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Dadirri and complexity

February 1, 2021

This comes from the discussions in the ‘mythos’ group, and celebrates that thought.

I want to start by quoting Aboriginal Elder, Ngangikurungkurr woman, Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr.

The whole piece is short and can be found at:

https://www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/about-dadirri

Its a bit odd to speed it up, so please read the whole if you can. She writes:

What I want to talk about is another special quality of my people. I believe it is the most important. It is our most unique gift. It is perhaps the greatest gift we can give to our fellow Australians. In our language this quality is called dadirri. It is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness….

When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness. There is no need of words. A big part of dadirri is listening.

In our Aboriginal way, we learnt to listen from our earliest days. We could not live good and useful lives unless we listened. This was the normal way for us to learn – not by asking questions. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting. Our people have passed on this way of listening for over 40,000 years…

There is no need to reflect too much and to do a lot of thinking. It is just being aware.

My people are not threatened by silence. They are completely at home in it. They have lived for thousands of years with Nature’s quietness….

Our Aboriginal culture has taught us to be still and to wait. We do not try to hurry things up. We let them follow their natural course – like the seasons. We watch the moon in each of its phases. We wait for the rain to fill our rivers and water the thirsty earth…

We don’t like to hurry. There is nothing more important than what we are attending to. There is nothing more urgent that we must hurry away for.

I’ve also been reading Raimon Panikkar on receptivity. A similar point is being made. It is helpful to humans just to be open, to listen, to be aware of whatever is happening, with no rush to judgement, no interruption, no necessity to understand immediately. To refrain from our words, and our criticism of what is – even when what is, seems to someone else presenting what we think is a misunderstanding.

Dadirri, or receptivity, is just listening and being, not judging, not interrupting, not interfering, not even attempting control or to get a ‘good’ result.

It seems possible to suggest that this is the first call of complexity – when we realise the world is too complicated to fully grasp. Just to sit with it, and listen, without thinking we understand, or even trying to understand.

By this listening we allow the complexities to exist with us. If we are split, we allow our split without shutting it down for what we think is the best result. We accept any dark thoughts or fears that arise, without condemning them, and without obsessing over them. They are there, they are part of what is. Without judgement. We accept cheerful, good thoughts, without praising them and without obsessing over them, or trying to stop them from passing. They are all thoughts. We sit and listen. We accept the noise of cars and drills, and jackhammers. They are part of what is. They may not be the wind in the trees, or the calls of birds, but they too exist. We cannot separate from what is, however much we wish to. We cannot understand everything, however much we wish to. Some understanding will be symbolic, and need not to be foreclosed.

What we might call ‘bad’ is present and a judgement. What we might call ‘good’ is present and a judgement. Recognising either can be a mode of force, if we push one side and suppress awareness of the other. In Dadirri, we just be open and receptive to what is, and what flows, and what becomes. As the Elder states: “There is no need to reflect too much and to do a lot of thinking. It is just being aware.”

It seemed to me that many of our problems stem from a refusal to be receptive or to practice Dadirri. From a desire to separate from, or control, what appears to be the case.

In politics we rush to condemn, rush to argue, rush to self-defense and justification, before we have even heard what other people are saying. We perceive people as opponents rather than accept them as just being. We take them as bad, as harmful. Indeed we will probably rush to condemn our opponents for rushing to judge.

We don’t just sit together, listening and feeling and receptive, leaving aside desires for control or victory. Perhaps this seems impractical, but as long as it seems impractical, the longer we will refuse to try it out.

One person, I’m sorry but I forget who, recently asked something like; “What if the Australian prime minister just sat with Elders, rather than told them what his policies were, or told them what to think. Wouldn’t that really indicate a change and a new mode of being together?”

Another story I remember, which I may have got wrong, was that a mining company was talking to Aboriginal people about what the company offered, and they were getting more and more worked up as the Aboriginal people did not speak. Eventually one person said something like “How can we reply till we have properly heard what you say, and thought about it?” They might also have added “and heard what country has to say”. Maybe the latter is just romanticism, but that is the point – there is a lot to hear, to be open to. And this is so, nearly everywhere.

You can’t make urgent decisions urgently, without full listening to all beings involved, and the web of their interactions, as best you can. And that takes time, and lack of pressure, lack of push to conclusions. Life is complex. That is its nature and life needs attention, openness.

“There is nothing more important than what we are attending to. There is nothing more urgent that we must hurry away for.”

It also means that you may change your course, as more listening proceeds and you hear what was previously silent or ignored by accident.

It is not entirely silly to say that the uninvited, or the excluded, will come back strongly and unwelcomingly, unless we are ready for them, or welcome them in advance.

Sometimes, we may have to recognise that something is broken and cannot be fixed. We still have to be, and be receptive to that brokenness. We may never be able to ‘fix it’, but we still may have to live with it, and not always automatically force it together when it is unwilling or incapable.

Receptivity means being open to the possibility that events appear unpleasant. It does not mean denial of what is. We cannot fix things if we deny there is a problem, or if we fixate on what we think is the problem, or jump straight into what we think is the solution, rather than being open to the complexity of the problem and its branching out all over the place first.

This slips into caution about positive thinking. Positive denial, is simply denial of what is. This is a refusal to listen, a refusal to learn, a refusal to accept what was unintended, or to acknowledge the ignored that came back offended. It denies complexity and life.

Denial is not receptivity. Denial, as I understand, is not Dadirri. Useful positive thinking is listening, and assuming that something will arise that can be enough at this moment. It is assuming no difficulty is too great, although recognises it may be difficult the less we listen. Receptivity does not deny difficulty, it allows what is to be what it is, and for us to feel the way forward slowly and quietly, and be open to the responses that are engendered by what we do.

It allows complexity to be, and finds the best way through.

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Basic Complex Systems for eco-social analysis again

December 25, 2020

This is another go at formulating a list of basic systems which need to be considered for eco-social analysis. For earlier versions see here, here and here.

Introduction

As a guide to the factors involved in eco-social relations we can point to a number of different, but interacting systems. This list is not claiming to be complete, but it can be used as a set of reminders when we try to make analyses of our contemporary situation, and we may be able to make some general statements about how they interact. The order of relative importance of these systems is a matter for investigation, and the order of their presentation, in this blog post, is not a claim about their relative importance.

The seven main systems, discussed here, are

  • Political;
  • Economic (extraction);
  • Energy;
  • Waste, pollution and dispersal;
  • Information;
  • Technological;
  • Planetary Boundaries (geography) :

All these systems are complex systems, and it is generally impossible to predict their specific course. They are also prone to rapid change, gradual instability, and the ‘seeking’ of equilibrium.

Political System

The political system, includes:

  • the modes of struggle encouraged, discouraged, enabled or disabled,
  • the patterns and divisions (the ‘factioning’) within the State and wider society,
  • the differing effects of different bases of power: such as monetary power, communication power, power through violence or threat, hierarchical power, religious and cosmological power (the power to delimit the official views of the way that the cosmos works), organisational power, etc.,
  • who gets into positions of power and how, and so on,

Politics can affect all the other human systems. What activities (extraction, energy use, organisation etc.) are encouraged or discouraged, the kinds of regulation that apply, what counts as pollution or risk, what information is easily available, and who is to be trusted, and so on.

Political systems can forcibly ignore pollution or the consequences of energy production, economic extraction, the wage system, and so on, effectively rendering them part of a general unconscious, which eventually ‘bites back’.

Economic System

Most of the dominant economic systems currently in action can be described loosely as ‘capitalist’. The economic system involves modes of appropriation, extraction, property, commodification, exchange, circulation of ‘products’, technological systems, energy use, as well as accumulation of social power and wealth and so on. Most of which depend upon the State for their existence and reinforcement, although they may also challenge organisation and politics within the State. There is no inherent stability in current economic systems.

In many sociological theories the patterns of economic organisation and behaviour are known as the ‘infrastructure’ and are held to be determinate of most other social behaviours, primarily because the economic system seems the most obvious determinate of what people have to do in order to survive.

This organisation may have apparently unintended consequences, such as producing periodic crashes, or destroying the ecological base of the economy, and therefore threatening that organisation. They also may have quite expectable consequences, which are downplayed. In capitalism, political and economic patternings tend to be describable as ‘plutocratic’; as wealth allows the purchase of all other forms of power. However, different factions in the State can ally with different or competing factions in the economic system. For example, different government departments or political factions can support different types of energy: fossil fuels, renewables, or nuclear. The political system legitimates and enforces, allowable modes of extraction, property and pollution, and regulates economic behaviour among different social groups. Economics always involves political as well as economic struggle; politics is part of ‘the market’. ‘Crony Capitalism’ is normal capitalism.

Extraction

The Extraction system is part of the economic system, but it might be useful to separate it out from the economic system because extraction is one of the prime ways in which economies interact with ecologies and because different kinds of economies can use similar extraction systems. Extraction not only involves extraction of what gets defined as ‘resources’ (minerals, naturally occurring substances such as oil, coal or timber, and so on) but also the ways that human food gets extracted for consumption, via agriculture, gathering, hunting, industrial fishing, and so on. Ecologies are not passive, and they respond to human or other actions in ways which are often unpredictable in specific, but still disruptive. Ecologies seem to need attention, for survival to be possible in the long term.

Extraction in capitalist and developmentalist societies, often seems harmful to the functioning of ecologies, perhaps because of the need for continual growth, and thus a need for increasing extraction. Clearly, not all forms of extraction need to be destructive of the ecologies and geographies they depend upon. Extraction systems can allow the ecologies to repair after extraction, or attempt to rehabilitate the land. However, repair of ecologies can be considered an expense leading to reduction of profit, and hence is not attractive in a profit emphasising system.

As such, we can distinguish recoverable extraction, in which the ecologies and economies repair the damage from extraction, from irrecoverable extraction in which the ecologies and economies do not repair the damage from extraction within a useful time frame.

The Global Footprint network, suggests that:

Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.6 Earths to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and eight months to regenerate what we use in a year. 

Global Footprint network. Ecological Footprint

If this is correct, then the current extraction and pollution systems are generally irrecoverable, and deleterious for human and planetary survival. Investigating the differences between harmful and less harmful modes of extraction may well produce useful insights.

Economies are not the only possible harmful extractive systems – cosmologies can also require irrecoverable extractive behaviour to build temples, or to show the ‘other-worldly’ specialness of humans, and so on.

Energy System

All life and its resulting ecologies involve transformation of energy. These transformations stretch from transformation of sunlight by plants, the digestion of plants, to thermal gradients in the deep sea, to atomic power. Eco-systems require a system of energy release, energy generation and energy transformation.

Transformation of energy, together with effective ecological functioning, is necessary for any human actions to occur. The human energy system powers all other human systems. Because food is necessary for human labour, cultivation of food can be considered to be part of the energy system. The energy system and its ‘infrastructure’, could seem to be as important as the economic infrastructure.

The human energy system is organised, at least in part, by the political and economic systems, and by the environmental systems available. The environmental system includes possible energy sources from plant material, animal strength and docility, fossil fuels, sunlight, wind and moving water. Human labour, and its organisation, is (and has been) part of the energy system, and while not yet, if ever, superseded completely, can be supplemented and possibly overpowered by technological sources of energy. Coal and oil power, for example, provide masses amounts more directed energy than can human labour, and this ability is important to understanding the patterning and possibilities of the economic and extraction system, and its relationship to colonial/imperial history. Modern military expansion and colonialism, largely depends on this ability to apply large amounts of energy to weaponry, movement and organisation.

Important parts of the energy system include the amounts of energy generally available for use, and the capacity for energy to be directed and applied. Non-directable energy is often wasted energy (entropy), and usually unavailable for constructive use.

Another vital point is that human production of, or using of, energy takes energy. No energy is entirely free.

The availability of energy is influenced by the Energy Return on Energy Input (EREI) or ‘Energy Return on Energy Investment’. The larger amount of units of energy applied to gain a unit of humanly directable energy output, the less excess energy is available.

Fossil fuels have historically had a very high EREI, but it is possible that this is declining otherwise nobody would be tempted by fracking, coal seam gas, tar sands, or deep sea drilling. All of which require large amounts of energy to begin with, have very high risks of extractive destruction, and fairly low profit margins when compared to the dangers.

Renewables and storage currently have a high energy cost to manufacture (and possibly a high extractive cost as well) but for most renewables, after they are installed, the EREI changes, as very little labour, or energy expenditure, is required to gain an energy output – it is more or less free – whereas fossil fuel energy generation requires continual energy use to find and process new fossil fuels and keep the power stations turning, and produce continual pollution from burning.

Social power and economics may affect the ways that energy is distributed, what uses are considered legitimate and so on. However, the energy system also influences what can be done in other systems, and in the costs (social, aesthetic, ecological or monetary) which influence choices about the constituents of energy systems The system’s pollution products, which may be significant factors in producing climate and ecological change, may eventually limit what can be done.

