Posts Tagged ‘ethics’

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Bregman’s Humankind

August 18, 2021

I have just finished reading Rutger Bregman’s book Humankind. It is quite simply well worth reading – and is eminently readable.

Our standard view of humanity, probably influenced by Christianity, hierarchy, capitalist economic theory and the writings of ‘statesmen’, is that humans are savage. That without the social restraint provided by religion and hierarchy we would erupt in an orgy of uncontrolled sex and violence. However, one of the problems for early anthropology was precisely why peoples without one of the ‘religions of the book’ and without generational hierarchy, a state, police and other enforcers were often (but by no means always), relatively harmonious, with quite strong sexual rules, and not human vs human – especially inside their own groups. Indeed, violence towards others tends to come with established hierarchies, such as hereditary chieftainship and ‘aristocracy’, and not always even then.

In other words the Hobbesian proposition that life without the force of hierarchy was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, was largely wrong – the ‘solitary’ part was completely wrong. Similarly, the classical to neoliberal economic view that we are all brutally selfish and greedy, and that order arises entirely by an act of God, from this stark competitiveness, through his invisible hand, is also not true.

Bregman argues at length that the idea of human unpleasantness is exaggerated, and that humans left alone are primarily co-operative and indeed kind to each other (hence the title). Bregman does not deny humans can be violent and deeply unpleasant, but this is not our default state, although it can be induced.

He shows that most of the evidence for the primary nature of human violence (such as the Milgram experiments, the Stanford Prison experiments, or the ‘broken window theory’) is deeply flawed; it often derives from experimenters pushing people towards violence when it was not being delivered. While this does not demonstrate humans cannot be violent, it shows the importance of context to the production of violence, and sometimes shows that people are over-easily persuaded by evidence for what they are attempting to prove, especially when their belief has deep cultural roots.

Likewise, when there are disasters and people cannot rely on help, most people generally don’t descend into looting, violence, or looking after themselves first; they work together to rebuild and help each other (despite the ‘evidence’ of novels like Lord of the Flies). This is not surprising if you think about it. What one human can do is extremely limited, we have to co-operate with others nearly all our lives; achieving almost anything requires others. We are a friendly beast, easily provoked into empathy and compassion, and this helps us survive.

As well as being a friendly beast, humans have spent most of their existence in relatively small, hunter gatherer groups, and these groups tend to be fiercely egalitarian and co-operative, trying to pull down the establishment of hierarchy and resist the enforced authority of others. This does not mean that they don’t recognise ability, or praise ability, but that praise is within bounds; they use shaming techniques to remind people that they are mutually dependent, should the person with ability think the ability entitles them to more privilege than the group agrees to. Decision making is a long and slow group affair, often requiring unanimity, and groups may relatively peaceably split, forever or for a while, if this cannot be attained.

Bregman shows that most evidence for warfare amongst hunter-gatherers, as opposed to fights, comes from people coming into contact with ‘civilisation,’ being slaughtered, having to defend themselves, or losing territory that sustained them. That includes the Yanomami who are often referred to as an exemplar of human violence. The book that argued they were continually violent was a best seller (probably because of cultural appeal), while the books arguing that that “violence is sporadic,” “never dominates social life for any length of time” and that “one cannot say that Yanomami culture is organized around warfare,” did not. The famous author also distributed steel weapons amongst the tribes people so that well may have changed behaviour, as previously injury rates may have been low. Anyway, the point is not that humans are incapable of high levels of violence, but that it is not primary and usual.

Bregman suggests that the thing that changed humanity was settled agriculture. This allowed surplus. It allowed population increase. It stopped people from wandering away if they needed to. It made land size important. It allowed raiders to take food. It forced inheritance laws to keep land in the control of someone, and thus pushed people away from being self-supporting. It allowed hierarchies to develop. It allowed hierarchical religions to develop, as explicit modes of domination and genocide. Along with all this we get the hierarchical state, to control people, hold them down, mediate all the new disputes that evolved, and to conquer more land to feed their populations and provide enclosed land for those who now need it. States are generally not friendly to hunter-gatherers wandering freely – I guess it sets a bad example. I also suspect the State and ideas of property are intertwined. I’m adding a bit to Bregman here, but his argument seems plausible.

Even with State encouragement, most humans are not good at warfare, without intensive training and bastardisation. We have to overcome our friendliness and our empathy and compassion. At Gettysburg most muskets seem not to have been fired. People seem to have spent a lot of time reloading so as to avoid shooting, and avoid getting in trouble with officers. The same in WWII. We all know the stories of the Christmas truces in WWI, in which soldiers found the opposing soldiers to be like them and surprisingly friendly. This soldier based truce was suppressed by those more distant from the battle. Truce and spontaneous friendliness had to be prevented from ever happening again. Who knows, without the officers’ efforts, the war could have stopped? Soldiers fight, not to kill the enemy, but to support each other.

So why wars? Because hierarchies select for sociopathology. Hierarchies select for people with no shame, for people who find deceit easy, for people who are nasty and brutish. In a large scale society they can hide from the knowledge of others. The idea that humans are generally brutish and need enforced discipline not only seems natural to such people, but can help them maintain their power by justifying harsh treatment of potential rebels.

I’m going to argue that social category theory can be important here. That is, the more that social categories are defined as existing in opposition to other social categories, the easier it is to have co-operation between members of a category and violent relationships between ‘opposing’ categories. If we are prevented from social participation by some other group, which happens almost as soon as we have agricultural States, then we also tend to develop either apathy or anger against others. Anger is easy to work up, because it is anger against the perceived persecution of one’s group. Working with others in one’s category to express or purge the anger leads to violence against those defined as being in the persecutory group.

The challenge for a hierarchical leader is to misdirect people’s anger away from the leader who might benefit by people’s real suppression towards someone else – another social group, another country, another religion etc. We are continually bombarded with propaganda about how all other humans endanger us, and how we have to keep the hierarchy to protect us from those evil others, when it is generally the hierarchy that increases the problems. We can see the Trump issue here – the US Right depends upon the idea that evil outgroups (Democrats, communists, immigrants, black people, professors and so on), are stripping away liberty and livelihood of those who are in-groups, so as to deflect attention away from how the party allows established corporations to continue their hierarchy and pillage of ordinary people. Without that manufactured conflict the party does not have much to offer. The idea that people are violent and selfish, helps justify the ruling groups and their violence against others.

Bregman spends the later chapters of his book explaining that strict policing, intense imprisonment, and so on, make the situation worse. We are teaching people to be violent and to fear others. This goes back to an earlier point, the more people believe that other people are selfish and violent, the more they feel justified in their violence. A warfare society will encourage this belief.

The suggested remedy is to hand power and responsibility back to the local level, to diminish the hierarchies, let people organise themselves and encourage hostile groups to intermix and work together. Bragman does give some examples of this in action. He does not discuss how capitalist economics is inherently hierarchical, depends on a State, and is prone to the destruction of liberty and opposition, but perhaps he wanted to keep a US audience.

The main problem is getting rid of hierarchy, and remove a whole slew of institutions that are based on submission of others, massive inequality, and suppression of friendliness, empathy and compassion. We may also need to get rid of religions that portray God as a tyrant, who harshly punishes people for disobedience or disbelief – that simply justifies tyranny and violence, and promotes emulation of sacred violence.

Removing these obstacles to a peaceful and settled life is difficult, as those who benefit will not go easily, and effective violence against hierarchy will probably lead to more hierarchy to re-impose peace. This has been the perennial problem of revolution.

We also have to deal with the problem that State based organisations, such as corporations, seem hostile to self-governing and egalitarian small groups and it is hard for these small groups to win conflict against a State.

Yet these are all problems worth facing. The first step may be to ask yourself, if the other people you are hostile to, are really as violent as you might think? How do you ‘know’ they are violent? Is that violence being exaggerated for political purposes?

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Buber and Binaries

May 8, 2021

First let me be clear I am no Buber expert, so everything I say may be wrong, but this is really a more general point.

I have in previous blogs said that I find the idea of binaries, over-common, and intellectually dangerous for several reasons.

1) Binaries tend to be conceived as opposites or negations,

However very few processes negate each other. Let us take a common binary: men and women. These categories are often conceived as opposites. Men are rational/women are emotional, men are aggressive/women are passive, men are tall/women are short. Whatever the level of plausibility here, there is lots of overlap, and the binary misses it, or even conceals it. For example while the ‘average man’ is taller than the ‘average woman’, it is not that difficult to find women taller than the average man, and men shorter than the average women. These short men or tall women are not, not-men, or not-women. The variation is not categorical but statistical. The same is almost certainly true of rational and emotive, or aggressive and passive.

