Keye Commentary

The Greatest Country In The World

2012-01-25T13:52:00.002-07:00

When I was a young child I marveled at my good luck at being born in America, the greatest country on the earth, and wondered at the various degrees of bad luck of others: gangs of hollow-eyed bone-thin children in the streets of the bombed out cities in Europe, Chinese families starving by the millions in a civil war, rebellions in Central and South America; the Japanese could not even be thought about openly even in the privacy of one’s own mind. Photographs in the great magazines of the great country supplied my pre-literate mind, and I had very big ears both figuratively and literally.

Yet, even back then there was a nagging question: America was great, powerful and good, how was it possible that we should have so much, both material and security, and others be so deprived? In my childish simplicity it seemed that my country could, if not fix the plight of others, then improve the conditions of their lives.

As a child I moved to the rural south. There I saw that migrant workers lived in tiny one-room shacks with no plumping, no glass or screens on the windows, often no real doors; I could see thin stacks of cardboard partly covered with dirty blankets on the floors. “Negroes” lived in isolated “niggertowns” off the main roads, really medieval villages, out of sight, out of mind.

I began to marvel more specifically at my good luck to be born in America as a white child to parents with enough money to buy a little land, build a real house and have a working car. I visited a friend’s house, a small frame place with only exterior covering, the 2x4 framing still exposed on the inside. In the bedroom, behind a blanket curtain, I saw my friend’s uncle, a skeleton in a bed, skull face with wet, searching animal eyes; a man with some terrible degenerative disease. I added to my list of marvels that everyone in my family, including myself, was healthy.

The Korean War (police action) was thoroughly terrifying to my nearly 10-year-old person. I added to my list that my immediate surroundings were not being overrun by millions of bloodthirsty Chinese in very scary quilted fighting suits. At about this same time the sanctity and security of my American, white, lower middle class, healthy, not in a war-zone life began to be challenged by the Russian Communists, who could, and perhaps wanted to, deliver and drop atomic bombs on my grade school. I felt completely out-classed by atomic bombs; that famous aerial photo of Hiroshima, ‘after,’ would dance up in my mind and I would search it for something that looked like my schoolyard.

Yet, even with all these things going on, the paradoxes of my safety and ease of life compared to those skinny farmers in India, their stick children trying to hide behind their stick mother or the little naked children of a Central American jungle village… I tried and tried to understand how they felt, how they might think about their world, what it must be like to be them.

My life remained remarkably easy by comparison: school, work, relationships; maybe not so much relationships, I wasn’t very good with relationships, but I was bright and quite attractive – like a shiny object that you want to pick up and play with until it proves not so interesting after all – and so always had normal people around. The rest of the world, on the other hand, also continued on with its incomprehensible inequities: Vietnam, South Africa, Central and South America, the Congo and a hundred other places where human life was not recognized to be of any particular value by the powers-that-be.

And the point of this little reconnoiter through personal reflections? It seems the usefulness of the social and economic structures that protected me and many millions more like me are coming to an end. I have come to understand that never was the “normalcy” of my life experience normal; it was a hiatus from the normal, lived out in the momentum of a previous time. The experience of Korean villagers driven from their homes by war was normal. The aboriginal displaced from ancestral lands (pick your country) was normal. The little 400 square foot apartment with 7 people and just barely enough food was normal.

The mineral and biological wealth of the North American continent, supplemented by the stolen wealth of the undeveloped world, was so great that just the splashes from the carrying bucket soaked the people. Those with serious psychopathic greed feverously gathered all that they could get, but were easily seen and somewhat easily constrained, though, perhaps more importantly, they needed the American people and, especially, they needed the people to need them. Not that they always remembered; it was possible to remind them.

But with the last half of the last century has come an explosion of transportation, digital and communication technology, the imminence of peak everything, the obvious near-term end of population growth and consequential end of economic growth binges; it is becoming increasingly clear that the bubble of American popular sanctity and security will have to end for the psychopathically greedy and their attendants to avoid sharing.

And they are frantic to avoid sharing. If sharing were to start, even a little bit, then the gates would be torn open and, horror of horrors, the elites would have to begin to confront the possibility of normalcy. And living like the rest of humanity is not on the table; the options have been thought through and are being put in place. There is always the moment, as a plan begins to be implemented, when all the participants can see what is happening; we may not like it, may be in denial for a time, but we know.

As our certainty in our American greatness and personal safety begins to weaken, we cry out our old phrases, the ones that we were taught by the economic and political elite: “economic growth, personal responsibility, free market, free trade, greed is good, pro-life, don’t tax the job creators, freedom:” We are like children who, when they suddenly feel out of favor and in danger of losing parental protection, search for just the right thing to say and do to return to good graces. But these phrases are out of date, are of no interest. And we are bewildered: we say to the powerful, “I still love you.” and it is replied, “But, I no longer love you.”

The powerful no longer need us, at least not as they did in the past; the American people have become fungible. Germany still needs Germans; if all the Germans were to disappear there would be no Germany, but if Americans were to disappear they would just be replaced with new ones from all over just like in the beginning, and just like “in the beginning,” stubborn ones who stayed on would have to be reeducated into the new society. The economic superstructure has come not to care who is running around on the streets and fields below so long as the running around is in all the desired directions.

The good cop/bad cop routine of the Democratic/Republican party proves that the people cannot yet be completely ignored, but the time is getting closer when we, common folk in general, will have experiences like the people of Chile, Argentina, China, Kenya, Iraq, Egypt and dozens of other places where the elites don’t feel the need to hide their intentions.

