Posts Tagged ‘disorder’

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Ambiguity

August 7, 2021

I’m trying to write something on ambiguity, as part of the the nature of life, and how ambiguity becomes part of the response to climate change…. This is a space to try and work on it.

Definition of ambiguity

To begin let me try for a definition of ambiguity – which not only begins well, but fits with what I’ve discovered in the writing. The definition is probably not completely unambiguous.

Using the full Oxford English Dictionary (OED) we can construct not only a definition of ambiguity but show that attitudes towards ambiguity are generally hostile until the 20th Century when it comes to be recognised as important – possibly an opening to limits.

Ambiguity arises when events, situations, beings, or words (I’m trying to be definitive here, rather than rely on a word like ‘something’) have “different possible meanings; [the] capacity for being interpreted in more than one way; [or] lack of specificity or exactness.” The OED goes on to elaborate (slightly rephrased), ambiguity occurs when interpretation of language or events is uncertain, doubtful, dubious or imprecise. We can also have situations in which the events are difficult to categorize (linguistically, or practically) or to identify; especially due to changeable or apparently contradictory characteristics. Reality is in flux, and our perceptions may shift, so nothing remains the same forever. We can say that ambiguity is demonstrated whenever people see an event in a different way, or choose to emphasise different parts of the event and its context or surroundings.

Ambiguity in language

Ambiguity is almost always present in language due to homophones, words with multiple meanings, normal and expressive imprecision (‘My love is like a red red rose’ – not really, even though we may know what the poet implies), metaphor, meaning being shaped by context of the text’s emission, the context of its interpretation, or the context of the words which surround each other. We have shifting contexts, framings or word meanings (so that the same sentence issued at one time, or by one person, may not have the same meaning as when it is issued at another time or by another person), and through strategy in which people use words to persuade others, or to interpret a statement in a way that satisfies them. That misunderstanding seems common also implies ambiguity is common.

In many of the early illustrative quotations ambiguity is to be removed (“That alle ambiguites and dowtes may be removede.” “To puttyne awey alle ambyguite” etc), as it is a cause of hazard or dispute (“To prevent ambiguities and quarrels, each Prince..shall declare his pretences.”), and it indicates probable lack of understanding.

Some forms of philosophy from Plato onwards, have attempted to suggest either that poetry and ambiguity makes bad philosophy, or that most philosophical problems stem from bad use of language or cultivated ambiguity, and they may be right, at least some of the time. However, they are perhaps unable to demonstrate consistent lack of ambiguity, or perhaps fixity of meaning, in their explication ].

There is also the possibility that if a person is trying to work up to say/write what has not been said before then that person will not have the language to say it, and hence will, necessarily, be ambiguous or at least obscure. At one stage of my life, I argued that language found in new knowledges was almost always ‘magical,’ dependent on metaphor, ‘similarity’ and ‘contagion’ and I still think that is true, and likely to produce ambiguity and misunderstanding.

William Empson famously insisted that awareness of ambiguity and multiple association (together with the reader’s own experience) was an essential part of receiving the richness of poetry. However, he also suggests “any prose statement could be called ambiguous,” (p1). That language, at enough length, is ambiguous is perhaps revealed by the fact that literary critics never cease to find new points and new approaches and new meanings for valued plays and novels and even for philosophers. To some extent we get by, by ignoring the ambiguity of ordinary speech, by communication being good enough, or exact enough, for purpose.

We further face ambiguity because of the social dynamics of information, the way that information is distorted and filtered by human desires for social belonging (to fit in with others’ understandings and be confirmed in that understanding), the social construction of trust though identification, and the habit of seeing our group as good, and outgroups as untrustworthy.

Ambiguity of Reality

However, not only is language ambiguous, but so are our perceptions of reality, descriptions of reality or perhaps reality itself. Simone de Beauvoir states that “to say that [reality] is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won” (#).

While meaning is rarely fixed I suggest that an unambiguous meaning cannot be won without loss of reality and loss of recognition of complexity.

For example most people today appear to ignore the ambiguity in capitalism. Thus the pro-corporate player notes that capitalism brings prosperity (all the world’s most prosperous countries are capitalist), it brings choice (think of the realms of books you can buy), it brings freedom etc. While the anti-capitalist might note that it brings plutocracy, destroying democracy through purchase of politicians and policies; undermines ecologies through overenthusiastic extraction, pollution and growth; substitutes greed for virtue; and promotes pleasing blame and fantasy instead of information, as the media is controlled by corporations and competing for sales and influence. The ambiguity arises in that both sets of claims are accurate to a point. Suppressing one set of claims simply suppresses reality and complexity.

In approaches to climate change we find the same kind of suppression of ambiguity. This often involves suppression of normal uncertainty, or an over insistence on uncertainty.

If there is any uncertainty about future trajectories (which there is) then people can decide to be certain that nothing bad is happening at all, or if we are told that 97%, or whatever, of climate scientists say climate change is happening and is humanly caused, then people will insist this means scientists are conspiring or suppressing counter evidence, or that we should completely trust the 3%, or even non-experts, who do not agree before we take climate science seriously.

Then people will claim that action on climate will undermine the prosperous economy, and others claim it will not – the problem here being that the economy causes ecological destruction and climate change and is thus destroying itself, and that effective acting on climate change has to alter the economy and what it can do, or the destruction will continue. Others claim the economy will adapt to climate change in time to prevent climate change. There is no evidence for this. The economy is ambiguous in that it brings both good and bad, and we cannot control it completely: the economy we have, encourages people to game rules and regulations to get the maximum profit, not produce communal survival. We need to recognise that economic change to fight climate change will require the economy to change and that may produce chaos, although perhaps not as much as climate change itself. However, economic change and climate change will interact and almost certainly produce unexpected results – which will be only ambiguously relatable to one or the other.

Then we have the supporters of renewables who condemn those people who want to defend their local environments against windfarms or masses of solar panels. It is true that renewable farms are not as destructive as coal mines, or coal-seam gas fields, but nevertheless, do we not want people to defend and relate to their local environments? If we what to save the environment in some way destroys or alters that environment, is their not a problem?

How, in climate change, do we balance the loss of liberty to pollute, or other losses of liberty, with survival or repair? It depends on what we consider more important to our group life, and that is an ambiguous decision because not everyone will see it the same way.

Again we have to recognise both the social dynamics of understanding and the politics of making some set of statements true, as often functioning as modes of reduction of ambiguity rather than modes of truth seeking. While perceived ambiguity may be lowered, it is also likely to reduce our perceptions of complexity and real uncertainty.

Ambiguity in Morals

Likewise we often have moral ambiguity. This is shown by the simple fact that most crimes can be defended, that people can undermine the reputation of those thought to be good, or that there are competing moral priorities. For example, justice through imprisonment can compromise the value of reforming someone, or sometimes it may not. What is a large fine for some person, may be trivial for another and just taken as the necessary ‘charge’ for being able to commit a crime. If a person has done lots of good things, but one really bad thing how do you weigh the good and the evil? Mother Theresa was frequently seen as a moral saint, for looking after dying people, but then we learn that she refused to lessen the pains of dying, because she thought those agonies part of God’s will, or reformatory. Is this good or bad? Moral dilemmas are normal, and arise because the world is complex and ambiguous, and again are often resolved by our assumptions about who is likely to be guilty and who is likely to be innocent, and the politics of morals in which we are more interested in defending what our group has done, than understanding the complexity of ethics in the situation.

For me, moral ambiguity is present in most conceptions of God. There is the old problem that if God allows evil, then God permits evil, and is therefore evil or impotent – and God is usually defined as omnipotent. In sacred writings we read of God commanding cruelty and genocide, because those who displease him can be treated harshly, and those who please him are compelled to attack those who displease him, or they become displeasing. Or we hear of a God who arranges for people to be tortured in hell forever with no remission, for often what seem to be trivial ‘sins’ which may even have no lasting effect especially if the sinned against are in heaven…. and if they are not in heaven it is because of the judgement of God. I would say that gods tend to be morally ambiguous when their morals are worked out.

Strategic Ambiguity

To return to a point made previously, ambiguity can be used strategically, to persuade others or elide reality. People can use an ambiguity in an attempt to remove an ambiguity which could be kept in mind.

One recent example. A government minister was accused of anally raping a young woman when he was young. The woman is dead, so apparently a case cannot be brought against him. I don’t know why as murder cases can be brought with the subject being dead, but this assertion is frequently made and accepted as true. Anyway, when facing the press he forcefully denied he had slept with the woman. The problem is that this statement is ambiguous. No one was actually accusing him of having slept with her. Indeed, if they had slept together, than perhaps the rape charges would be less believable, or indicate more of a misunderstanding. However ‘slept’ is in the context of sex usually taken to mean having sex, but it may not, and his words may have been carefully chosen to truthfully avoid the untruth of denying he raped her.

Again in climate change, we may be told the government has acted, or is acting rationally and carefully, when they have done little to reduce the potential damage of climate change – they may have acted in other ways, or the evidence that they use to imply successful action does not originate in their action or lack of action.