Likewise the category of ‘not-woman’ contains a lot more creatures than just men: sharks, elephants, cows, bacteria, gum trees and so on. Men do not exhaust the entire category of not-women. So the category is not even logically sufficient or illuminating. Men are not the negation of women, or the opposite of women, or vice versa. The binary conceals a much more complex and shifting reality.

2) Binaries tend to have one pole made significant or dominant

This point was made by de Beauvoir although many people will attribute it to Derrida.

Using the man/woman binary again as an example, it has been standard practice to take the male as exemplary of the human, saying ‘Man’, ‘Mankind’, using the pronoun ‘he’ to include everyone, or using the term ‘the opposite sex’ to mean ‘female’, because male is supposedly the natural default sex. And of course, the male is supposed to dominate the female naturally. So the binary tends to inculcate, and indicate, dominance and passivity, or significance and lesser-significance. It lessens the chance of a mutual I-thou relationship.

Surprise?

The continual reduction to binaries, might be considered surprising when the dominant religion in the West supposedly believes that God is a trinity, and that its sacred text talks about the human triad of flesh, spirit (pneuma) and soul (psyche). Spirit and soul have been made the same, so we can have the binary of mind and body, spirit and body, mind/matter etc, with the mind/spirit dominant over, and more important than, the body, which can be dismissed and transcended.

This kind of binary might help people think their real life is in the spiritual world or ‘heaven’, and to dismiss the planet that they live on, as being inferior, and of little concern.

The solution?

Look for the third….. This is not the Hegelian or Marxist third which can be reduced to the synthesis of the original two, or a mediation between the two, but another factor altogether which co-exists with the original binary. Let’s be clear we are not limited to three, but the four tends to be reduced to binary oppositions again, so if we recognise a four, let us aim for a five…..

The Buber binary

The Buber binary is the two relations I-thou and I-it, of which the I-thou is primary.

The It-Authority relationship

I would suggest that there is at least one other possible relationship which adds to our understanding of human life. That is the It-Authority relationship. In which the ‘I’ becomes an ‘it’ in the face of authority, and there is no thou.

Before authority we are to quail, obey, stop thinking and side with the authority, or else we are to be crushed without remorse. We become instruments of the authority, without comment, or with only minor comment. The authority is not a subject and neither are we, there is no interaction other than authority’s instruction and our pleading or acquiescence.

Of course we can rebel, but we often rebel within the format of the It, just being resistant, not taking back our, or others’ ‘thouness’.

I would suggest that many people’s relationship to God is of the form It-Authority, were God is the authority, the rules, the punishments and blandishments, applied with no input from the human. This is the God who needs an eternal hell. I suspect that this is not a healthy relationship, or even a relationship at all – even if people pretend it is, so as to placate their God and hope to get on its good side, for fear of the alternative.

The It-Authority relationship seems common in sites of neoliberal employment, in which employees are an inconvenient cost centre, to be controlled, restructured and dismissed as ‘it’s, with little to no real valued input into the process….

I also suggest that the political response to ecological crisis is often conditioned by an It-Authority relationship to ‘the market’. This is the religion of the market, in which the market is neither recognised as being both made by humans, and made politically, but gets taken as a force in itself; an Authority, superior to the ecology in which it is actually immersed. The market is taken as an authority with which there is no appeal, and which will not be placated – unless it is to help out those who are already sanctified by the market, such as fossil fuel companies. This market reduces people and the world to ‘it’s, and treats them accordingly.

It makes the crisis even harder to deal with.

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Martin Buber: Psychoanalysis, Existentialism and ecology

May 7, 2021

Buber, the I, thou and it….

Martin Buber famously suggests that there are two main ways of relating: ‘I-thou’ and ‘I-it’; recognising that the ‘I’ exists within these relationships: “All real living is meeting”.

In the I-thou relationship we treat the other as an opening, a mystery, a being full of potential, full of value, which resists reduction to linguistic labels, which can modify us and be modified by us, which we have responsibility towards, offer respect towards, and so on. As we are open, we are vulnerable, so it involves a risk.

We attempt to encounter the other in their whole being; this may be impossible, but it is the aim. The relationship is mutual, possibly uncertain and ambiguous, because of its unpredictable and transformative possibilities.

In the I-it relationship the other is an object to be manipulated – the it is limited in its response, it rarely if ever opens us up, other than through what we do with it. It is an object, not another rich ‘subject’. We often tend to make our enemies its, then refuse to deal with them, and lock ourselves down. It is possible to suggest that the I becomes something of an impersonal it, when it treats an other as an it. However, much of life is easier if we treat some beings as ‘it’s, as when we build a lego object, change a light bulb, fill the car with petrol, and so on, so there is some ambiguity here – although perhaps all these it creations are forms of modern life.

This distinction seems a very simple point to make, but confusing the two, or extending the I-it relationship to situations in which it is not appropriate seems a major cultural flaw.

Psychoanalysis

You may think psychoanalysis is invalid for any number of reasons, but let us just look at one. Freud called unconscious processes the id, or the ‘it’. This automatically suggests unconscious processes are mechanical rather than subjects. The id is not something to be entered into relationship with, not something which can be plural or creative, but something repetitive to be manipulated, constrained, disciplined and brought under control. The best the ‘it’ can hope for is ‘sublimation’, or being bent to the will of the ego.

Jungians, to the extent they get Jung’s breakthrough, treat unconscious processes as a ‘thou’ another subject, with consciousness, wisdom, creativity. This may well be a difficult set of subjects to relate to, as it is made other by the ego’s suppression or misperception, but they can be respected, successfully dialogued with and lived with. They will never be exhausted, or made entirely clear; in short unconscious processes are thous.

Buber’s distinction helps us understand this difference, and it is irrelevant whether Buber and Jung got on, or understood each other, shadow processes happen to the best of us…

Without having done the research I would hypothesise that many (but not all) therapies treat internal processes as ‘it’s, to be mastered, released or accommodated to…

Existentialism: de Beauvoir

We can see a similar issue arise in de Beauvoirs ethics, and the distinction between the ‘free’ and the ‘determined’, or the ‘for-itself’ and ‘the in-itself’. Recognising oneself and the other as free opens the possibility of an I-thou relationship. To be ethical, one opens consciousness to open the freedom of the other. However, towards the determined, we appear to have no necessary care, no requirement to be open or to open, it is merely an ‘it’, something beyond relationship. It can be subject to instrumentalism, even as it escapes because of its complexity.

Where de Beauvoir adds to Buber is in asserting the ambiguities of response, of relationships, of situations, and the impossibility of always being able to produce the results we might desire, or of even deciding what is ethical in particular situations. But we can still ask, if we can behave ethically to an it? An it is not an equal. Therefore if there are defined its in the world we can attempt, but sometimes fail, to bend them to our wills. We may not have to respect their freedom or unknown way of operating.

An ethics may need to recognise that determining that something is determined it, is ambiguous at best.

Politics of Environmentalism

It seems obvious that, in Australia at least, the problems for the two main parties are that they are not able to conceive of ecology as a thou, which they can have a serious relationship with. For them ecology is an it, to be manipulated, exploited and subject to the will – or rather to the fantasies of will. Thus they fantasise, we can sell coal and gas and cut emissions. They fantasise that the world will not bite back and that they have plenty of time. They fantasise that Carbon Capture and Storage will have to work in time. They don’t really accept that the world could change – they fantasise they world is inert, a dead ‘it’, rather than a complex subject which responds to provocation in ways of which we are uncertain in advance. There is no sense, in our political discourse, that we need to establish a friendly relationship to ecology, an open relationship to ecology, or even a learning relationship with ecology. They act as if we should be the masters of it, and that ecology is an it. There is little recognition of mutuality.

With this view, we will never establish a mutually beneficial relationship. We can only head for disaster….

The tragedy is, that I doubt that any indigenous person, with their roots still in country, would need to be told any of this. They would already know much more, much better than me, and be able to ‘say’ much more if we could listen, or they might ask us to listen to the world as thou, because it seems obvious, it consists of many thous. That way we might come to learn.

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There are some subsequent comments in the next post Buber and binaries

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De Beauvoir’s ethics??

May 4, 2021

This is a very incomplete account of Ethics of Ambiguity, made because this writing of de Beauvoir’s is one of the few ethical texts that take ambiguity seriously, although perhaps not seriously enough. It may also be one of the most interesting ethical texts of the last century. I’m not going to claim that at this stage I’ve noticed everything and understood everything, so this account is likely to be incomplete or even incorrect.