As the energy system determines what energy is available for use, it is not an unreasonable assumption that social power and organisation will be partly built around the energy system, and that changes in energy systems will change energy availability, what can be done or who can do it, and thus threaten established social orders. Threats to established orders will be resisted. If an energy transition does go ahead, it is likely that the established orders will try and preserve the patterns, of organisation, wealth and social power which have grown up under the old system.

One important question is ‘how do we transform the energy system without continuing a damaging extraction and pollution system?’

Waste, Pollution and Dispersal systems

Transformation of materials through energy use, or through energy production, produces ‘waste’. The simplest human society imaginable (and this is an overt simplification), turns edible material into energy and human excreta, which in this case can usually be processed by the ecology – although, even then, dumping excreta into rivers may not help those downstream.

Understanding the Waste, Pollution and Dispersal systems is also vital to understanding possible energy and economic transformations.

In this book we will define ‘Waste‘ as material which can be re-processed, or recycled, by the economy or eco-system, and ‘Pollution‘ as material which is not re-processable within an arbitrary useful time frame, say over hundreds of years or more. ‘Dispersal’ occurs when some essential material is dispersed into the system, and becomes largely unavailable for reuse without ‘uneconomic’ expenditures of finance or energy – as occurs with helium and phosphorus.

When too much waste for the systems to re-process is emitted, then waste becomes pollution. This is what has happened with CO2. CO2 is normally harmless, even required for the system to work, but too much CO2 changes the ways eco and climate systems work. CO2 has also been dispersed into the atmosphere which makes CO2 extraction, which is stated to be essential by the IPCC and IEA for climate stability, difficult and costly in terms of energy expenditure.

These concepts, along with ‘extraction’, directly import the ecosystem into the economy, while pointing out that what counts as allowable waste, pollution or dispersal can change, economically, politically, scientifically and ‘practically’.

Waste, pollution and dispersal from the energy system and from modes of extraction, enter into the political system because that system decides and regulates what can be emitted, and where, and who is too valuable to be poisoned by the pollution. The political makes the laws allowing, diminishing or preventing, pollution. Often localisable pollution is dumped in ‘wasted’ zones or on poorer, less noticeable and less powerful people.

Energy and extraction may not the only significant sources of pollution, and other sources of pollution need to be curtailed, or turned into sources of waste.

Information about pollution from the fossil fuel energy system and from the extraction systems, provide a major driver for energy transformation, partly because this issue seems ‘economically’ politically and energetically solvable, while other sources of pollution seem more difficult to deal with.

However, even facing the problem, provokes a likely politicisation of the information system. How would people, in general, become aware of pollution and who primarily suffers from its effects, especially when it threatens established systems of power?

Information System

What people become aware of, what can be understood or done depends on the Information System. This system determines what feedback is available to conscious humans, about what is happening in general. The information system, in theory, could allow humans to recognise eco-feedback in response to systems such as waste and pollution, or extraction. Information is vital to social functioning, and part of social functioning. Accurate information is even more useful.

Unfortunately, information about complex systems, such as societies or ecologies, is almost always limited and inadequate. Some information may tend to be symbolised rather than literal, because of the difficulties of representing the information in a literal form (these difficulties can be political as much as in terms of human capacity).

Information systems can also hide, or distort, ecological feedback, because of flaws in their design, or because powerful people do not want it to bring the problems to general attention. This adds to confusion, and to the possibilities, that the information system primarily reflects human psychological projection, fantasy and shadow politics.

The political and economic systems also directly impact on the information systems, as politics often centres on propagation of politically or economically favourable information and the inhibition of politically unfavourable or economically information. Economic power, ownership and control of sources of information can also influence what information is collected, processed and made widely available.

Information is not so much ‘received’ as interpreted, so Cosmologies and politics which provide a framework for interpretation, play a big part in how the information is interpreted and, then, what kind of information is transmitted.

Government, Religious, Economic, or military (etc) regulation can be a further important part of both the information and political systems, sometimes affecting what is likely to be transmitted. Information systems, in turn, indicate the availability or coherence of regulation and the understanding of problems and predicaments. Regulation is based on information selection as well as political allegiance, and regulations can be opaque, or hidden, as well as easily decodable. For example, until recently it seemed very difficult to find out what the NSW governments regulations for Renewable Energy Zones, meant in terms of business, building, or connection to the wider system.

The information system does not have to be coherent, thus we can be both informed and disinformed of the progress of climate change and energy transformation by the system. Certain groups are more likely to be informed than others, even though everyone tends to frame themselves as being well informed – especially in an ‘information society’ when being well informed is a matter of status. Information does not have to be accurate to have an effect, it is also part of socially constructed propaganda – as we can see with climate and covid denial, and this can influence political process, victories and inaction.

In summary, most information distortion comes from: economic functions such as business hype, secrecy and deception; from organisational functions such as hierarchy, silo-isation, lack of connection and channels; from politics where information is distorted for strategic advantage; and from the complexity of the systems that the information tries to describe and the inadequacy of the language or approach being used.

Technological Systems

Technological systems enable the kind of energy use, direction and availability, a society can have, the kinds of extraction it can engage in, the range at which political and economic systems can have an effect, the modes of transmission of information, and the types of waste pollution and dispersion which are likely to happen. Technologies also necessarily use properties of the environment and ecologies around them in order to work, and thus interact with those environments and again cause unintended consequences.

People use technology to extend their power over others, extend their capacity, escape regulation, or render previous technologies less dominant, and hence technologies tend to be caught in struggles between groups, thus provoking unintended social consequences.

We could hypothesise that technologies, as used under capitalism (and perhaps elsewhere), tend to extract people out of their environment, and break the intimacy between humans and ecology, or shift human perception onto the technology rather than the world, therefore making it easier to regularly engage in processes of destruction.

In the contemporary world, technologies become objects of fantasy, and metaphors by which we think about the cosmos in general. For example the clockwork universe is now almost replaced by the information processing universe.

Planetary systems and boundaries

Finally we have planetary boundaries. The planetary boundaries are ways of conceiving the limits and constitution of ecosystems, and are, as such, fairly abstract. These boundaries represent systems necessary for human and planetary functioning.

They do not necessarily form the one system, and can be separated out for purposes of analysis. They act as guidelines, and probable reactive limits which are essential for the consideration of ‘eco-social’ relations, and the likely long term success of those relations. Measuring the boundaries may have a wide margin of error, as due to the complexity of these systems and their interactions. We will not know for sure when they will collapse until they do, and once they start collapsing they will affect the resilience of other boundaries. So the known limits on the boundaries will change as we take more notice of them, and keep challenging them.

Exceeding the boundaries almost certainly leads to the rundown, or breakdown, of ecological functioning, and this breakdown then adds difficulties to maintaining other systems. If they are maintained ‘artificially’ then this requires extra energy expenditure, and may have further consequences. Kate Raworth’s ‘donut economics’ presents a quick and easy way of conceiving functional economies in terms of ecological boundaries and human betterment [1], [2], [3].

Any global system which does not preserve or reinforce planetary systems will probably give impetus to global ecological collapse.

The systems are usually listed as involving: climatic stability, biospheric integrity (distribution and interaction between lifeforms, balance between species, rates of extinction etc), water flows and cycles (availability of drinkable, non-poisonous water, and water for general ecological functioning), biochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles, dispersal of valuable materials which literally form the ‘metabolic rift’, etc), ocean acidity or alkalinity (which affects the life of coral reefs, plankton and so on), levels of particulates or micro-particulates (which poison life forms), ozone levels, and the introduction of novel entities into the global ecology and their unknown systemic consequences (new chemicals, plastics, microplastics etc.). [4]

It is the functioning and disruption of these boundary systems which make processes of pollution and extraction problematic. Thus they impact directly on society, and appear to limit the kinds of economic growth, extraction, energy and technological systems that can be deployed safely.

Capitalism and developmentalism tend to recognise boundaries only to ignore them, and claim that ingenuity and willpower, will overcome those boundaries forever without limit.

Geographic Systems

Then we have Geographic systems as a subset of planetary boundaries. Geography affects the layout of energy systems, the potential reach of political and economic systems, the ‘natural’ flow of air and water, changes in temperature, the availability of sunlight, and the kinds of extractions which are ‘economic’ or economic in the short term, but deleterious in the long term. Geography is relational, giving layout in space between spaces and constructions. Geography shapes and is shaped by politics, social activity, economics, pollution and so on.

Mountain ranges, forests, plains etc may affect the layout of Renewable Energy, or the RE may affect the land, if trees are felled, fields converted etc. Wind may be severe, putting a limit on size of turbines, or the angles of solar panels. Winter darkness, or heavy seasonal rain can affect the possibilities of solar power.

Geography constitutes the human sense of home, and transformation of geography or relations of geography can produce a sense of ‘unhoming’, or dislocation in place and in the future of place.

Conclusion and Provisional Advice

Recognition of the interactions of these systems, with their differing but interacting imperatives, seems vital to getting a whole and accurate picture of the problems and opportunities presented by energy transition.

All the systems that have been discussed here, are complex systems. They are composed of ‘nodes’ which modify themselves or change their responses in response to changes in the ‘system as a whole.’ The systems are unpredictable in specific. The further into the future that we imagine, the less likely our predictions are to be specifically accurate. We can, for example, predict that weather will get more tumultuous in general as we keep destroying the ecology, but we cannot predict the exact weather at any distance. Complex systems produce surprise and actions often have unexpected consequences. If we seek to apply a policy, we cannot expect it to work exactly as we think it should. For example, the political move to make ‘markets,’ the most important institution, did not deliver either efficiency or liberty, as was expected, almost the opposite in fact. In all cases of actions within complex systems we should seek for unintended consequences. Sometimes the only realistic way to approach unintended consequences is to realise that our theory could not predict those events, and without looking we might never even have seen the events, or realised their connection to what we did. Working in complex systems, all politics becomes experimental.

While complex systems adapt or seek balance, they do not have to arrive at the best conditions for human beings. From a human point of view, they can be maladaptive. For example, a social system can be maladaptive and destructive of our means of living. The ecology could arrive at a balance within which many humans could not live.

People involved in promoting Energy Transformation have to deal with the various complex systems we have discussed above. The complexity does not mean we cannot make any predictions, although we need to treat them cautiously.

  • People engaged in transition have to consider the effects of the political systems involved, and be aware that politics influences what is likely to be possible. A transition may be delayed by political action, and political patterning, no matter how sensible or affordable the transition is.
  • The Economic system will be entangled in the political system, and those who dominate the economic system will have disproportionate input into the political system, and this can cause problems. This recognition reinstates the economic process as both a political and a business process.
  • A transition has to fit in with existing economic patterns, or its supporters may have to be prepared to change those patterns.
  • Patterns of extraction, pollution and dispersal have to be less harmful than previous patterns or the harm will be continued, even if in a different manner.
  • Changing the energy system is a political problem, and may require a change in the economic system as well as in power relations.
  • We need to have the available energy to build the transformed system. As we are supposedly aiming to replace the existing harmful system without lowering the energy availability, this may prove difficult. Where does the energy come from to build the new system if not from the old? And we need to demolish the old system, because of its dangers.
  • We need to avoid using renewables to simply add to energy availability, without reducing energy from fossil fuels.
  • The new system and the path of transformation, has to reduce pollution and extraction damage, or ecological and climate crises will continue, and planetary boundaries will be given no chance to recover. A transition plan which does not consider this problem is probably futile.
  • Considering these problems may lead to conclusions about the necessity of some kind of degrowth.
  • Transition plans should consider diminishing the dispersal of rare and valuable materials. More of what is currently pollution and dispersal has to be transformed to waste, in amounts the systems can process.
  • The current information system does not seem to be functioning in favour of the transition. It seems highly politicised and does not report ecological feedback accurately, either denying crisis, or delaying the supposed arrival of crisis.
  • Our current information system is largely owned and controlled by the neoliberal fossil fuel based establishment, which is defending its power, wealth and ways of living in the world. Without an independent information system, it will be impossible to win the political struggle. At the same time accurate information will be attacked and dismissed as political.
  • Likewise, many people will see accurate information as political, because it potentially disrupts their way of living, or because of interpretation and projection issues.
  • At the least, people engaged in energy transformation have to be aware of the nature of complex systems and the normal arising of unintended and unexpected consequences. We need an information system that allows us to perceive such consequences, without attacking the transformation as a whole.
  • Geography will affect the layout and possibilities of the transition. Renewables appear to require far more land than fossil fuels per unit of energy although fracking and coal seam gas seem to require similar amounts of land and do far more permanent damage to that land.
  • Renewables should probably never be installed through deforestation.
  • Renewables should not monopolise agricultural land. They should co-exist with previous land use, or help rehabilitate the land.
  • We should note the capacity of any new form of energy generation, or large scale technology, to ‘unhome’ people. Fossil fuels are especially bad at this, and often also poisonous, but the information systems tend to find this easier to ignore.
  • The energy transformation should aim to avoid disrupting the planetary boundary systems as much as possible. They should be installed with the longer term target of restoring those systems.
  • Pointing to the range of boundaries will possibly remind people that climate change is not the only problem we face, and it should be clear that no energy, or social, system is going to survive if it violates these boundaries in the long term.