Ambiguity and Complexity

We both are complex systems, and live amidst complex systems, and these systems produce ambiguity for humans. They are inherently not fully understandable by humans; we cannot predict the course of events or the results of actions with absolute precision. Events in one complex system are not separate from the system, or from events in other systems, boundaries are rarely precise, events are nodes rather than things: a storm is not separated from the atmospheric conditions, or the wind, or the low pressures, or the moisture contents, or the cloud formations, or the sea, or… A person is not completely separable from their culture, their language, the cultural history they participate in, those around them, their experiences and learnings, their social position, the food they eat, the air they breathe, the bacteria they carry and so on. So even if we were to have a completely precise non-metaphoric language, then reality would still escape that language and appear ambiguous. Language itself is an interactive complex system, in that words interact with each other and with different contexts to produce understanding, meaning and behaviour. We discover ambiguity everywhere even, if I understand Godel, in mathematics, which is the best attempt humans have made to remove ambiguity from rules and their consequences, and mathematics may not be able to formulate ‘subjective’ qualitative events to begin with, and that is what we live with.

Conclusion

The point is that we face several types of ambiguity, and this ambiguity is normal and unavoidable. We face the ambiguity of language, brought about by the complex multiple and different social tools we use to use and understand language and communication, and we face ambiguity in the world because of the lack of precision in our social tools of understanding a constantly changing complex reality, and we face moral ambiguity when judging our actions and the actions of others again partly because of complexity and also because of social positioning and alliances around the case we are judging.

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Thoughts on change in the workplace

August 3, 2021

1) Workplaces like any social systems are ‘complex systems’ , this means that complete prediction of the results of any ‘reforms’ is impossible, and that unexpected consequences are normal. Being wrong is normal.

2) This means that any change in work environment should be provisional. You can plan all you like, but you must be prepared to keep observing, and modify the plan as it goes along. Management must be capable of admitting mistakes and correcting them, without appearing confused and indecisive.

3) Information about almost anything in the workplace will probably be disrupted and inaccurate. Hierarchies distort information flow. The more punishing the hierarchy, the less accurate the flow.

4) Information disruption gives rise to destructive fantasies, especially if people feel ignored or pushed to one side. This can obstruct any attempts at improvement, meeting psychological needs, or finding the best work environment for workers. People’s perceptions of how they fit in, will be distorted.

5) While many organisational structures demand that managers appear to know the work better than workers, this is normally not the case. Managers may not understand how people have to do their jobs, or even what those jobs require. However, maintaining the appearance of superior knowledge can be vital to maintaining status in the company. This again leads to disruption.

6) Good communication generally becomes possible with equality, which can disrupt chains of command. So it can be unnerving. This is the role middle managers should have been serving, with feet in both camps, acting as a bridge.

7) In software programming, the lack of knowledge of managers can cripple the software and its capacity. This is overcome by actually listening to the workers and what they do. You may also want to ask ‘What do workers think their role in the organisation is, what would they like it to be?’ And that may include, “hey your management, you make decisions” it may not.

8) Trust building is fundamental but difficult, and it is probable managers are not perceiving the causes of distrust, because of the information distortion. Fixing this primarily means listening to and acting on suggestions from people below.

9) You cannot switch trust on, it takes time to lower levels of distrust. That means you need time before reform, time during reform and time for follow up. This time should be leisurely if at all possible. The less pushed people feel, and the more they feel participatory, then the more involved they will feel. However, even with care change can be messed up.

10) Do NOT do consultations in which you already know the answers and are going to do what you want to do anyway. While it is obvious that this sets up resentment, obstruction and delay, and breaks trust and information flow, it seems normal for managers and authorities to behave like this. The real point of a series of consultations should be to be open to improving the plan, and let people see you are open to their input.

11) Change consultants will often not help here, as they can see their job to implement the managerial plans, rather than to build trust or communication. That is much safer for them, and pleasing management leads to more job recommendations for them.

12) Repetition 1: Without attention to information flow, the building of trust and the recognition of unintended consequences, the workplace will be a mess, and people will not be satisfied.

13) Repetition 2: Workspaces are complex. Different people have different requirements of their work satisfaction. This is why ‘caring’ but unobtrusive managerial attention is important. In general people want to feel they have done something, that they have control over work, that they can make mistakes and not be crucified, that they have a chance of getting better and getting rewards.

14) If changes appear random, too frequent, or appear to over ride what workers know works, or is needed to do their job, then they will never understand their role in the organisation, other than as people who suffer arbitrary change and the whims of management.

15) I you want your organisation to be resilient, it needs redundancy. It needs more workers than strictly necessary, those workers need more time than strictly necessary. Not only does this often produce better thinking, but if everything is stretched to begin with, then in a time of crisis, there is no slack helping to hold everything together, and the crisis is likely to have worse effects.

16) Please note that if your organisation is thoroughly neoliberal, and regards workers as inconvenient but necessary costs, who must operate with machine like precision, and who are completely expendable in the name of profit, then you will never succeed in producing a ‘happy’ reform of the workplace. Any such reform would be destroyed as it appears slack, and the managers are not getting every drop of blood from the workers.

17) Final reiteration. As a manager, you may have an idea of what is best in advance, and that is probably good, but it needs constant testing and consultation, and awareness of information problems.

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‘Development?’

July 21, 2021

I wonder if we can still use the word ‘development’?

This is because ‘development’ has been a word that has excused much abuse of the world, and much harm.

While ‘development’ clearly has had many good consequences, such as better medical attention, longer average life spans and so on, it has also been the term for the change in a ‘nations’ orientation from working with the ecology and people, to unrestrained use of coal, massive hydropower, industrial farming, mining, over-fishing, deforestation, militarisation and so on. It has not been an unmitigated good.

Development formed a track which nations were almost forced to take into significant levels of destruction to gain their place in the modern world, and avoid more colonialist imperialism from others. It is a form of ordering which produces a disorder which is often easy to ignore or dismiss, because of the good being attempted.

One of the moral dilemmas of the last 20-30 years has focused on the argument as to whether India and China, were excused in the massive and dangerous amounts of emissions they released, and ecological destruction they engendered because they were ‘developing’. Objection by the developed world could easily be seen as imperialist and interfering, and as aiming to try and prevent them gaining power and influence and helping their people out of poverty.

Similar events have happened in South America, where forests have been stripped to boost development, and this too has affected the world. The Amazon forest is so devastated, that it may now be releasing more CO2 than it stores.

Development has led to massive pollution in countries and dispossession of people who lived well with forests.

Indeed, development seems to seek sacrifice. Who is it that that gets removed, or suffers so the nation may develop and become powerful? Are people who resist the changes to their landscape reduced to being mere ‘backward’ ‘obstacles’, who can be treated with patronisation, contempt or brutality? Is development a site of ‘class war’? Or even of ‘race war’ when, as in Australia, the Aboriginal people are continually dispossessed for development (even sometimes for development elsewhere in the world – a frequent argument seems to be that our fossil fuels are being sold to charitably help development and end poverty).

Likewise some development of Renewable Energy can also operate in the same way as development through coal, although perhaps less destructively in the long term. This should be born in mind to avoid ill-consequences.

Development has grown to include destruction, when it should involve consultation and political involvement of those who are being developed, and change of path when (or before) the destruction begins to have an effect.

But if development was to be abandoned as a term for attempts at improvement, what should replace it, that does not have these conventions around it?

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Disorder again – or against eternal order

July 14, 2021

This is just a reply to a comment on the previous blog post, lifted up into the main blog. This answer is slightly longer, with some deletes…

It does seem correct that people like Plato and most Christians theologians, saw the world as messy, but they denied that this was real reality. They possibly even fled from the idea it was real reality. Real reality, they appear to have asserted, had to be extremely ordered and unchanging. That is one reason, I suspect that they became idealists. There was little evidence of this ultimate order in the material world so they had to find it in the intuited real spiritual world; in God and/or the Archetypes.

This meant that everyday life, material life, real life was a fraud or at best a fall from reality, or a shadowy image of reality (the cave argument). The disorderly world is nothing (non-existent) when compared to the totally orderly ‘real’ reality they imagined. Our disorderly or contingent life was to be despised, other than as a preparation for reality. The lives of those who did not prepare for the eternal order were of no consequence. Change was threatening; change meant failure, imperfection and unreality, and was to be denied as being real. God was perfection and perfection could not change – in their eyes. Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, self mortification and ecological destruction, all seem to be consequences of this position.

This may stem from what Plato implies was Socrates’ method.

Socrates would ask for a definition of something, say ‘justice’, and demonstrate that another person’s definition was incoherent, and then say that, because of this disorder of incoherence, that person, however functional they were as a citizen, knew nothing at all. The implication of Socrates procedure is that justice has to be the same in every situation, or at worst, share similarities with every other incidence of justice, or it was misunderstood and unreal. The Sophists disagreed with this approach, which is why they are Plato’s villains. To the sophists, virtue and justice seem to have been situational and variable, depending on the people, the problems, and those judging the case. They could list different virtues, rather than make them the same. In other words they did not accept that something had to be the unendingly the same to be real.

If we accept the Sophist argument the whole platonic edifice falls over, and we could realise we are just dealing with a particular view of how words should work, not of practice or reality.

While Sophists could cope with the disorderly justice of the moment and the world, for Plato reality had to be uniform, eternal and orderly. And, as we cannot find real orderly justice, it too is only real in the archetypal realm of static order, or in a static authoritarian State which enforces lack of change. For Plato, surprise is not beneficial, and control is always good, when it is control by the Good.

