need to take “personal responsibility” for ensuring our homes are not flooded and our power lines are not destroyed by storms.
There is no learning involved in “learning to live with” [hence its easy and makes no demands personal or political]….
A few days ago, a senior executive at the Institute of Economic Affairs suggested that instead of preventing climate breakdown, we could simply “build sea walls”. It is not just denial we’re up against. It’s a belief in magic.
MPs with no discernible record of concern for poor people, and a long record of voting against them, suddenly claim that climate action must be stymied to protect them. [Or that we must sell poorer countries our fossil fuels to reduce their poverty.]
An analysis by conservation charity WWF suggests that, while the last UK budget allocated £145m for environmental measures, it dedicated £40bn to policies that will increase emissions.
It is still government policy to “maximise economic recovery” of oil and gas from the UK’s continental shelf. According to the government’s energy white paper, promoting their extraction ensures that “the UK remains an attractive destination for global capital.”
Boris Johnson appears to be on the point of approving the development of a new oilfield – the Cambo – in the North Sea.
Since [Joe Biden] pledged to ban new drilling and fracking on federal lands, his administration has granted more than 2,000 new permits. His national security adviser has demanded that Opec+, the oil cartel, increase production, to reduce the cost of driving the monstrous cars that many Americans still buy.
[Laws and regulations are written to support this corporate death spiral.] A UK oil company is currently suing the Italian government for the loss of its “future anticipated profits” after Italy banned new oil drilling in coastal waters. Italy used to be a signatory to the Energy Charter Treaty, which allows companies to demand compensation if it stops future projects. The treaty’s sunset clause permits such lawsuits after nations are no longer party to it, so Italy can be sued even though it left the agreement in 2016.
There is no realistic prospect of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating unless all new fossil fuel development is stopped. In fact, existing projects need to be retired. Nor can we achieve the government’s official aim of net zero emissions by 2050. [But magically we can work against climate change and keep on with more fossil fuels. that way we don’t have to struggle against the plutocracy.]
Renewable power, for instance, is useful in preventing climate chaos only to the extent that it displaces fossil fuels.
[However, fossil fuel companies are rich] and fossil fuels will become stranded assets only when governments insist that they be left in the ground. [So that probably won’t happen for a while yet.]
[Again there is magic. A reasonably well known economist Oded] Galor claims, without providing the necessary evidence, that “the power of innovation accompanied by fertility decline” may allow us to avoid a difficult choice between economic growth and environmental protection. [We will also develop] “revolutionary technologies” that will one day rescue us from the climate crisis. [Just like that. No problem. Technology will always be found to solve every problem, when we need it.]
[People] appear to believe that the transformations necessary to prevent systemic collapse can happen without political pressure or political change. [So we don’t have to trouble THE Market or face up to the corporations who temporarily benefit from from not paying the cost of their pollution and destruction.]
[Magic innovations would be nice, but we still need to stop burning fossil fuels, just in case they don’t eventuate. If they do eventuate, we just have to deal with less pollution.]
Carbon Credits: Magic or Fraud
[Carbon credits are an idea which depends on] removing historic carbon from the air, and counteracting a small residue of unavoidable emissions once we have decarbonised the rest of the economy.
[However], they are being widely used as an alternative for effective action. Rather than committing to leave fossil fuels in the ground, oil and gas firms continue to prospect for new reserves while claiming that the credits they buy have turned them “carbon neutral”.
The French company Total is hoping to develop new oilfields in the Republic of the Congo and off the coast of Suriname. It has sought to justify these projects with nature-based solutions: in Suriname by providing money to the government for protecting existing forests, and in Congo by planting an area of savannah with fast-growing trees.
If the drilling goes ahead it will help to break open a region of extremely rich forests and wetlands that sits on top of the biggest peat deposit in the tropics, potentially threatening a huge natural carbon store. The rare savannah habitat the company wants to convert into plantations to produce timber and biomass has scarcely been explored by ecologists. It’s likely to harbour a far greater range of life than the exotic trees the oil company wants to plant. It is also likely to belong to local people though their customary rights… In other words, the offset project, far from compensating for the damage caused by oil drilling, could compound it.
Last year, forests being used as corporate offsets were incinerated by the wildfires raging across North America [showing how precarious, this form of carbon store is, in the climate fossil fuels are producing.].
Oxfam estimates that [even if carbon credits worked] the land required to meet carbon removal plans by businesses could amount to five times the size of India – more than the entire area of farmland on the planet. And much of it rightfully belongs to indigenous and other local people, who in many cases have not given their consent. This process has a name: carbon colonialism.
A better strategy would be to spend money on strengthening the land rights of indigenous people, who tend to be the most effective guardians of ecosystems and the carbon they contain. {But that would prevent land from being alienated and purchased (or stolen) by corporations and other wealthy people for their own use.]
The number of undernourished people fell from 811 million in 2005 to 607 million in 2014. But in 2015, the trend began to turn. Hunger has been rising ever since: to 650 million in 2019, and back to 811 million in 2020. This year is likely to be much worse.
Last year, the global wheat harvest was bigger than ever. Astoundingly, the number of undernourished people began to rise just as world food prices began to fall. In 2014, when fewer people were hungry than at any time since, the global food price index stood at 115 points. In 2015, it fell to 93, and remained below 100 until 2021.
[Food forms a complex system, and as remarked above if nodes behave similarly there is a problem. In this case the] features that might impede systemic collapse (“redundancy”, “modularity”, “circuit breakers” and “backup systems”) have been stripped away, exposing the system to “globally contagious” shocks.
On one estimate, just four corporations control 90% of the global grain trade [and] just four crops – wheat, rice, maize and soy – account for almost 60% of the calories grown by farmers.
[Food companies nowadays can depend on just-in time supplies with no redundancy or stores, this is easily disrupted by collapse in supply through company problems, war, bad weather or eco-crises – all more likely in climate change.]
If so many can go hungry at a time of unprecedented bounty, the consequences of the major crop failure that environmental breakdown could cause defy imagination. The system has to change.
Ukraine and Russia produce nearly 30% of the world’s wheat exports, 15% of the maize (corn) and 75% of the sunflower oil. Altogether, they generate about 12% of the calories traded internationally. [This obviously has effects given the current war in Ukraine]
Just as European countries allowed themselves to become hooked on Russian gas and oil, they are also highly reliant on Russian and Belarusian fertilisers. About one-third of the nitrogen and two-thirds of the potassium imported by the UK and western Europe come from Russia and Belarus, and we can expect them to use this dependency as another economic weapon.