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Is coronavirus engineered? The case for Intelligent Design

December 3, 2020

Paranoid time.

Points in favour of design:

1) Conoravirus is amazingly contagious.

2) Most people who get coronovirus will not have symptoms but they will spread the disease, increasing the infection rate by stealth – other people will not engage in protective behaviour around supposedly healthy people, and supposedly healthy people will be less likely to protect others from their unknown sickness.

3) Minor quarantine/hygene efforts can slow the apparent infection rate down, while the disease keeps spreading secretly. Then the bang hits.

4) Coronavirus looks like flu, heart attack, stroke, lung embolism, lung failure, liver failure and so on.

5) Coronavirus looks like other diseases, because it often damages the organs it lodges in – it appears to stop cells from doing what the cells are supposed to do.

6) Therefore it is really easy to mistake Covid-19 for something else.

7) If you are not looking for it, then deaths will often just be recorded as something normal, and the disease will keep spreading.

8) It would be normal to undercount the fatalities from Covid-19 for a long time, until someone wonders why so many different illnesses are off the charts. Then people might start looking for a common cause. They might not see it until too late.

9) Some people, getting organ or muscle damage, get what is now known as ‘long coronavirus’ – the disease effects last for months after they are supposedly healed. They consume medical and social resources long after they have supposedly recovered, which lowers resources for other people. We as yet do not know the average length of long coronavirus.

10) There is dispute about how long immunity lasts, however, it does seem pretty likely that some people who healed have got it again, thus becoming new sources of vulnerability.

11) This possible lack of long term immunity, may undermine vaccination efforts.

12) Anyone who now tells you Covid-19 is flu, or like a flu, is misinformed or lying. They may even be part of the war team – assuming it exists. After all the war team would want to downplay the severity of the disease, and persuade others it was not dangerous, so as to maintain its spread.

13) The death rate is quite high; not so high that its immediately noticeable, and so again deaths will appear minor until they start accelerating by the normal processes of exponential contagion. Deaths seem to have started to accelerate badly in the US since October.

14) Some of the acceleration has occurred because the President and his supporters have consistently played down the danger, and played at being positive (engaging in hype) – because that’s how business works. At the moment, the President is preoccupied with casting doubt on the election result (as he promised he would, if he didn’t win), the disease has even less organisation acting against it, at a time in which many US citizens have family celebrations and effectively will spread the disease. His most recent comment, which shows his focus:

The Democrats had this election rigged from the beginning. They used the pandemic, sometimes referred to as the China virus; where it originated; as an excuse to mail out tens of millions of ballots, which ultimately led to a big part of the fraud.

Speech: Donald Trump Makes an Unscheduled Pre-Recorded Speech on the Election – December 2, 2020

Or, trying to keep people safe is part of a plot, and:

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump·

European Countries are sadly getting clobbered by the China Virus. The Fake News does not like reporting this!

twitter

Obviously he does not read any decent news and I guess that is possible in the US, but given it is ‘clobbering’ Europe, which it is, then the virus is not fake news itself. It is not a hoax, or something which should be ignored…. None of this helps people survive.

15) Further, many states want to keep the labour and the profits going, and neoliberalism is about sacrificing people for profit, so if people die for the economy that is ok.

16) We could suggest that the more unequal and authoritarian the State, the more likely it will fail to deal with the problem, as the elites think they can escape – until they realise otherwise.

Other remarks

The disease seems to have been around in Europe since at least November last year (2019). There is a suggestion it was in Italy as early as September 2019, but this is not confirmed.

The first time it was identified as a new disease was in China in December 2019. The first case confirmed in Australia was announced on 25 January 2020. The first US cases confirmed on 21st January.

Let us be clear without the Chinese efforts to identify the disease, and let people know (however slowly, although a month or so for a new disease is not slow), the world would be in a much worse situation than it is. The disease could have spread with little check. There would likely be no relatively safe spots anywhere.

Real explanations?

So given it is the kind of disease we may not have noticed until the deaths were so high that societies could not function, is Covid-19 engineered?

The US informally accuses China. China accuses the US, as do Iran and Russia.

There are problems with this hypothesis. Firstly, any sensible person should have realised that with the amount of global air traffic we had pre-covid, that any camouflaged disease would be worldwide in a month at the most, and coming back into their own country very quickly. So they would need vaccines before launching it – and even then that might not be enough. They might of course think God, or destiny, was on their side and therefore be committing unintentional suicide.

Any sensible regime would not engineer bioweapons in the first place. And particularly would not engineer something potentially uncontainable like Covid-19.

Having said that, there are a few non-sensible regimes in the World. Trump’s US for example. But there are other places which you can probably guess for yourselves. Some of which claim remarkably low infection rates. I don’t think China is likely to have done a deliberate release, because why tell everyone else?

The other possibility is that the disease escaped before protection was ready. This could have happened anywhere, but again we are assuming people would have generated a bio-weapon which could wipe themselves out. I don’t see any sensible State doing that either.

The final and most plausible possibility, is that viral evolution now functions amidst human protective regimes, and that diseases will evolve to spread despite those regimes – or even through those regimes.

Global interconnection acts to spread (and incubate) diseases very quickly after they have hit people who travel.

Given the contemporary ecology of human prevention, it was probably only a matter of time before something like Covid-19 developed to look like intelligent design, through the processes of interaction, random mutation, survival and replication.

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Covid and Complexity 2

July 26, 2020

From my amateur alchemical/medical historian point of view there are some obvious human ‘knowledge disruptors’, that can lead to problems with medicine, which may need to be rendered explicit. These are:

1) Tradition and authority
2) Reaction
3) Misguided Logic
4) Anecdote and self-confirmation
5) Self-interest
6) Ethical staunchness

There may well be further obvious knowledge disruptors; this is not an attempt to limit them.

Nearly all medical problems are intensified, through the interaction of these human knowledge disruptors with biological complexity. However, these disruptors are not just present in medicine, they are likely to generate problems in people’s attempts to deal with complex systems of all types.

Furthermore, these knowledge disruptors all tend to be boosted when there are social groups, or social conflicts, involved.

If other people agree with you, praise the genius of those who agree with you, praise the ethical rightness of agreement, or condemn those who disagree with you as stupid or immoral, then that reinforces the knowledge disruption. As I have said many times before: for most of us, in most situations, knowledge is socially verified. Thinking we are independent, probably means we think similarly to those we classify as fellow independents.

1) Tradition and Authority.

This disruptor usually takes the forms of: “We have always treated the disease this way, and this way alone,” or “Galen, or Paracelsus, or Steiner or ‘some other important figure’ say we should treat this disease or this problem this way, and this way alone” or “We have always lived this way and it was really successful, so we should continue to live this way”. “Those other people who disagree with tradition and authority are traitors, and are at best misguided.” “Altering our treatments and behaviour would be immoral.”

There are several problems with these claims and procedures.

The first set of problems is that the tradition or authority may:

  • a) never have worked in the first place,
  • b) never worked without problems,
  • c) the makers of tradition came to their decisions by applying some of the other knowledge disruptors, or
  • d) have been enforced by violence, not through effectiveness.

For example the makers of tradition may have argued “Galen used treatment X on a person and they recovered” (Anecdote). Or people may have applied the logic that people with damp conditions should be treated by warmth (possibly Misguided Logic), or asserted that “Paracelsus used the elixir of Gold, which I can sell to you, to cure this disease” (Self-interest). Or they might argue: “Treatment X is traditional and anti-socialist, therefore it will work better than something that looks like socialist medicine” (Reaction and Ethical Staunchness). Ethical Staunchness is also likely to lead to enforcement by violence, in the same kind of ways the religion of love led to the inquisition: it’s how you save people.

The Second set of problems centres on the issue that we have a finite number of descriptive terms which can be applied to any disease. The description may ignore other important factors, which given that bodies have a huge range of possible responses, can render the normal treatment valueless in this case, or in this series of cases.

For example a disease may generate the sense of heat and damp, with a rash. It may be important as to whether the rash is red, pink, brown, mottled etc. Is the patient thirsty or dry? Given the limited vocabulary, diseases can resemble each other in the ways we describe them and yet be completely different in cause, prognosis and required treatment. Diseases are changing all the time, and new diseases appear. So a treatment which traditionally works for this apparent disease (as we describe it), may not work on the disease actually being faced.

Even if we diagnose a person by the presence of a ‘virus’ or bacteria within them then, as we can see from Covid-19, it may have radically different effects depending on its interaction with the system: random variation, the patient’s constitution, age, other diseases or poisonings present, etc… and thus require different treatments.

Even if the ‘same’ disease could be treated by herb X or antibiotic Y one hundred years ago with huge success, the disease may now have evolved to an existence in which those treatments no longer work. Or the medicines may interact, combine, or compound with new background chemicals in different ways and no longer help – the medicines may even harm people nowadays in ways they did not originally. The herbs themselves may have changed, or it may have been a variety of herb grown in a particular field with a particular chemical composition, that was actually effective, and that is not where the practitioner is getting the herbs from, as that variation was unknown.

It is also possible that part of the traditional treatment has been lost, because it was verbal, or imitative, and all we have of the tradition is the bit that seems (logically) plausible.

In summary. Tradition and Authority can be wrong, diseases and situations may change, may look the same but be different, and the items used in the treatment etc can change over time as well. Fear of violence, or being morally wrong (and or being punished for this), can lead to a lack of attention to the actual problems.

When tradition and authority succeeds, it is because the traditions have been useful in the past, and the past is similar enough to the present for them to be effective. The question is always, whether the situation is still the same as it was in the past, or whether the traditional ways of behaving have now created a problem, which further application of those ways of behaving cannot solve.

2) Reaction

This occurs when a group of people don’t like one or other tradition for whatever reason, so they avoid its treatments, even when the treatments seem to work, or when the practitioners take on board their criticism and improve.

Usually if people are in reaction they campaign forcibly to destroy the tradition or people’s use of that tradition, they do not believe it can work or be improved. Potential useful knowledge is lost- the classic baby thrown out with the bathwater situation.

Reaction can be useful if the previous, or other, system has failed. But that attacked system may have advantages which are in danger of being ignored. It is not uncommon for a system to modify itself in reaction to the challenge from another system, then defeat the other system and when that system is gone enforce the old destructive ways more thoroughly.

3) Misguided Logic

This is probably one of the most common ways of getting things wrong. ‘Logic’ is only as good as its assumptions and procedures, and few sets of assumptions and procedures are going to be able to completely deal with, and predict, a complex universe. The Logic and procedures may be faulty as well, but they backs up important assumptions made by the group.

We can see this when people make such arguments as that fatty arteries are found in people with heart problems, therefore no fats must be eaten. However, some fats need to be eaten, as they are essential for human biological functioning, so the procedure based on this fault logic may have bad health effects. Other people might argue that as some fats are useful, humans should eat almost nothing but fat etc. But what if some ‘types’ of people should eat more fat and others less fat, or different people should eat different types of fat. The issue needs ongoing investigation, not to be settled by tradition, logic, anecdote or self-confirmation.

When Donald Trump advised his medical teams to study the effects of injecting disinfectants and using light to fight Covid, he was engaging in apparently misguided logic of the form: “Disinfectants and light may kill the virus, therefore they might kill the virus inside the body.” The problem was that taking disinfectants internally might also be injurious, or even lethal, and many people expected the President to be aware of this, and not make the suggestion in public where it might lead some people to try it out without medical supervision (because of the authority of the President, who is a self-confessed super-genius).

Group logic tends to ignore the variety and complexity of life, the things we don’t know, or don’t value, and the side-effects of treatments. As well, because it is persuasive, the logic may not be tested. If the patient dies from applying the logic, the problem is said to arise from the patient (Self-confirmation). Perhaps the patient did not follow the instructions properly? Perhaps the logic was applied too late? Perhaps it is just one of those things, as the procedure normally works? May be there was a mistake in this situation, but it is generally effective? Much back surgery seems a great example of “follow the logic” going wrong, and the apparently large lack of success has been ignored.

Another logic error, takes the form of “if small amounts of something is good, then large amounts of it are even better”. People might argue that small amounts of substance B, have beneficial, even necessary, properties, so we should take large amounts of substance B, when it could actually be poisonous over a certain level. We can see this most obviously in climate denial were people can argue that larger amounts of CO2 will simply propel plant growth and not cause any problems at all. The logic does not recognise the change of state that can be induced by too much of something which is generally necessary.

In summary, the effectiveness of logic and theory is always limited in a complex universe. A deduction from the theory may be wrong in a specific situation, no matter how persuasive it is. Theory and logic has to be tested repeatedly, and data gathered which shows how effective the deductions are (and whether things have changed). That means someone needs to actively try and disprove the logic, as humans will tend towards self-confirmation, no matter how badly the deductions deliver.