Making an ambiguous binary: determination vs freedom

The book starts with the distinction between ‘determined’ and ‘free’ which is, for humans, ambiguous (and essential) because:

  • past actions to a large extent determine what we feel, experience and can choose (the affects of the past are largely unchangeable givens – although some psychotherapists insist not completely);
  • we live amidst what appear to be determined processes (or, perhaps more accurately, processes we do not appear to have direct influence upon, which can include world and bodily processes);
  • <I’d add that we also experience the affects of unconscious processes, which may influence our thinking and freedom – but existentialism seems to have a problem with recognising these>
  • while we experience some freedom of choice.

Or as she says, in the language of the translator, “[Man] asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things.” This ambiguity cannot be accurately removed. I would add that culture seems to be another source of ambiguity, it gives tools teaching us what, and how, to think and thus both restricts and enables freedom.

Humans are part of the world of which we are conscious (EA: 7) and so we cannot escape being ‘messed’ by the world. Indeed attempts to escape the world are possibly harmful or limiting to both ourselves and others.

De Beauvoir argues that people (“philosophers”) often try to “mask” this essential ambiguity, by reducing reality to one side of a binary such as ‘determination’ or ‘freedom’; ‘mind’ or ‘matter’ etc, and establish a hierarchy of dominance whereby one side of the binary is, or should be, more significant than the other (and dominant) – mind over matter etc.

Or as de Beauvoir says: “It has been a matter of eliminating the ambiguity by making oneself pure inwardness or pure externality, by escaping from the sensible world or by being engulfed in it, by yielding to eternity or enclosing oneself in the pure moment” (EA:8).

We might wonder if the idea of freedom may be ambiguous itself? I’d suggest that it is a significant reduction when “philosophers” reduce the world to a binary of freedom and determination rather than a possible plurality, or continuum. Seek the third to destabilise the binary – which in this case might be those necessary and responsive natural processes, which we need to take account of to live…

Freedom as source of value

Let us accept, for the moment, the binary, but be aware of its possible reductionism, then de Beauvoir asserts that freedom “is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence” (EA: 24). To “will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision” (EA: 24). There also seems to be an assumption that freedom and openness are morally related “My freedom must not seek to trap being but to disclose it” (EA: 30). I will later suggest that for de Beauvoir ‘disclosure of being’ does not seem to explicitly include the non-human world, and that further complexity and ambiguity would be recognised, if this was the case….

We have the usual problem of why we should select freedom as the basis of ethics, without a previous ethical assumption that freedom is good. We also know from de Beauvoir’s opening, that freedom is never total, we are splitting reality into a opposed binary of free and determined and making freedom the dominant and valued pole. We could imagine someone arguing that enthusiastically embracing our fate is the real basis of virtue, or that only certain people are entitled to be free and that virtue is about accepting, or earning, these limits.

However, it certainly appears that we seem free to make choices, and most people would agree that virtue and ethics have to do with choices, or argument over correct choices in particular situations, so let us assume that this freedom to choose, is one basis for ethics, and see what happens. What is the role of the ambiguity that de Beauvoir points to?

Freedom implies an ability (to some extent) to make ourselves up as we go along, so that we become the path of our choices, and that path is open to change as we are free to choose to go in a different direction at this moment, now. However, we are not free of the consequences of that choice. Or in existentialist lingo: “To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed” (EA: 78-9). We make our being through our choices; perhaps it is better to say ‘in the interplay between choices and the world,’ to make the freedom less absolute, and to emphasise the relationships involved.

Moving into relationship

Given her position, de Beavoir can suggest:

Freedom is the source from which all significance and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence. The man who seeks to justify his life must want freedom itself absolutely and above everything else. At the same time that it requires the realization of concrete ends, of particular projects, it requires itself universally.

(EA: 24)

Or Freedom requires that others be free. And:

the constructive activities of man take on a valid meaning only when they are assumed as a movement toward freedom; and reciprocally, one sees that such a movement is concrete: discoveries, inventions, industries, culture, paintings, and books people the world concretely and open concrete possibilities to men.

(EA: 80)

So again, we have the moral proposition that freedom should lead to the opening of freedom for others.

There are several problems here. One is whether absolute freedom is required for this ethics, as opposed to a moderate level of freedom. The other problem is what is a “valid meaning”? The construction of forts and killing machines has a meaning, and what makes that meaning invalid? De Beauvoir’s answer might be that they limit freedom by violence, but they might aim to protect freedom as well. Surely they could have both meanings, or both functions simultaneously? The meaning could be ambiguous and difficult to resolve, and indeed this is implied in her accounts of communist revolution…

It seems important to recognise that freedom of choice does not mean we can achieve exactly what we choose to attempt in the world, because of complexity, epistemological insufficiency, and unintended consequences. In other words, perhaps success involves some restraint and ambiguity itself? Freedom may even achieve its undoing, for some people, because of such factors – especially if the supposedly free being operates without paying attention to the world.

Part of the answer to these questions are that, more or less by definition, while individuals’ have ontological freedom (ie some inherent apparent freedom of choice) they do not have moral freedom by themselves alone. While you cannot probably force freedom, ontological freedom leads to the possibility of plural social and moral freedom, and the possibility of working towards it or against it. As is being implied, freedom always occurs in relationship with other people and other beings, and this may attack freedom of oppression. This sets up the “the paradox that no action can be generated for man without its being immediately generated against men.”

Sometimes increase of freedom can result in loss of some levels of freedom for oppressors. “I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.” But oppressors try to give up nothing.

To withdraw from this problem is “a way of fleeing the truth of the present” which is that we, by choice, are opening a future whatever we do. Acting now is not the same as contemplating what has already happened – “With regard to the past, no further action is possible”.

However, this misses the ambiguity of working towards freedom for, or better with, others, while perhaps undermining it, through lack of understanding etc., although she does discuss the ambiguities of Soviet Russia… A problem is that we cannot know the result of our actions until it arrives.

Some people try to will themselves unfree to justify their choices. ‘I could do no other’ and this could be their experience, even if it is ontologically incorrect. Death is always on the horizon. How would I know what they experienced without being in the same position? which is not something that I can do.

So freedom only occurs in relationship to other beings, and this relationship is not always easy.

Relationship occurs everywhere

Every human has to do with other humans. Consciousness itself is always about the act of being in relation to, or interaction with, something else – world, humans, non-humans. There is never a consciousness by itself. So we might again suggest that consciousness is not purely free but conditioned to a degree. Consciousness arises in complexity, and in a world with its own dynamics. Because of its origination in the world, human consciousness is never as we imagine pure consciousness to be, it is permeated by feeling, by understandings, by unrealities and so on.

While De Beauvoir recognises this fundamental existential issue that we are inevitably in relationship to other people and (we add) to the world by whether we help or hinder the freedom of other beings (and hence our selves), it is not clear she recognises the impurity of consciousness.

De Beauvoir argues that our freedom inherently involves an involvement with the freedom of others. Without the freedom of others we are unfree in the moral sense (and I suspect in the ontological sense as well, because we have made our being free in tandem with this lack of freedom in others). Again I suspect people could deny this, but we cannot live without interaction, and this interaction heavily influences our own capacities. Limits we impose on others (intentionally or otherwise) may impose on ourselves.

I concern others and they concern me. There we have an irreducible truth. The me-others relationship is as indissoluble as the subject-object relationship… To will oneself free is also to will others free. This will is not an abstract formula. It points out to each person concrete action to be achieved

(EA 72-3)

One must “act to defend and develop the moral freedom of oneself and others” (EA 98). The attainment of my “moral freedom depends on others being able to attain it.” (Arp: 3) A community of free people can help us be free.

freedom always appears as a movement of liberation. It is only by prolonging itself through the freedom of others that it manages to surpass death itself and to realize itself as an indefinite unity.

“[W]e say that freedom can not will itself without aiming at an open future,” as opposed to a future of constraint. This is a problem if an open future may lead to destruction of others.

This opening may imply some level of equality or sympathy with others, otherwise our freedom may seem to depend on harming the freedom, or existential process, of others.

In which case equality, sympathy or empathy or compassion, or the ability to imagine the sufferings and restrictions of others are also bases of virtue, not just freedom. De Beauvoir has over-simplified in making the original binary of freedom and determination, although she also says ““I concern others and they concern me. There we have an irreducible truth” (EA: 78) – but it is an irreducible truth which suggests that more than freedom could be at stake. Freedom is not the all, and not the only, basis of ethics.