[Adding to the precariousness of food supplies we have agricultural land and crops being used to make biofuels, hence reducing the world’s food supplies again.]
Between 2019 and 2021, farmers in England raised the area of land used to make biogas by an astonishing 19%. Now 120,000 hectares (300,000 acres) is ploughed to grow maize and hybrid rye for biogas, which is marketed, misleadingly, as a green alternative to fossil gas. The reopening of a bioethanol plant in Hull that will turn wheat into fuel for cars is likely to take another 130,000 hectares out of food production.
About 450 hectares of land is needed to feed a biogas plant with a capacity of one megawatt. By contrast, a megawatt of wind turbine capacity requires only one-third of a hectare.
The investigative group Transport & Environment shows, the land used to grow the biofuels consumed in Europe covers 14m hectares (35m acres): an area larger than Greece. Of the soy oil consumed in the European Union, 32% is eaten by cars and trucks. They devour 50% of all the palm oil used in the EU and 58% of the rapeseed oil. Altogether, 18% of the world’s vegetable oil is turned into biodiesel, and 10% of the world’s grains are transformed into ethanol, to mix with petrol.
Since 2000, 10m hectares of Africa’s land, often the best land, has been bought or seized by sovereign wealth funds, corporations and private investors.
[We might be told the biiofuel plants will run on waste, but] Invariably, as soon as the market develops, dedicated crops are grown to supply it.
The UK government, “responding to industry feedback”, increased its target for the amount of biofuel used in surface transport. Worse, it justifies continued airport expansion with the claim that planes will soon be able to use “sustainable” fuels. In practice this means biofuel [and more magic and fantasy]
There’s a limit to how much we can eat. There’s no limit to how much we can burn.
Changing the plutocracy
Society is a complex system, and complex systems can never be sensibly and benevolently controlled from the centre. A centralised, hierarchical system means concentrated power, and concentrated power favours concentrated wealth. [And concentration of power and contacts may favour system collapse.]
Politics is “the active engagement of free citizens” in their own affairs. [Politics is a normal part of everyday life as we organise ourselves to do things together].
Bookchin proposed a structured political system, built on majority voting. It begins with popular assemblies, convened in opposition to the state, open to anyone from the neighbourhood who wants to join. As more assemblies form, they create confederations whose powers are not devolved downwards but delegated upwards. The assemblies send delegates to represent them at confederal councils, but these people have no powers of their own: they may only convey, coordinate and administer the decisions handed up to them. [possible examples include Rojava in Syria and the now defunct participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil. This kind of proposal might end the problem that] we have no opportunity to engage creatively with each other in building better communities.
Until we change our political systems, making it impossible for the rich to buy the decisions they want, we will lose not only individual cases. We will lose everything.
An analysis in the journal Global Environmental Change suggests that $10tn of value is extracted from poorer countries by richer ones every year, in the form of raw materials, energy, land and labour. That’s 70 times as much money as would be needed to end extreme poverty worldwide….
A report from Green New Deal suggests that debt has been used by the World Bank as a means of obliging Senegal to allow US, Australian and British companies to exploit its oil and gas. In Argentina, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has reportedly pushed for the development of the giant Vaca Muerta shale gas basin, using similar leverage. Impoverished and coerced by debt, poorer nations have little choice but to allow destructive industries to exploit them.
An analysis by Oxfam suggests that 85% of the Covid loans made by the IMF to poorer nations were connected to austerity programmes: the fund is using the power of debt to push nations into cutting wage bills and spending less on public services and support for poor people.
Rich nations owe a massive climate debt to poorer nations: for the devastating impacts of the fossil fuels we have burned. Yet they have no intention of paying for the loss and damage they have caused. Poor countries are deemed to owe massive financial debts to the rich nations, yet they cannot pay them without destroying their economies and their ecosystems.
The proposal is simultaneously to cancel both the climate and the financial debts, liberating the money poorer nations need to take climate action.
[This sounds good, but it would, like any other climate action which cuts energy, would probably produce some kind of degrowth. However, degrowth will undoubtedly happen when the cost of fixing climate damage starts becoming a significant fraction of the profit made from provoking that damage.]
[Needless to say, it is probable that the plutocracy will oppose this measure, as they or the wealth economy will suffer, and most people will never get to hear of it.]
Conclusion
There is hope. But we have to be prepared to take on the Plutocracy and their promotion of harmful magic and distraction. We have to slow emissions, and keep fossil fuels in the ground. We can’t phase them out immediately, but we can agitate for more democracy, degrowth, and debt reduction as part of a strategy to help poorer countries.
This is based on Jay McDaniel’s What is Process Thought, Process Century Press, 2021.
Process thinking resembles complexity and ecological thinking…. Most of the points below would be recognised in both other forms of thinking.
McDaniel describes some characteristics of process thinking, on pp.20-21, 33ff. There are distortions in the replication below and I have rearranged the points to make the flow more persuasive to me. Statements between brackets are additions to express the importance of ‘disorder’….
1) The Term ‘process’ suggests that the cosmos flows, constantly building [and destroying] itself. The cosmos is never precisely the same in any two moments.
2) The cosmos is continuously creative. New events are constantly coming into existence. Novelty is normal.
[Process thinkers tend to think of the world as resembling ‘verbs’, ‘events’, ‘happenings’, ‘patterns’ and so on, rather than resembling individual nouns doing, or suffering, actions]
3) The future is potentiality and possibility, it is not determined. We may need to be open to those possibilities, and to working with them, rather than thinking we can do nothing. The question is then, “How could we be best open to those possibilities?” [Each point in time opens to infinite or large number of possibilities, although previous history may affect likelihoods of those possibilities]
4) Everything is interconnected or interdependent. ‘Things,’ nodes, or events cannot be separated out completely. Nothing exists by itself.
5) Everything has value, or relevance, in itself and in interconnection. Nothing existing is ‘dead’ or without potential, as it is part of process. Processes may seek balance or harmony [equilibrium]. [This balance or harmony may not necessarily include humans, especially if they work against it. For example if we disrupt ecologies too much then they may become uninhabitable by us.]
6) Humans find value in being in harmony with what is happening, with working with process and each other. Harmony is not sameness or enforced. Harmony allows change.
7) Humans find themselves in community or with others [human and non-human, and sometimes against others]. Recognising relationship is important, and we should aim for mutual respect and support. This includes recognising vulnerable and distressed people.