4) Anecdote and self confirmation.

The George Carlin video, in the version discussed earlier, is a great example of this. He says he swam in raw sewage as a kid (or had exposure to ‘germs’ and pollution) and has always been healthy, and that no one in his locale had polio. We may know he did not get polio, but we only have the word of himself, a person who was not studying polio in his area, as to the lack of polio in his area, and we have no study of the connection between the exposure to germs and pollution in the Hudson sewage and the lack of polio that he claims was general. It is also not impossible there may have been a substance in the river which killed polio, while not affecting other diseases, so the success had nothing to do with the factors claimed.

We also don’t know whether people died of other things that we could attribute to such exposure, but which were so normal that they were ignored. We don’t know whether all his friends had life-long health from the same source, or whether some of them where sickly, or died in their thirties as a consequence.

Carlin has not looked for evidence that is not confirming, probably because he is in self-confirmation mode – and possibly because he made money telling his audiences what they want to hear. (“Disease is not threatening, you can get over it by being tough. Pandemics are never a problem for tough people as its only weak people who die. You do not have any responsibility to others, as that inhibits your ‘tough liberty.'”)

He might just be a naturally healthy and robust person. This fact is, in itself, interesting, but it may mean that his discussion of what keeps a person healthy is completely without generalisable value. Perhaps a person who is born robust enough can do things that would normally hurt other people, without any ill effect? We probably all know people who live in ways which would harm us, but which does not effect them that badly.

Self confirmation usually leads to people ignoring evidence which goes against their anecdotes or logics. If you have a group of people with the same biases, then self-confirmation is reinforced by the confirmation of trustworthy others in your group who are your compatriots and friends. And if people outside your group say you are wrong, they are ‘obviously’ untrustworthy and likely to be trying to deceive you. You keep your belief to avoid losing status in your group, or being exiled for heresy

Anecdote can open up interesting discussions, and it may be the only way to proceed at the beginning of a study, it may even be correct, but it is not compelling evidence, because it usually focuses on a limited number of cases, in a complex world of difference.

5) Self Interest

This may occur when the practitioner makes a living out of selling treatment. If you have a system, and someone comes to you, then you are likely use it, rather than wonder if another system might be better in this case. If a practitioner sells medicines, surgery, treatment, health planning etc, then they will try to sell these to their patients, to keep their livelihood. They may be tempted to sell the most expensive and glamorous treatment – because glamour confirms anecdote and gives authority, and because the practitioner might make more money out of it. They may over-prescribe. They may perform recondite surgery because they can and they can charge for it, and so on. Again, if others you admire do similar things then it reinforces the practice.

If a practitioner depends on selling treatment for their livelihood, they have even less incentive to test the treatments in the short term, and more likelihood of self-confirmation, following the authority which pronounces this a good treatment, using misguided logics to justify the treatment, and ignoring counter evidence. This does not mean all practitioners are corrupt by any means, but that many practitioners have an incentive to give unnecessary treatment – which may prove harmful.

Likewise if a researcher receives funding from a body which has a commercial interest in a product or treatment, then they are more likely to keep their funding by praising the product or confusing objections to the product. The purchaser of research may also suppress negative results and keep the positive results, because the negative results must be wrong, and its easier to see why they could be wrong. It does seem to be that Pharmaceutical Company research needs to be independently checked, rather than simply accepted.

6) Ethical Staunchness

Ethical staunchness comes about when a theory becomes identified with an ethical position which is taken to be fundamental. Change in the situation is irrelevant. Modification of the condemned, or the condemned procedure, is irrelevant. Failure of the moral position to generate what it considers to be success is irrelevant – the position is correct irrespective of the results. Ethical Staunchness basically implies that taking in evidence, aiming to find out what is wrong with an approach, or looking at the situation in detail is forbidden. If you criticise the position you are immoral, and not only face expulsion, but you cannot be listened to. People can be sacrificed to morals. Morality overwhelms observation.

Ethical Staunchness seems to be a refusal of complexity or negotiation – which is not the same as saying that ethics are unnecessary or always harmful… And sometimes ethical rigor may be required, to as not to compromise with something the person considers deeply immoral – as when people were staunchly anti-Nazi, and refused to support the persecution of those the Nazis had declared immoral. It may be that recognition of the problem does not lead to easy answers.

Complexity

With complexity it is tempting to try and limit the variations and hesitations that are a normal part of the knowledge and living process, and to foreclose to certainty. This simplification may help action, and to some extent may be useful for a while, but have long term consequences which are disruptive of our ways of living and knowing.

In this blog post I have tried to suggest how socially standard ways of knowing and responding to complexity, may disrupt our knowledge of the world, and our reactions to it.

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Covid-19 and Complexity 1

July 26, 2020

There is a video of comedian George Carlin being circulated as “George Carlin told us about the Corona panic years ago” This video seems to be receiving rave comments from sensible people, but it also seems completely inadequate as a guide to responses to the ‘panic’.

In summary Carlin argues:

People are encouraged to fear germs and the latest infections and people are panicking, and trying to avoid all contacts with germs…. However, the immune system needs germs to practice on. If you lead a sterile life then you will get sick, and you deserve it because you are fucking weak and you have a fucking weak immune system.

He lived along the Hudson River and ‘we’ swam in raw sewage. The big fear at that time was polio, but no one where he lived ever got polio, the polio never had a prayer. He concludes that he never got infections ever, because his immune system was strong through getting a lot of practice.

This is not all direct quotes. It is paraphrase. Go see the video if you think I’m wrong 🙂

I guess the framing of the video as “George Carlin told us about the Corona panic years ago” is meant to imply Carlin is telling us that the Coronavirus is a mere ‘panic’ – it is nothing serious. Indeed the implication, of the framing, seems to be that all pandemics are nothing serious.

There is some truth in what Carlin says. It is probably a good idea not to use germicides everywhere, in everyday life. This is because some exposure to normal disease is helpful for immune protection, and also because Germicides are poisons – they kill life forms after all.

However, this idea, that pandemics and death by disease do not occur in tough traditional societies, or old time cities, because people develop strong immune systems through bad hygiene, or living with dirt, ‘germs’ and infection, is just silly.

There are, and have been, plenty of places were people have been exposed to ‘germs’ as a matter of daily life, and they still get wiped by pandemics. Badly. Especially when the pandemic is new and people have not adapted to it. Think of the black death, and cholera. Diseases, like small pox, have even used as a weapon, and we rightly fear bio-warfare.

Building immunity is not all that this needed. Being ‘tough’ won’t help you completely. If Carlin really thought that exposure to random ‘germs’ and pollutants, such as found in the Hudson River when he was a kid, is a complete protection against pandemics, then he simply does not know what he is talking about, and is suffering the benefit of historical ignorance.

It is more than probable the reason the US, and Europe have had few pandemics recently, is because of public health measures, like clean water no sewage in the street, and a relative lack of malnourished people living in the street. Vaccinations, or other treatments might have helped, but public health is likely the main breakthrough. If Carlin’s statements were true you would have expected heaps of pandemics over the last 40 or 50 years as hygiene improved and people got ‘soft’.

The US has only been seriously threatened by one pandemic in the last 50 years and that was AIDs, and it turned out to be relatively easy to deal with. Carlin had no experience of a really hard pandemic.

We didn’t stop HIV-AIDS by vaccination, because it was impossible to vaccinate against. We did eventually manage to extend people’s lives. We further found that physical distancing, or not intaking other people’s sexual fluids and blood, largely solved the spread issue, so it became something we can live with.

That was pretty easy. It had nothing to do with swimming in raw sewage or ‘vaccinating’ through ingestion of random hazards.

Now people might say Carlin is engaged in humorous exaggeration and not to be taken seriously. However, whatever Carlin’s intent, I think it is being used quite seriously.

The issue is whether what he says tells us anything about the ‘corona panic’? About whether it tells us anything about a new supervirus that turns our vital organs to liquid shit – or in this case into solid shit.

In terms of exaggeration, the Hudson River would probably not have been 100% sewage, no river would be, it would not flow very well. However, it probably would have had a lot of chemical effluent in it as well, including heavy metals. If you object to vaccination, you probably should object to swimming in polluted excrement as well.

We only have his anecdote to show there is any evidence that people in his neighborhood never got polio. It would be interesting to see if that was true, unusual, or just another ‘humorous exaggeration’.

His statement: “if you die you deserve it because you are fucking weak and you have a fucking weak immune system” is a great way of wiping away any sense that you might have responsibility towards others in your ‘freedom’.

So I guess the message of the video for Covid, is ignore medical advice, eat sewage, and don’t worry you might pass the disease on to other people.

If you really want people to die by the millions or billions, but not feel guilty or sad about it, then following the advice in this video will probably help.

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Directed Skepticism II

May 25, 2020

Previously I have suggested that there is a common form of skepticism, which is not a real skepticism as it is directed. It is only skeptical of particular positions, and because of this tends to be politically active, or result from politics. It is the kind of skepticism that is skeptical of the motives of climate scientists, but unskeptical of the motives of climate denialists. It appears to be motivated, although it is not always the user who is motivated; they main gain their motivation through the one sided skepticism of their exemplars. Sometimes the direction comes from what is socially accepted as common sense, and is thus not challenged, or from common defense against the possibilities of forthcoming pain. There is also a kind of cache in information society about being skeptical, even while you are apparently believing rubbish – directed skepticism is particularly useful in that situation.

In this piece I consider a skeptical argument, based on one proposed to me by a very smart guy, and attempt to show this skepticism is directed rather than general.

The post, also touches on interconnection and complexity; we can be skeptical of these views, but we should also be skeptical of views which do not take interconnection and complexity seriously. In a pandemic, everyone’s actions have the possibility of affecting many others, and many others through those others. An individual act has the potential to move outwards through society – a ‘humorous’ cough in someone’s face could spread the disease, even if the cougher does not feel sick.

1) I am skeptical that the current restrictions placed on the people of the world, which amount to a draconian dictatorship, are connected to the virus.

Response: I’m skeptical the restrictions amount to a draconian dictatorship, or that they have a specific aim other than lowering the disease.

Physical separation is the standard and historic mode of dealing with contagious diseases which are lethal. We try and keep healthy people away from sources of infection. We try and stop infected people passing on their infection. There is little that seems overtly odd about this. Diseases spread through social interconnection. We might be skeptical as to whether the proposed “social distancing” will work by itself, or that the consequences of this distancing are entirely predictable, but there seems little reason to think the rather diverse set of distancing regulations we observe are not primarily connected to a response to the virus. With the internet they certainly do not keep people socially isolated.

The death rate and the infection rate in Australia is way, way less than in the US, and the main difference is the speed and effectiveness with which the governments imposed distancing. So the better the isolation, it seems the better the result – at the moment.

As a rather trivial remark, I don’t know of people being executed for breaking restrictions which was the hallmark of Draco’s laws… And there is nothing I’ve seen to indicate the laws are coherent across the world. I’m skeptical that the relatively mild lock-downs in Europe, the US or Australia, are an indication of harsh dictatorship – certainly without considerably more evidence than is being offered. At the moment, these allegations seem over-emphasised.

It is true, that rather than making attempts to make distancing compulsory, it might be nice if we could persuade people to volunteer to cooperate in distancing, or for employers to decide everyone could work at home, out of the goodness of their heart, but I’m skeptical this would always happen. We appear to live in a society which does not always recognise a general good. However, there is always the factor of time. It appears that reaction to a pandemic must be reasonably quick to have effects.

However, the plausibility of distancing, does not mean we may not be able to find better solutions.

I am also skeptical that all those opposed to lock-down are necessarily proponents of freedom and liberty. Indeed, the organisations which seem devoted to diminishing human freedom and cultivating subservience to the corporate sector or State, such as US Republicans, British Tories, Australian Coalition, Putin, Modi, Bolsonaro, etc are generally trying to pretend there is no, to little, problem.

I’m skeptical of the idea that they do not anticipate benefit from encouraging skepticism about the disease and getting people to risk their lives on their behalf.

On the other hand, I don’t see who is benefiting politically from quarantine, other than ordinary people – if they get income support. The only underhand things that seem to be happening while the disease provides distraction, are the channeling of recovery money to wealthy people and established companies, and lessening restrictions on pollution and environmental destruction. That seems like business as usual, and apparently illustrates the idea that capitalist development requires ecological destruction.

2) Given that Governments are not dealing with severe problems, I’m skeptical that this is a serious problem.

Response: I’m skeptical of the idea that because governments do not deal with some major problems, they may never attempt to deal with major problems.

It does seem correct that governments are not dealing with severe problems such as climate change, ecological destruction, rising wealth inequality, or the growing dominance of the corporate sector etc. but it could be that the dominant classes think they can make money out of ecological destruction with no personal risk, while COVID-19 is potentially dangerous to them.