My childhood conundrums have been largely cleared up. The “normalcy” of my youth and early years was really not normal at all, but life in a very special protected community, one over which I either never had or had given up influence as its price. The American Dream of more and better every year should have tipped all of us off to the con game, that we were being used and that there would be a judgment day. All that was required to understand the game was Life Magazine or National Geographic and a newspaper or a radio. Even as a little child, I could see that something was wrong.

There is still the opportunity to remake the place that we live, this country. Not into the country that used to be; that was and is a lie, but into something more real. There is still great power in the people, great energy when the TV is turned off. There are ideas and many millions of available ‘man-hours.’ First, however, it is necessary to see ourselves with honesty and reality, and it is there that I despair.

3 Essays About The Truth

2012-01-09T12:00:00.002-07:00

Here are 3 essays written simultaneously, literally side by side on a screen array. It is my intention that they be read in order since reading them simultaneously is impractical; though I tend to think of them as a visual triptych which can be seen all at once, the various parts forming patterns of multiple relationships.

I read so many news reports and opinion pieces that treat the world-that-is as if there is no other, has been no other; as if the thoughts in the writer’s head are the “Thoughts of Man.” It has never been true that the problems realized are necessarily the problems to be solved – the first ‘problem’ is always to recognize the real concerns.

I do not, cannot, claim to have cracked the nut of truth on these matters, but I do claim that these and other essays on this blog model the method reasonably well.

The essays are 1) “Corporations Are Collective Entities, My Friend”, 2) The Real Economy v. The What-if Economy and 3) The Natural History of Human Change

“Corporations Are Collective Entities, My Friend”

2012-01-09T11:58:00.000-07:00

Here are two somewhat conflicting and competing statements, both true, that must be understood and harmonized for the self-serving economic and political arguments around corporations to make sense and for our responses to be meaningful [1].

1) The responsibility for actions can only be assigned to individuals (natural persons) or groups of identified individuals.

2) The human unit of action is the community; the actions of individuals form into collective phenomena arising, one way or another, from community opportunities, rewards, rules, values and beliefs.

Taken separately these statements offer little difficulty: a door is opened by a single hand, a lever is pulled, a pedal is pushed, a trigger is pulled; in every case actions ultimately are done by individuals (a situation somewhat complicated by our machines). But, of course, there are “team sports” in which individual actions are coordinated into group behaviors, and then the responsibilities must be spread among all participants. Perhaps one or more individual may be considered more responsible than certain others, but this doesn’t change the basic understanding.

Given our present habits, the first statement raises the question: Can the individual actually performing the action be absolved of responsibility for it; and a companion question, are there times when the individual should be absolved of responsibility for it? In other words, are there times when it is possible for the responsibility for an action to be assigned to some other entity than the actual performer, and are there times when such reassignment is also desirable?

These are not trivial or purely academic questions since their answers ultimately decide our relationship to each other and how we treat collective entities like governments, corporations, religious and other institutions. When, where and why responsibility can be taken from the performing hand and reassigned makes all the difference.

Clearly there is great power in the ability to assign and reassign responsibility for actions; whole “industries” have grown around such (re)assignment, generally in one of two forms. Responsibility has often been assigned to the various forms of community, either in whole or in part, or assigned to some supernatural cause. Here we have obviously entered the domain of the second statement.

The second statement, taken in its most literal form, is also clearly true. Human action is a product of the community in which it occurs. Even those actions that we typically see as completely individual are actions assign to that status by the community; other communities can assign quite differently [2]. Therefore, actions are rewarded, punished and guided, this way and that, all based on community values and beliefs.

If individuals are acting out the prescriptions for behavior given by the community, then how can it be that they are responsible for the consequences? Even those who violate more general community standards are almost always acting in coordination with some narrow part of the community standards that they have either gotten wrong or been led to believe to be correct, at least in the moment. And if it is not identifiable community standards being followed, there are the beliefs associated with even a very personalized supernatural (even madness) that can be said to account for behavior.

However, if the first statement is to be adhered to, then while assignment of responsibility might be made to some entity other than the primary actor, that assignment would have to be to another natural person and not to a collective entity; it is in the attempt to assign responsibility for actions to collective entities that have put us in our quandary. Either natural persons are responsible for their actions or no entity is; only natural persons have the substantive existence that is required.

Since both statements are true, then they must be harmonized rather than taken to be competing, with one or the other them supreme. The first step toward harmony has already been suggested: only natural persons can be assigned responsibility for an action; responsibility cannot be spread so thin that it fails to adhere to an identifiable person or persons.

The person speeding cannot claim, since the whole raft of cars within which he was driving was speeding, that he was not speeding. The business executive that acts out the stipulations of a contract cannot assign responsibility to her boss, to company policy or the law. It must be a matter of community understanding that responsibility for an act lies with the hand closest to the action. Of course, this cannot be an iron law, but as a general expectation, attention would be focused in the right direction.

The problem with assigning “cause” to company policy or community standards is that no actionable entity is required to respond to grievances or harm. Those complained to might offer that “someone should really change that policy,” or that “it doesn’t seem fair, but everyone does it.” How different the situation would be if the process server had to be sufficiently informed of the correctness of her actions that she could support them on her own behalf; and that she might refuse to do actions that offended her, would of necessity refuse since she would be responsible for delivering a summands created falsely.

Impossible, you say, people cannot be held responsible for the actions required of them by the society; no one is responsible. Everyone must do and live within the adapted form of their social situation. If the crowd is speeding, then you must speed. If the group is stealing, then you must steal. If the community is murdering, then you must murder. This is, certainly, how we have been living!