This recognition leads to another problem. While we can extrapolate that humans individuals exist in a network of human consciousness and culture, de Beauvoir does fully open and extended this interrelationship to non-humans and non-human world processes, perhaps because she does not regard non-human beings as free. If so, this could be said to be the use of ‘freedom’ to perpetuate a form of domination and suppression of the non-human. Perhaps this is inherent in the imagined idea of absolute human freedom? She is, perhaps, not open to enough ambiguity as to what consciousness involves?

It seems that if we recognise we live in interaction, then we probably have to recognise that we live in interaction with the sun, the planet, and all beings or processes on the planet. We may have to respect their ‘freedom’ to continue to exist. Forests may have to exist, to not be clear felled, not only to preserve human freedom, but to preserve the world. Water cycles have to exist, and not be dried out by boosting deglaciation or drainage, and so on. This too may be ambiguous, forests may be felled to make space for humans or feed humans, but at the same time we are endangering humans and their freedom. The ambiguity is huge…. and the temptation is to reduce that ambiguity by making humans, or some form of social system, more significant than the ‘other’ of the world, and to imply these humans should dominate, rather than respect the way the world’s ecologies work.

In other words, freedom (if limited to humans), can lead to the destruction of co-existing interactions and lessen the possibilities of human freedom…

I’ve argued elsewhere that ethics is primarily situational. It is a response to events, as well as an attempt to rectify, or improve those events, by some kind of measure. As people may interpret situations differently, then this also leads to ambiguity.

Moral development and conflict

De Beauvoir notes that people are not born with an innate moral sense which will lead them to agreement. This seems obvious. De Beauvoir tries to specify some kind of moral ‘styles’ and to show their inadequacies.

Children tend to take the world as they find it. Adults tell them what is moral and punish or reward is taken as being the nature of the world. “This means that the world in which [the child] lives is a serious world, since the characteristic of the spirit of seriousness is to consider values as ready-made things.”

Through social oppression some adults are forced into remaining children. “This is also the situation of women in many civilizations; they can only submit to the laws, the gods, the customs, and the truths created by the males.” This is ambiguous, as we can be complicit in our own oppression. We can try to make the oppression comfortable for ourselves, or even call it freedom. Similarly, as ‘freedom’ can be culturally defined then our views may be incompatible to begin with and without working together remain so. For example is it freedom to have to choose between working for a boss or starving, dying of easily preventable or treatable diseases, being shot or beaten by police for protesting against police violence, have homelessness thrust upon you, have the dominant classes be free to ruin your ecology and poison your air? It looks as if for many people in the US, this is the case.

Therefore it could be that working for others’ freedom might seem to be an imposition in a way that working with others for their own version of freedom might avoid. The difficulty of defining a common version of freedom, and the difficulties of arbitrating between different freedoms, adds to the ambiguities, uncertainties and negotiations we face in creating an open future.

If there is little oppression then: “With astonishment, revolt and disrespect the child little by little asks…, “Why must I act that way? What good is it? And what will happen if I act in another way?” Although there are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything.

Moral growth involves becoming aware that acts have consequences for others, as well as ourselves – and the skills to relate to those other beings and processes, which is why (for me) empathy, compassion, imagination etc seem as important for ethics as freedom.

Yet accepting that we bear the responsibility for exerting our freedom can be frightening, anxiety producing etc. and this can lead us away. Some people “have eyes and ears, but from their childhood on they make themselves blind and deaf, without love and without desire. This apathy manifests a fundamental fear in the face of existence, in the face of the risks and tensions which it implies.”

People can attempt to remove this fear by arguing that they are compelled, or should be compelled to behave in a certain way to be moral. In this way the freedom of others is a threat. Their acts “are never positive choices, only flights.” This reduces ambiguity, but crushes morality, empathy, imagination and freedom.

The ‘sub-man’ (and the ‘serious person’) want to reduce ethics, and the world, to the static or ‘unconditioned’. They want a guarantee. They refuse to engage with ambiguity, flux and uncertainty, and suffer a “fundamental fear in the face of existence” (EA: 42). They do not want choice, but instructions/programs, and take orders and values from authority. As such people don’t have to think, or relate carefully, they can be dangerous.

In lynchings, in pogroms, in all the great bloody movements organized by the fanaticism of seriousness and passion, movements where there is no risk, those who do the actual dirty work are recruited from the sub-men. (EA 44)

(EA: 44)

The sub-man is not very clear about what he has to lose, since he has nothing, but this very uncertainty re-enforces his terror. Indeed, what he fears is that the shock of the unforeseen may remind him of the agonizing consciousness of himself.

The serious person “gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned. He imagines that the accession to [agreement with] these values likewise permanently confers value upon himself.” Such a person fulfils a social role or persona: “no longer a man, but a father, a boss, a member of the Christian Church or the Communist Party.” The serious person loses all meaning if cut off from these enforced social placements, they fail to recognise their freedom, or the responsibility of that freedom; they follow the rules.

Other more ‘advanced’ types include the nihilist, the adventurer, the passionate man and so on.

“The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and make himself exist validly” (EA: 57). The nihilist flies from life into nothingness, perhaps longing for something new to fill themselves with, and become serious.

The adventurer takes “delight in living” (EA: 58) but is insensitive to needs of others, or the freedom of others. They remain “indifferent to the content, that is, to the human meaning of his action, [and] thinks he can assert his own existence without taking into account that of others.” Even ‘worse:’ “He carries the seed of [a tyrant] within him, since he regards mankind as indifferent matter destined to support the game of his existence.” He “will enclose himself in a false independence which will indeed be servitude.”

The adventurer is like the passionate man, but de Beauvoir asks, in regard to the disposition of the passionate man, “why not betray, kill, grow violent?” (EA 66).

It seems to me, that all of these deficient types are deficient primarily in their ability to empathise with others, have compassion for others, or ability to imagine what it is to be another. They also do not move beyond themselves, into their mutuality with the world. They interact with others, but these others are source of authority, or objects for their own actions. If these ways are freely chosen then it takes other processes than freedom to lift the person into another choice. And it seems that an ethics should recognise it cannot be completely driven by one ultimate alone…

Precarity of morals

As implied morality is both ambiguous and precarious. It requires work, and attention to what is happening and likely to happen. “[C]oming to recognise and accept oneself in one’s ambiguity is the necessary pre-condition of the moral life” (EA: 81).

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.

Why can’t ambiguity remain without being fixed or won?

Partly this had to do with inevitable insufficiencies: “man does not create the world. He succeeds in disclosing it only through the resistance which the world opposes to him”

“There is an ethics only if there is a problem to solve” and we might add, disagreement on solving the problem – ethics is also political – ‘what should we do, in this situation?’. Given different views and complexity, there is likely to be failure: “the freedom of man is infinite, but his power is limited” (EA 28), “ “without failure, no ethics.”

“moral consciousness can exist only to the extent that there is a disagreement between nature and morality” (EA 10)

From my point of view, ethics tends to be revealed in these conflicts and problems. Conflicts produces the ethical justifications, and the attempts at persuasion. Ethics is social, and ethical ambiguity and uncertainty cannot be escaped, as every situation and every problem is slightly different.

Because of complexity moral actions are always ambiguous and uncertain, we can never know whether our choice and actions are the best ones possible. There is no unambiguous guide to correct choice. every attempt in some way is a failure “Art and science do not establish themselves despite failure but through it”, the same is true of ethics.

Ethics is open to the constant tension inherent in the “perpetual contestation of means by the end and the end by the means” (EA 155).

People have to confront the contradictions: “what distinguishes the tyrant from the man of good will is that the first rests in the certainty of his aims, whereas the second keeps asking himself, “Am I really working for the liberation of men? Isn’t this end contested by the sacrifices through which I aim at it?” In other words it is the ambiguity, uncertainty, struggle and unfinished nature that makes ethical thought ethical. Because situations are ambiguous, and non-repeated, and escape understanding there are not guaranteed ethical formulas. “The movement of the mind, whether it be called thought or will, always starts up in the darkness… at each particular moment we must… maneuver in a state of doubt” or recognised uncertainty, and we cannot see what results, whether we did the right things, until afterwards.

“Ethics does not furnish recipes any more than do science and art.’ It is the failure of this realisation that ethics is never complete, never avoids risks or failures, that is one cause leading to tyranny over others (human and non human) and harm.