However the more COVID-19 effects the economy, and the more it does start to affect their wealth, then the more they appear to want to do nothing about it. They are also able to practice self-isolation to keep safe.

In this situation, I am skeptical that we will continue to deal with this problem. I suspect we will revert to the ways that we deal with other severe problems, by pretending they are not real or significant.

3) I am skeptical of anything in the mainstream media. The mainstream media is obviously fully behind the agenda of control. I place a question mark over everything I encounter in the media on both sides. I don’t trust any of the world’s government’s left or right.

Response: I’m skeptical of the idea the media speaks with one voice, or that what is reported by some media is always absolutely wrong.

If you don’t trust any of the world’s governments, then you should also be skeptical of the reasons given by those governments who oppose lock-down as well.

While saying “the media is arguing in favour of something” is always supposed to indicate that what those various sources are arguing for is suspect, it is possible they argue for things because they believe them to be true or strategically beneficial, even if they are not.

I am skeptical that because youtube channels, Q-Anon, or other mainstream news like Brietbart, may have ‘odd’ or different news, they are necessarily correct, or a voice of truth.

It also seems to be the case that not all media is fully behind lock-down, even if they were behind control. The Murdoch Empire for example, often argues in favor of whatever Trump’s position is at the moment, and generally of the disease being trivial. It is as mainstream and corporate as it gets.

I’m skeptical that people know about the world independently of media. Where else do they get their ideas about the wider world from? I am skeptical of the degrees of co-ordination required to fake a disease, across the world. I am skeptical of my own knowledge that would enable me to say the media is always wrong, even if it was uniform, which it isn’t.

There is lots of conflicting information but none of it, that I have seen, is able to imply that there is any logical ulterior motive in the way lock-down has been applied.

Lock-down may not be effective. That is a different question.

4) Even going by the highest statistics, the death rate is very small. I’m skeptical about this disease being harmful.

Response: I’m skeptical we know much about the disease as it is relatively new, and organisms and their interactions, and spread are complex. It may be deadly and destructive. It may not. It may be destructive enough. We will find out eventually.

Going on previous experience we can probably assume that humans will not have great defenses against a new disease, if this is a new disease.

My understanding is that the current medical understanding states that COVID-19 is more contagious than flu, and can be contagious before people exhibit notable symptoms. It is therefore likely to be fairly contagious. And, the closer together people are, the more likely contagion is. Which is not to say that we cannot do stuff to boost our immune systems, and cut down contagion, but we should be skeptical of claims this is enough.

At the moment the US CDC is estimating that in the 2018–2019 flu season there were 34,200 deaths from flu in the US . In 2017-18 there were 61,000 deaths, and in 2016-2017 there were 38,000 deaths

As of today, the current estimate of deaths in the US from COVID-19 is
98,004 and rising every day. There is little sign of a decline.

I admit these figures could be wrong, and COVID may turn out not to be as harmful as flu, but it seems unlikely at the moment…

Contagion rates and death rates do not have to be related. A disease can be highly contagious with an extremely low death rate, and it can have a high death rate but be mildly contagious.

Testing is difficult and often inaccurate with a new disease as well. So we would expect false positives and negatives, we do not know if these will cancel each other out.

The death rate certainly does not seem to be as high as originally expected.

However, some figures I’ve seen suggest that in many places people are dying at a far greater rate than last year, even after covid deaths are removed. Surprisingly this does not seem to be the case in Australia

There have been stories of significant undercounting of deaths, [2], [3], mistakes and of people being asked to revise figures downwards so as to get people back to work, and in the US until April 14 COVID-19 deaths had to be confirmed in a laboratory test while testing was not generally available, so where almost certainly undercounted.

We also now know that the doctors who were dying of heart attacks and strokes (which I was hearing about quite early on) were in fact dying of complications from corona virus, and were not counted.

There are now reports that children are getting rare inflammatory diseases, and that some people are remaining sick for a long time after infection [2]. So incapacity has to be counted as well as death rate.

At the moment some people seem to get the illness more than once. WHO has stated:

“There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection,”

This is not unusual with diseases probably because they mutate, but there may be other reasons. I’ve seen reports suggesting Covid mutates quickly and mutates slowly, which suggest large degrees of uncertainty.

What looks like small death rates can mount up. If 60% of Australians get the disease, and the death rate is 1% that is still in the region of 156,000 dead people, and if we add incapacity to that disease consequences could well be significantly disruptive in many ways. If the disease continues for years, then of course it will likely mutate and the healthy people will get it as well. So the total death rate is unpredictable in the extreme.

We will probably never know, the true death rates in countries in which isolation is more or less impossible for ordinary people, India, Indonesia etc., as they won’t be able to test the bodies.

Getting vaguely accurate figures will take a while. But if we don’t act when we don’t have certainty we could kill a lot more people.

5) In Sweden, where there has been little done about the virus, conflicting reports are being given about the infection rate there.

Response: Yes, it could appear that information about Sweden has been politicised, because they may have gone for ‘herd immunity’. That means we should not just be skeptical about reports saying it has a high death rate, we should also be skeptical of reports that its doing well.

However I find the Murdoch Empire reports… 21 May that “Sweden is suffering the highest COVID-19 death rate in Europe”

“Nearly 4,000 people have died from the virus in Sweden, a figure many times higher per capita than those of its Nordic neighbours Denmark, Norway, and Finland, which all imposed strict lockdown measures.”

Stefan Lofven the Prime Minister, has faith their system will work in the long run, and there will not be a second wave of illness. The strategy is also relying on the Swedish sense of self-discipline, and not suprisingly the government can say “We get figures now that people are actually increasing their adherence to our advice [about distancing], not decreasing.”

We could be skeptical about his faith. He is making a prediction in a complex system… it is not guarranteed to be correct, and it is not cautious or conservative.

Other reports suggest that it was not working that well. “Just 7.3% of Stockholm’s inhabitants had developed Covid-19 antibodies by the end of April.” This is well below what seems to be required, to make a population relatively safe. Annika Linde who was the Swedish state epidemiologist from 2005 to 2013, has also expressed doubts as to whether the strategy is working.

Sweden is an experiment, which is useful as it gives information, but which because of what Sweden is like as a nation, may not be replicable elsewhere. I am skeptical of sigificant real confusion in the reported death rates.

6) Hospitals in the US are being paid more to diagnose patients as having the virus. I saw an article on this which had been “fact-checked” by a snopes-type crowd and they had to reluctantly admit it was true. This might be justified in that they may need more money if it is the case, but it also opens the system up to the inevitable over-diagnosing for the cash-strapped institutions to gain more resources in general. So who knows what the real numbers are?

Response: Payments to US hospitals are complicated matters. For example I read

“There isn’t a Medicare diagnostic code specifically for COVID-19.” The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that “the average Medicare payment [is] $13,297 for a less severe hospitalization and $40,218 for hospitalization in which a patient is treated with a ventilator for at least 96 hours.”

And

“A COVID patient on a ventilator will need more services and more complicated services, not just the ventilator,” said Joseph Antos, scholar in health care at the American Enterprise Institute. “It is reasonable that a patient who is on a ventilator would cost three times one who isn’t that sick.”

There also do appear to be special bonuses for COVID patients, which were instigated to protect US hospitals from loss of their normal business.

As suggested previously, there also seem to be pressures leading to undercounting – such as the initial dismissal of heart attacks and strokes, and people dying outside hospital or in old people’s homes, or people wanting other people to go to work.

As I have said previously, I am skeptical that we know the exact figures, and I am skeptical that there is any reason to think deaths are significantly overcounted as opposed to undercounted.

It is also probable that if hospitals are over-counting then insurance companies and government auditors will likely sort this out, at some cost to the hospital and its reputation.

7) I’m skeptical that what ‘they’ are doing is necessary. Some professional doctors are criticizing the the idea of wearing masks and social isolation.

Response: I’m skeptical of all doctors, including those who say isolation is pointless. However, wearing badly designed or useless masks badly is probably useless.

Isolation may not be necessary, but as remarked earlier we have less dead in Australia per head of population than in the US, where the regime is more uncertain. A lot depends on what you think human life is worth, under various circumstances, as with old people, poor people, black people etc. This is a value judgement. I’m skeptical we will have agreement on this issue.

Another problem we face is that medicine is an empirical science of complex systems. As a consequence, there will often be disagreement about best procedure and likely results.

Most medical pronouncements are based on deductions from theory. We cannot know if the pronouncements are correct until after the event. However, unlike neoliberalism, they will likely be modified by failure.

Physical isolation is generally thought to be the best way of preventing transmission. Ideally if the disease dies in a person, or adapts to being harmless, without being transmitted to another person, then the problem is ended

8) What about Madagascar and WHO?

I’m skeptical of the relevance of this.

I read that WHO commends Madagascar’s fight against COVID. I also read that they are prepared to test a local herbal remedy.

I would be skeptical of assumptions such medicines work, before proper testing. If there is a remedy which works and is traditional, then wonderful, and even better if it becomes a source of income for the locals.

WHO did apparently say, in this context, that use of untested medicines: “can put people in danger, giving a false sense of security and distracting them from hand washing and physical distancing which are cardinal in COVID-19 prevention.”

Yes WHO are skeptical, but why not?

There only seems to be a problem if the supposed remedy is proven, and then outlawed, or we cannot make enough of it, or corporations won’t distribute it without the patent or something. And that has not happened, yet. It is freely being consumed by those who can get it.

9) I’m skeptical Bill Gates would be involved if there was nothing in it for him. It is highly suspect that all of a sudden he has started giving WHO advice. I’m skeptical he is a philanthropist of any kind. His organization is motivated solely for profit.

Response: I’m skeptical Bill Gates is particularly evil or incompetent. I’m skeptical he is more evil or incompetent than those politicians who disagree with him.

Anyone can give WHO advice, the question is whether they listen. The wealthier and more prone to be involved in global medical projects the person is and the more funding they can provide, the more likely such an organisation is to listen to them. I don’t know whether WHO has changed any policies based on what he has said, and I personally know very little about Bill Gates and his motives at the moment.

He does not seem to be an issue in this part of the world, except to people who think he is trying to mind control them through 5G.

It is one thing to be skeptical that 5G is absolutely healthy, but another to hold that it transmits viruses. If the latter is true, then we have had a major set of scientific breakthroughs which no one seems to know anything about… I’m skeptical enough of these propositions to wonder who is encouraging them and why?

Gates has been trying to support vaccination, and he likes orthodox medical science, that seems to be enough to make him suspicious to many. Especially to the active financial class.

It could be that wealthy people who don’t obey the party line and who might show another way is possible, get attacked, and lied about, by those who support the current order of power and wealth.

I’d also ask what’s in it for Trump and Boris Johnson, Alex Jones and all the other right wing media players, claiming there is little to no problem… they actually have a direct stake in the power game.

Bill Gates does not have to play power games anymore, but it does seem he has been worried about pandemics for a while, like many other people, and has warned against them. I’m skeptical that this is evidence he actively wants a pandemic.

10) If it is an emergency then where are all the requisitioned football stadiums being turned into temp hospitals? The whole “crisis” is being handled by the existing infrastructure.

Response: I’m skeptical health emergencies always overwhelm the existing infrastructure.

As far as I can tell hospital wards were stretched in the US, and Trump was boasting about the military erecting temporary wards, but I am pleased that minimal activity has saved the US from a true crisis.

I have read that hospitals in Northern Italy were overwhelmed, and doctors were discussing who should receive treatment and who should be left….

There were crises of body disposal, and it was clear that systems were overwhelmed. President Trump seemed troubled by this at one stage.

I would however add, that I am skeptical that the crisis is over, or has necessarily reached its peak.

Because the pandemic is an issue involving complexity, we may be able to say things like “without isolation, or without successful vaccination it is likely the disease will continue to spread,” but we don’t know how badly countries will be affected for some while, or even after the event. We do not know all the variables, or even the properties of the virus, as yet. So prediction is messy.

To only be skeptical that the disease is serious, is not real skepticism, it seems to be directed, possibly at continuing current life and fantasising ‘all is well’, when this may not be the case.

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The Black Elephant

April 17, 2020

This is largely just a collection of quotes:

The Black Elephant is an unholy union of two boardroom clichés: the Elephant in the Room, the thing which everyone knows is important, but no one will talk about; and the Black Swan, the hard-to-predict event which is outside the realm of normal expectations, but has enormous impact. The Black Elephant is an event which was quite foreseeable, which was in fact an Elephant in the Room, but which after it happens, everyone will try to pass off as a Black Swan.

A: Dougald Hine | Black Elephants and Skull Jackets | A Conversation with Vinay Gupta

“There are a herd of environmental black elephants gathering out there” — global warming, deforestation, ocean acidification, mass extinction and massive fresh water pollution. “When they hit, we’ll claim they were black swans no one could have predicted, but, in fact, they are black elephants, very visible right now…. We’re just not dealing with them at the scale necessary. If they all stampede at once, watch out.”