If all responsibility is ultimately to lie with the community, institution or corporation, then there will no standards within which human beings can live. It is only when responsibility for actions adheres to individual human beings that behaviors organize into functional systems. But then the question is begged: where are the standards to come from if not the community?

The standards must come from the community, but the responsibility for the outcome of actions must reside with natural persons. In this way individuals are guided in their behavior, but are required to regularly consider the standards by which they live and the behaviors of others to which they contribute. Ultimately, it is the community’s collected behavior that acts on the world; it is essential that all the contributors take personal responsibility for the community rather than being absolved of responsibility by consigning it to the community, institution or corporation.

It should be obvious that a collective entity cannot be assigned responsibility for actions since it has no device other than human agency by which to act: The Church acts only through the humans who, by their own actions, claim association with it; the government acts only through its humans; a corporation is only a collection of human beings who accept, by their own actions, to live within its standards. In every case it is the human that is responsible for the collective entity, and must not be allowed to claim that their actions are absolved by the collective’s habits and rules.

A collective is only a way to organize – synergize – the behaviors of individual human beings so the whole can accomplish more than the uncoordinated actions done separately. It, therefore, must have organizational principles: rules that members must follow to become and remain a member. Our present general point of view, that unaccountable forces move our collective action, leads to collectives that are truly unaccountable. If natural persons are not accountable when they are guided by collective interests, and if collective interests are not accountable since accountability has no place to be assigned, then the whole human enterprise is a run-away train and will “adapt” itself right out of existence along with all that it grabs hold of on the way.

The attempt to conflate the functional relationships of natural persons with the functional relationships of collectives, especially corporations, is only a way of continuing to remove responsibility from natural persons who find it uncomfortable and inhibiting. The great mass of us natural persons have supported that conflation, in our own immediate interest, by going along with avoiding responsibility for the actions of our own hand whenever we can.

We accept a level of ignorance in ourselves and others that is criminal. We appeal to social standards (or the lack there of), the behaviors of others and economic necessity to reassign to the community responsibilities that are ours. We narrow the scope of our accepted responsibilities to the barest minimum, often to the point of them disappearing altogether. It is impossible from such a place to understand how increasingly outrageous, especially, collective corporate behavior is.

It is as foolish to claim that corporations are responsible for their crimes as it is to claim that they are in any way equivalent to natural persons; they are neither. And we are as responsible for our part in the consequences of their collective action as their managers are for their part. If we are to hold the CEOs accountable, we must also do so for ourselves. These ways of thinking and the demands so naturally created are a necessary beginning to setting our relationship to collective powers right.

[1] See Robert Hinkley’s, Time for a Real Debate: Are Corporations People?, to see how a more “inside baseball” account of the situation is affected by the thinking in this piece.

[2] Women in the sway of certain religious traditions (community standards!) are legally and socially charged, jailed and sometimes beaten or killed for adultery even when they are raped. Another example is the way, in our society, we assign individual success and collective failure to the wealthy and collective success and individual failure to the poor.

The Real Economy v. The What-if Economy

2012-01-09T11:56:00.000-07:00

The Real Economy is my belly and the aurochs’ meat: the Real Economy (economy = ecology) is the energy and material flows from primary sources through the myriads of ecosystem and biophysical transactions. Eventually all economics must comport with the Real Economy. The What-if Economy (what economists call real!) is an ad hoc design concerned with putting off that accounting.

Real Economy: There are 100 cattle in the river valley. Left to their own they will remain, year in and year out, about 100 cattle, as long as I and other predators take below the replacement rate. This is especially true, and even valuable to the cattle, if we predators take the most marginal animals. The functional forces are independent of human thought, imagination and planning; the forces of the Physical and Living Systems of Order working as they have for 4 billion years.

What-if Economy: If I can get some of those cattle into a pen and stop the wolves, lions and bears from getting any, then I can have all of them for myself. Of course, the wolves, lions and bears do not stop trying to eat the cattle and thus time and effort must be expended to drive them off or kill them. Fences must be built and maintained; the cattle guarded.

Cattle must be parceled out as incentive for others to help, promises made for cattle not yet captured or born. If I had more than a hundred cattle it would be easier to gain the help of others; I would be more secure. Of course, more time and effort would be required to protect them, to account for them, to find pasture for them, to process them.

The promises made must be kept: a cow to this man, three cattle to that woman, a calf here, a bull there. The cattle must be more easily controlled; bulls must be kept from the cows; dangerously aggressive animals must be killed. Other grazers must be kept from the pastures. All of these things and more must be done so that the numbers can increase to meet the obligations.

There is no end to the What-if Economy; there is always another what-if, another challenge from the Real Economy to be defeated, another possibility to be explored. But eventually, the aurochs cattle are no longer wild and cannot live on their own, eventually local pastures are insufficient, eventually stream courses are damaged and eroded. What if we kill the beavers up the valley and dam the stream here? What if we take the pastures further down the valley? What if we trade some cattle for the gathered hay from the people over the hill?

This seemingly simple and obvious process has grown and mutated until the Real Economy is actually conceived to be a pressing danger. A summary of the statements of What-if Economists is that if humans are prevented from continuing to damage the earth’s primary Real Economy systems, then our way of life will be destroyed and millions, even billions, of us will die. What makes such a summary compelling is that it is true.

It is also true, if humans continue to treat the Real Economy as a foreign and competing process, that the failure to comport our What-if Economy with Reality will result in the failure of both the ecological systems that allow for the support of abundant and diverse life, as well as our What-if Economy. The result would be catastrophic for the human species and for the incredible complexity of ecological integration that forms the living structure of the planet’s surface.