This even infiltrates supposed philosophers of change. As far as I understand Hegel, which is not much, it appears to me that the change process of the dialectic stops when Geist reaches its pinnacle of unchanging understanding, order and reality, famously (?) in the philosophy of Hegel himself. That fixity constitutes supremacy is emphasised, because even Marx seems to think that the dialectic stops when the worker’s paradise eventuates. Whitehead, despite proposing ‘process’ and dynamics as the fundamental of reality, has to invent “eternal objects” to feel complete and to preserve the required lack of change.

While I clearly agree with the proposition that reality is (usually) not predictable in depth, I do not see how this is compatible with eternal sameness or eternal order. It may be that humans are incapable of predicting accurately at all times, but God should be able to know the prediction if the reality is orderly. None of these orderly people seem to suggest that God’s reality is chaotic, or beyond God’s understanding. So, according to them, we have to have faith in the order and justice, even if it is imperceptible. And this again proves the unreality of the everyday world and the superiority of the ideal.

Evolution and complexity theory suggest that the world makes itself up as it goes along, in massively complicated and sometimes accidental interactions which do not head in a particular direction. If that is the case, then order is not guaranteed beyond the situation or the moment. Order is flowing rather than eternal. If we accept this, then we then may well come to re-recognise the beauty of the creative and destructive disorder which the imagined eternally, unchanging, orderly reality was supposed to protect us from. That this interaction produces some order, and paths taken my limit future paths, does not show that there is only order. The apparent reality that my lungs seek air would not seem to be a belief or proposition my lungs hold and operate by. They just do what they evolved to do. And if there is no air, then I die. The lungs fail, and the disorder and joy of life terminates.

The orderly philosophers seem to have seen mathematics as a symbol of divine real predictable order, not of the intermixture of incompleteness and chaos. Probability theory would not be acceptable to Plato as a fundamental rule of order, any more than it was to Einstein, who could not believe that god threw dice; their assumption is that the word is non-probabilistically ordered, or that given all the information we should be able to predict what would happen.

What we call disorder is interesting and part of any life that is real.

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Skepticism and order

July 12, 2021

I’ve been interested in what happens when you don’t posit uniform order as the prime directive of the universe for a fair while now.

Almost all philosophies after Plato have been obsessed with imposing an order on reality, and seeing that as a guarantor of truth. This even affects the idea that a good scientific academic article presents a clear and coherent single argument, usually with a single causal factor/process. However, I am skeptical of the proposition that what we call order is inherent to the universe, is equivalent to truth, is unchanging, and that what we call disorder is negligible. This proposition seems contradicted by evolution to begin with. The world seems to be in constant flux and change, but I’m not dogmatic about this. I’m equally skeptical of the proposition that the universe is entirely random. Skepticism of one does not have to lead to the other.

I often find that people cannot understand what I’m getting at, which is interesting as its all rather simple.

  • There seems to be no perfect order in the world which is not disrupted or which does not self-disrupt.
  • Prediction always seems to have limits. The further ‘away in time’ the prediction refers to, the more likely it will turn out to have been incorrect. This is clearly demonstrated by most science fiction, and by economics.
  • Perfect order could be the same as death, as mess and unpredictability is associated with life.
  • To explain most events we may need multiple perspectives. Sometimes we may even need a single minded perspective.
  • Most, if not all, human understanding seems to involve degrees of uncertainty. Probably even mathematics, as attempts to find an impersonal non-subjective basis for mathematics, seem to have failed; but again my understanding is not certain.
  • Uncertainty should be recognised if at all possible. There may be specifiable or non-specifiable probabilities to the likelihood of accuracy.
  • We should not just be skeptical about things we already don’t believe, or don’t want to believe. I have noticed that many self-called skeptics are not skeptical at all about some political dogmas. “Directed skepticism” is not skepticism, it seems to function as another way of trying to impose order on the world.

‘Pre-platonic’ philosophy attracts me, because I don’t think it is as obsessed as post-Platonism with order as ‘truth’ or ‘life’. Take Heraclitus who asserts eternal flux and struggle (apart from the Logos, the meaning of which is unclear), or Sophism which asserts the importance of rhetoric to understanding. I was intrigued to find sophism seemed far more sophisticated than Plato claimed it was – that his philosophy seemed based on a lie, which made me even more skeptical of Platonism.
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My interest in Skepticism came about because it often is a skepticism about order and its importance. I began with David Hume, who is extremely hard to classify, and then went back again to its apparently underlying ‘base’ of Pyrrhonism. Looking at Pyrrhonism I have learnt many other things such as how the desire for theoretical order can produce misery and suffering – skepticism and uncertainty as a practical philosophy of life – which transformed my views of the possibility of skepticism. I also like the crossing between East and West because of Pyrrhonism’s apparent connection to Buddhism. Taoism is skeptical about humanly imposed orders and stability. Chavarka or Lokāyata is an Indian philosophy seemingly skeptical of spiritual order.

Order and chaos may need to be balanced as the Western Philosopher Michael Moorcock seems to be arguing, but perhaps without making them forces as such….
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The right and imperialism

July 6, 2021

Any discussion of this question should probably consider why countries and organisations are imperialistic, and the relationship between this and right wing politics.

Right wing politics

Lets assume that there are four dominant varieties of right wing politics in the modern world… [This may get expanded later, like most of these blogs, this is a work in progress]

  1. Nationalist
  2. Pro-capitalist, pro-corporatist,
  3. Theocratic, And
  4. Militaristic

Obviously, organisations and countries can appear to be a combination of some, or all, of these varieties, and they are not completely exclusive to the ‘right’, but they are extremely common in the right. All of these varieties of right wing politics tend to be imperialistic.

Nationalists can be imperialistic because they:

  • consider they are better and stronger than others
  • consequently others are inferior and deserve to be ruled by them,
  • they need more land to support their population,
  • they need cheap, or slave, labor,
  • they want to protect the homeland from everyone who is envious of their superiority and wants to bring them down
  • they need to rescue their ‘own’ people who live in another country from that country, and bring them into the national fold.
  • Imperialism becomes a continuation of successful national politics

Pro-corporate rulers can be imperialistic because:

  • they want guaranteed markets for their corporations,
  • they want guaranteed resources for their corporations,
  • they want cheap labor or production for their corporations,
  • they want to protect or control their corporations’ trade routes,
  • they want to protect their corporations’ private property in other places,
  • they wish to extend regulations which benefit corporations over people throughout the world,
  • they see themselves as rugged individualists, and hence better than other people,
  • like nationalists, they like proving how superior they are.
  • Imperialism is seen as a continuation of successful trade

Theocrats can imperialistic because:

  • they have the true religion and other people must share in it to be saved,
  • it is sinful if they don’t make sure other countries have the true religion,
  • to make sure its the true religion they have to control that religion,
  • they are really virtuous, or more virtuous than other corrupt places, because they have the true religion, and that will be decisive in any struggle,
  • they are better than other people,
  • God is on their side, so they will be victorious in the long run.
  • Imperialism is seen as a temporary and necessary part of obedience to God, spreading his word, and bringing about his will. It is, ultimately, a source of good. etc.

Militarists are imperialistic

  • because the point of a military is to have wars, to compete with others in matters of arms, etc.

Now there may exist some right wing governments who think that extending power is dangerous, and that they have no business interfering with other people, but these people are rare and they are usually happy to interfere with the lives of their own people to make them virtuous, and that interference is easy to extend to others elsewhere as a matter of national pride.

We can also note that most of these forms of politics tend to be authoritarian.

Nationalist because some one has to represent the nation and tell others what that is, suppress those who disagree and reinforce whatever they approve in the nation’s hierarchies. Nations tend to be identified with ‘kinship’ and race, so they devote a fair amount of energy making sure that non-kin and non true-race people are kept down.

Pro-corporate tends to be authoritarian because they have to enforce property laws, massively unequal incomes and privileges, force people to work for others, and defend the hierarchy and crony capitalism that evolves. They also have to defend whatever makes money that serves them. So they can support companies that corrupt, or destroy the whole system, as is illustrated by the current support for fossil fuel companies and attacks on IT companies. They may also need support for the trade wars which support certain companies profits.

Theocrats are authoritarian because they have to enforce the word of God, or the conventions which have grown around God’s laws, they need to stop other religions and ideas taking off and seducing the innocent and, because some people are considered to be particularly expert or holy, the religious hierarchies need enforcing against sinners.

Militarism just comes with authoritarianism.

The ‘Left’

There are also ‘Liberals’, may tend to try and build alliances through promoting their own political and economic systems in other countries, but this is often hard to distinguish from imperialism as far as the ‘victims’ are concerned – their world and culture is being changed to resemble that of another another place, often without consultation, especially consultation with the less powerful.

Left wing workers paradises may also be authoritarian and imperialistic to protect themselves against the rest of the world (as when facing the war against the Soviets after WW1), and to extend the supposed virtues of their system outwards to others to stop the challenge against them – this usually helps confirm any dictatorial tendencies they have.

So most of the common forms of government have imperialistic tendencies. All organisations which need to suppress opposition to survive, tend to become authoritarian or imperialistic, whatever their primary reason for being. This imperialism is magnified because common forms of government in the world today are competitive with other governments.

The End of Western Imperialism?

Given this, the most likely end for imperialism is to be defeated by another rising set of imperial powers.

This option in the contemporary world is made more likely because of the exhaustion of US power, and economy, in a pointless set of imperialistic wars started under GW Bush probably for reasons of nationalism (“New American Century”), Pro-corporatism (protecting US oil interests), Theocracy (Bringing Armageddon and the new godly world closer) and Militarism (we have the best and most expensive military in the world, and have to show it off).