[What humans may call ‘disorder’ is a vital part of process, that needs respect. It can possibly arise because of misguided attempts to impose order, or because the humans refuse to recognise interconnected process, or ignore what is happening in the world and create an unconscious which will disrupt them.]
8) Power should be persuasive, or exemplary, rather than coercive, as coercive power disrupts natural processes or the flow. [All processes are natural]
9) Human ‘mentation’ involves reasoning, feeling, imagining, intuiting etc. and you cannot always separate these out, they can work together, and do [both for accuracy and inaccuracy…] Mind and body are not separate. We feel ourselves into the world, and the cosmos may behave like a mind.
10) It is too easy for humans to confuse the abstract with the particular. We should try not to confuse abstractions with actual events.
11) Humans can work with different perspectives and put them together into something new.
12) Education and learning is a life long process.
13) There is no separation between theory and practice. What you do, expresses what you believe and vice versa.
This is trying to say much the same as the last post in a much less formal and much briefer manner
The point of praxeology is to make our axioms, suppositions, hypotheses, observations, and deductions obvious and open to criticism, so we can progress our understanding as we encounter new events and new understandings.
Capitalism is a set of social organisations of ‘forms’ or ‘systems’ of life
Human life occurs within interacting systems. The basic system on which all others depend are the planetary ecological systems. The capacity of human life depends on the functionality of these systems.
Propositions on Profit
Monetary profit seeking does not seem to be a sufficiently complex concept to drive a functional economic system. [People have many aims beyond profit.]
Monetary profit seeking appears to drive non-functional or even pathological systems, which delete human capacities, reduce most humans to machines for cheap labour, set up plutocratic forms of government and induce confusion and ignorance over vital information and understandings of problems.
Whatever pro-corporate economics says. there are no externalities to the planetary system, and any economics which considers pollution external to its own working, will cultivate non-functionality and death. It is useful to remember Ruskin’s idea of illth. Profit seeking will often produce externalised illth.
Continual enlargement of profit, company or economy is likely to be impossible, and should be treated with suspicion as generating non-functionality and destruction.
Freeloading
Freeloading seems inevitable in profit seeking and profit enlargement economies, and is harmful to social development, constructive co-operation and ecological functionality
Prices
Competition is imperfect and difficult because of the information system, and because of risk (companies are not providing exactly the same products).
Historical Digression: Trajectories of Capital accumulation
Differences in access to capital accumulation are not just the result of virtue, or productive talent as claimed by most pro-capitalist economic theory, but of a history of violence, theft and murder.
The advertised benefits of capitalism have largely been brought about by worker co-operation, threat of revolution and by becoming a market. The benefits have not been brought about by capitalists.
Proposition: Human Competition and Co-operation
Humans are both competitive and co-operative. Most pro-capitalists economics ignores co-operation between the wealth elites, against the working classes, but its important.
Propositions on power and economic action
Wealth is a basis for power.
Capitalism generates a situation of unequal wealth and hence unequal power – especially when the Wealth elites co-operate against the ‘lower classes’
Proposition: ‘Crony Capitalism’ and ‘State Capture’ are inevitable
Crony capitalism is normal and leads to State Capture or State Takeover – plutocracy. Capitalists use their wealth and power to shape the State to serve what they think are their best ends….
Wealth gives power, liberty and capacity; and inequality of wealth gives inequality of power liberty and capacity.
Siding with the elites
Some working people side with the capitalist class through taking managerial positions – however this may not lessen their vulnerability.
Power in the ‘Marketplace’
Power differentials affect market transactions and satisfactions.
Information system
Capitalism inherently confuses the information system by using it for advertising, PR, lies, etc., and by doing so, lowers that system’s capacity to provide useful and accurate information. This undermines the response of the wealth elites, and the polity as a whole, to real problems.
Information mess likely exists within most corporate bodies as well as in the more public sphere.
The information system is confused by normal action, so that various forms of market and social collapse are usually surprising.
Markets, Relationships and Trust (Morals?)
Human non-capitalist economies are as much about relationship and co-operation as monetary exchange. Exchange of money may defeat relationship.
Uncertainty and experimental politics
Uncertainty is normal in life and information incomplete even in the best circumstances. Hence policies should be regarded as experiments rather than as dogma. Attention should be paid to after-events in order to refine the actions and understandings.
Returning to systems
We live within systems. Individuals appear in systems of interactions.
The primary political need seems to be to recognise that we need functional ecologies in order to have functional economic systems, functional political systems and so on. Tending to ecologies is a fundamental political act that needs encouragement.
If we kill, or unrecoverably disrupt, our ecologies then the likelihood of us humans having much of a future severely diminishes….
I’ve been reading John C. Hulsman’s To Dare More Boldly: The audacious story of Political Risk (Princeton University Press 2018). I have no idea whether this is considered a good book or not but its interesting. He gives ten principles for political risk and, in so doing, points towards principles useful for dealing with complexity, as what could more complex than political behaviour between nations?
Today I’m going to consider the first principle, and show that while its good, he actually ignores it in favour of ‘received knowledge,’ ‘individualism,’ and apparently ‘meaningless words’….
“We are the risk”
The point here is that we tend to ignore our own possible failings, or the failings of the systems we like. We look elsewhere for the problems.
For example, the author attended a Council of Foreign Relations meeting, and he suggested that American “political sclerosis” (whatever that is) was one of the ten most significant political risks in the world today, he was told it was the rest of the world that was the problem, not the USA, which could be left out of the problem sphere (p.45).
This is pretty clearly not a useful form of analysis, as the USA interacts with everyone else (complexity) and therefore has an effect on the result – no matter how ‘healthy’ it might be.
Another way of looking at his point, is that civilisations which collapse under external attack first suffer an internal collapse that makes them vulnerable.
He suggests that 18th Century Historian Edward Gibbon makes this kind of analysis in his Decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Or as he summarises:
Rome fell not primarily because of outside pressures but rather owing to an internal and gradual loss of civic virtue amongst its citizens
(P.43)
Now as an anthropologist I’m going to state that a decline in civic virtue, is not an explanation of anything. It is a statement of what might have happened. We may also need to ask, what caused this decline? What made the decline seem reasonable to people? What are the structures and processes involved? What are the complex interactions that lead to collapse, or slow phase out. I doubt that many individual people woke up one morning and said to themselves: “that’s it for civic virtue” and then Rome fell, or as Hulsman puts it
society atrophied as a result of personal failings that accumulated over time
(p 48).