There is only one solution. It is the solution that every organism, plant, fungus, microbe, animal, in the history of life has followed. The economy of the organism must comport with the economy of the ecological system: economy must equal ecology.

This doesn’t mean that every organism’s detailed functioning must be the same; new physical designs, physiologies and behaviors are de rigueur for life – but all that is new must be integrated into the patterns of biophysical reality: every organism must live within homeostatic limits. Nothing about the special adaptive capacities of the human species have changed that reality; we have simply used our capacities to discover how to violate those limits for a time and are moving nearer and nearer to the unavoidable consequences of those violations.

So how must the human species live in order to comport with the Real Economy? The simplest answer is “very differently.” It is impossible to know, with any certainty, the details since the result will come from complex “negotiations” among human actions and ecological realities; every successful organism solves its problems in special ways. But, the general outlines are clear.

Before developing these general outlines, it needs to be said that there is no obvious and clear way to attain them. It is unreasonable to demand that an imagined situation should always be accompanied with a detailed plan for its implementation; this is not now we commonly work and is only a way of refusing to consider an option. We have always recognized a goal, decided on its desirability and then discovered, in process, how to accomplish it.

There are only four primary conditions that we must meet. The failure to fully meet any of these conditions will be (will continue to be) catastrophe for either our species or for the whole planetary surface:

• Humans must live within environmentally determined energy and material use limits.

• The environment must not be perturbed to a greater extent or at a greater rate than it can repair with uninterrupted natural cycles and processes.

• The conditions of human nurturance – the raising and educating of our young – must fully support our biological potential.

• The recognition of the need for biologically sound principles of human nurturance must include the clear recognition of the special nature of the human Consciousness System of Order adaptation, its powers and dangers.

Since, at the moment, we are doing none of these things, the statement that we must live differently is much too weak; we must radically change almost everything that we do every day. Notice that I do not say that we have to change “who and what we are,” but we must change many, if not most of the things we do in order to become what we are.

– Suffer me a polemic: as an evolved creature on the earth, there is a particular way for our species to be on the earth just as with every one of the billions of other species that are, or have been, here. If, as a species, we are dis-integrating to the order of biophysical processes, then we must be acting in ways antithetical to our biological nature; which, in our case, results from the failure to meet the third and forth conditions above. –

The science is clear (physical sciences, biology and the economics that include the Real Economy), the earth cannot support the present rates at which humans are using it. It is also clear from human history that we, the masses, will not tolerate abuse by other humans beyond certain limits. These two facts point toward more egalitarian social economic forms. Conditions 3 and 4 can only be obtained in communities sized by human capacities for responsible relationships of obligation across the whole community.

Recent history strongly suggests that large institutions become self-sustaining at the expense of all four primary conditions. And so, responsibility for all actions would have to clearly be put on natural persons answerable to a community, a community that is informed by sufficient processes of communication. Institutions would need to remain small, flexible to a social purpose and transitory.

There seems to me to be only two ways for the four conditions to be met; the last time all the conditions were nearly completely met was when humanity was uniformly composed of Paleolithic hunter/gatherers – and even then the forth condition was only very vaguely adapted to and was almost completely unrealized. So the first possibility would be to return to Paleolithic ways of living; the present earth could support perhaps a few million people living in that way—the population of only one of our moderately sized cities.

The second way is to devote, in essence all, the incredible disposable wealth of humanity, much of it presently being privately confiscated in the insane pursuit of personal glorification and dominion, to discovering how to live in communion with the Real Economy and educating those that need it to such discoveries; especially, empowering and educating the women of the world and retraining the people of the developed world how to live simply and responsibly. The mechanisms to accomplish this use of resources should be the first concern for students of the Real Economy.

The What-if Economy must begin to be seen for what it is; concerned with its “Rube Goldberg” intellectual inventions, Ponzi schemes and power/control plans; a social science co-opted and compromised by accumulations of wealth; and a complex mechanism to defeat the Real Economy, an attempt to allow a species, out of control, to defeat Reality.

The Natural History of Human Change

2012-01-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

Our physical world is made up of dominating motions: the pull of the Sun’s gravity, the earth’s yearly revolution around the Sun and daily rotation on its own tilted axis, the moon’s monthly transit. Our small personal motions, going to work, sex, betting on a football game, growing a kitchen garden, all happen within the parameters of these dominating and other motions. We adapt to all of them; no one seriously demands a weaker force of gravity, a 30 “hour” day or less extreme tidal fluctuations; and we almost as universally accept the normalcy and necessity of our personal lives.

There are motions in our social, political and economic world that, while not based directly in universal physical law, have some of the qualities of dominating physical motion – more on the model of glaciers and large ocean currents, on the one hand, and avalanches and hurricanes on the other. We, humans, help to create the conditions in which they manifest, but once in motion they are similarly irresistible.

To further explore the potentials of the analogy: the strength of a hurricane depends in major part on the temperature of the water over which it forms and moves. It does no good to simply build barriers in front of the winds while ignoring forces that form, strengthen and guide the storm.

As a function of both habit and capacity we are ignoring the dominating motions of our present reality: the irresistible glacial forces of population numbers combined with technological developments, the ocean current of wealth extraction and concentration, the avalanches of social disruption and dislocation and the hurricanes of ecological perturbation. Attention is given to many of the consequential details of change, but not to the reality of the motions themselves and their underlying forces; for finally, this is not a metaphor at all.

Millions of people acting in unison, acting from common belief and habit, cannot be redirected in any simple way. The forces of change must be equal to the momentum possessed by continuing to stay the same. This has almost always meant that such forces of change be draconian. Reasoned argument, scientific and logical conclusions and even general acceptance of abstract ideas have had little impact. Major changes are, therefore, almost always traumatic for societies and individuals.