There is some evidence (see Naomi Klein) that there was no plan for the aftermath of conquest of Iraq because the Bush admin hoped that with no government and no regulation the libertarian free market paradise would emerge and be a showplace for the world. If this was intended, it obviously did not happen.

Collapse is the fate of most imperialisms:

  • It is harder to hold onto territorial gains than to destroy those powers holding territory, especially with modern weaponry
  • The expense of conquest eventually becomes greater than the gains
  • Supply lines and back up gets exhausted, stretched or becomes too expensive
  • Information becomes more distorted as it passes up the chain of command, and nobody knows what is really going on
  • The conquerors get fed up of the effort of maintaining conquest and the cost in lives loses popularity back home
  • Without massive local support, conquerors can find themselves in an endless guerilla war
  • The harder the conquerors impose their order, the easier it is to see as imposed, annoying and incompetent
  • The wider the front or border, and the more expanded the empire, the more enemies it encounters or generates and the fewer resources it has to fight them all

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This blog is about, again: Dealing with crises

April 6, 2021

This is something of a sequel to the post “What is this blog about?”

Multiple Crises

We are in the midst of several crises of ecological and social destruction, , mainly brought about by our processes of extraction and pollution. Focusing only on the climate crisis can be a distraction from, or a defense against, realising how deeply we are caught in these multiple crises.

The Eco-crises include:

  • Deforestation
  • Destruction of agricultural land, through mining, house building, over-use, erosion etc
  • Poisoning through pollution
  • Over-fishing
  • Ocean Acidification
  • Disruption of the Nitrogen and Phosphorus cycles
  • Pollution, and loss, of water supplies
  • Introduction of new chemicals and materials
  • Changes in weather patterns

There are also social crises:

  • of information,
  • of social and political fracture,
  • of wealth and power disparities, including poverty
  • of political corruption,
  • of insecurity of work and income for most people (what is often called ‘precarity’),
  • of psychological contentment (existential crises)
  • and so on.

All these various crises interact in complex ways. Loss of agricultural land, for example, will probably spur the fractures of wealth and power, increase poverty and increase insecurity.

Part of the aims of this blog is to identify the problems, the underlying causes of the problems, and the ways we might come to change our minds and actions so as to deal with those problems.

Complexity and wicked problems

Complexity [1], [2], [3] adds to the difficulties of solving the crises. However, complexity has to be part of our understanding of social problems.

The term ‘wicked problems’ is used for problems:

  • Which don’t have a standard precedent, or standard formula for action; or the precedents and formulas appear to dig us deeper into the problem.
  • With no universal formulation; every wicked problem appears to be unique.
  • The people involved are in conflict, with different opinions and different aims, and there does not seem to be a possible mutually pleasing or agreeable solution. So solutions are likely to be undermined by those participating in the process, or prove unstable in the long run.
  • There are many linked problems, factors, drivers and consequences. The problem branches out into the systems.
  • Knowledge of the situation is obviously, and perhaps dangerously, incomplete. Some important people may dispute we have any knowledge.
  • There is little certainty a solution can be found in the time available for solving.
  • The problems are likely to change over time.
  • Solutions can also change the nature of the problem, and create further problems.

Wicked problems are systemic problems within complex systems. They sound impossible to fix, and hence are psychologically disorienting.

However, I’d say it is very difficult to fix the system rather than impossible. But the longer we leave it to stop what we are doing to disrupt the system, then the harder it will get to ‘fix’ it – or to keep it livable for the kind of society we might like.

It is easy to forget that we have always lived in complex systems and, in general, humans survive quite well – it’s not as if ‘wickedness’ or complexity are new phenomena, just something we often don’t recognise in contemporary societies.

If we remember we live in complex systems with a degree of unpredictability and uncertainty, and need to modify actions as we go along (and observe what happens), rather than assume we know in advance, then this realisation can change the ways we act, and process the results of our acts.

Complexity implies learning as we go along, trial and error, and so on.

It can also be helpful to pay attention to other sources of information than just our standard orderings. Information is a real problem nowadays, partly because there is so much of it, and so much of it is evaluated by whether it fits in with the politics of our ‘information groups’ online or in the media, and sometimes information primarily relies on the techniques of magic.

Social breakdown?

We are currently not organised to solve complex problems of great magnitude, but this does not mean it is impossible.

People may note that many large scale societies seem disrupted by ‘tribalism’ I don’t like the term ‘tribalism’ because not all forms of organisation we call tribal, have the features people use the word ‘tribal’ to indicate, However, the UK was at one time incredibly split and diverse, with big breaks between people. Papua Niugini was likewise one of the most diverse and splintered countries ever, with more completely different languages than any other country in the world. Both those places are now reasonably together, PNG in a remarkably short time – even if there are still obviously problems. We can, and have reduced the problems of ‘tribalism’ in the past.

Consequently, I don’t think there is any inevitability in the idea that people cannot unify or recognise difference and be able to live with it.

We may need to look at more closely, is what kinds of patterns of social organisation promote ‘gentler competition,’ more cross-social empathy and a sense of unity and, on the other hand, what patterns promote faction. That has become a recurrent theme on this blog – observing the ways that contemporary political communication patterns depend on the creation of enemies and outgroups, to bond the ingroup together behind the rulers.

My suggestion is that the patterns of behaviour over the last 40 years have increased the factionalisation of the US, for example. Things can get better or worse. But if we think the world is hostile, and prominent people encourage this thinking, then we tend to retreat from being-together, into being against each other. If we think that different humans can get on pretty well in general, and there are fewer forces promoting separation, then we are more disposed to try and get on.

We have also had times in human history in which the difference between the top and the bottom of the wealth hierarchy was not that great in terms of poverty, we have had times in which living conditions improved for a lot of people, and we have had times of better social mobility than others. These kinds of conditions need to be investigated without dogma, and without trying to prove that our dominant groups are really the best ever, or that hierarchy is essential – hierarchy is common, but hierarchies can vary in depth and separation between levels.

I have this vague suspicion that if we had encountered eco-problems we face now, in the 50s or 60s of last century, we would have found it easy to do a better job of handling it. We had a better sense that we all were all in things together, that sometimes money was not the only thing – and we had a growing sense that the world was fragile, which was useful, if threatening to some people.

Conceptual steps

It is now not uncommon to recognise the issues around complex systems, once people become aware of them. It is not hard to gain an awareness of the dangers of ecological destruction. It is easy to gain some sense of the political confusion, and learn that this confusion is not necessary, if you are not afraid to take on established destructive powers and habits. There are lots of people working on these issues; they even get some coverage in some media. There is a lot of effort put into discrediting science, on behalf of profit, but we can still learn if we want to.

As implied above the first step is to recognise that we do live in a set of complex systems, and that we need an experimental politics that looks for unintended consequences, and is prepared to modify policies depending on results.

We then need to be able to live with some levels of uncertainty and skepticism towards our own understandings – which plenty of people do already. In this skepticism, it is useful to be aware of the difference between real skepticism and directed skepticism, in which you are only skeptical of the out-group’s ideas, and use this apparent skepticism to reinforce your own dogmas.

We need to be able to recognise the ecological crises are problems, and that we probably cannot survive without working ecologies, and that societies previously have seemed to collapse because of ecological crisis. Dealing with the problems cannot be postponed indefinitely.

We need to understand that everything operates in contexts, and that changing the context can change the whole system, or even the meaning that some events have for us.

We probably need to be able to perceive some things in terms of continua, or statistical difference, rather than as binary opposites – because it is more realistic, and allows greater communication.

We need to be able to recognise that people are hurting because of the social and eco-crises, and that we cannot afford to have that pain be commandeered by fascist-like movements who try and impose more dogmatic order on the world.

Talking to each other with as much respect and kindness as we can, is often a good start.

Practical steps

While we cannot solve the problems entirely by ourselves, and they can seem overwhelming, it is useful to make whatever start you can, by yourself if necessary.

I’ve seen books which have long lists of things people can do:

  • learn as much as you can,
  • cut your electricity usage and bills as much as you can,
  • turn the heating down, and wear warmer clothes if possible, when its cold.
  • buy food from local producers,
  • buy organic food when you can afford it,
  • eat a bit less meat,
  • sit with local plants, get to know your local environment,
  • be careful what weed killers, insecticides and fertilisers you might use,
  • don’t use bottled water unless you have to,
  • avoid buying plastic,
  • engage in recycling even if it does not work,
  • don’t use a car for short distance travel if you can walk,
  • contact your local representatives about ecological and climate problems,
  • sign online petitions (if you don’t sign them, they won’t count),
  • engage in, or help organise, street marches or blockades. Start with the easiest first,
  • talk to friends about the issues, but not aggressively,
  • write about heavily polluting local industries to the owners, managers and local politicians,
  • buy ecologically principled renewables if you can afford them, or get together to explore organising a community buy in, if you can’t,
  • if you have superannuation, try and make sure it is not invested in fossil fuels or other ecologically damaging industries,
  • if you do buy shares, buy them in beneficial businesses,
  • let politicians and business people know that climate change and preserving the environment are important to you.

I’m sure people can think of other things which could make a difference in their area – even showing your support for other people who are doing the work is good.

If you are retired or young, you get extra opportunities to practice these kinds of things, and to work out what to do.