If its personal failings there is nothing we can do, except blame others. However, if its shared personal failings or social dynamics then we can look around to find common causes and remedy them. Pretty obviously Rome in the East continued on for quite a long time (falling in 1453) so its a bit foolish to just focus on Rome in the West (476, almost a thousand years earlier), and we need to know what civic virtue (or personal failings) even are, and how they changed – not just assume they are immediately obvious, and obviously important because we like the idea and maybe think we are virtuous and have them.
Gibbon may have thought that Roman civic virtue was a matter of militarism.
The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigour of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine
Christians, while violent, did not support the military as such, and hence helped the downfall. However, Gibbon begins this passage by making an added point.
Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.
The Roman Empire became too big, and to clumsy to control, and to respond properly to challenges, as well as Romans becoming less interested in constant military ventures which consumed even more energy away from making it work. It is doubtful that even a modern empire with internet, jets and satellite can expand forever and hold its conquered land, as its context of supply chains, identity failure and local resistances grow more and more complicated.
However the point is clear, as Hulsman says, Rome may have eventually fallen because of a failure “to recognise and combat [the] home grown problems” of its Empire. This is a form of societal suicide which he calls ‘decadence’ (nothing like having a word that already tells you something is bad to help your judgements, and think you mean something) which he defines as “a society’s loss of ability to deal with its problem, coupled over time with a long-term abdication of responsibility for them” (p44).
My personal guess is that a lot of Romans probably tried to take responsibility for the problems, by blaming other people for them – despised classes like passive people, lazy workers, prostitutes, gays, people reveling in Luxury, nouveau riche, freed-slaves, Christians and later pagan philosophers etc. and they probably felt quite proud of facing up to the faults of others and berating them (Juvenal for example). Our vocabulary for condemning decadence (not being the same as we once were) very likely comes from Romans condemning each other.
Anyway, the point is that the Empire grew to such a size that it had to use barbarians to make its legions – which might have lengthened the decline – after all it gave the Barbarians something to fight for that wasn’t the fall of Rome, and made them invested in the Empire itself to an extent – they could become Roman citizens. They lived dangerous lives and got paid for it.
However, it is possible that ordinary citizens no longer saw the Empire as a particular advantage for them and lost interest…. It solved problems which did not seem that relevant to them, or it created problems for them – such as finding work, finding land, not having political representation, being unable to make social change and so on. Sport, public murder, and religious dispute, was all they might have had left to make a meaning for life
Hulsman further discusses the dangers of the Praetorian guard who were meant to defend the Emperor and family, but became a force in themselves from quite early on. They slaughtered emperors they did not like, appointed new people to the throne, and demanded higher and higher payments for loyalty – because they were necessary. Obviously not a mechanism for stable government, but it did not immediately cause the collapse of Rome, as the Emperor Constantine disbanded them and destroyed their barracks when he invaded Rome in AD 312.
So the main take away is the problems may issue from us, from the way we approach the problems, or the way we organise ourselves – but it is not simple.
The ‘Perfidious French’
Rather oddly, instead of moving to look at his own society from this point of view, he moves to condemn the modern day French. Let’s charitably assume that this is because he thinks Europe is part of the US, or he will talk about the US later on….
In France, 14,802 heat-related deaths (mostly among the elderly) occurred during the heat wave, according to the French National Institute of Health.[6][7] France does not commonly have very hot summers, particularly in the northern areas,[8] but eight consecutive days with temperatures of more than 40 °C (104 °F) were recorded in Auxerre, Yonne in early August 2003.[9]
Wiki 2003 European heat wave.
Houses in France are not generally built for heat waves. Hulsman alleges that the French government, and doctors (?), did nothing. The relevant ministers were on holiday and reluctant to come back to the heat. Many people who died where healthy people living alone, and the government blamed French Families for not taking care or elderly relatives.
Hulsman blames:
The sanctity of French summer Holidays (Lazy selfish people)
Worship of an unsustainable mode of living (not ecologically unsustainable, but unsustainable in terms of capitalist economics.)
Europe “rotting from within” with decadence.
People avoiding responsibility for their kin.
Growing older populations
People wanting too much from work.
His solution, is pretty obvious for a North American. Capitalism.
Lets not bother to look at whether the Capitalist system still works or not. Let’s not bother to ask whether something we like, or participate within, is a problem or not. Capitalism may be great for getting development going, but after its reached a point in which a very few of the people own nearly everything, and have bought the political system and taken it away from the people, is it still the solver of all problems? Or is it a generator of at least some significant problems? Is economic growth a solution or a problem? Not asking these questions is like avoiding American “political sclerosis.” It is violating the principle that “We are the risk”.
Let us assume he is correct and that capitalist markets in Europe are not allocating most people enough money for what they want to do, and that it will all crash down. Then how are you going to sell a project which means – YOU (other people) work harder, take home less pay, get less benefits, retire later, pay increased personal taxes if middle class, have pensions privatised and subject to risk and rip off, in return for an uncertain promise that allowing other people to earn more in half an hour than you do all year round, might fix the problem or might not. This sounds like a standard neoliberal solution in which austerity is for the poor and the middle classes. Indeed Austerity seems to be both the solution and the result.
The wider questions around Are we the problem?
Capitalism as a problem?
He may be correct that Euro-capitalism is dying, but is the only solution US style capitalism, which could also be said to be dying? Or could it be something new?
Do we need to abandon capitalism? I’m not suggesting we always do (although there are obvious problems with neoliberal capitalism and its theories which I’ve discussed elsewhere), but it needs to be examined if the Anglo-sphere is not just to rest on its claimed laurels.
Are people uninvolved because neoliberalism encourages a “selfish” individual focus?
Are people uninvolved because capitalism encourages obedience to bosses, and irrational managerial restructures in which no one affected is ever listened to?
Are people uninvolved, because all spiritual and psychological questions become reduced to purchases?
Are people uninvolved because capitalism reduces tradition to obstruction?
Are people uninvolved because capitalism:
has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade.
Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto
I don’t know, but they, and other questions, are questions worth asking.
We could also note that pro-corporate media is very keen on the idea that people who die of Covid, die with Covid, have existing conditions, or are old and useless and would die anyway. We repeatedly here how old people are a cost not a benefit, and so it is perhaps no wonder that people ignore the elderly and leave them to die. That they are solely a cost and burden, as they are retired, might even be an implicit message in his own arguments…
If people cannot labor, in relevant fields, or have no money to invest, do they have any value in capitalism?