B: NYT Herd of Stampeding Black Elephants

So to be clear: a black elephant is a known, or suspected, highly dangerous but not yet overtly current problem, which many people, especially powerful ones, do not want to see, or which they downplay hoping it is trivial, exaggerated, improbable or going to occur after it’s not their responsibility.

“In terms of sustainability, there are two questions. Sustain what? And then, can we sustain those things? Right now, more or less the whole of the debate focuses on whether we can sustain hyper-consumption – and the answer is no, of course not. Something is going to give: oil, climate,topsoil, some other factor we’re not even paying attention to. You can’t just burn the earth’s natural resources like a gasflare on an oil rig forever…. climate is just the first of a long list of things that can and eventually will go wrong.”

A:

These ecological, production and consumption problems make up a horde of black elephants, but powerful people appear to lose out if we do anything about them, and we are helped to be comfortable ourselves by ignoring them, or by pretending they are not looming. The powerful do not have to push us that hard to get us to pretend there is no problem or to act half-heartedly about all these problems.

“the power that financiers and corrupt politicians still hold in setting the limits on what we can and cannot destroy in nature — as opposed to the scientists and biologists — remains the bad news.”

B:

And again this is a black elephant. It is pretty obviously not sensible to have the world run by financiers or business, when what they finance destroys the land we are standing on.

Sometimes black elephants were possibly quite normal things or processes which have just grown up with us, and many people have not caught up to realise that the normal has become abnormal. Nearly everyone says, “oh Elephants are only 2 ft tall… and there is only one of them, and its really cute.”

Perhaps black elephants are created by human cognitive and social processes. One writer remarks that science is full of black elephants:

The scientific world is a sprawling and untidy place whose inhabitants practise their craft in myriad ways. Attempts are periodically made to bring order to this world by building model homes in it, so to speak, and declaring that what’s inside is what science is really like – all the activities outside being imperfect versions. That way, we can easily teach it and tell outsiders what it’s about.

Two such homes are particularly attention-grabbing. The first is orderly, its atmosphere logical, and its disputes calmly resolved by proposing theories and taking data. Experiments are good when they get the true result, wrong when they don’t. This house does not have normal people inside – the inhabitants are so exacting and rule-abiding that they live and act quite differently from the rest of us. Discoveries made inside this house are universal, reflecting truths about nature outside. This house was built by traditional philosophy of science.

Another house was erected in reaction to the first. Its inhabitants behave exactly as non-scientists do, motivated by the same social and psychological forces. Experiments are good when they get a result everyone accepts. What’s found in the room is not universal but local – arising from what’s happening in that room. Obtaining consensus about a result is a matter of swapping interests, like the work of diplomats. This home, built by “social constructivists”, has real people inside but no real nature.

The [models] differ in what they include and omit. The first, to oversimplify, gets rid of human beings, who disrupt the rationality inside the house. The second gets rid of nature, which would resist, define and frustrate the negotiations.

Physics World: Black Elephants

Either model diminishes ‘science’ by creating dangerous black elephants. The first by making science objective, inhuman, valueless or ‘unspiritual’ when we know it is human and made by humans and hence limited and slightly weird, and the second by disconnecting it from reality and making a matter of enforced consensus and desire, when we know the reactions of reality are vital to that consensus (or it cannot be called science) – and you will hear both positions taken by those attempting to discredit some science they don’t like….

Historically it has been quite difficult to speak of science as human and riddled with personal politics, and bias without appearing to discredit the ideals of science, its power, and relatively accurate truth. This inability now reinforces the arguments of those who would listen to nothing but their own short-term interests.

We also know that science is nearly always better when it is not played according to government or commercial policy. That is when people say “We would like this. Make it it so, for us.” Then you get a whole load of finance for projects like turning lead into gold, and pressure to push scientists to pronounce certainty when not enough research has been done, especially to get the product into consumption and make a profit.

This dynamic is another black elephant we hope our world can survive, when it comes to things like genetic modification, biotech and so on (which literally have a life and evolution of their own).

Science also sometimes generates black elephants in that there are non-solvable problems, weird occurrences, or theoretical incoherencies, which scientists ignore, in the hope that they are not significant problems, or that they will somehow turn out to be explicable by the current theory. And sometimes they realise things like an atom bomb could cause the world to ignite or that a hadron collider could produce black holes, but “hey let’s do it anyway!”

One writer points to the consequences of an obvious political Black Elephant that was pretty clearly present, but which it is probable hope got in the way of analysis…

Last year, many of us would have been astonished to learn that the Treasury in the United Kingdom had made no contingency plans for Brexit, despite the fact that the polls showed that the outcome of the referendum would be a close call. The British military – which I presume is like most armed forces and makes contingency plans at the drop of the hat – also reportedly did nothing. 

The black elephant challenge for governments
Peter Ho

That author points to another “obvious problem”

governments often ignore the complexity of their operating environment. They typically deal with complexity as if it is amenable to simple and deterministic, even linear, policy prescriptions. In a sense, the crux of public policy has been to apply – if not impose – orderly solutions to the myriad of complex problems that afflict our societies, our politics and our lived everyday experiences, in largely vain attempts to make what is complex merely complicated.

We see this in legal systems that are based on uniform punishments for complex and varied crimes, in public health enterprises that treat patients as largely homogenous, and education systems and pedagogies that assume that all children develop uniformly, or ought to.

We also see the same problem in business, for a similar reason: standardisation makes things appear simple, and allows the illusion of command and control. For some reason people rarely seem to want to admit this problem in business. Perhaps business is now where we put the search for perfection? Anyhow, the idea that business (big business in particular) does not face similar problems to government, is another Black Elephant, and possibly an extremely dangerous one, given how much of government we hand over to business.

The author goes on to ask:

What can governments do to improve the way they manage complexity, and at the same time mitigate the effects of the various cognitive biases that afflict them?

We can start by accepting that complexity creates uncertainty. Prediction is not possible.The right approach is an orientation towards thinking about the future in a systematic way.

We have to be careful here, because we can use unpredictability to hide black elephants from ourselves and others. “The climate change elephant may not come, we cannot be certain about it, it might go away, we might find a technology that can chain it up, if it was a problem people would be doing something about it before us – if we act first then we will be taken advantage of… We can’t be sure, let’s just ignore it.”

Ultimately this author recommends scenario planning, but does not say why this should overcome the social bias of avoiding the elephant.

Just in case you think the idea of the Black Elephant is simple:

Black Elephants capture the postnormal dynamic of the Extended Present, and they are decidedly contextual and ought to be situated and/or articulated from more than one perspective, if only to capture the contradictions inherent to their emergence. Finally, Black Elephants indicate that PNL is present, and perhaps dominant, within a particular system.

https://postnormaltim.es/black-elephant

I have no idea what PNL is either.

You may remember the famous and quite common-sensical lines from Donald Rusmfeld

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

Black elephants are those knowns and probables we don’t want to know, don’t want to acknowledge, don’t want to acknowledge as important, or don’t know we know, and which will effect us. Zizek has a nice essay on this going back to the Bush Jr. Admin and the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in which the army knew what was going on, and decided to ignore the reports. [I wonder if this elephant has almost been forgotten, nowadays?]

In the past several months, the International Committee of the Red Cross regularly bombarded the Pentagon with reports about the abuses [of Iraqis by US troops] in Iraqi military prisons, and the reports were systematically ignored….

To anyone acquainted with the reality of the American way of life, the photos brought to mind the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture – say, the initiatory rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo to be accepted into a closed community. Similar photos appear at regular intervals in the U.S. press after some scandal explodes at an Army base or high school campus, when such rituals went overboard….

In being submitted to the humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture: They got a taste of the culture’s obscene underside that forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom. No wonder, then, the ritualistic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was not an isolated case but part of a widespread practice….

What [Rumsfeld] forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know – which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.

If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns,” that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns” – the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.

What we get when we see the photos of humiliated Iraqi prisoners is precisely a direct insight into “American values,” into the core of an obscene enjoyment that sustains the American way of life.

What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib

In this context, we might also think of this comment:

Republican Rep. Trey Hollingsworth asserted that, while he appreciated the science behind the [corona]virus’ spread, “it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.”

“It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils. It is not zero evil, but it is the lesser of these two evils and we intend to move forward that direction. That is our responsibility and to abdicate that is to insult the Americans that voted us into office.”

CNN 15 April: GOP congressman says letting more Americans die of coronavirus is lesser of two evils

In other words, he is making a rare acknowledgement that the American way of life, both requires and demands the early death of Americans.

Sartre had a point about this kind of unconsciousness, that we have to know what it is we don’t want to know, in order to ignore it – so we are writing of actively unknown knowns. Or things that are made ignorable matters of chaos when they are actually part of the order of everyday life and acknowledging them would somehow undermine that life, or its (moral) validity.

This is not ignorance but effort. The more upsetting the black elephant the more effort is put into ignoring it, and the less we will be prepared.

Perhaps all cognitive and social life requires us to create a social unconscious, which includes Black Elephants. Things that everyone knows are likely to become a problem, or generate problems, but which they believe would cause them problems were they to mention it. And besides the future is uncertain, perhaps the elephant will wander off, or prove to be a mouse in disguise. “Why should I upset my life for this? Nobody will thank me, and they might even hurt me.”

The other problem is that people tend to think that if it really was a problem then other people (especially people they respect) would be dealing with it. The fact that no one worthwhile is dealing with it, shows it is not a problem. And if everyone worthwhile thinks it is not a problem, then it probably isn’t – it’s certainly not my business. Again this formulation adds to the “Why should I upset my life by screaming about Black Elephants? Couldn’t I be deluded? And it looks tame now. Its not yet trampled anything important underfoot. Other people are not going to thank me, for going on about it”.

This is how a social unconscious is constructed, and it can become personal. Because if something is not acknowledged by people a person respects and desires to emulate, then they to have to suppress awareness of it, to emulate the admired ones. If you are lucky, you may never have your attention drawn to the black elephant, before it kills you. So you can relax – up until that moment.

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Rationality defines the unreasonable?

March 3, 2020

I come from a world in which people who call themselves ‘rational’ can dimiss the experiences of others as ‘irrational’ largely because they do not understand how such experiences work, they can explain the experiences away, or they think the experiences are inherently implausible by their standards of rationality.

Likewise I meet people who see rationality as a curse that is leading us to destruction and actively attempting to destroy all the things that matter, and shatter our relationship to that which ‘is‘ (the cosmos, nature, ‘spirit,’ imagination, feeling etc.)

Personally I see this cultural opposition between rationality and experience as destructive. Rationality is only ever as good as its axioms and evidence gathering techniques.

Thought systems highly influence (and limit) the way we can see the world and the way we experience the world. They often lead people to seek self confirmation, and can become a prison, whether we call them rational or irrational.

If reality, experience or the best theories we have say that your rationality is wrong or limited, then it is rational to change what constitutes rationality, although it is often thought not to be.

Newtonian mechanics overturned the rationalist objection that ‘action at a distance’ was occultism. Newton also proposed the (at the time) irrational argument that he had no conceivable explanation of why gravity worked (“I make no hypotheses”) and this did not matter. Eventually, people adapted and got use to the idea his mechanics could only explain the patterns of gravity’s working, and that was good enough (for the moment).

Obviously relativity theory, non-Euclidean geometry and quantum mechanics all threw out what had previously been considered rational axioms. In discovering and explaining more experience, these theories broadened and overturned what became seen as a limited rationality, which impeded investigation. Rationality adapted.

What people call rationality is often used to simplify or delete experience, thus removing complexity from the world, when complexity is vital to understanding the world.

At the moment there is a long fight going on in popular philosophy and in science to insist that what we call Mind is emboddied and not abstract, and that we do not understand the supposed limits or potentials of Mind (partly, it seems to me, because we tend to separate it from matter, or reduce it to what we think of as matter). Because of our history it is hard not to fall back into something resembling a mind body opposition and separation, or to say one is derived from the other, without recognising that this changes ‘the other’.

Feeling and embodiment is part of thought and human recognition of situations, and this has to be recognised. If some people need to be shattered by the grief of what is happening in the world, in order to think about and perceive the world differently, then that is what is needed. It is not rational to deny this, even though some people will claim that such feeling, or action, is irrational, and possibly fear it.

If people need to really realise that animals other than humans have minds and feelings or kinship with humans, in order to relate to those animals, or in order to understand or value those animals and help prevent them becoming extinct, then that is part of reality, and understanding it is rationality in action; dismissing this need is not rational. Neither is it rational to insist that animals do not have minds at all, because their minds might be different. Nearly everyone treats animals they know as if they have minds and feelings, because mindful behaviour in those animals seems obvious.

If dreams and imagination can bring people insights into life, it is not rational to dismiss them as “only” dreams or “only” imaginings. Just as it is not rational to dismiss making symbolic responses to a problem and do nothing; as symbolic responses can motivate ‘real’ responses.