All these actions may sound trivial, but they will help a little. The greater numbers of people who act, then the greater the effect, the more it becomes part of their habits and common sense, the more it becomes part of social common sense, and the more it carries political weight, and the further sensible action will go. Find the things you can do and do them. Even better if you can join do them with others, as that helps support your actions and widens them, but the main thing is to do them.

We are helped in this process of change because of two factors:

1) small events, especially small accumulating events, can have large effects in complex systems, and

2) people tend to emulate others; so if you set as good example as you can without forcing it on others, then people may pick up the ideas and actions themselves and these actions may spread – and that builds a movement, even if it is not organised.

If you identify as part of the ‘political right’ and you think climate change is a danger, then it could be even more important for you to set an example, as people are more likely to learn from those they identify with, or classify themselves with.

There will be opposition to your protests, but that is life….

Old regulation

One of the main things that obstructs renewables in Australia is regulation, and I’d guess that would be a factor in most places. Markets tend to be regulated to favour those who have historically won in those markets, and those regulations often make assumptions which are no longer accurate. When something new starts, it has to fight against the established regulations. There are few markets without regulation. If there are no regulations then there might be ingrained corruption.

Anyway, finding out the regulations, finding out where they stop change, and agitating to change them, or draw attention to how they work, can also be useful. Politicians, or people in the market, may not even be aware of the regulatory problems

Climate Generosity

I’m interested in the idea of climate generosity as opposed to climate justice [1], [2]. It seems to me that people living in the justice or fairness framework, often behave as if they should begin to act when it’s fair, and that other people should act first to show them it’s fair. People are always saying things like “why should we destroy our economy while they are still polluting?” and so on. Leaving aside whether action on climate change necessarily involves economic destruction, we can’t really afford to wait. So we may need to just be generous and act before others act. We might be being exploited by those others, but who cares if it encourages more people to act and we survive?

This is another reason to act, even if it seems pointless.

Generosity is quite normal human behaviour. We might give gifts to gain status, or gain advantage, but that is fine. It often feels good to be generous and helpful. How we act is up to us: we might try and gift solar panels to a community building, even better if we work with others. We might try to get our politicians to use our taxpayer funds to help gift solar panels to a village, rather than force a coal mine on them, we could try and raise money for this ourselves.

Again we might talk to people and find out what they want rather than we think they should want, and see if it’s possible to help them get it with minimal ecological damage. Gifting is fraught, but you can increase the beneficial nature of the gift, by finding out in advance whether people would like it, and whether they will accept it, and understand that no return is expected, except for them to use it and acknowledge it. There are all kinds of ways to proceed, and involve others. Most people can at least make a present of some of their time.

Generosity reputedly helps people to feel good, build relationships, creates meaning and allows action. It helps solve the existential crisis.

Environmental relating

Sitting with, and observing, your environment can be fundamental to relating to the world, and getting  a sense of how it works and changes, how important it is to you, and how much a part of it you are. Almost everywhere that people live there is some sense of environment, some form of nature.

One of the problems with renewables at the moment, seems to be that the people installing them think primarily in terms of business and money, rather than in how renewables can be installed with relative harmony, help people relate to their environment, and be socially fair and appropriate. This is partly because of the success of neoliberal ideologies in shaping people’s common sense and sense of how the world works.

The number one bad?

One of the most dangerous things that has happened in the last 40 to 50 years is the triumph of ‘neoliberalism’. Hence I write about it a lot on this blog [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and so on.

Neoliberalism is the idea that only important social function is business. The only responsibility of business is to make profit. People are taught that business can do anything, and that what it wants to do, must be good, that wealthy people are inherently virtuous, and that the job of government is to support established business and protect them from any challenge at all. This is usually justified by a kind of naïve Marxist idea that the economy determines everything else, so a ‘free market’ must mean freedom. But the idea is nearly always used to structure the economy to support the established wealthy, who can buy policies, buy regulation, buy politicians and so on.

A standard neoliberal process is to strip away regulation of the corporate sector, particularly ecological regulation, and try and regulate ordinary people so they cannot stop corporate action. Common tools of neoliberal economic policy include taxpayer subsidies of corporations when they face trouble, selling off public goods and profit to the private sector, tax cuts for corporations and wealthy people, and cut backs in the helpfulness of social services and making social services punitive. The main idea is that the wealthy deserve even more privilege, and the poor deserve less.

As such, neoliberalism has helped lessen the sense of possibility, and collaboration, that I referred to above. I suspect that neoliberalism, and the power relations that go with it, have done more to slow our response to the problems we face than anything else. This is not to say that free markets are not useful tools, but they are not the only tools or always the best tools, and neoliberals tend to want to structure the world so that it helps markets, rather than structure the market to serve and preserve the world. Indeed many people will argue that the idea of structuring the market to serve the world and its ecologies is tyrannical. But the basis of all economies is ecology. If we don’t make sure the ecological system can regenerate all that we take from it in a reasonable time (even, or especially, in a bad year), then we are on a dangerous path. Neoliberalism seems inherently opposed to action to stop ecological destruction [1], [2].

One reason neoliberalism is harmful, is that its supporters cannot win elections if they tell people that their primary interest is transferring wealth upwards, increasing the power of corporations, rendering ordinary people powerless, and making ecologies expendable, so they have to lie, stir up culture wars, and build strong ingroups to have any chance of victory [1], [2]. Now, in the US, they appear to be trying to stop people from voting. Sadly, the end point will probably be something like fascism [3], [4], [5], [6].

Neoliberalism suggests that ordinary people have no ability to cooperate (and should not cooperate outside of their jobs), are largely competitive and selfish, poverty is a moral failing, and that money is the measure of all virtue.

Any conservative should be able to tell you:

  • a) that people are cooperative and competitive, and that for good social life we want a competition which builds cooperation amongst the population rather than destroys it,
  • b) people are selfish, but they are not only selfish, and
  • c) virtue has little to do with money.

So we have to move on from the idea that it should be forbidden to criticise markets in politics – or perhaps more precisely, the players in those markets and the way they play. Tax cuts for wealthy people are not the only economic policies which exist.

The problem of virtue – the prime dangers of renewables comes from companies not from renewables

We should never assume that because a project appears to be virtuous, and we support its virtue, it will not have harmful effects. Furthermore, our ideas about the project, and how it works, may be completely wrong.

This applies to everything. Recognising that a virtuous, useful project that we completely support can have harmful and unintended consequences is fundamental to an experimental politics, and to navigating complexity.

So far the main problem we have had with renewable energy, is that we are often (although not always) carrying out the transition through the normal ways that we have carried out business and development in the past. These ways of proceeding have traditionally harmed people, and harmed ecologies, partly I suspect because they have always put development, business and profit ahead of those people or ecologies. So we have to be careful.

For example, production of solar panels can involve ecological destruction through mining or pollution. The factories can have harmful working conditions – workers can be poisoned. Disposing of old, or broken, panels can create pollution. We face the usual consequences we might expect from attempts to increase profit, without any ecological or social concern.

Biofuels have in many places resulted in small farmers being pushed off their land, loss of casual farm work for people without land, breakdown of village relationships, deforestation (which goes against the point of the fuels), replacement of food crops with fuel crops pushing up the price of food and leaving people short of food. Biofuels have resulted in greater use of fertilisers which may harm the soils and rivers, they may consume vast quantities of water which can threaten local livelihoods, if rain is rare.

It’s pretty obvious that cultivating vast areas of monocrops takes fuel burning, and making and transporting the resulting fuels can take fuel burning. As well, it usually takes much longer to grow biofuels than to burn them, so it is not immediately obvious that, unless fossil fuel consumption is significantly curtailed by these processes, that it is actually helping at all.

Likewise, wind and solar farms can involve companies fraudulently stealing land from small farmers (people I research with have observed this in action), can involve secret agreements which split townships, unclear distribution of royalties, disruption of people’s sense of the land, agreements that do not involve local people or only involve some local people, fake community consultations, use of water which is in short supply to clean panels, destruction of jobs without replacement and so on. Sometimes it can even involve organised crime, or militia’s, intimidating opposition, forcing people to sell land, or provide ‘services’ for the non-local labour that has come in to install the renewables.

Even events like attempting to conserve forests can lead to traditional people who have lived pretty well with the forests for thousands of years, being thrown out of the forests and becoming homeless.

It should be clear to anyone, that an energy transition does not have to proceed like this, but this is how normal developments proceed at the moment. Mining is often surrounded by local protest and horrendous treatment of local residents, and even poisoning. Having a large chain supermarket arrive in your town, can destroy local business, and create unemployment amongst previous business owners. However, for some reason or other, many of the people who lead country wide protests against wind farms, do not see a problem with mining, even when destroying agricultural land completely, perhaps because they think mining is virtuous. However, it is not just renewables that cause problems, it is the system. So the system needs change, at whatever levels we can manage.

The point is we need to have more care about how we proceed, and more awareness of the problems in virtuous projects without feeling we have to abandon them. If people get dispossessed by renewable companies, behaving as companies often do, we need to stop this, as they may tend to react with hostility towards the transition in general, when the problem is company behaviour not transition.

This blog aims to explore some of these effects, and suggest possible remedies. We cannot afford for business to behave like this, so renewables companies must be regulated to engage with communities.