But looking at human capacity and potential, it seems that major changes should be possible for human beings without all the Sturm und Drang. We can learn new things with relative ease and, in general, show a remarkable adaptability, however, large groups are most often better understood as large masses in motion than as many highly maneuverable separate entities.

We might imagine a convoy, a thousand cars long, filling a thousand-lane highway. It must go in the direction of the roadway; it may not slow down or speed up except in the most complex and gradual manner. The communication and coordination to perform even the simplest maneuver would be monumental… and this in cars with only the function of moving from one place to another. Whole lives in motion, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for many tens of years, accumulate complicated interwoven patterns of momentums with all the other surrounding lives.

In practical terms, it may only be possible to redirect the convoy by crashing the cars and suffering the consequences. The burdens of coordination and communication would be greatly eased by only the need to crash the convoy, but, of course, the outcome may not be substantively different than doing nothing at all and waiting for the eventual end of the roadway to force a pile-up in any case.

In terms of the metaphor, we are watching increasingly frantic attempts to communicate and coordinate changes in direction coming from all the various ideational centers. If we image that the convoy can be communicated with by car radio and cell phone, and that people will be tuned to different stations and receiving calls, texts or tweets from different sources, they are still – and this is vital – utterly dependent on the immediate patterns of movement surrounding them to give order to their sustaining behavior. No matter how compelling, the messages beyond the moment cannot compete with the immediate conditions within which each person finds him or her self. In other words, the dominating momentum of the convoy, regardless its rationality or irrationality, matters more than any communication from beyond it – even completely believable descriptions of the end of the roadway and the certainties of driving into it at speed.

Ultimately, people learn to not give attention to the messages from beyond their immediate condition – even when they understand them to be true. It is only when the immediately surrounding conditions become impossible to predict and respond to that actions are taken in response to the messages from beyond the convoy and then only in terms of the long habit of local attention; once that begins the only certainty is that the loss of internal structure will spread crashes at random. As a society we are just approaching that point.

Some would say that we have already begun, that economic inequity and the decline of the middle class are evidence, but these have long been the direction of our travel; we are just beginning to realize where we’ve been going. And we have quite a long way to go in that direction yet before the end of road. In the world fantasized by typical economists, one that is unlimitedly substitutable, we would have a much longer way to go than we actually do, but we still have the time to retrace our steps into a “modern” version of medieval feudalism, a motif tellingly dominant in fictional portrayals of our future.

The question for us, for all ideologies of change, is, what are the mechanisms and messages that might be successful in communicating with the great momentum of movement that is present humanity, and what are the realistic expectations? In terms of the metaphor, a small percentage, say 5%, spread randomly throughout the convoy could slow it down or speed it up, eventually even guide it to some extent, by coordinated increments of change.

If, at every opportunity, such a random assortment were to apply the brakes a little sooner, brake a little longer and return to speed more hesitantly, then the whole convoy would slow over time. This is almost certainly how we have gotten to our present place; the incremental speeding up of a random collection of actors. But, given human nature, slowing down is a more tedious and contentious process. It shortens distances, greater attention is required by all and our animal competitiveness is not triggered by increments of slowing in the way that it is by someone speeding ahead [1].

Clarity of idea is key, and a way to communicate with accuracy and honesty to a sufficient percentage of people. Otherwise our momentum will carry us all along to the end of road, that point were the systemic order that forms our actions in the world fails to meet our needs beyond our capacity to ignore the failure. At that point we really do enter the maelstrom knowing nothing of if or how our kind might come out on the other side.

[1] Even after many tens of years I am still amazed and amused when drivers in cars seem to have to speed up to pass me when I am riding my bicycle faster than ambient traffic.

Is There an Adult in the House?

2011-12-24T11:36:00.000-07:00

(This is a new version of an essay of the same title posted earlier this year.)

There are people who, when they look at the opinions and views of others, try to find the depth in those views, try to see the source, the reasonableness and the constructive value; I am one of them. But, there are beliefs and principles of action so clearly wrong, that I am incredulous when I confront them. No; more than incredulous: it is some seething combination of amused, frightened and outraged.

We humans have this massive capacity to store data, and to organize that data into navigable landscapes of experience; and since we all live in the same world, made of the same elements operating by the same laws of physics and chemistry, there is, at least, the presumption of some reasonable commonality in those landscapes.

At the physical level that is certainly true: our bodies learn to respond to gravity and the laws of motion in very similar ways; the combination of learning and instinct hone remarkably consistent perceptual senses, though language has strong influences. If we could just keep our mouths shut and work or play together with hand signals much of our dysfunction might disappear.

Often I cannot even imagine how other people come to what they believe in and act on. How does someone come to think that there is a non-material universe run by a non-material entity with intimate, human-like interest in every movement of every atom; we’re talking big numbers here: infinite capacity infinitely applied. And then, once people think this, they think that they know what this entity is all about and wants of them; and it is almost always some projection of their own narrow human self-interest, desires and fears… now imagine that.

You may notice that there is the seed of a theory in the preceding paragraph, but I didn’t say I didn’t have a theory, only that I am incredulous, amused, frightened and outraged! Here is a partial list of habits and beliefs that I call, in my own personal shorthand, ‘nutty.’ The list is uneven as to specificity and hierarchical consideration, but some of that will be worked out later.

• All religion based projections onto the physical world: These include that the earth was given to humans for their fun and games, any special creation ideas, miracles, sectarian non-standard science in general, ‘chosen’ races or creeds, ‘chosen’ politics and the many minor spin-offs from these beliefs; especially those beliefs that are seen as empowering the domination of others.