Conclusion

Main points of contention are:

  • The freedom/determination distinction sets up a false binary, and leads to the imposition of human freedom as the valued part. This leads to the implied value that human freedom involves domination over the world.
  • The reduction of the non-human to an inherent, pre-determined essence, rather than to independent processes, or apparent passivity before humans, essentially puts the world into the devalued pole.
  • For freedom to be any basic part of ethics, we may need to encourage the cultivation of empathy, compassion, sympathy and imagination. By itself freedom leads to a temptation to dominance, even when people recognise that the freedom of others is valuable for their own freedom.
  • Freedom is ambiguous. What is it? Does it have limits? What influences our conceptions of freedom?
  • Freedom needs to be able to enter into dialogue, and is thus not the entire basis of ethics.
  • We need to recognise the consciousness and freedom are not transcendent, they emerge out of interaction in the world. Hence we may need to recognise the nature of that world and its importance, and the importance of ethically oriented relationships with it.
  • We still do not have a basis for ethics, even though it is a useful position.
  • Ethics is difficult, and political.
  • Ethics occurs within dispute, uncertain and ambiguous situations and with uncertain and ambiguous outcomes.
  • It appears that we cannot escape these realisations without losing ethical awareness.

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Development, Pollution and Emissions

March 10, 2021

Please note this post should make more sense, if it is read after the previous post, and the next post. The next post was supposed to be before this, but it got lost in the system.

One of the problems the world faces is that if the developing world attains the same levels of prosperity as the developed, in the same way, with the same amount of extraction damage, pollution and emissions damage per head of population as the developed world then it is extremely likely we all will suffer.

This is deeply unfair for the developing world, or the global South.

Let me be clear. The developed world, in particular, Australia (because that is where I live), should be doing far more than they are to avoid climate change and ecological destruction. There is no excuse for Australian Governmental support of fossil fuels, fossil fuel exports, land clearing, pretending bushfires are ok, and so on. Australia has one of the worst set of figures for carbon emissions per head of population, and this is without counting the emissions in coal or gas exports, or the emissions from the devastating bushfires. We are reasonably wealthy, and have plenty of room to move. We are relatively resilient.

Given this resilience and the peril, Australia should declare: No more coal mines. No more gas wells. All fossil fuel burning and exports to be phased out by 2030.

This is possibly messy and costly, but so is the alternative. All Australians, who can, need to push for action at all levels, local, State, country, and international, to help ourselves and others. This is not a secondary call to anything else.

However, while some other parts of the developed world are doing ok, most of it is not. Most of it, seems to be refusing to change, whatever the peril. We cannot wait for them to act.

Partly this politics of destruction is coming from belief in economic models which insist on eternal growth, and partly because entrenched and previously successful economic organisations and corporations have political power. These people tend to see the peril not in eco-catastrophe, but in cutting back growth and their profits, so they resist change.

Politics is part of the economy, and always will be.

This also means there is nothing unchangeable about the organisation of the economy. However, it is true, that not all organisations of the economy will work – the current one does not.

However, this post, unlike most of my others, is not about the uselessness of the developed world but about the problems of further development in the developing world, and the lack of fairness which is present, because of the urgency of change, and because the limits of the planet are now different, to what they were.

Let us be clear. Developing nations quite possibly should give themselves some leeway with emissions if they choose. That may be necessary, but the levels of leeway need to be thought out carefully.

However, the argument, which is often made by Westerners, that the developing world should be able to do as much polluting and destruction as developing authorities like, because ‘the West’ already did so, is suicidal for everyone. There is no point developing, to find it all crashes down, or your water supplies decline, land mass shrinks and people flee. Something else needs to be done, and the developed world should probably help, without telling people what should be done.

I also have to say that a moral argument of the form:

  • “Someone else did X (which is morally dubious, or physically harmful), therefore no one can protest about us doing X as well – even when it is not necessary – as we have never done it before,”

is not the most compelling moral argument I have ever heard. E.g:

  • “You guys got wealthy plundering and starving India and Africa. Now its our turn.”

Really?

[In case it needs to be said, I’m not implying anyone is making that particular argument. It is supposed to illustrate the problems with this kind of argument]

No one needs to build coal energy, or gas energy and the huge infrastructure that it requires. There are other routes.

Again, I’m not denying ‘the West’, or ‘the North’ has greater responsibility for the problem (and indeed a whole load of problems), and should get on with taking responsibility and fixing those problems as best they can, but I’m also asking everyone: “Why don’t we all pursue a different path?” “Why stay on the path of destruction?”

If we know a path will lead to death, inequality, corporate domination, destruction of land and precariousness, as well as material prosperity, why is there such a hurry to take that path, rather than to find something better?

Again it probably comes down to economic power, and conceptual difficulty.

This is one reason for setting clear targets. Faced with known, non-shifting, targets, people tend to get ingenious.

Let’s hope the ingenuity which goes beyond rule bending works quicker.

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God and ecological ethics

February 26, 2021

Religious people often assume we could solve the eco-crisis with ‘more God’, or by everyone recognising God as King, Jesus as Saviour, or Mohammed as God’s prime prophet. But these people rarely explore the issue of why it is that more recognition of God would necessarily guarantee sustainable behaviour, or whether it has in the past.

I’ve previously argued that God, or rather ‘holy books’, do not solve the problem of ethics. Indeed we may use our ethics to judge the behaviour attributed to God and wonder if such a God is ethically worthy, of being ‘the’ God. If the God is not judged worthy, then it is probable that belief declines, or the stories become symbols and allegories interpreted to save God from lack of ethics, rather than taken as events demonstrating the power and justice of God. While it is obvious that a desire to please God, or a love of God, can inspire people to do marvelous acts, it also seems correct that people often use God to justify unpleasant, or cruel, things they wish to do to others.

Some features attributed to God, may even (perhaps unintentionally) hinder an ethical relationship to the world:

  • We might assume that God’s creation is eternal and we need do little to preserve it, as it will continue whatever we do.
  • We might assume God put humans on this world to subdue it, or master it, rather than care for it.
  • We might assume the world is something to be left behind (as trash?) as believers ascend to Heaven after death or after the last judgement.
  • We might assume that we are saved by faith, or by performing the rituals, and our other actions are almost irrelevant, or that the ecology comes way down the list of important things we need to care about – such as purging non-believers, punishing sexual minorities, subduing women, making the law harmonious with the holy books and the interpretation of our favoured scholars, or whatever.
  • We might assume that eco-destruction is part of God’s plan for the final judgement, and that working to stop this from happening, is working against God or evidence of the failing of pride or presumption.
  • We might think that God models tyranny, and that leaders should be likewise and discipline everything that exists (including the natural world) without regard to the people or the ecology’s needs.
  • A person might think that Humans are special in their connection to God, and non-human creation does not matter – certainly it may matter even less than caring for the present lives and comfort of heretics or infidels.

All of these views might derail attempts at preserving ecological functionality and sustainability. They might have that effect, even if people talk about how God commands us to keep balance, look after the land, or plant trees.

Another problem for me, is that I presume that people are currently influenced by their ethics and religion, and this has not prevented us from generating ecological problems. For example Evangelical Protestants and rightwing Catholics have supported Trump and thus have supported Trump’s lessening of environmental protections and pollution control rules; Islamic states have not curtailed the sale of their oil and the destruction that results from its use, or even supported the use of renewables until relatively recently, and they do not seem to take responsibility for the results of the use of that oil, any more than other non-religious oil companies do. Many Catholics seem to oppose Pope Francis because he does not continually praise capitalism and environmental destruction, even if they previously argued that obedience to the Holy Father was fundamental to Catholicism. Few major religious, or ethical, organisations are having great success challenging the crisis – although many are making the effort.

To effectively argue that we need more God to solve the problem, we would need to show that devout and religious countries have treated their environment better, and made it better and more sustainable, than countries that do not have a strong code of belief in God. If you then argue that the US, Italy, Brazil, Saudi Arabi, Iran, Afghanistan and so on, are not really devout enough, then you are probably going beyond human capacity into fantasy, or planning to use more violence to force people into devoutness, which probably means you will use more force on ecologies as well.

If there are God believing countries that have protected their ecology, and have not contributed to ecological destruction or climate change elsewhere in the world, then we need to explore what they have done, and how it ties in with their religion, and what is different in their practice to the practices of those with a similar religion.