That a form of capitalism worked well in the 60s to 70s in the Anglo-sphere to bring prosperity, social mobility, art, and education to all is not a guarantee that neoliberal capitalism will do the same, work now, or could not be modified with consultation. We could look at it as a potential cause of problems. Or do we have to protect capitalism from being considered even briefly a problem generator? There is plenty of degrowth economics around.
While it is cynical, we might find the answer to the question of why are these questions completely avoided in a chapter on not avoiding questions which implicate ourselves by reading the opening chapter and finding out that most political risk analysis is sold to corporations. Telling them capitalism might need to be changed is possibly limiting the market.
Climate
Lets look in a wider sphere, dragging in events or contexts he seems to be ignoring. Events only have meaning in context.
Can you publish a book on real political risk in 2018 without mentioning climate change and ecological decay. I don’t know yet, but I suspect you can. There is no entry for these problems in the index.
People did not normally die in late summer in Paris from heat. The contexts of events are changing. Climate change was already here in 2003. However at that time, probably no government or corporation on Earth recognised climate change as a current problem. There was little to no preparation for it. It was in the distant future, despite the warnings. So it is not surprising that few people were prepared. This was unusual. Nights in Paris are usually cool, but this time they were not. Houses did not cool over night.
Summer 2003 was the hottest in Europe since 1500, very likely due in part to anthropogenic climate change. The French experience confirms research establishing that heat waves are a major mortal risk, number one among so-called natural hazards in postindustrial societies. Yet France had no policy in place, as if dangerous climate were restricted to a distant or uncertain future of climate change, or to preindustrial countries.
Let us remember the Australian Governments some 15 years later and their complete lack of interest in climate change, and complete lack of preparedness for the “black summer” bushfires and the huge floods a few years later. It is much harder to excuse these pro-market people for their failure, than the French; especially after all the warnings and the wild events around the world. However, people like Bjorn Lomborg are still trying to argue that heat is not as deadly as a cold people will be unlikely to suffer in France; indeed that heat saves lives [1], [2].
Capitalism, and pro-capitalist governments, have not been good at dealing with climate change, although they have been good at denying climate change and resisting social change to deal with it. Given this, it seems even more odd to argue that capitalism is a solution for either the problems of climate change in France, or the long-term problems of the French Economy.
Conclusions
It is worthwhile looking at the failures of our own system, or the systems we like, and not to protect them from questions, when we are considering the future. “We, and what we like, are (part of) the risk“.
It is also useful to look at the contexts of those system we live within, such as the global ecology and the global climate. These are changing and will challenge established systems which grew up within different systems and developed different expectations as a result.
Something which once worked ‘well-enough,’ may now no longer work, because it operates differently dues to internal changes, or the context it is working within is now different.
In terms of climate politics we might need to look at how our attempts to initiate lower emissions, renewable energy, ecological care and so on, are maladaptive, remembering again that: “We, and what we like, are part of the risk to our own success and to our own future.”
First thing that has to be grasped. Fixed borders between countries seem to be a relatively recent development. In ‘olden days’ people would cross from one country, or duchy or whatever, to another as part of daily life, even when the law confined residence to a village. People on the border shifted around and generally ignored it. The borders where whatever could be held by the troops at the time – or when under challenge by other troops. The Roman and Chinese Empires did not have fixed borders as far as I can tell. Borders were fluid although often based on rough geographical features. Borders may be argued over, if they exist at all. In Hunter and Gatherer societies ‘borders’ are matters of respect, and occasionally of what you can defend – other people may wander into your territory all the time. Central sacred sites may be more important than the borders around. Lack of firm borders may not be a problem with the proper requests, or if you don’t meet each other. Borders may be marked by myths or pronounced geographical features. The land owns you, not vice versa.
In the modern world Borders can be so arbitrary they can even be lines on maps drawn on a latitude line, which is purely conceptual and does not correspond to any geographical, or mythical, features at all. These borders are not real other than in the sense that social conventions are real.
Even Islands like Australia do not have clear borders. We have had long term people movement and small trade between Australia, Indonesia, Papua Niugini and the Pacific Islands and this has not stopped, and will probably will not stop without local disruption. In the USA, large sectors of the economy seem to depend on fluid borders, and large parts of Mexico depend on income being sent home from the USA. Cutting that flow off completely may have unintended consequences for both countries.
Taking borders as real and fixed leads to problems, especially in the modern world which, whether we want it to be or not, is global. However, this does not mean that a country has no right to enforce its borders, just that this may be more complex and have more side effects than the people imposing those borders think.
Borders and Climate
Climate change is not local. It does not respect human borders. Our country’s pollution affects people as far away as India or Iceland. We are helping to cause temperatures to rise in Pakistan to 50 degrees C. (122 degrees F). Chinese decisions likewise affect us.
We need to not only work within our borders but across borders. If we make emissions worse, we make it worse for all, including ourselves. We are not safe from the emissions of the coal, gas and oil that we export when they are burnt in other countries – even if these emissions are not counted as being our emissions. Everything we do affects others and ourselves as we live on an interlinked Planet not just in a bordered country. What we do influences how others behave. If we set a bad example, then other people will excuse themselves as well, and that will affect us.
If governments do not understand this, then they have no hope of understanding climate change, or dealing with it.
Borders and Economy
We now live in a global economy. We probably have done so for a long time. However, it is now clear, that economic events in one country affect economic events in other countries. If Russia blocks exports of Ukrainian wheat, that affects the world. If banks in China collapse because of bad local loans, that affects the world. When financial companies in the US tried to defraud home loan owners in large enough quantities – that did affect the world. Money lost in one part of the world effects operations in other parts of the world. If companies go to where the labor is cheapest, and the pollution costs smallest, that affects everyone, and likely puts downward pressure on wages and environmental regulation in other places. If companies can find no tax zones that affects everyone, and lessens money for social spending. Economic crashes may not be confined within borders, especially when companies are not so confined. Inflation and depression are often cross-border events. Neither Biden nor Trump could keep inflation outside the borders of the USA.
Large corporations are commonly cross border institutions. They export something from one country and sell it in another. They make some parts in one country and use them in another. They may generally not be self-supporting in one country – they require many countries, and they ignore borders, except for the advantage that local regulation can give them. Exports and imports between countries can exist within the one company.
Companies have the wealth of small (and sometimes quite large) States, and push States around rather than vice versa. Corporations have the advantage of mobility, which States do not have. They can move from one place to another leaving destruction behind. Consequently, no country has complete control over its economy, and its economy depends on other economies. Economies do not respect borders. If you are going to understand and deal with economies you have to understand this.