As many people know, sometimes new ideas which help us understand things arise from dreams, from images, from what we call intuition. This arising can appear irrational, but it is irrational to ignore it.

Some people have what they call spiritual experiences, sometimes these do seem irrational, or even faked to gain fame, power, influence or money, but it is irrational to dismiss the whole class of these experiences, or their effects and possible effects on the world. Those people who fake rationality do not discredit rationality and those who fake spirituality do not discredit real experience. Such experiences are probably fairly normal (at least according to surveys and my experience of others), and given their normality, surprisingly under-investigated. Psychologists, such as Jung, who have been interested in such experiences have persistently been accused of irrationality or occultism because of the interest. Yet it is part of life, and should not be condemned if we wish to understand humans.

We will never dispose of religion, even if some of really want to, and it seems fatal to abandon it to power-hungry abusers or fanatics.

Those people who have these experiences may fear their experiences will not survive investigation, but perhaps that means the tools we have used for investigation are not useful.

Sometimes people appear to get wound up in defending the emotional or felt truth of their axioms against the evidence. In which case we can say the axioms are acting as defence mechanisms rather than truth mechanisms. Some say that science strips away the poetry of the universe, but in reality science is another, slightly more coherent, poetry.

Sometimes I am told that some research shows that rightwing politics tends to be more ‘rational’ than left, and I’m usually confused by this, as a lot of (but not all) rightwing politics seems to involve shouting, name-calling, threats, irrational discrimination, assertion of falsehoods, and avoidance of complexity. Non of which seems particularly rational. (See “Trump 2020 Hurting Your Feelings Isn’t a Crime” sweat shirts and “Liberal Tears” coffee mugs). However, it does tend to deny empathy, concern or tender feeling for others (while making harsh, or purely competitive, feelings ok) and I suspect that is what makes it seem ‘rational’ to those who think it is. If humans are feeling creatures, and base their relations to others on feeling, then it is not rational to deny it. The fact that this kind of rationality is so irrational in its behaviours, implies its ‘reason’ is a defense against gentle feeling, and this defense might be useful to survival in a neoliberal society.

To reitrate: rationality which does not recognise reality is not rational, and needs to change, and change what it defines as irrational.

As a mode of thought, rationality conditions what people see in the world. Hopefully, if it is disrupted enough, then we can chuck aside non-working axioms and evidence procedures and start again with new ones.

The processes which lead to new ideas and paradigms are generally going to differ from, and produce ideas outside, established ‘reason’ and its axioms. These insights are inherently going to be seen as ‘irrational’, because they do differ from previous rationality and its axioms. This does not mean all insights are useful, they need to be tested in practice against reality, and modified or abandoned as required

This adaptation and exploration is rational. It is not always what people who claim to be rational do.

Rationality also needs defence.

Firstly, while people often say ‘science is leading us to destruction’, this is simply not true. It is because of science that we have known for 40-50 years we are heading for ecological destruction. Scientists have been warning us repeatedly but we, and our leaders, have not listened or have refused to listen.

Secondly, it is not remotely rational to pollute more than the environmental ecology can process. It is not rational to poison the ecology and think we can get away with it. The planet is finite, it is not rational to think in terms of endless planetary extraction. It is not scientists, or rational people, who are telling us its ok to pollute or ignore ecological destruction and climate change. It is not scientists, in general, who have campaigned to keep fossil fuel corporation profits high. Some may have done so, but by doing so they foresook their calling and their rationality in favour of continuing paychecks.

Our society is not destroying itself because it is too rational, it is destroying itself through certain forms of irrationality, hope and the power relations that enforce those irrationalities because they seem essential to a particular class of people. Our politics is not rational and it aims at overcoming scientific-ecological rationality, in the name of neoliberal economic and sometimes spiritual thought.

Rationality works to improve and systematise what we know, and to work out test points for that knowing.

Rationality also offers tools for making arguments, refining arguments, and testing argumenets. If the tools are not adequate for what you need to do, then make new ones, which seem rational. This is what we had to do in the social sciences and humanities, and we will never know if any adequate tools are possible. The tools need to be relevant to the task.

Rationality is useful. The understandings provided by science, are useful to us. It is easy for humans to self-deceive, rationality provides some tools for easing self deceit, and for communicating experiences to others.

There is no necessary collision between rationality and experience, or rationality and survival. Retreat from science will not help us any more than retreat from human psychology and spirituality will help.

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Baroness Thatcher and the Moment of Climate Retreat

February 28, 2020

All Baroness Thatcher’s realism had gone by the publication of the 2002 book Statescraft, which she reportedly recognised was her last book. She was, sadly, becoming increasingly fragile and unwell. However, there is little mark of this fragility on the writing style or the forcefulness of her arguments.

This section of my exposition, includes more comment on the Baroness’ arguments than previously. This is because they need to be challenged, and because they seem incompatible with the positions she took while PM.

The section, “Hot Air and Global Warming” comes in a chapter defending capitalism from its critics.

Her main focus in the surrounding section is on refuting prophecies of doom:

the better things are and the greater the reason for optimism, the louder the voices prophesying doom seem to become… taking the longer perspective, global gloom is out of place… Was there ever an age when children had better prospects, all things considered, than those born into the world today?

p.444

She argues capitalism and liberty are responsible for this success. We might wonder if capitalism and liberty are always, and indelibly, joined even by pointing at British History (certainly the path is not straightforward, and has a lot to do with the militancy of the working and middle classes, and their suspicion of capitalism), but she argues:

We should be very wary indeed of turning aside from the path that has made us rich and free, simply because some group of experts or a collection of NGOs advise it

p.445

She argues Malthus, who suggested that the direction of humanity was towards mass death because population always increased faster than food supply, was simply wrong. This is despite her earlier warnings about population increase as being a problem, and the obvious fact that certain levels of human population (200 billion??) may be unsupportable by the planet in nearly all circumstances. Indeed population increase in non-western countries seems to have become one method the contemporary right has developed to blame climate change on other people.

Thatcher argues that people like Malthus, underrate “mankind’s ability, given the right framework to invent and adapt” (p.447) Indeed, but it is still theoretically possible that there may be times in which the speed of the problem-increase overwhelms people’s invention and adaptation. TThere is no guarantee we have not reached, or will never reach, that point. We may not have, but that is a hope not a certainty. In her words the “right framework” may not be present or even possible.

She generalises her response to Malthus to the problem seers of today:

Today’s doomsters have broadened their attack. It is not just population growth by economic growth… that they dislike…. Many of the gloomiest warning were associated with a group of international experts calling themselves the Club of Rome

p.447

This pessimism was supposedly a dominant force in the years leading up to the 1980s. This may be something of an exaggeration: if it was dominant, surely people would have done more to face the problems?

Only when Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office did we hear an alternative, optimistic message – that our free-enterprise democratic system had the moral, intellectual and practical resources to overcome any challenge.

p.448

Again this is a hope, not a certainty. It is not proven for ever, and cannot be proven in advance. And why should our “moral, intellectual and practical resources” not include Government policy and direction? After all, neoliberals seem to recognise the rights of governments to direct people to keep the neoliberal system going, all the time.

She rightly emphasises that cutbacks, through policy, are not the only methods:

we are constantly assailed by warnings that we cannot go on consuming. But we hardly seem to reflect upon the extraordinary way in which we get more and more out of less and less…. Less farmland is producing more food. There has been a dramatic fall in the number of famines.

p.448

there are, of course, still natural disasters. But it is by scientific and technological advance that we predict them, plan for them and cope with them. That advance occurs in free-enterprise capitalist societies, not in sclerotic socialist ones

p.448

So government planning for disaster is not impossible, and we can use science to predict such possibilities.

Before opening her section on global warming she remarks:

We should, therefore:
Recall how wrong the doomsters have been and take comfort from the fact.
Learn the lesson that as long as a free political system, a free society and a free economy are maintained, the ingenuity of mankind is boundless

p.449

That human ingenuity has been very great, does not mean that it is “boundless”, can solve all problems through uncoordinated profit driven action, that such profit driven actions can solve the problems in the time available to avoid mass suffering, or that these actions will not have unintended consequences, which require more action to remedy.

The section on global warming opens with a long footnote refering to various books and articles which she has read on the matter and which have persuaded her. Non of these writings are by climate scientists, or from scientific publishers, or scientific journals. They are all from corporately sponsored neoliberal think tanks, such as the Reason Public Policy Institute, Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Centre for the New Europe, and the Institute of Economic Affairs.

These are ‘research’ establishments, who’s results and opinions can be predicted in advance. They largely appear to say what their sponsors require. It could be suggested that these documents serve primarily propaganda purposes, and aim to oppose ‘action on climate change’ to ‘capitalism’, and suggest any planned climate action must represent dictatorial socialism. They do this to defend the established corporate profit of their sponsors. It is, perhaps surprising, that the Baroness decided to listen to them, rather than to scientists in the field. But, these neoliberal thinkers are her primary in-group, and if it was possible to stop her identifying with scientists and get her to completely identify with neoliberalism then that would make science less persuasive to her.

“The doomsters’ favourite subject today is climate change. This has a number of attractions for them. First, the science is extremely obscure so they cannot easily be proved wrong. Second, we all have ideas about the weather: traditionally, the English on first acquaintance talk of little else. Third, since clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvelous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.

p.449

There is no reason to assume that while global action might provide a “marvelous excuse” for socialism, it could not also provide an equally marvelous excuse for encouraging transnational capitalism to work its supposed magic – unless one of the prime directives of neoliberalism is liberty for the transnational corporation from any form of responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

She gives some examples of exaggeration.

President Clinton on a visit to China, which poses a serious strategic challenge to the US, confided to his host, President Jiang Zemin, that his greatest concern was the prospect that ‘your people may get rich like our people, and instead of riding bicycles, they will drive automobiles, and the increase in greenhouse gases will make the planet more dangerous for all.

p.450

While all Chinese driving petrol fueled cars does present a real problem, the actual remark seems unlikely and her source is an article in the American Spectator rather than any government record. But rather than dismiss recognition of the problem as foolish, we should wonder what the solution might be, or at least wonder how we might avoid the problem. Previous versions of Thatcher might have recognised this as a problem requiring governmental help to overcome.

She then refers to Al Gore saying:

‘I believe that our civilisation is, in effect, addicted to the consumption of the earth itself.’ And he warns: ‘Unless we find a way to dramatically change our civilisation and our way of thinking about the relationship between humankind and the earth, our children will inherit a wasteland.’

p.450

This is possibly true. It looks more likely to be true now, than might have done then, but the statements are not that incompatible with statements in Thatcher’s own speeches. She was, at one stage, able to wonder if all economic activity was compatible with survival.

The fact that seasoned politicians can say such ridiculous things – and get away with it – illustrates the degree to which the new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-centre governing classes.

p.450

These comments do not seem that ridiculous, or to be dismissed on the word of some pro-corporate think tank, without further evidence.

She remarks she was active in the anti-chloroflurocarbons debate, and successful. But the greenhouse gas effect “was a more difficult issue, because the science was much less certain.” As we have seen, she had always recognised this uncertainty worked both ways. By 2000 the climate science was far more certain, but perhaps she had not read it, becoming more interested in defending neoliberal capitalism than in the science?

I was more sceptical of the arguments about global warming, though I considered that they should be taken very seriously…. there was, in fact, rather little scientific advice available to political leaders from those experts who were doubtful of the global warming thesis…. By the end of my time as Prime Minister I was also becoming seriously concerned about the anti-capitalist arguments which the campaigners against global warming were deploying…

p.451-2

That some “other side” is facing a problem by advancing their own arguments in their normal fashion does not seem an excuse to argue the problem is not real. It should give people an opportunity to present better policies, and to defeat that other side yet again.

the choice might appear to be between preservation of the climate and preservation of prosperity. This is, of course, how left-of-centre opinion wished and still wishes to portray it

p.451

“Might appear” is not the same as “must appear.” Does she have to accept this supposed left-of-centre opinion as the only possible approach? Again why not recognise the problem and present better arguments?

Personally, I’m inclined to wonder if the issue was not politicised by the neoliberal think tanks, who wanted it to seem like the political action of defending capitalism and capitalist ‘liberty’ was incompatible with the political action of dealing with climate change. If so, then they succeeded, but there may be no necessary incompatibility; that would have been a possible approach, if you were not primarily interested in preserving fossil fuel corporation profits.

She moves on to illustrate the bias of anti-global warming arguments and their anti-capitalism.

When President Bush anounced the US would not sign the Kyoto Protocol.

“The French Environment Minister said, ‘Mr Bush’s unilateral attitude is entirely provocative and irresponsible’.
[While the EU Environment commissioner] issued dark if unspecified threats against US business [and] Britain’s own Environment Minister.. described the American decision as ‘exceptionally serious’ [but ruled out sanctions].

p.452

Whether you believe in the perfections of capitalism, or not, these comments seem pretty mild. They didn’t involve much more than an expression of disappointment that the President of the world’s biggest economy was going to put the possible future of the world on hold and thereby disrupt the pretty minor global action and promises required by the Kyoto Protocol. There is nothing necessarily anti-capitalist, or unreasonable, about objecting to this.