Perhaps this means that community based renewables are a better way to go? People working as a community are more likely to listen to each other, and to relate to the place they are working in – which does not automatically mean harmony of course. If this is true, then it again demonstrates the importance of working at a local level – even in cities.

The downside is that careful processes take longer and slow progress down, but we want a liveable world at the end of it.

Problems of Fantasy Tech

Finally, some imagined technologies like ‘clean coal,’ ‘carbon capture and storage,’ or geoengineering [1], [2], [3] often act as ways to reassure us we can continue on as we are doing, and suggest we can fix everything up with a future technological add on to the process. These technologies currently do not exist safely, or are not working at the rates we need. It is generally not sensible to imagine that a working technology must appear because we need it, or in the right amount of time to solve our problems. That is just fantasy. While we should research new technologies, we also have to act with the technologies we have now, as well as we can. Further delay, because of technological fantasy, just makes the situation worse.

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Australian Solar Traffic Jams?????

March 25, 2021

Charged for providing solar power

The Australian Energy Market Commission is recommending new rules which allow people with rooftop solar to be charged for exporting energy to the grid.

This official reasons for this appear to be because:

  • a) the grid is struggling to cope with the increase in solar energy,
  • b) the grid was not configured for two way traffic, and
  • c) 20% of all customers now partly meet their needs through rooftop solar.

This level of solar can, sometimes during the day, mean that the minimum demand for corporately supplied electricity approaches zero. This pushes fossil fuel production into unprofitable regions – although this factor may not be being mentioned.

Switching solar off in South Australia

Once in South Australia, the whole State was powered by solar panels, as about 280,000, or 35% of households in South Australia have solar installed. At that time Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) chief executive Audrey Zibelman said:

Never before has a jurisdiction the size of South Australia been completely run by solar power, with consumers’ rooftop solar systems contributing 77 per cent.

Davies All of South Australia’s power comes from solar panels in world first for major jurisdiction. ABC News 25 October 2020

This event was greeted by the announcement that new inverters must have software installed that allows them to be controlled remotely by the power company.

This appears to mean that a person’s own solar panels can be switched off by that power company, and they have to consume energy from the grid. The first such mass switch off occurred in March 2021, five months after the announcement.

with South Australia experiencing “near-record minimum demand levels for electricity from the grid” during a planned outage of circuits feeding the Heywood interconnector which links the state’s grid with Victoria… AEMO instructed transmission company ElectraNet to “maintain grid demand above 400 megawatts” for one hour during the afternoon [by switching people’s solar off].

Keane et al Solar panels switched off by energy authorities to stabilise South Australian electricity grid. ABC News 17 March 2021

Which is great for a centralised power system that does not face any export charges.

Climate Justice and the social good of charging solar owners

As we might expect there is an attempt to justify this imposition of charges on exports by encouraging rivalry.

The AEMC said the recommendation was not designed to create mandatory export charges, but to create more flexibility and pricing options.

“Introducing this flexibility should benefit the 80 per cent of consumers who don’t have solar PV (photovoltaic) on their roof,” Mr Barr said.

“We’ve modelled that there’s a small reduction in their bills if this comes in.”

Mr Barr said households across Australia could see a reduction of up to $25 a year on their energy bills.

Eacot Australians with rooftop solar panels could soon be charged for exporting power into the grid, under proposed changes ABC News 25 March 2021

The ABC quotes a person in a family of four celebrating the charges, saying

“I looked into getting [solar power] because our electricity bill is around $1,300 a quarter, that’s for two adults and two kids,…

“I kind of think, ‘Well, you’re lucky because you might have to pay an extra minimal amount per year but the amount you’re saving is a lot more than what we are saving because we don’t get any savings at all,'” she said. 

“I’d swap any day.

Low-income families back proposed solar export fees in hope of reducing power bills. ABC News 26 March 2021

I suspect that this is inaccurate as one source implies the average annual home electricity bill in NSW is $1,421. If the $1300 a quarter bill is accurate, then some kind of energy efficiency, power-saving scheme, finding out where that consumption was going, would probably be far more effective in reducing the family bill than charging people with solar. Especially given that the new rules might mean “Australian households could save up to $25 on their bills each year.” This seems to be of trivial advantage (less than 2% reduction) for most people who can afford to pay electricity bills.

On the other hand people with solar panels would see a reduction in their earnings. Solar Citizens argued

It is inequitable to charge solar owners when generators in the transmission network are not charged for accessing the network

Eacot Australians with rooftop solar panels could soon be charged for exporting power into the grid, under proposed changes ABC News 25 March 2021 .

The AEMC is essentially making a ‘climate justice’ argument – people who cannot afford solar are supposed to suffer from solar, so to be fair we should continue to use fossil fuels, and charge people using solar. It could also be argued that solar panels provide cheap energy, and that this reduces everyone’s electricity bills. Over-supply is supposed to make a product cheaper. Restricting that supply is supposed to make the product more expensive, especially with ‘necessary products’ as opposed to voluntary consumables. On the other hand if people decide to respond by storing power and going off grid, to avoid being turned off when convenient for power companies (or if the grid collapses) then use of the grid could become less economic, and real problems start.

Some also say that the evidence is that:

proportionately, rooftop solar uptake is the highest in middle and lowest socio-economic areas and the lowest in the highest socio-economic areas. Where then, is the supposed transfer from the rich to poor that needs to be righted?

Mountain, Where is proof that rooftop solar is being subsidised by non-solar households? RenewEconomy, 26 March 2021

At this moment, I do not know whether this is true or not in general, but it is true that there is more solar in Lismore, as a percentage of rooftops, than there is in Annandale in Sydney.

The same author comments:

Snowy Hydro will pay nothing towards the (at least) $3 billion of to-be-built “shared network” to get their electricity to market. Instead, electricity consumers in New South Wales and Victoria will pick up the tab at around $560 per connection.

While Snowy Hydro gets away scot-free, the typical household in NSW or Victoria that has solar panels on its roof should, according to the AEMC, be charged around $100 per year to use the grid to export the circa 2,200kWh that we estimate the typical household with rooftop solar exports each year.

Mountain, Where is proof that rooftop solar is being subsidised by non-solar households? RenewEconomy, 26 March 2021

I guess Justice issues do not apply to corporations.

Official optimism about power corporations

The AEMC seems to be claiming, that companies will undoubtedly provide different services so people need not fear loss, while others have suggested the charges will provide investment funds to encourage the building of a better grid. It also, for reasons which are not clear, expects this to allow more Australians to install solar.

According to its draft report, the AEMC started its journey with three potential scenarios for consumers in Australia’s booming rooftop solar market: [1] Do nothing to upgrade the grid, pass on no costs, but nobble distributed solar investment and returns in the process; [2] upgrade the grid and spread the costs over all customers; [3] upgrade the grid and recover costs through export charges on solar customers only.

Having summarily ruled out scenario one, the Commission said its analysis of total revenue recovered under the remaining scenarios indicated that the fairest distribution of costs was made under scenario 3; as opposed to scenario 2, where all customers – solar and non-solar – would pay an estimated $14 a year to cover the cost of solar exports.

Vorath Modelling: How the proposed rooftop solar tax will affect solar households. RenewEconomy 25 March 2021

Energy Networks Australia [“the peak industry association for energy networks“] chief Andrew Dillon supported the charges:

“The AEMC’s draft decision will help networks support the increasing number of customers who want to connect solar and export their energy into the grid.

“Without changes to how DER (Distributed Energy Resources) is managed, the ongoing growth in solar means networks would increasingly need to restrict power exports or even block solar connections to prevent voltage spikes and even local black outs…

“This rule change will incentivise networks to invest in a smarter grid that can better support a two-way flow of electricity as more customers both consume and export electricity

AEMC move to support more solar welcomed Energy Networks Australia 25 March 2021

Despite this kind of claim there is no guarantee that companies will use the money to upgrade the grid, as this would lower their profit, and possibly benefit their competitors. If they improved the grid the companies could not justify getting the extra income from the regulation (?). Able to charge, rather than pay, people for solar exports they would appear to have more incentive to keep a bad grid, and not upgrade it.

The current recommended cost is

2c/kWh for exports in the middle of the day. This would cost up to $100 a year, but it is not recommending a flat or compulsory tariff and wants consumers and networks to negotiate flexible outcomes.

Parkinson Solar tax: Networks able to charge households to export solar power to grid. RenewEconomy 25 March 2021

The AEMC modelling suggested that the charges would not significantly reduce solar take-up of systems less than 6-8 Kw. The AEMC announcement of charging people for export:

was promptly labelled a “sun tax” by community interest group Solar Citizens, which called on state energy ministers to “protect solar owners from this discriminatory charge”.

But electricity distribution companies said the proposed reforms would allow more rooftop solar systems and batteries, collectively known as distributed energy resources or DER, to connect on to the grid and provide networks with the incentive to invest in “smarter” management systems for the network.

McDonald-Smith ‘Sun tax’ riles solar users Australian Financial Review 25 March 2021

It is not clear why. After all if people are paying to export, then the companies either make money, or people decide not to export, and thus make more use for fossil fuel back up, and remove the cheaper exports.

Also batteries are reasonably expensive. Choice comments:

Batteries are still relatively expensive and the payback time will often be longer than the warranty period (typically 10 years) of the battery. 

Choice. How to buy the best solar battery storage. ND.

This goes against the climate justice argument of penalising the wealthy for having solar. Only the wealthy will afford batteries, as well as the costs of installation. So the wealthy benefit rather than ordinary users.