• Secular prejudice, especially when it passes beyond simple discomfort and uncertainty of difference into assertions of evil intent; for example, in the recent history of the old Congo, the Hutu claimed both superiority and racial purity over the Tutsi, a “racial” designation that the Hutu attempted to remove from the earth with AK-47s and machetes, even though the two “communities” had been exchanging genes and everything else for, at least, 500 years (see Rwandan Civil War for a complex history of secular prejudice in operation).

• The confident assertion that ‘my way’ (my group’s way) is the only correct way; other ways of thinking and acting are suspect and potentially dangerous and evil. These sorts of beliefs can span the chasm between Ayatollah Khomeini and Pope Benedict XVI or between Pat Robertson (Jerry Falwell) and Ted Kaczynski.

• The simple “hell with the other guy” basis of life: Unfortunately, this form of belief and action can function from lane changing in traffic to tax policies, from shop-lifting to securities fraud. This is social neoteny, the infantilization of “adult” action.

• “Marshmallow man” syndrome: a know nothing, space-taking attitude that goes along to get along, that adopts and adapts to whatever is immediately convenient. It is a disengagement that produces as much harm as active mal-intention.

• The specialized infantilization of the power hungry: this tends to incorporate a variety of the above peeves.

• More annoying than the power and attention hungry is that so many of the rest of us do not immediately recognize, shame or otherwise direct such people into remedial human training. They are actually accepted and even encouraged to take leadership roles.

• The deifying of the super-rich by people who don’t realize the danger, who don’t see that the economic elite are constructing a new economic, political and social structure in which a tiny percentage of people, who are increasingly in control the discretionary wealth of the world, plot to have their own society dominating all life on the planet, answerable only to their own twisted, dysfunctional “reality,” a society for which “lower human forms” would be only service devices [1].

• Unalloyed materialism: the attachment of feelings of value, measures of worthiness, of self and others, to the accumulation of material possessions. Even in weaker versions, the judgment of value and worthiness based on material possessions is a harmful and diminishing shorthand.

• People who continue to believe that they can and should have all of the stuff generated by the material world. This is different from the preceding bullet-point in the depth of the habit; this is not the drive to acquisition, but the unconsidered certainty that one should “live like everyone else” even if living like everyone else is destructive [2].

It is not lost on me that both my attitude and list are violations of my own attitude and list; that is, much of what I am arguing involves accepting the unfamiliar and the off-putting, and yet I am making a list of things that are “unacceptable” to me. But you have to undraw the line somewhere!

Much of this boils down to an obliviousness to, or willingness for, harming others out of infantile selfishness, psychopathic greed, sociopathic fear/aggression… and religion supported versions of the foregoing. These are conditions of dysfunction, but have become the standards, often the social goals, of much of our society. These are all conditions that develop out of deprivation, especially the deprivation of community and environmental experience: the denial of the totality of nurturance required to grow a fully functional adult human being from the zygote.

Like every other organism on the earth, the human animal requires certain conditions of nurture and experience to implement full human potential; additionally, the full human potential is both powerful and frightening, especially to those who are not in possession of it. And so a process has been in place for some few thousands of years, a process in which the changes in life habits have contributed to weakening human contact with primary conditions of nurture, a diminution of the numbers of humans with full development and the quality of that development. The consequence is the corresponding aberrant behaviors of the species as its members struggle with the results of insufficient developmental experience.

As a general rule, humans can only become as mature as the most mature person in their formative experience. And a major result of our “progress” has been the tattering of the fabric of the nurturing experience resulting in a dramatic loss of the human adult condition [3]. The consequences of that loss seem to underlie most of the issues on my list.

The behaviors on my list of peeves are not just misapplied natural human behaviors, though they are very wide spread and dominate our economics, politics and social order – and they are not made “natural” by their preponderance. Natural is still, as it is for every organism, what would be obtained by fulfilling all the conditions of a biological and social development to which and in which the organism evolved [4].

With this underlying reality largely unrecognized and completely free of any meaningful societal response, all of our solutions to our problems are missing key ingredients. There are two basic approaches possible for the problems that we face; one is to have small segments of society strive to enact “solutions” that, in appearance, benefit them; the other is to try to reestablish the conditions that allow the species to both function and flourish in integration with the biophysical realities that will ultimately determine the fate of all life on earth.

We know the consequences for the first “solution”: segments of society vying for power to create the world of their dreams, especially when those dreams are madness, is the summary of our recorded history. Pick a moment, any moment, and 7000 Greeks are holding off 100,000 Persians at Thermopylae, a mad Frenchman invades Russia, an atomic bomb is dropped on Japan, an economic elite is both preparing for and publicly denying the ecological catastrophe of anthropogenic earth abuse; it would seem time to try the second option.

Since we have the lost the thread of the processes of proper human nurturance, it must be recovered with effort: it is still to be found in the lives of some peoples largely uninfluenced by the large scale social experiment of modern life, and it is there in our genes, expressed as propensities, to be discovered by scientific investigation, to be teased out by answering the right questions with good experimental design and statistics – none of it will be easy.

It is a wearying realization that we cannot effectively solve our problems with the tools that we have, but must rediscover/invent tools that we currently do not possess. One of those tools is the sufficient abundance of fully adult human beings.

It seems an impossible task until we realize that humans are an impossible animal, far more outrageous than a peacock, tyrannosaur or a blue whale. An animal with the capacity to “invent” the power to change and endanger the whole surface of the earth in the eye-blink time of a few thousand years, such an animal certainly contains the capacity to save itself as well, but only if it can equip itself with the right tools. And the most basic of those tools is the full performance and comprehension of ourselves as our species.