Kyoto was an anti-growth, anti-capitalist, anti-American project

p.453

This is an assertion and no evidence is presented. The US was then the world’s biggest economy and, both at that moment and historically, was the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Given this, it does have more responsibility than other relatively low emitters, and this means, that it has more actions to take and more wealth to take those actions. Kyoto is only anti-capitalist to the extent that neoliberalism supports capitalism without responsibility or honour.

in matters of public policy it is as important to recognise what we don’t know as what we do… The golden rule is: all government interventions are problematic, so intervene only when the case is fully proven

p.453

We do not know for sure, it is not fully proven, that Capitalism can solve this problem. The passage of events since Statescraft was published implies it cannot, yet we still do not act. Previously Thatcher recognised that the results of global warming could be worse than predicted; we are by its very nature, going into uncharted territory and do not know exactly what is going to happen.

She argues, referring to “some experts,” that the long term trend of warming is “not relevant to current concerns” (P.453). Presumably these are experts from the think tanks, not climate scientists. Again this case is not proven. However what Thatcher did not say is also significant, in terms of contemporary denial. She did not say that scientists were part of a conspiracy, that the science was being faked, or that the science itself was biased by leftist politics.

Secondly, CO2 is not the only greenhouse gase “so exclusive concentration on CO2… is bound to mislead.” (p.454)

This position is probably true. However, it means we should deal with all greenhouse gases, not just CO2. We should in fact return to Thatcher’s earlier position that there is a general systemic issue with ecological destruction and change. Climate change is not the only problem.

Third

There is now, as always, nothing that the liberal intelligentsia likes to believe more than that ‘we are all guilty’ But are we? The facts are unclear.

p.455

So what if this is true? And it is not proven. This does not change the problem. That the problem may harmonise with biases in some intelligensia (clearly she is not talking about the neoliberal think-tank intelligensia here) does not mean it is necessarily untrue. It does not mean we should stop research, stop looking at the latest research or try to mock research by real scientists, that you disagree with.

She remarks that the IPCC report “is a great deal more tentative than some alarmist assertions” (p.455). Previously she could admit that getting scientists to agree on a general proposition was difficult. The reports are likely to be tentative, by their nature.

Carbon dioxide levels have increase as a component of the atmosphere by nearly 30 per cent since the late eighteenth century, probably because of past deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels. But in any one year most CO2 production is not related to human beings

p.455

The question is whether this issue of the smallness of yearly human production of CO2 is relevant. Essentially, she mentions the importance of the cumulative effect of emissions since the late eighteenth century to dismiss it.

In fact, less than 5 per cent of the carbon moving through the atmosphere stems directly from human sources – again mainly: burning fossil fuels and deforestation….

p.455-6

She previously understood that small persistant changes can have complex consequences. Now she apparently does not. Things become simple and linear.

“The more closely one examines specific proposals to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere by emission controls alone, the more costly and economically damaging they become.

P.456

In that case, the sensible thing to do is to suggest better procedures. She has been prepared to engage in economic distortion and taxpayer subsidy when she considered it useful in the past, so why not now? Cost is never an excuse to do nothing. Surely we can rely on the ingenuity of capitalists to deal with the costs? Perhaps it will spur them into action?

The problem of acceptable costs, is acceptable to whom? Is people being driven from their homes by rising sea levels, drought or unbearable temperatures an acceptable cost of keeping profits high?

it will be be necessary to resolve many remaining uncertainties before risking action that makes the world poorer than it would otherwise be by restraining economic growth…

p.457

Apparently, for her, there is no imaginable paradigm in which capitalism could flourish without growth, and so we must be completely certain before acting against something which would likely cost economic growth. What would allow such certainty is not described.

Climate change doe not “mean the end of the world: and it must not either mean the end of free-enterprise capitalism”

There is no reason it should – if pro-capitalists are prepared to engage with the problem, or with other people.

Once her allies suggested to her that her beloved free-enterprise capitalism was being challenged by ‘socialists’ because of the problem of climate change, the Baroness appears to have suffered a major failing of confidence. She was previously famed for not backing down when she thought she was right. Here she did.

Her back down was so complete that she did not advance the case that free-enterprise should be encouraged to face up to the problem, and she did not propose non-socialist measures to deal with the problem. When faced with socialist opposition to many of her actions as PM, she continued; she did not say, “oh well we can’t do anything”.

However, faced with the apparent choice proposed by the think tanks of either pro-capitalism or action on climate change, she collapsed and allied with her mentors and supporters.

Therefore her path brings up the issue of whether it is possible for neoliberalism to actually deal with climate change or other problems, at all. At one stage she could, but the more she listened to neoliberal think-tanks the more this became impossible.

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The UN has failed Climate: What Next?

February 1, 2020

This post is based in two insightful posts by Richard Hames from 2012. [1], [2] I think it is important to summarise them. All the good bits are his, the rest of it is mine. The unsourced quotations come from the blogs just referred to.

We all know the assertion that

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.

which was apparently written by someone from Alcoholics (or Narcotics) Anonymous in 1981. It was not Einstein. It is also not quite correct. If you practice a musical instrument you would hope you would get better at playing from doing the same thing over and over, indeed you learn through repetition. Anyway let’s change the cliche to “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, failing to improve every time, and expecting different results.” Not as neat perhaps, but it makes the point…

Pedantry aside, we have been hoping that UN sponsored Conference of the Parties would help us solve climate change and come to an agreement since the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

They haven’t. They have not delivered better results and, by now it should be clear, that even with increasing disruption from turbulent weather events, they probably won’t.

When something fails repeatedly that is part of its pattern and existence. And the pattern cannot be ignored, without retreating into some kind of inability to deal with reality, or simply wasting energy which could be better expended elsewhere.

So let us propose that the UN Conference of the Parties, nowadays, primarily exists as an excuse for those parties not acting ethically or responsibly. Parties can always use the UN to find someone to blame for their own failure, so as to deflect criticism from a task they never took up whole heartedly in the first place, or that they expected others to solve without them having to sacrifice anything significant.

Not everyone has to refuse to take the conference seriously, and use it as an excuse for not acting, but if enough do, then it will fail. Consensus, of any other kind than ‘it failed again’, is unlikely.

What is the primary dynamic behind this? Hames suggests the Nation State.

Nation States are geared to compete with other Nation States, and to defend themselves against other Nation States. This goes back a long way, but it was reinforced by Colonialism and Developmentalism. Colonialism basically showed the importance of superior military technology and organisation, steel manufacture and highly available cheap energy from coal. The British were leading the world in the mid to late 19th Century and other countries emulated their processes, both as a mode of gaining resources and enforced markets (from colonies), and as a mode of defending themselves from British (and then European) power and dominance. The leaders of the Communist Revolution in Russia saw the development of Russia in terms of survival; they had been attacked and just managed to defend themselves: electrification and the coal to power it, was vital. After World War I, the US slowly shifted into dominance using the same kind of techniques, and lack of concern about environmental destruction, even if they set aside areas to be protected.

With the decline of colonialism, most of the ex-colonial states, no matter what their political system, embraced development and the implied rivalry behind it. Part of this embrace means embracing ‘GDP’ growth driven by cheap fossil fuels.

The Nation State:

defends and protects those citizens who choose to live within its borders , in return for which its citizens compete with those in other states for resources, territory, influence and wealth.

Hence the difficulty of any state giving something up which will perhaps weaken them and empower others.

The problem the UN faces is that there can be no losers, other than generous or unconcerned losers, if they are to preserve unity.

Hence the targets they issue are aspirational, and they have no enforcement mechanisms. Few States will voluntarily give any sovereignty to the UN and their potential enemies. This is why we have the security council and the power of the historically most important States to veto anything. The less “important” states are already afraid of less sovereignty, so they also resist. Not only do the numbers of negotiators, and their lack of authority or responsibility, inhibit negotiation, but a significant percentage are driven by Nationalist and Developmentalist loyalties.

So far most of the desperation and loss of life produced by climate change has appeared in the poorer States, and this is ignored by States with most of the power and producing most of the pollution. Recently, we have learned the wealthy states are quite capable of ignoring massive destruction in their own territory, if they choose. So the pressure to do something declines, as the results of action gets worse.

As the targets are aspirational, they tend to be pleasing and “possible” rather than based in our changing knowledge of what is actually required. They also tend to be manipulable, and interpretable in different ways, rather than fixed or meaningful. As a result the emissions from planetary industries have not declined, although they may have declined in some countries.

The UN is not geared towards producing alarm, for fairly obvious reasons of trying to keep the peace and status quo, so its warnings tend to be couched in vague terms, its science tends to be tilted towards conservatism.

This, as Hames notes then translates into the language used in the proclamations of the COPs.

Any effective communication, such that conveys compelling ideas or provokes collective action, is deliberately avoided or understated. Almost all briefing documents, reports, pledges, commitments, protocols, conventions and records of the meeting, supposedly intended to expound and inform, are invariably bogged down by a babel of weasel words – ambiguous, tortuously verbose or deliberately vague. This results in a weird kind of bureaucratic etiquette where nothing meaningful is said. Indeed the art of drafting these documents is to avoid saying anything explicitly that could cause offence to anyone at all.

The prime way of imparting information at the COPs is through instructional documents written by experts, according to the above restraints. But instruction does not necessarily result in new learning nor lead to behavioural change. It may just get people’s backs up, and reinforce their resistance. The documents fail on all levels, but do so in order to avoid complete dismissal as politicised. Not that it works.

The aim of consensus becomes impossible, and the aim may inhibit action. It allows any ‘recalcitrant’ State to blame others. For example:

  • “If the US does not reduce its emissions to zero immediately, it is not fair to ask us to reduce emissions at all.”
  • “If the Chinese can’t reduce emissions, neither will we.”
  • “We are only a small country, and acting would destroy our economy. Others need to act first”
  • We cannot reduce emissions without sacrificing our people to poverty

You all know the excuses and the blame game.

The most obvious other problem is that climate change is an unintended consequence of what are supposed to be beneficial acts, working through complex systems.

Consequently Nation States can be particularly reluctant to give up what they consider to be beneficial acts for themselves, in order to benefit other people in general. The costs of giving up the supposedly beneficial acts are obvious, the benefits of giving them up are not. Especially the benefits of being amongst the first to give them up. Its obviously better to let other people give up first. And if everybody waits for everyone else to give up first, then very little will happen.

As I have suggested previously, Climate Justice merely bogs us down in this fairness paradox, while climate generosity may free us to act in our and other people’s best interests, without waiting.

Suggestions

So we may need to recognise:

  • The UN is not the place for climate action.
  • People competing for advantage and past benefit are unlikely to act. Ever.
  • Nation States cannot all reach agreement, because of their nature and history.
  • A treaty is currently impossible.
  • We need to be doing something else.

What has been successful are things like the climate cities movement, in which cities compete to become more climate resilient, and to ameliorate their affect on climate. Of course such cities have faced attack from their federal governments, because it makes the government’s inaction look a little odd. In Australia, for example, despite confusion at the federal and state level:

nearly 40 per cent of the surveyed local governments had made commitments to reach a zero emissions target by or before 2050 for their community emissions – that is those generated by residents, businesses and visitors. ….

The report also found that 58 per cent of assessed councils had set targets to bring their own operational emissions to zero by 2050.

One Step Off the Grid

These moves are also acts of generosity, because they doe not expect others to act first. It allows people to take responsibility for their emissions now.

While there are conferences outside the conference in which history and power relations are explored, these secondary conferences seem to be kept isolated from the main proceedings – perhaps because the nation state is less important, and the conferences are less driven by wealth and power. International NGOs have also participated in such acts.

However, in the model proposed, we start to ask what can people at these conferences do without waiting for their Nation States to act, or to recognise their acts, or waiting for other places to act..

The Nation State, and the UN, cannot save us, so we have to stop expecting them to do so. We have to take action at the local level, or wherever we can act, and start building new institutions which will express our collective interests and enable us to co-operate to build local solutions, and to oppose local pollutions.

This is not easy, but it is also not impossible.

We further need to understand the history and dynamics of our position. As Hame writes:

“You must know where you have come from, where you are now, and where you want to get to,” to get there.

This knowledge seems more likely to happen at the local level or at the ‘secondary conference’ level than at the UN or the State level.

We also need a change in our psychology and our understanding of systems and complexity. In particular we need to attend to the notion that what we do may not just have the effects we are hoping for, we have to explore all its possible effects, and be prepared to change if our actions do not produce the results we expect.

Solutions to problems in complex systems cannot be worked out completely in advance, they must be discovered, at least in part, as we proceed, and that again is easier at the local level, where people have their senses and their direct concerns.

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