The Tasmanian Renewable Energy Alliance remarked:

It is also discriminatory. Large power stations are not charged to use the network to export power, neither should solar owners…

There are many positive ways of encouraging consumers to invest in new technology and change their behaviour in ways that benefit all consumers. These include time-of-use tariffs, better feed-in tariffs and virtual power plants…

Vorath No biggie or bin job: Solar advocates react to export tax proposal. RenewEconomy 25 March 2021

As long as it penalises solar, and does not use it as an energy source

Currently it looks like we have two systems proposed. One in which solar panel users have to pay for grid electricity they don’t need because their panels are switched off, and a second in which people are charged for exporting electricity. We could have both. In both cases it would appear electricity companies are profiteering off solar generation. There is no proposal for a system in which supposed overloading leads to exports being switched off, or stored, so that people are not being charged extra for having solar panels. If we switched to people with solar, heating their water during the day, that would also reduce input into the grid. Another route would be to encourage the construction of decent grids, perhaps by public utilities, or perhaps all we need is better/redesigned transformers and substations – some of which are getting pretty old. Although, the Australian Energy Market Commission’s chief executive, Ben Barr, said fixing poles and wires would be “very expensive and end up on all our energy bills, whether we have solar or not”, which given the ‘gold plating scandals of a few years ago was not a concern when the sources of power were primarily fossil fuels. Indeed the previous incentives to improve networks were held to be a public good.

If you believe people are driven by profit then charging them extra at your whim, seems to be a way of discouraging uptake. Bruce Mountain, from the Victoria Energy Policy Centre said:

“It is like arguing that bicycles should be charged for using the roads…. The uptake of solar was the one big success we have had in the energy transition.”

Parkinson Solar tax: Networks able to charge households to export solar power to grid. RenewEconomy 25 March 2021

The point seems to be not to use solar constructively in a way that does not cause these ‘traffic jams’, but to penalise people with solar for some reason.

Conclusion: Do the claims match likelihood?

This is not the first time the AEMC has made this proposal for charging people for export, but it abandoned two previous attempts due to unpopularity from solar users. This time as well as using ‘Justice’ arguments it is also claiming that is is:

Changing distribution networks’ existing incentives to provide services that help people send power back into the grid…. We also propose recognising energy export as a service to the power system in the energy rules to give consumers more influence over what export services networks deliver and how efficiently they deliver them…

Gives networks pricing options they don’t have now, like rewarding solar and battery owners for sending power to the grid when its needed and charging for sending power when it’s too busy. New incentives will give customers more reason to buy batteries or consume the power they generate at busy times on the grid…

Allows each network to design a menu of price options to suit their capability, customer preferences and government policies. Customers could choose things like free export up to a limit or paid premium services that guarantee export during busy times.

New plan to make room on grid for more home solar and batteries, AEMC 25 March

None of these points seem to encourage people to export energy to the grid, or make it likely for companies to encourage export to the grid, or make more room on the grid for household solar, other than by stopping exports as opposed to fixing the grid problems.

While perhaps we can agree that “Customer preferences [should] drive network tariff design and the solar export services they get,” that we should “recognis[e] energy export as a service to the power system” and that “planning ahead will avoid costly over investment and crisis solutions down the track” (AEMC) This does not seem to be it. Neither do the results being aimed at seem to be likely to arise from the method being proposed.

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Endnote

There is some evidence that there are plans to expand the poles and wires, but whether these plans will be useful for connecting new renewable farms to the web, and solve the local grid wiring problems that make small scale export problematic, is difficult to say.

The new projects include:

the Marinus Link, between Tasmania and the Australian mainland, Project EnergyConnect, linking South Australia and New South Wales, HumeLink linking the Snowy 2.0 project with the grid in NSW, and VNI West between Victoria and NSW.

Vorath Wind farm commissioner role expands to tackle tricky transmission projects. RenewEconomy 26 March 2021

Another report adds that researchers from the University of NSW are going to investigate how distributed energy resources (such as small-scale energy devices, like rooftop solar and battery storage systems), behave during periods of sudden failures in the energy system (including failures of network infrastructure due to fire or lightning strikes or unscheduled outages at large thermal generators), in an effort to boost system resilience and maintain reliable supplies of power.

It is expected that there will be opportunities:

to harness rooftop solar capabilities to help restore power system security. Despite this growing role and potential impact, there is very little data showing how solar PV behaves in the field during such events

Mazengarb Can rooftop solar and household batteries keep grid stable when big generators fail? RenewEconomy 1 April 2021

ARENA says:

“Integrating renewables into the electricity system is a key priority for ARENA, so the tools being developed throughout the project will help to ensure that Australia’s record-breaking solar installations continue to be of benefit to the grid and in helping with system security.”

Mazengarb Can rooftop solar and household batteries keep grid stable when big generators fail? RenewEconomy 1 April 2021

This functionality may be changed by distributors charging for electricity export or shutting down solar panels…..

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Update

Giles Parkinson, founder of RenewEconomy, who is generally a reasonably reliable source, states:

State energy ministers are looking to adopt new protocols that will allow network operators to not just switch off rooftop solar when instructed, but also pool pumps, electric vehicle charging stations, hot water systems and even air conditioners….. the promise is that it will be used rarely – in terms of hours a year. But that remains to be seen.

Parkinson. Solar “switch-off” rule to extend to EV chargers, pool pumps and air con. RenewEconomy 13 April 2021

This is an extension of the idea that people with solar panels must be forced to buy power from the grid when it is convenient for those big operators selling power on the grid.

As Parkinson and others point out this is likely to get people to plug their EVs into the socket.

Another consequence is that rather than the householder being a ‘prosumer’ a producer and a consumer, the corporate aim seems to be to gain control of what happens ‘behind the meter’ so that the company puts its own advantage first, and makes the consumer a paying labourer or producer – an appendage and slave to the system, rather than the other way around….

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Praxeology, Culture, Ecology

December 20, 2020

This post continues to explore the apparent lack of consideration given to context in the basic axioms of Austrian economics; in this case culture and ecology.

Not Recognising ‘Culture’

Discussing purposeful action, which is supposedly basic to the economy, Rothbard goes on to argue that a human must have certain ideas about how to achieve their ends. Without those ideas there is little in the way of complex human purpose.

However, this sidesteps the issue of where does this person get the ideas from, as well as the language to think about those ideas? The ideas are unlikely to be purely self-generated, with no precursors. In reality, ideas arise through interconnection with other people and previously existing ideas. This of course does not mean people never have original ideas, but without interacting with other people it is doubtful they would have complex ideas or language at all. Indeed, the people they interact with may have a massive influence on the ideas, and approaches, available to the person. Ideas are socially transmitted.

Even our individuality is based in the groups we have encountered, the ways we categorise our selves in relationship to others, and the child rearing we experience. It is not as if we are born fully conscious and evaluative, able to deduce everything all by ourselves from first principles….

However, in response to criticism, Rothbard states: “We do not at all assume, as some critics of economics have charged, that individuals are ‘atoms’ isolated from one another.”

  • (Note the way that his economics becomes all economics as opposed to ‘my economics’ or ‘our economics’).

Where is the evidence of this recognition in the initial axioms, from which all else is derived? Its certainly not clear to me that this recognition exists, other than to be wheeled in to get rid of objections. “You think people are isolated from each other” “No we don’t. I mention this in a footnote.” This recognition seems an add on – whereas it seems more likely that humans are both individual and collective from birth onwards. To some extent we can even say that humans have the capacity to learn to be individuals, to individuate, but it is not always easy.

I suspect that if we included culture’s (and social organisation’s) effects on exchange and economic action, then we might not be able to perform a supposed universal justification for capitalism, and its exemption from attempts to control it or regulate it to be less harmful. And this justification and protection, seems to be the purposeful action of Austrian economics from its beginning.

Ecologies

All action takes place within a web of actions – which is sometimes known as an ‘interactive network,’ or a ‘set of complex systems’ and sometimes, in Austrian economics, as a catallaxy, or as Hayek says “the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market.”

It is possible that, with this term, Hayek is pointing towards what is now known as “emergent order,” which involves far more than just ‘individual economies,’ adjusting in a ‘market’ – as markets cannot be separated from other processes, including social and ecological process which also adjust to each other.

While it is often assumed to be the case, it should be noted that the ‘order’ which emerges from a complex system or ‘catallaxy’, does not have to be hospitable to humans. Historically we can observer that the ecological order is often changed by humans disasterously and, as a result, humans can no longer flourish in those new ecological orders.

Sometimes this ecological collapse occurs because some form of behaviour which once helped survival has been intensified to a level at which it:

  1. becomes destructive,
  2. blocks information flow and perception of danger which challenges the behaviour, or
  3. simply prevents change through entrenched power.

Hayek’s formulation uses the cultural assumption that order is ‘good’ for humans, to imply the market always brings ‘good’ results, when it may not, even if the ‘order’ arises ‘spontaneously’.

Economies occur within general ecologies: they can be said to be context dependent. An impoverished ecology is likely to produce an impoverished economy for most people, even if the wealthy are very wealthy and well provided for.

  • [Rothbard uses the term ‘catallactics‘ to refer to the “the analysis of interpersonal exchange”, or “study of money exchanges” which do not seem to be quite the same things as not all interpersonal, or intergroup, exchange involves money, although it is interesting that Libertarian economics tries to reduce all exchange and interaction to money. Neither does this usage seem to refer to the same kind of process as Hayek’s catallaxy].