Another step in the argument would be to ask what religions are most likely to encourage ecological relationship. We might suggest that some forms of Buddhism (with explicit compassion towards all beings) or non-ritual Taoism (with its efforts towards living in harmony with the flow and non-domination of the world) are promising. Unfortunately, the tendency of some kinds of Buddhism to leave relationship behind, and aim for non-suffering in ’emptiness’ or ‘nothingness’ may sabotage this possibility, and non-ritual Taoism is not really an official religion by its nature. Probably, the most effective religions of relationships and care are indigenous, in which natural beings are relatively equal and have to be respected, honoured, observed, talked to and cared for, and in which relationship with country is fundamental. But these people may not worship God as such, or they may be marginal to God religions, so they are not probably those being recognised by those who want more God.

Perhaps the call (unintendedly) suggests we need a new religion, one that hallows relationships with the natural world, one that situates humans in nature, one that does not promote violence against non-believers because they clearly sin against the true religion and hence deny God, one that does not have a God that lives entirely somewhere else or implies that good humans will leave the world behind, one that does not encourage consumption and wealth accumulation, one that encourages relationship and sympathy with all beings.

It could be logically possible to construct such a religion, but artificial religions rarely take hold. However, acknowledging the apparent failure of existing religions and knowing we could need such a religion, might set creativity, inspiration and discussion going. The New Age, whatever its obvious faults of positive thinking, prosperity by accumulation, or promotion of the idea that there is no reality beyond a person’s thoughts, may be a start in that direction – who can tell at this stage? It is even possible there could be a new reformation in Christianity, or a new understanding of Islam, which does not promote violence against nature and against non-believers.

The final problem is that I’m not even sure that people make decisions based on ethics, or moral instruction. There is the problem that people also seem to choose their ethics to justify what they, or people they identify with, have done or want to do. Although it is now a cliché, religious organisations might not have been expected to protect people in their organisations who were rapists while condemning their victims, if they were ethically concerned at all, but this process seems to have been quite normal and (presumably) ethically justified. We are even learning that despite the scandal, the same attitudes seem to be being taught at elite religious private schools.

While religion may promote morality, it does not guarantee universally valid morals.

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Complexity and Philosophy

February 22, 2021

Complexity theory, challenges standard Western philosophy, which is possibly why so many people seem to find understanding it difficult. This is a place where I will put those challenges as they occur to me.

1) Interdependence and interaction

  • Everything that exists, seems to exist in interactive ecologies.
  • ‘Being’ seems connected.
  • All ‘individual beings’ depend on others for their particular existence. Lone individuals, as far as we know, do not exist as ‘lone’ for their entire lives/existences.
  • Buddhist ideas of ‘dependent causation,’ ‘dependent arising’, or ‘dependent origination’ seem to be reasonable approximate descriptions of what actually happens (although we do not have to accept their usual statements about reincarnation).
  • As a consequence of this idea of interdependence, it appears that humans are not separate from ‘nature’. They depend on ‘nature’.

2) Flux and process

  • Everything which exists is constantly in flux along with everything else. Life flows.
  • Some processes are much slower than others, and so they might seem static from a human point of view, but they are still processes.
  • There may be no eternal, or static, units of being.
  • ‘Archetypes’ and ideas are probably local and temporal.
  • We assume that ‘regularities in process’, or the laws of nature, can be unchanging, but we don’t know for sure – certainly everything else changes. Stars do not seem constant over billions of years.
  • Small events can produce large scale change in certain circumstances (which we may not be able to define in advance).
  • Taoism seems to be useful beginning for reflection

3) A degree of unpredictability and uncertainty are normal

  • Humans cannot predict exactly what will happen in the future, but we can often make good guesses. We can also make very bad guesses.
  • This is just a fact of life.
  • Unpredictability does not mean pure randomness. Evolved complex systems generally oscillate around a stable point – this is called homeostasis and produces a degree of regularity in the flux, at any moment.
  • This degree of regularity means that while we may not know exactly what will happen next we may have some idea. We can expect that people will fall downwards towards the Earth. Our house will not disappear, even if it could collapse. We do not expect that, without some major intervention, pigs will grow wings and fly under their own power.
  • The system does not appear completely random, but it is not completely predictable. A word which has been coined for this state of affairs is “impredictability”; it aims to recognise the normal reality of ‘regularity within limits’ together with the apparent lack of complete certainty in anticipation.

4) Problems of models and understanding

  • In complexity, the only true models of the systems are, generally, the systems themselves.
  • As humans generally do not have a complete understanding of all the complex systems involved in a situation, they cannot completely control complex systems, although they can affect them.
  • As a result unintended consequences are a normal feature of human life.
  • We have to live amidst this uncertainty, regularity and unexpectedness. We should expect unintended consequences.
  • Dogma is almost certainly going to prove incorrect and inadequate as a guide to the future.
  • A statement about what is true at one moment, may not be as effective or accurate at another moment.
  • Being aware of what we don’t know is probably useful to survival, but it is also useful not to simply hope that events will not go badly despite our expectations. We don’t normally hope we can jump out of an aeroplane in full flight without any other technology and survive all the time.
  • Uncertainty about the absolute truth of any statement is probably more prevalent than real clear certainty.
  • Statements have degrees of approximation to reality.
  • We learn by doing, and by attending to unexpected, or discomforting, events, and fixing them as best we can.
  • If we develop policies we should probably regard those policies as experiments, and be prepared to modify them as the results come in.
  • Recognising degrees of failure is important to living within complexity.
  • That statements may be ‘true’, does not mean there is a thing we can call ‘truth’.

5) Boundaries, are not always clear

  • The boundaries between living and dead are not always precise.
  • ‘Matter’ interactively organises, or self-organises, as well as dissolves.
  • As we are constantly in interaction the boundaries between beings are not always precise. We breathe each others’ air, we absorb and transform language, ideas and food. We share continually with other beings.
  • The boundaries between human and non-human are not clear. Mitochondria may be parasites. Most of your weight may come from organisms which are not genetically related to you, but which affect, or even drive, human process.
  • It does not always appear easy, appropriate or entirely accurate to separate a system from its ‘environment’ for purposes of study. This is especially so, if we then proceed to try and render the environment inert, without ongoing interactive effect on the system.

6) Minds and Systems

  • Interdependence and boundary vagueness imply there are no lone or purely bounded ‘minds’.
  • Minds are interactive, they grow and learn in interaction with each other and the world. They learn together.
  • Minds do not appear to end with the individual’s skin, or with the individual.
  • Thinking occurs not only with others, but through learnt language, technology, cultural tools, and ‘natural phenomena’ (trees, objects, creatures, rooms), and the responses and resistances felt, used and observed.
  • Minds are possibly distributed through ecological systems; we learn amidst minds, encouragements and resistances.
  • Human minds (and possibly others) are not born intact or complete – we all have childhoods and learn as we develop.
  • Using our adult mind as a guide to minds or awareness in general, is likely to be fallacious.
  • Not all minds have to be the same, and mind of some sort seems dependent on, and distributed through, the world.
  • That humans seem to have relatively good minds, does not mean that other beings are without minds.

7) Non-Harmony in Holism

  • That everything depends on the presence of others, and interaction with others, implies holism. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the whole influences the parts. The individual is born into, or thrust into, the whole. The individual does not exist without the whole. Yet the whole is not necessarily harmonious.
  • Evolution occurs because of imbalance and failure. Failure to replicate completely perfectly, failure to survive, failure to meet competition, failure to adapt to change in the rest of the system.
  • Competition is real. Co-operation is equally real.
  • As has already been proposed, if a system has been stable for a long time, it is probably relatively harmonious and homeostatic. It is likely to be robust and resilient within limits, but should anything significant change (weather, a new creature arrives, a normal creature has an abnormal reproductive burst, a geological event occurs) then harmony may be disrupted, and change may occur quite rapidly. We may not know precisely what events are ‘significant’ in this sense, until afterwards.
  • Systems can heal, if we stop disrupting them, but not always.
  • Complex systems are adaptive; that is they work towards balance and homeostasis, but that balance and stability need not be beneficial for all members of the system. Complex systems can appear to be maladaptive from the perspective of those they are eliminating. There is no guarantee that humans and ecological systems will always be able to live together. There is even less guarantee that all social systems can exist in interaction with all other complex systems.
  • While we humans are part of a whole, we are not One in the sense that we are all the same, or all similar, or all working harmoniously together all the time. Complexity implies variety.
  • Attempts to enforce ‘oneness’ will almost certainly have harmful consequences for everyone.

8) Hierarchy?