[1] Graphic presentation of various wealth statistics

Examples of political actions: (1) , (2) , (3) , (4)

[2] Of course, people look to those around them to set the standards for how they live, that is simply the way it is done. But, when culture is in flux, when standards are challenged and in change, as they are now, digging in and refusing to use our human capacities of response and adaptation is abomination.

[4] In our “founding” human communities (ancient hunter/gatherer societies) only a few members became and maintained full adulthood, it was a behavioral niche like mystic, warrior, psychopath, earthmother or explorer/risk-taker. The presence of true adults served the whole community by offering the “adult” behavioral option to everyone when needed in the same way that the presence of a true warrior served as model when that behavior was needed. True adults potentiated the whole community for adult behavior, for intellectual, emotional and mental clarity structured on honesty and principles of honor designed into a fabric woven from the threads of the ‘long view.’

[4] A beaver raised in a concrete pond can be maintained alive, but would never be considered to be a fully functioning “natural” beaver. The distortions of behavior of the beaver as it tried to express some of its native potential using whatever opportunities were available in the pond could not be considered a new “normal” for beavers.

An Entreaty

2011-11-27T13:51:00.003-07:00

As I have been attempting to follow my own advice, to take actions that reaffirm specieshood, as well as to work diligently on a project too long postponed, there has been a constant sense of need (purely the product of an unwarranted hubris) to “write to the world at large.” But when I examine what it is that I want to say, it is clear to me that I have already said it. And so, I have made up a list of 7 essays that singly and in unison scream out what seems to me to be essential understandings.

These 40 pages (at a standard of 300 words per page) comprise the kernel of my thought on the species and our dilemmas; and the minimal, and inadequate, solutions that I see as possible. I see glimmers of these ideas and in some cases quite bright shinings of them sprinkled around the universe of human communication – and am heartened, and burden eased – but they must be more relentlessly and widely propounded. We must change the Story that we are telling ourselves and it must begin to come more and more from Reality.

I have no illusions about the importance or potential impact of these words; they are like the drops of water on the basalt and andesite lava flows of my beloved volcanic hills. Much of the time, the exposed flows from 2 million or 3 million years ago still have the ropy and plastic shapes on their surface frozen into them at the moment they cooled beyond moving. But there are also those places where the drops of water have been consistent enough, organized by gravity and the lay of the land, that the lava has been cut through and shaped anew.

I am suggesting the order given, but there was no intentional order in their creation.

1) A New Way of Understanding Our Situation ~ 6 pages

2) Meaning of Specieshood ~ 6 pages

3) Reality and Illusion in Human Experience ~ 5 pages

4) Consciousness Order and Belief ~ 7 pages

5) Being Made Human, Again ~ 3 pages

6) Religion Is Not An Institution; It Is A Process ~ 5 pages

7) What is Science? ~ 8 pages

I’m Going For A Walk

2011-11-02T14:48:00.002-06:00

I am not a multitasker; not good at trimming my toenails while riding a bicycle or having sex while doing back flips on a trampoline. I find it equally difficult to mix intellectual activities. And since my attentions are being drawn to spending time on, thinking about and writing about a bit of, more or less, “natural” desert in my vicinity, contributions to this site will drop off precipitously.

I present this formally rather than just not posting new essays so that the 5 (or 25 or 55, it must be some odd multiple of 5 for my sense of order) people who, for whatever reason, regularly visit this site will not think that I have given up on the world or died (ultimately the same thing).

No; I am gone walking. Last night I rode my motorcycle out to the dry plains and sat (and walked around) through one of the greatest events in the human universe: the setting of the sun. When I got to my selected place the sun was about 3 palm widths above the low volcanic hills to the west. There was a mild, but clear urgency, to collect a bit of wood for a fire; for cooking my supper and for heat against the late October cold.

It was an area that I knew well. The dry wash where I gathered stones combined with others like it, eventually making a vertical walled canyon a mile to the east and “exploding” out onto an old river channel of the Rio Grande where the river had down-cut making miles of lava cliffs. The river was now 7 miles to the west, fickle thing that it is, seeking the easiest way off the Colorado Plateau.

As I walked back to the spot where I had settled in for the evening, the sun was just on the horizon. The return route was determined by the location of the little trees – hardly trees at all to someone with experiences from the mountains or the great forests of the east or coastal west – tall, dense bushes to block the light letting me see when in their long shadows. I will not even attempt to describe the colors.

I heard some coyotes talking to each other down toward the lava cliffs and wondered if they knew yet that I was there. Except for the delicious sound of the old BMW engine on the way in I was very quiet. I also thought a bit about the mountain lion tracks that I had seen in the hills just to the west, tracks coming from these plains; but not too much.

I knew as soon as I built a fire the coyotes would know all they needed to know about me. Later, after the fire had been going for sometime, the sun had been down for almost an hour, but the last of its light was still in the western sky, there came a howling from south of east, from the area of a little box canyon in one of the many dry washes that trail to the east toward the lava cliffs – about a half mile away. The yelping, barking and singing quickly proceeded north along a spiraling curve that came closer and closer until a crescendo just to the north and 50 yards away; a space where no light came from the darkness, only the free flowing sound. The 2 or 3 singers hidden in the darkness went through a rapidly changing display of coyote virtuosity for about a minute and then the night went silent. At least 6 performers had acted in this opera (which was, lest we forget, life and death to the coyotes). I hesitate to think that it was done for me, but whatever the reason it was wonderful.