Rothbard states on page 4: “With reference to any given act, the environment external to the individual may be divided into two parts: those elements which he believes he cannot control and must leave unchanged, and those which he can alter (or rather, thinks he can alter) to arrive at his ends”.

Earlier he talks about rearranging elements of the environment…

All this suggests that Rothbard thinks of the environment as a largely passive backdrop to human action, not a participant in that action, or even likely to react to that action. The environment is portrayed as essentially passive or dead, or humanly controllable, neither of which seem to be the case. Again the aim seems to be to reduce everything to the human individual, who determines what is to be done.

The approach not only does not recognise the importance of groups but appears to be anti-ecological, or anti the recognition of the necessity, and force, of ecological processes. This could be accidental, but perhaps it occurs because neoliberalism grew up to be anti-ecological in the roots of its thinking (thinking that humans are detached from each other and the world), perhaps because social movements recognising the importance of ecologies were seen as a threat to corporate profit and liberty, or perhaps it is just their overconfidence in the culturally backed idea of human specialness and isolation.

Rothbards adds that acts involve means, and this involve technological ideas. Both true, but forms of government and organisation can also be thought of as technologies. It is easier to hunt with hand weapons if we organise to hunt together, and use strategy and planning in that hunt.

“In the external environment, the general conditions cannot be the objects of any human action; only the means can be employed in action.”

I’m not sure what this means, but it seems to be suggesting that we cannot work with environments….

However, economies are enmeshed in environments. Economies do not exist without ecologies and, at the moment, without naturally livable ecologies. (Possibly in the future large numbers of humans may be able to live in purely constructed environments, but not now).

We have to grow food, we have to survive climate, we have to survive in the atmosphere, we need drinkable water, we need ‘raw materials’, we need energy supplies (more than just food and water if we are going to survive with any technological complexity). We need functional waste recycling systems and pollution processing, and so on.

If ecologies are destroyed then economies are highly likely to collapse, and in any case the aim of the economy becomes reduced to survival, and radically simplifies. Social support and social action is still vitally important.

Economies are also enmeshed in environments of social and political life, as people attempt to use rhetoric and persuasion and sometimes violence to protect their markets, regulate and structure the markets and so on. Wealth, earned on markets, gives power and that power is used to ensconce and intensify the position of the wealthy. At the least, all economies are political economies, in the sense that economic action involves politics and vice versa.

It seems to be the case, that extracting something called an economy from both social and ecological life, is a massive and probably dangerous over-simplification.

More Accurate Foundations

In these last two posts on praxeology, I have implied you cannot ignore history or social studies to formulate a study of economics, because that forms the conscious (or unconscious) data you draw your a prioris from. I’m not asserting that a prioris of any kind do not exist, they may, but it seems unlikely that social science a prioris exist, and that the a prioris of Austrian economics are inadequate and dependent upon unacknowledged (or unconscious) cultural foundations.

Let us reformulate the initial propositions as simply as possible, from the discussion above.

  • Human action is defined simply as purposeful behavior.
  • Purposeful action almost always involves humans acting with or against other humans, human groups, and environments – often several at the same time.
  • Most human motives and means are learnt from, with, or against, other humans and the environment (often through trial and error).
  • Purposeful action often involves trying to influence, or sway, other people’s action and/or gain approval in some other humans’ eyes.
  • People are not always aware of the origins of their purposeful action – they can be unaware of their true purpose.
  • Human action normally results in unintended consequences.
  • What we interpret as disorder is as normal as what we interpret as order, and vice versa
  • Human being is social. People act in groups all the time, and belong to groups. Without some group backing, most humans would die when young. It may be easy to say people are individuals but it is not entirely correct, and so will take us to incorrect conclusions.
  • A group acting together is not just the sum of the individuals acting – this is one reason why humans act together.
  • Human groups tend to regulate, or govern, themselves, so as to act together. They team up to achieve individual and group objectives – which may just include company and conversation, or it may include world conquest, acquiring new resources through violence, teaming up to get governmental policy which favours the group, overthrowing the state or the lack of a State and so on.
  • Government is normal. Corporations and business involve forms of government both ‘internally’ (in relation to themselves) and ‘externally’ (in relation to the government of others). Like other forms of government, they can use threats and violence.
  • Corporations and businesses may attempt to influence the government of others.
  • Market action involves politics, persuasion and building of trust – it is based in social life.
  • Markets involve interaction with ecologies for food and resources. They can destroy the ecologies they require to function. The orders which arise from market/ecology interaction can be hostile to humans. That is, markets can suffer from unintended consequences. It is magic to expect that the order which emerges will always be ‘good’.
  • Interpretations of other people’s actions and ideas, can be false, but are generally based on cultural expectations. Economics is a tool of interpretation
  • Economics cannot be isolated from social, political, ethical, and ecological life.
  • Economic functioning depends on social and ecological functioning.

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Shortening Time Horizons and the Crises

November 8, 2020

An initial rave, with and in response to Panu Pihkala.

We are frequently told we should live in the present, and focus on the moment, as a mode of therapeutic behaviour. At the same time people complain about other people’s lack of history and their lack of understanding of how events connect together.

This article briefly explores the dilemmas of this issue.

If we live solely in the present then, to some extent, we are stripped of our conscious past and our experience. We can call this having a short time horizon.

As is well known, experiences are given their meaning by their context, and one context is always our previous experience. This context and experience, also suggests to us how we could act in the current situation. Sometimes we can get stuck in repeating the acts, but sometimes we can learn from that past. Without the past we have no space for conscious reflection and action – so we might make no conscious progression – we are simply locked into automism, and ‘pure response’ to what appears to be happening to us.

This is helped by our ways of living.

The Internet helps us live a haze, as its multiple links can always take us everywhere, so that we do not develop a continuous train of thought, we are always accepting in the moment and only have reflex like criticisms of what we read. If we like it, then it is correct and we might pass it – the act of passing it on, is also an interruption of thought – if we don’t like it, then it is false and we can forget it – we don’t have to ponder, we can just abuse.

We go over text by quickly scanning rather than with attention, to select what we want to know, to bolster what we want to know, or confirm what we want to know. This behaviour makes us more vulnerable to manipulation. When we present something which turns out to be embarrassingly wrong we can delete the whole thread, so we don’t have to be reminded of our failure, we just live in the present.

Because we move on quickly and keep to the present, then we do not for example, have to read books, we can just accept the summaries by those who tell us what we want to hear.

Our places of work, in general, are restructured, and re-organised almost at whim. Many people do not even have a place in the workplace which is their own – they are shifted around deliberately, networks and connections are constantly broken – new software changes our ways of proceeding. We build only on ‘flexibility’ – which generally means accepting that we should “do as we are told”.

As part of the acceleration of life, it can be inconvenient to remember the past. What is the use of knowing MS-DOs or CPM now? What is the use of remembering the hardships of earlier days, when we have the hardships of now – and do younger people really want to be told of the problems of being young in the 1970s, as an aid to life? Is it remotely relevant to them?

This lack of past is convenient for society’s dominant forces, because we cannot see events getting worse, or learn how to avoid them, and we cannot learn from the past.

We don’t have to know anything about Marx, socialism, worker’s rights or whatever, because that was the past, and we are in a different and better(?) world, which has no interest in what the past can teach, except perhaps in flashes.

It seems to be the case in the contemporary world that followers repeatedly dismiss the past lies of their heroes, and anticipate that their leader’s current statements must be the truth because they have no reason to distrust them – partly because they cannot remember the past lies, or the past times the pronouncements did not turn out as expected. Knowing everyone has no past, there is no attempt by those leaders to construct a coherent and vaguely true narrative – other than the narrative that they are always successful or always correct, no matter how often they fail. No one can check them, and if they do then it is not relevant, because of the new important conflict that has arisen.

Indeed leaders may attempt to overwhelm people still further by generating constant upheaval and scandal, so that the past is always overwhelmed by the present.

Low time horizons strip away both meaning and recognition of the complexity that is fundamental to the world. As well as stripping away the past, we strip away the future.

Without a sense of time, then we cannot understand events that move in time, and change radically over time, like pandemics and exponential increase of cases – we are probably not very good at understanding that anyway – we just reduce the event to this moment. The figures at this moment are always static and deniable. “Life can go back to normal,” to booze, physical contact and social eating, without there being any change, or any possible consequences of that action. Indeed it is doubtful whether people think hard about the consequences for those who are less healthy than themselves. Those people can look out for themselves – everything is simple – there is no effect.

With climate change, we can assume the change is somewhere in the future, therefore not troubling to us now, which also helps those who profit through generating climate change. With the constant new information, refutations and scandal, the majority of people will not remember last years’ fires, they may be open to being persuaded that those fires were not that bad, by people who could have a longer strategy to make the situation worse, or who are just reinforcing their own defenses against awareness. Without history people will not notice the heat as it increases, because they adapt and get used to it, until it is too late.

The shallow time horizon lowers the change of us seeing the trajectory of changes as they pass – things have been as they are now, forever.

In this process, we are possibly defending against anticipated trauma – the knowing that we, and our children, are probably doomed. If so, this is part of a flight from personal death into an eternal present, where it can be no worse than it currently is – it is a mode of denial and defense, backed up by the routines of our lives

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