  • Complex systems may have hierarchies, in that some systems (for example planetary) include or overlap with many lower level systems (such as a stream or a lake).
  • However, those more general systems ‘higher’ in the hierarchy may not fully determine what happens at a lower level, although they may influence events.
  • Complex hierarchies are not ideal human hierarchies in which those people at the top command those below, or have a better life than those below, because they supposedly deserve it.
  • What happens below has a large degree of independence, and can eventually influence the top level systems, as has occurred when bacteria started producing oxygen billions of years ago, or when humans started to destroy planetary boundaries.
  • Complex hierarchies involve transmission of influence, in both directions.
  • Real human hierarchies are often like this as well.

9) Order and Chaos are intertwined

  • What we might call order and chaos are co-existent, not different realms.
  • Human attempts to produce order, often produce what the orderers call chaos or disorder. Especially if the ideas of order are dogmatic or ideal, rather than attentive to reality, flux and unintended consequences.
  • Complete order approximates death.
  • Life is disorderly. The more alive something is, the less predictable it is.
  • ‘Sustainability’, in the sense of maintaining a particular order forever, is impossible. However the only alternative is not just destruction, as it can be possible to work within the flux, and help maintain a beneficial homeostasis.
  • Ethics can never be about establishing complete order, but it could be about making temporary homeostatic ‘islands of beneficial order’ for all or most beings.

10) Ethics is situational and uncertain

  • As ecologies flux, no situations are ever completely the same. Relationships change.
  • What is right, just, or ethical in one situation may not be in another, no matter how similar they appear (they will differ).
  • Ethics is a form of decision making with regard to a probably uncertain and imagined future. Ethics cannot be abstracted from the other systems present; political, religious, technological, ‘natural’ or whatever.
  • Ethics becomes visible when there is ethical dispute. Dispute is central to ethics. Ethics will probably never guarantee harmony.
  • Most, perhaps all, ideas and actions have ethical consequences, as they play out through the system.
  • The consequences are likely to be unintended.
  • Ethical ethics may involve care and attention to unintended consequences, after the act of deciding, to make sure the results are ethically acceptable.
  • Insisting a decision is ethical without attending to results will probably lead to disastrous, or cruel, behaviour.
  • Ethics is probably part of our understanding of the cosmos and how it works.
  • Because of uncertainty, ethics involves imagining what we need to do, and what the consequences of those acts will be.
  • Ethics involves imagining the reactions of others, and the level to which we can identify with those others.
  • That is ethics may be built upon imagination, empathy and sympathy.
  • If we imagine a complete difference between ourselves and others, then our ethics towards those beings will probably be different and harsher.
  • As events are interconnected, and boundaries are uncertain it is not easy to say where ethical ‘ethical responsibility’ ends.
  • As ecologies promote life, we probably should not abstain from ethical responsibility towards ecologies, should we wish to survive.
  • David Hume’s point still stands, that because human ethics is based on the way humans behave, does not mean that such behaviour is necessarily ethical. A descriptive statement is not necessarily a proscriptive statement. There may be an unbridgeable gap between an ‘is’ statement and an ‘ought’ statement.
  • There may be no basis for ethics independent of ethics. Ethical relativism is not immoral (as often claimed), it could be an ethical position, which involves a hesitation to condemn.
  • Ideas of God may not not provide a basis for ethics. However, the ethics associated with God, can provide a ethical basis for judging the reports of that God’s behaviour. Is it consistent? Is it good? Or do we have to excuse God from behaviour we would judge as bad if performed by someone else? Can any supposedly all-powerful and all-intelligent God who punishes people with eternal torture be described as purely good?

11) God

  • If God created, or engineered, a world of variety, complexity and uncertainty (for us), what does that tell us about God?

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Ethics and positivity

December 1, 2020

Strong ethical guidelines

There is a pretty standard argument that goes something like this: ‘moral relativity’ is untrue, because it does not allow us to make strong moral evaluations and act against evil, or evil people. Therefore, we need a clear set of moral guidelines to guide us, and for us to be able to act decisively.

Now this may be correct but it is also extremely problematic.

Which Guidelines?

Firstly which set of moral guidelines do we choose?

Do we choose Christian ones, Buddhist ones, Islamic ones, Confucian ones, or the traditional mode of tribal societies, which we might call negotiated custom?

If, for example, we choose Christian ones, then which Christian ones? There is a considerable range of ethical systems within Christianity, and a fair amount of dispute over them. Its not immediately clear which set of Christian morals we would choose as they are all based on roughly the same set of texts and principles.

Even Sharia law has areas of dispute, and in practice people argue over how it should be applied.

Even the same sets of instructions do not always result in moral agreement. There does not seem to be an ethical ‘mechanism’ which can be rolled out and used infallibly in all cases, or which is immediately obvious, if you do not already accept it.

How do we choose?

Secondly how do we choose our preferred system?

I often suspect that people who make this allegation about the virtue of strong moral systems, have already chosen, or already know what they think people should choose, but let’s postpone that allegation for a while, and ask a question….

“Is it possible to make an ethical decision which is not already based on ethical principles?” How do I judge one set of ethical principles as being better than another, without already having made an ethical choice in favour of some ethical principles?

To rephrase a little, the question of “Should people base their life on this set of ethical principles?” may only be decidable by ethical principles.

For example. “Should we accept text A as the word of God, and should we obey it without question” is a set of ethical questions. We evaluate text A at least partially, by our feeling whether or not it is ethical enough for God to have “dictated it.” If we think not, then it is hard to accept it as a complete guide to ethics.

The assertion about obeying that text, then implies the question of whether it is ethical to obey whatever God is said to have said. People might think that particular ethical question is easy, but it is still an ethical question. Someone could assert that it is not ethical to obey God, because God gave use free will and allowed us to think for ourselves. Or we could assert it is not ethical to obey God because every situation is fresh and the text simply provides examples for that moment, or the moment when it was written or dictated. Or we could assert that some of what God is reported as having said, is contradictory, or immoral judged by other parts of what God is alleged to have said and taught, and we have to evaluate which statement has precidence and when.

Then thee is the old question of whether God give us ethical principles which are ethical only because God says so, or because they are really ethical, based on something else? If morals are only morals because God said so, then is God immoral and tyrannous? Different people give different arguments on these subjects.

Even a text which asserts ethics should be about human survival, makes the ethical assumption that human survival is good. Others may be more skeptical about that ethical assertion. We could at least ask, “at what cost can we privilege human survival?”

Are strong guidelines ethically beneficial, or do they just give us excuses for immorality?

Thirdly, is there any evidence that people with strong ethical guidelines are more ethical, on the whole, than those without? The Inquisition comes to mind. Islamic slavery comes to mind. Religious wars come to mind. The Nazis and Stalinists come to mind. These systems were pretty morally absolutist, yet to people outside them, they could easily look immoral, and need to be resisted.

We may need to ask, whether a demand for strong ethics is often merely a demand for the ability to harm people we don’t like, or think are inferior, with a clear conscience? The demand allows us to oppose those we have defined as evil, without examining whether our own views of righteousness also cause evil, or other harms? If so, then could a demand for strong ethics be immoral?

It is an interesting question because often these arguments in favour of strong morals, come from those who seem committed to acts others might define as evil. For example I’ve recently heard Trumpists declare “One must never tolerate evil” – that is apparently apart from Donald Trump, who is to be supported (not just ‘tolerated’) whatever. There is apparently, to be no question that he is moral as is the movement which supports him, and he is not to be questioned. This does suggest that the strong guidelines are demanded to excuse people from moral reflection, or from facing normal ethical difficulties, and to help them assume that they are correct and righteous without effort, or without much attention to their guidelines or the accuracy of their judgements. Other people might assert that this refusal to consider moral difficulty is, itself, immoral.

It could well be that if a person believed that failure to keep the strong moral code meant eternal damnation, that they would do everything they could to condemn others for their own failures, so as to try and persuade God not to harm them. And if God does harm people forever, is God moral, or are we just providing an excuse that He must be, in fear of what will happen to us if we consider the possibility that God is not moral?

Human psychology seems forever ingenious in its ability to engage in self-justification and self-protection. I could be doing the same, but at least I am aware of the possibility.

Are any parts of Moral Relativism useful?

As implied above it seems impossible to take a moral position without moral assumptions. In which case what others call ‘moral relativism,’ and immoral, may also derive from morality.

A real moral relativist may well not consider it moral to condemn others all the time. They might engage in self-defence, or decide someone could need locking away to protect people, but they may not assert that they were particularly righteous in doing so.

They might accept there is a God, but ethically leave absolute moral judgements to God, who is apparently capable of it and not insist on the righteousness of their own condemnation or dislikes.

They may well accept that an ethical basis of ethics is to admit that ethics is difficult, and possibly not certain in every single case.