Borders and the Military
Military threats also don’t respect borders. Never have. Civil wars are always destructive. It is now easy to smuggle incredibly destructive weapons into countries. The US is probably in as much, or more, danger from internal threats than from external threats. An Atom bomb set off by an internal terrorist is as physically dangerous as a bomb launched by a foreign power, and it is probably more psychologically dangerous. Putin’s Russia is facing a problem, not just because Ukraine is resisting far better than they expected, but also because the economy and resistance to the war is international, and does not respect the borders of the two warring countries. It is also forcing Russia to become dependent on China, and it seems unlikely the Chinese will be long term allies, or do not have some objective here that may not be in Russia’s interest. Ukraine used to be inside Russia’s borders, but it is not anymore. Powerful Russians seem to have thought Ukrainians thought of themselves as Russians, and as living within the Russian border, or within Russian influence, but it seems to have been wrong.
No country is immune to war because of its borders.
Borders and Fences
Borders are long and fragile. It is impossible to entirely fence off the USA from the rest of the world and stop people from crossing the fence, or to stop weather, ecology and climate from knocking the fence down. As plenty of other people have shown this is what has happened with Trump’s famous border wall/fence. It was easy to climb. It collapsed; blown over or swept away by rivers and floods. It stole private land. It was a waste of money and resources, and did not serve to protect the USA from climate problems, economic collapse, migration, or modern military challenges. At best it seems a distraction from the real problems…
Social Categories and Borders
It is generally assumed that social categories have firm borders, and people act as if this is correct, but it is often not correct. A few examples:
‘Racial’ categories, blend into each other. People breed with each other, sometimes by violence, but nevertheless they breed across cultural and racial groups People often seem to have ancestors from all over the world. People breed across borders and then inland from the borders, so the whole group is affected. It is unlikely that any country has ever been pure in ‘race’. Attempts to reinforce racial boundaries attack the reality of the mixtures.
Cultures borrow from each other, and separate from each other. They innovate and change – people are good at having new ideas. Attempts to reinforce cultural boundaries attack reality and creativity.
Class and caste borders are permeable – not only because we breed with each other, but because people do go up and down, people marry in – even in caste societies – wealth gets shared (although people can try and stop this). Attempts to reinforce class and caste borders attack reality and the distributions of talent and ability.
Male and female categories flow into each other, no matter how hard people try to police the boundaries, and punish ‘masculine’ women and ‘feminine’ men. Again, people have different abilities and it seems best if these competencies are recognised and allowed to flourish, so we can adapt to changes in reality.
More obviously, there is a tendency to treat people who identify with political parties, or positions, as if they are all the same, or at best, similar. Even a moments discussion should show people this is not true. Not all ‘right wingers’ think gays or lesbians should be exterminated or excluded. Not many ‘left wingers’ , think that people should be forced to be gay. Not all Conservatives are fans of free markets, or corporate power. Not all left wingers think capitalism and private property should be destroyed. The idea that people who support one thing, will support another is rarely correct. There is far more movement and room for alliance, than many influential people would be prepared to admit. The borders between parties are not as distant as is made out by people in power, and as was shown by the recent Australian election in which right wing candidates who firmly stated that they would promote action on climate change overthrew the established right wing who pretended that they were opposed to climate change. They attracted votes from all sides of politics (possible in the Australian voting system). The category borders appear to stop discussion, stop us from seeing what other people really think and stop the resolution of problems.
Borders
While they can be useful to mark differences, borders of all kinds are largely conceptual and conventional. They do not always solve real problems and may even make the problems worse. We need to avoid being distracted by them, or waste energy trying trying to enforce them, and reach across borders, to solve the world’s problems and to involve people in the process.
Every now and again I just try to give myself some summary of my understanding about complexity. This was originally written for the Anthropocene Transitions Project
Definition
A complex system is a system in which “nodes/beings” in the system alter their behaviour (automatically or consciously) is response to the activity of the rest of the system. All living systems are complex systems.
Interconnection – systems
Everything that exists is interactive, or inter-being.
All beings depend on other beings for their existence in complex webs of inter-connection.
Therefore human beings depend on Earth systems, ecologies and other humans.
Often nodes or beings in a complex system are composed of multiple complex systems – all the way down.
Minds
As nodes do not exist in themselves, minds are present in systems, not in individuals alone. There is no originary or individual consciousness.
Humans become intelligent through interaction with others, and through sharing and competing with others.
Culture is essential for intelligence, and seems to be born in dispute and instruction.
Minds are not always harmonious – they contain dispute and contradiction.
Human psychologies are complex systems. Our attempts to impose order on our minds, or suppress pain, can create a disruptive personal unconscious – which is probably similar to other people’s personal unconscious.
This is like a microcosm of human action in the world – attempts to impose order can create the very disorder we fear.
Flux
Every being is in flux or process. Nothing is static forever.
Small events can produce big changes at tipping points.
Systems tend to seek equilibrium, but equilibrium processes change over time, with changes in other systems, and accidents.
The system can depart from equilibrium fairly quickly. Sometimes the disruptions to equilibrium are the result of chance ‘external’ events, such as an intense fire, an introduced plant seed, or a meteor crash. Tipping points are not always identifiable in advance.
Change is not always a “linear” process. Because nothing much has apparently happened yet, does not mean we are not approaching a tipping point in which change radically accelerates.
Harmony?
While the system can be thought of as ‘one,’ it does not have to be harmonious.
Nodes can compete, destroy each other and have differing aims.
Systems do not have to ‘aim’ to benefit humans.
While it is common to talk of Complex Adaptive Systems, as they change and adapt to change; from a human point of view some systems can be considered maladaptive or destructive.
Many economic systems, for example, do not seem to be geared to human survival.
Human organisation and power relations, can distribute harms and risks as well as ‘goods.’
Evolution occurs because of failure, to reproduce identically, or to survive.
It is probably worthwhile to try and identify maladaptive systems, and see if they can be modified.
Boundaries are not always clear
Many categories are not sharp and firmly bounded.
Beings and their categories are interconnected.
Everything affects everything.
Categories overlap.
Hierarchies are not always mutually exclusive and may overlap. The ‘upper’ levels of a hierarchy may be heavily influenced by the ‘lower’ levels.
Humans are ‘conditioned’ by planetary, social and cultural functions – but they can also influence those conditions in certain circumstances.