They might accept that an ethical case nearly always involves some dispute between the parties involved, and that it was ethical to listen to the other sides, and to learn from the case if possible, before you came to an ethical conclusion.

They might recognise that it was easy for humans to deceive themselves about their morality, and judge actions of members of our own group as good, when those actions would be condemned if performed by members of another group, especially a disliked group.

They might accept that what was ethical action in one situation would not always be ethical in another apparently similar situation, as situations are rarely (if ever) identical.

They might doubt it is ethical to claim to be a moral authority, and hence be suspicious of people who did proclaim themselves to be moral authorities.

They might decide that as human knowledge was limited, the ethical approach to any ethical decision was to regard the decision as provisional and open to change.

They might accept that many acts appear both good and bad, depending on what aspects you focused on.

They might decide it is immoral to force their morality on others. They might also admit the possibility they could be wrong, which again reinforces the idea it is immortal to force their morality on others.

This does not mean that they would always have to choose to “resist not evil” (Matt 5.39), but that they understand it is probable the ‘evil person’, or immoral organisation, thinks they are doing good, as do their followers. They realise this fact could apply to themselves as well, but never-the-less they may act, after consideration, as best they can.

They are likely to accept that in this world we can only achieve imperfect good, and that virtuous acts, and organisations founded to pursue virtue, can generate unintended consequences which may not be judged as good. So we ethically need to pay attention to the consequences of our actions, rather than assume that because we think we are good, or doing good, we can do no harm.

I leave it to readers to think about other ethical goods of ‘moral relativism.’

If you cannot bring yourself to do this, then maybe you are being immoral? But of course you can dispute that ethical position.

Positive thinking and ethics

If you remember, the original position being looked at, apparently suggests moral relativism is harmful and is therefore untrue.

There is no reason a truth cannot be harmful, unpleasant or demoralising. To assert otherwise, is just optimism or positive thinking speaking, and there is nothing necessarily true about that. If someone makes this argument, it could appear they are either refusing to look at the subject, running away from the Truth, or simply trying to hold onto some kind of power.

Some of ex-president Trump’s reasoning seems to follow this pattern.

  • Covid-19 is unpleasant and harmful to the economy therefore it cannot be happening or its only of minor importance. The evidence people are dying in large numbers must be false.
  • Climate change is unpleasant therefore it cannot be happening or its only of minor importance. The evidence indicating it is getting worse must be false, and I will get by whatever.
  • Racism is unpleasant therefore it cannot be happening or its only of minor importance. The evidence that black people in the US get shot and injured by police disproportionately to their numbers in the population must be false. People on my side, cannot be racist, they are just misunderstood.
  • Being taken advantage of by North Korea is unpleasant therefore it cannot be happening or its only of minor importance.
  • Failure to build or extend a wall very far, or get the Mexicans to pay for it, is unpleasant therefore it cannot be happening or its only of minor importance. The wall is a great success.
  • Losing is unpleasant therefore it cannot be happening or its only of minor importance. As loosing is unpleasant, there must be lots of evidence that loosing did not happen, even if I cannot seem to present it in court. People who say I’ve lost are biased, or weak, enemies. Virtue says I have to have won.

Trump’s followers often seem to think, that if Trump (and Republicanism) is not on their side it would be unpleasant and there would be no hope of life getting better, therefore he must be on their side and working for them, and all the evidence he is not is pure fakery.

Sadly the unpleasant is often more accurate, and needs to be faced rather than avoided or concealed.

Harmful positive thinking denies reality.

Beneficial positive thinking can accept the unpleasantness, or “non-optimality” of the situation, but asserts we do not have to be victims, we might still have lots to be grateful for, we can survive, we can struggle to be in the best place possible, we may triumph if we persist in those struggles, or learn a new way of proceeding. We may even have God on our side, but the problems are real, and have to be faced, even the unpleasant problems of ethical uncertainty.

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Some suggestions from William E. Rees

February 2, 2020

 

William E. Rees is professor emeritus of human ecology and ecological economics at the University of British Columbia.

He suggests that there are eleven minimum actions we need to take to avoid crisis, or to face into it. Here they are with some commentary.

1. Formal recognition of the end of material growth and the need to reduce the human ecological footprint;

[The important thing here is the need to reduce the ecological footprint – which means the amount of ecological destruction, and pollution issued by each country and per head of global population, in its current mode of existence. This will end ‘material growth’ which is a rather vague term, implying the material is a problem.]

2. Acknowledgement that, as long as we remain in overshoot — exploiting essential ecosystems faster than they can regenerate — sustainable production/ consumption means less production/ consumption;

[We have to move back from consuming or destroying more per year than planet Earth can regenerate in a year. This also means ending ecologically destructive modes of gathering.

[For example, if trawlers damage the sea bottom when trawling for fish, they almost certainly lower the capacity of the sea, in that region, to regenerate fish. In current models of fishing, the large fishers move in, destroy the regenerative capacity and move on, as they have little connection to place. We should probably prevent such types of destructive fishing, and hand the activity back to small fishing fleets. This should lower the amount of food available in the present (which could be a dire problem) while increasing it in the future. One step is to make sure all the fish is consumed, or released if not suitable, rather than thrown back into the ocean dead.

[These first two moves, are the beginnings of “sustainable life styles”. Without these steps, particularly the second, we have no long term prospects outside of war and mass murder.]

3. Recognition of the theoretical and practical difficulties/impossibility of an all-green quantitatively equivalent energy transition;

[A complicated way of saying that we probably cannot replicate the energy characteristics of fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy. We need to use less energy. As Williams states earlier, this probably cannot be done with large cities. Large cities are, so far, extremely energy intensive. They are quite possibly based on the availability of cheap and plentiful energy for food among other things.]

4. Assistance to communities, families and individuals to facilitate the adoption of sustainable lifestyles (even North Americans lived happily on half the energy per capita in the 1960s that we use today);

[Happiness does not depend on consumption, or on energy usage. However, cheap energy increases what people can do, so reducing energy consumption is likely to be seen as restrictive – it would eliminate whole industries (air flight based tourism etc). This would take adaptation and persuasion. It will be difficult.

[It may be particularly difficult as people are now used to having material prosperity taken from them and handed to the elites, although they may define, and perceive, elites differently. Avoiding this perception is going to be difficult. We either probably have to get the elites to go first and cut their lifestyles back, or ignore the elites altogether, or attack wealth elites for their role in the destruction. All these procedures have problems.]

5. Identification and implementation of strategies (e.g., taxes, fines) to encourage/force individuals and corporations to eliminate unnecessary fossil fuel use and reduce energy waste (half or more of energy “consumed” is wasted through inefficiencies and carelessness);

[The more energy is available the more is wasted. However, wastage is sometimes part of profitability. We may need to force the prices of pollution upwards. At the moment, the price of pollution and the penalties for pollution are being reduced in the US. That this increase is not automatically seen as bad, shows the conceptual difficulties faced by our societies in dealing with our futures.]

6. Programs to retrain the workforce for constructive employment in the new survival economy;

[This will have to happen whatever we do. Even if we had the ability to pollute without limits, the contemporary economy is based on destroying jobs, and people have to be retrained for work and income, which is not always welcomed. Or we need to rethink work itself.]

7. Policies to restructure the global and national economies to remain within the remaining “allowable” carbon budget while developing/improving sustainable energy alternatives;

[Carbon prices, based on the amount of pollution which can be issued, are probably the best methods. Not carbon trading which is unstable and gameable.

[However, allocating remaining carbon budget to countries will be difficult. Should Western countries like the US and Australia, be given any? They could be considered have overspent already. And yet we cannot cut down completely overnight without massive social disruption, and the likelihood of countries leaving the scheme. Nation States are usually competitive, and non-cooperative, by their history, so it will probably not be possible to allocate the budget in a way in which everyone will see as ‘fair,’ ‘just’ or ‘practicable’.]

8. Processes to allocate the remaining carbon budget (through rationing, quotas, etc.) fairly to essential uses only, such as food production, space/water heating, inter-urban transportation;

[I can see vast arguments over what is ‘essential’ happening here, and these arguments being used to slow transitions, but it possibly has to happen]

9. Plans to reduce the need for interregional transportation and increase regional resilience by re-localizing essential economic activity (de-globalization);

[Yes. The problem is that without the global ties of trade there is more tendency for nationalist wars]

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The UN has failed Climate: What Next?

February 1, 2020

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

We all know the assertion that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Nation State:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You all know the excuses and the blame game.

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

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

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

Suggestions

So we may need to recognise:

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

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

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

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

One Step Off the Grid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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