It does not always appear easy, appropriate or entirely accurate to separate a system from its ‘environment’ for purposes of study. This is especially so, if we then proceed to try and render the environment inert or without ongoing interactive effect on the system.
But you have to simplify. We cannot include everything ever.
Uncertainty is normal
The only true models of complex systems are the systems themselves.
Humans cannot always make exact predictions of events, but they can predict trends.
Hence human actions will likely have unintended consequences. This is fundamental to understanding human interaction with reality.
That a system is unpredictable in detail does not mean it is purely random – there are constraints at any moment. However these constraints may not continue forever.
None of this means a system cannot be modelled usefully, just that the models will not be the system. “The Map is not the Territory.”
We can, for example, predict that some bad human behaviours will affect your life deleteriously, but not exactly how or when. We can predict that weather will get more and more unstable if humans keep releasing greenhouse gases in increasing quantities, but we still cannot exactly predict the weather on a certain day, in a certain place, in a year’s time.
Lack of perfect models does not allow us to assume that everything will remain the same, or not be maladaptive, as when people argue that because climate models may be inherently inaccurate, we should do nothing. Nothing changing for the worse is an even more dubious model.
Some problems with Complexity
This view of complexity undermines a morality which seeks its justification in predicted consequences.
It implies lack of perfect control or domination, and hence the possibility of existential crisis, if human progress and control is central to human life.
As unintended consequences are normal, we may need to look for them as part of the system. For example, Ruskin’s idea of ‘illth’ the harm produced by the production of riches, cannot be ignored if we want to understand economics.
It implies politics should be experimental rather than dogmatic. We should expect policies to need adjustment or abandonment. Failure can be a learning experience.
Dealing with complexity
Slow down.
Be receptive to what is.
Lessen demands on reality, that it should be a certain way. “It is what it is.”
Lessen requirements we be in control.
Learn to live and work with the flow.
Suspend attempts at total understanding, as all understanding is provisional.
Accept a level of ignorance and expect contradictions, they are informative.
Be prepared to ‘feel’ your way through. You may fail, but it may just help you get there.
Create redundancy rather than “just in time” mechanisms.
Try to recover that which you have made yourself unconscious of.
Allow yourself to become aware of possible unexpected consequences of your acts no matter how well intended they are.
This blog is written at a disadvantage, because I don’t have a full, or even a partially full transcript of the extremely long discussion between Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. I’m relying on media articles which may be inaccurate or deficient. As soon as I can listen to enough or get a full transcript then I will update.
The main point of this blog is that Peterson is correct in some ways, but he is trivially correct and does not apply his criticisms to everyone, including himself. He also understands some aspects of complex systems, but does not understand enough… neither do I, but that is a different issue.
Complexity 1: Models are complex and probably inadequate for exact prediction
Peterson claims that climate is so complex, it can’t be accurately modelled.
This is partially true. The distinction I have emphasised repeatedly is that we can often model trends, but we cannot predict particular events accurately in the future. This seems to be correct. Saying we cannot model everything with 100% accuracy is not the same as saying we cannot model anything, including trends, for climate at all.
As Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler and senior adviser at Nasa, says:
Peterson has managed to absorb the first part of George Box’s famous dictum that ‘all models are wrong’ but appears to have not worked out the second part ‘but some are useful’
Another problem that bedevils climate modelling, too, which is that as you stretch out the models across time, the errors increase radically. And so maybe you can predict out a week or three weeks or a month or a year, but the farther out you predict, the more your model is in error.
And that’s a huge problem when you’re trying to model over 100 years because the errors compound just like interest.
Another account says he said that errors “compound over time,” which means, apparently, the models are “all errors.” He argues that trying to predict what’s going to happen with the climate, is like trying to “predict how your life goes.”
Let’s be clear, that if you delete our ability to predict trends, then climate is unpredictable, just like your life. However, the fact that your life is unpredictable in specific, does not mean that you cannot predict useful things about your life, and plan to build a better life. Indeed Peterson writes books about this, so we can presume he believes this is possible.
If you spend your life shopping online rather than doing your work, you will not get better at work. If you keep moving from one article to another you probably won’t retain that much. If you eat too many foods full of sugar, all the time, you will probably put on weight. If you take cocaine frequently it will not help your health or your thinking. If you repeatedly step in front of speeding cars you will probably be injured. If you keep your room tidy you might eventually gain a tidier mind. These things may not happen with everyone, but we can see the trends and make predictions based on those trends. That is the basis of his psychological advice, and it is true with climate as well.
However, Peterson does not transfer his insights about human life into climate, or his insights into climate modelling into his own modelling.
Thus he does not say climate change is real, and we know what bad habits it is based upon and we can correct those habits. He does not say we don’t know exactly what speed climate change will come, or how bad it will be in 20 years, but it will probably be bad, and its worth trying to avoid.
He appears to assume that because climate modelling is not 100% accurate, the climate will stay stable, or not change too much. What is his modelling for that? Why should we assume that his modelling, which seems to be based on hope and the assumption that the future will match the past, is more accurate than the climate scientists models? I don’t know, and I suspect neither does he.
He is banking a lot on his ‘common sense,’ and his untested models, being accurate – which they won’t be as they face all the problems the scientists models face, and they are not being improved, or compared to the fullest data sets we have. His models are not even being compared to the results that say the hottest years and days ever recorded tend to accumulate in the last 20 or so years.
Errors can compound over time Peterson is correct. This is why scientists repeatedly reconfigure and improve their models, so that past data is better ‘predicted’ in retrospect and future data is more expected, and models checked when data isn’t as expected. If we were still using the climate models from the 1970s then they might be wrong, although some were pretty accurate. I quote the abstract of one article:
Models are compared to observations based on both the change in [global mean surface temperature] GMST over time and the change in GMST over the change in external forcing. The latter approach accounts for mismatches in model forcings, a potential source of error in model projections independent of the accuracy of model physics. We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model-projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account.
Scientific models are being tested and improved, and made more complex, all the time.
Likewise, he should know that bad habits, such as continually polluting and destroying ecologies in search of bigger profits will probably not build better ecologies in the long term, that this destruction will almost certainly weaken human society, and that these habits will likely weaken human virtue and morality, and possibly personal functionality.
So Peterson is not consistent. He varies his implicit arguments when it suits his desire to support the status quo.
Complexity 2: Categories overlap
Peterson apparently claims that climate and environment do not exist, because they mean ‘everything’.
Peterson gets confused because he likes sharp distinct categories, and the world is not always like that. Human categories are not always 100% accurate and, in reality, systems often overlap with each other.
PETERSON: Well, that’s because there’s no such thing as climate. Right? “Climate” and “everything” are the same word, and that’s what bothers me about the climate change types. It’s like, this is something that bothers me about it, technically. It’s like, climate is about everything. Okay. But your models aren’t based on everything. Your models are based on a set number of variables. So that means you’ve reduced the variables, which are everything, to that set. Well how did you decide which set of variables to include in the equation, if it’s about everything? That’s not just a criticism, that’s like, if it’s about everything, your models aren’t right. Because your models do not and cannot model everything.
ROGAN: What do you mean by everything?
PETERSON: That’s what people who talk about the climate apocalypse claim, in some sense. We have to change everything! It’s like, everything, eh? The same with the word environment. That word means so much that it doesn’t mean anything. … What’s the difference between the environment and everything? There’s no difference….
Let us be clear, a statement that implies the ideas of ‘climate’ connect to everything and the ideas of ‘environment’ connect to everything, is correct. However, none of his conclusions from this recognition are accurate, because he does not like that recognition, or shies away from it.
In reality, almost everything connects to everything. Jordon Peterson would not be online without the internet which involves the research of heaps of engineers and scientists, and continues because of maintenance people, and businesses, and people who build computers and cables, and the farmers who provide food for them, and the builders who provide buildings for them and their equipment, and the people who build roads the trucks can drive down, and drill the oil or build the electric engines. That all depends on the geological history of the planet, climate conditions and the weather that results, and that depends on the earth’s spin, densities of greenhouse gases, and cloud formations which depend on the sun and other things. The oxygen he breathes and the food he eats, depends on complex bio-systems and ecologies. His fame depends on a particular political patterning, which interacts with modes of celebrity and sales promotion and so on and so on. He presumably has learnt from books, and from other people. He shares an existing language with others. No one, and nothing, is an island of themselves. Everything depends on everything. It should be no surprise that from one point of view climate and environment involves everything. They are large scale contexts, and their background also forms a context – they are in two way interaction. For example, climate affects economic life, and economic life affects climate. Jordon may affect political life, and political life may affect his thought and popularity.
Models for anything are, as he states, based on a finite number of variables. They have to be. This is true of any understanding.
Absolutely accurate and all encompassing statements which are not definitional or trivial, are difficult and rare.
The intellectual models and understandings he promotes, by the same reasoning, are also incomplete. Does this mean they are worthless? Apparently not. They are apparently worth more than climate science. His skepticism is directed at statements he does not like, and is not directed to the statements he does like.
This also leads him to exaggeration. Most people don’t think we have to change everything to avoid ‘climate apocalypse’. Most people would insist that we need to stop changing the environment and the global ecology for one. Let us be clear these people may be wrong, but there is no evidence that people wanting to change everything are in the majority on the green side of politics. He is just panicking, because he appears to want nothing to change – and many things will change because of climate and ecological damage.
Conclusion to the first part
So. Peterson makes some valid statements, and uses them to come to invalid conclusions, probably brought about by his biases in favour of the current systems and its power domains.
Just in passing, Rogan appears to make a big fuss about how he wants to hear both sides. Climate denialism is pretty much the mainstream, as shown by lack of accurate reporting, lack of Government action and continuing support for fossil fuel companies. Has he ever had a climate scientist on his Show? Or is he part of the mainstream censorship apparatus?
The next blog will treat of Peterson’s reported comments on poverty, hierarchy and climate.
Firstly, there are lots of economic theories and practices guided by those theories- there is not just one economic theory, although people tend not to realise this. Some theories may be better than others. However, evaluating different theories is not the point of this post.
Nearly all economics faces some incredible difficulties.
Economics tends to be caught up in social values. After all, economic theory encourages behaviours, forms of organisation, government policies and aims for particular results. It is difficult to conduct social theory without importing values into it, and much harder to be objective about such issues, than it can be when studying physics for example. I suspect that values cannot be separated from what a person perceives to be reality, and what they ignore of reality. Values can prompt unreality, but we cannot not have values.
Values also get caught up in the dynamics of politics and power. The economic theories and practices which tend to be well known and used in a society will nearly always be those which support the wealth and power of the dominant groups in that society. Who else gets to promote theories and their proposers easily? Even if the theories were ok, they will be distorted by this practice, and become ideological tools to hide important processes, or to justify inequalities of power and opportunity. We could ask if some action is avoided because of economic damage, what kind of economic damage counts, whom does it primarily effect, and what might be a way of avoiding that damage?
As a result of these political processes, most current well known western economics, tends to assume that capitalism is an inherent given, rather than one mode of social organisation among many, even in capitalist societies. For example, people generally do not treat their children as only being cheap labor, or as a cost.
Societies and economic systems seem to be what people call “complex systems”. That means they are composed of ‘events’ which are influencing each other. A theory may have been a good theory, but after a while the practices associated with that theory change the system, so that the theory no longer works – sometimes people say that the system is ‘self-reflexive’. Complexity means that all knowledge is a simplification at best, and that the only accurate model of the system is the system itself, and that reality includes people working with the theories. [This does not mean models of complex systems are useless, they are the best we can do, but they are not completely accurate in their predictions, and this should always be remembered]. ‘Items and events’ within complex systems do not exist apart from those systems, or without being influenced by those systems.
Complex systems don’t have firm boundaries. Economics, in its current forms tends to forget that John Stuart Mill’s removal of social factors, culture, politics and psychology was only an attempt to simplify the system to make a start at analysing it. He did not, and economists should not, think that economics is independent of these factors. If you remove these factors then you are going to be erroneous.
These factors seem to be relevant for all kinds of social and political understanding. They are one reason it is difficult to engineer a ‘good society’, whether we try to do this by regulation or unregulated capitalism.
This does not mean it is impossible to get a better society, but we probably should remember:
Our values can distort what we perceive and what we do.
Models can have values and politics and self-benefit hidden within them.
Capitalism is not natural, inevitable or inherently good.
Complexity seems to be a fact of life. Uncertainty, degrees of ignorance, unintended conseuqences, and unpredictability are normal. Useful values and policies probably have to reflect this ‘fact’. Everything we do is experimental, not given as true in advance.
Different fields overlap. You cannot have a healthy non-ecological politics, or an economics which disregards power, the power of wealth, or the existence of varied modes of exchange.
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 