So I leave you – for the high desert plains, lava cliffs and river-cut canyons of the Caja del Rio – to play with the coyotes, mountain lions, bears, deer, elk, wild horses, chipmunks and jack rabbits. Golden eagles nest in the river canyon cliffs and do their plunging mating dances right there in front of God and everybody who happens by. Ash-throated fly catchers and phoebes somehow make a living on the 10 inches of rain a year, and piñon jays are returning in response to the gradual return of the piñon trees following the great die off several years a go.

I’ve got a lot to do. I leave you with what is intended to be a tantalizing hint of where I’ll be playing. There are a few places like this left; a land-ocean without trails, all directions possible limited only by the shape of the land, and the capacities and courage of the traveler: a living metaphor for the proper place for the human mind.

I will drop by here periodically when something sticks too persistently in my craw. And if you drop me an email, I’ll reply eventually; when in an area that gets service.

(Damned application wouldn't put the images in the order of my choice, but that is just the way it is.)

1) The road into the central hills

6) High desert plains: a year without a fall bloom

7) The Rio Grande in its long narrow house

2) The central hills seen from the northern hills

3) Diablo Canyon looking west toward the Rio

4) Coyote track with juniper berries

8) The perpetual optimism of youth

5) Fall bloom: winterfat and chrysothamnus

The Trade Trap

2011-10-22T14:43:00.002-06:00

Ari Berman’s piece from The Nation, ‘How The Austerity Class Rules Washington’ (Oct. 11, 2011), discusses an interest-based collective that he calls the ‘austerity’ class. This designation is, however, misleading: this grouping should be called the ‘austerity for others’ class. The naming is clumsier, but much more accurate.

The ‘austerity for others’ class is offering nothing new. Self-centered bandits have been robbing those least able to protect themselves from the beginning of biological time; that is all that they stand for and ultimately argue for: a reinvigorating of the ‘strong over the weak’ principle of naked, unadapted biological confrontation. They have their apologists, like Butler Shaffer, who argue for them that their guiding economics and politics are based in evolutionary principles while ignoring the vastly greater body of evidence that ecosystems are naturally cooperative systems that only function by Hobbesian principles when disturbed, that is, as they are most often seen by humans when the juggernaut of “development” rolls through the environment [1].

The ‘austerity for others’ class arises from what I call the Trade Trap and has been with us for a long time. People trade for advantage. In the origin of exchanging and trading objects and behaviors, advantage was derived from spreading nets of obligation through the community, giving it order and stability, rather than in the amassing of material excess or even in individuals acquiring the means of meeting essential needs. But, people trade for advantage. Originally the advantage was to the whole community; eventually advantage was realized as possible for individual community members.

Exchanging goods and services becomes a trap when the various utilities of trading disguise the loss of the capacity to meet primary needs without trading. Trading, in this circumstance, ceases to be voluntary and becomes essential, and advantage goes to those people who have either least lost their capacity to meet primary needs or who have used their trading advantage to build sufficient military capacity to take what is needed (or force the trades they desire). And thus the trap is sprung:

A community that maintains its self-sufficient capacity cannot also build a military force for either defense or offence against another community that uses trading advantages to acquire its primary needs, and can, therefore, devote, time and material to an army. Our recorded history is largely of the resulting organizational and arms race.

Trading and the panoply of activities and motive forces generated by trading is both salve and whip. Once the trap is sprung and a community or society can no longer survive, without trading, in the form to which it has become accustom and assumes to be necessary and connate, then trading supplies powerful motives to maintain ordered relations with trading partners. It also supplies powerful motives to use significant resources to build and maintain defensive and offensive armed forces, exacerbating the trap since these resources can only be had by trading at greater and greater advantage.

A particularly devilish aspect of this process is the way the Trade Trap turns back onto the community. Individuals begin to be seen as trading their time and work for the necessities of life rather than as members of a community structured on patterns of mutual obligation. The spreading of material and behavioral wealth begins to be motivated more by individual advantage than community relations. Labor is no longer voluntary. The building of nets of obligation becomes fragmented and disrespected in favor of both subtle and explicit force, modeled on the relations characterized in community force: the trading of labor becomes a form of slavery. This has been obvious throughout our history: slaves, serfs, servants, bond-servants, wage slavery – any of those occasions when the “laborer” has only the choice among working for the benefit of another, abject poverty or death. Thus, Marx’s critique.

It is a mistake to get too caught up in the details of the activities or personalities of the actors in our present drama: it is like thinking that there can be no basketball without Michael Jordon or no fascist extreme without Hitler. There would have been no Michael Jordon without the game, the other players and the fans; there would have been no Hitler without human process and organization. As long as we have the game of basketball great players can express their talents; as long as we have the present economic and political design the ‘austerity for others’ class will have its peferred court to play on also.

There is only one solution to the circular roller-coaster that we are riding; it is simply, though seemingly impossible, to get off. Unless communities can begin to restructure in ways that support self-sufficiency, reducing the force behind involuntary trading of labor, the playing field for despotism will not be changed. Great psychopaths will continue to have a place to express their talents and the masses will continue to be their involuntary game pieces and audience. The real struggle in the current structure is between plutocracy and oligarchy, whether the top dog is to be corporate power or government/military power. People at the level to actually contest these matters understand that one or the other has to come out on top – it is in the nature of the situation and the players. This also makes an opening for fascist players.

The deficit issue is, of course, of no real concern to the ‘austerity for others’ class; simply a handy device to steal from the masses. As long as Mr. Berman and others of intelligence and capacity are persuaded to focus on the details as if they were the real issues, then the people’s pockets can continue to be picked with impunity.

The facts are that no system can use more energy than is available; the idea in the form of a money budget is generally recognizable to the population. Therefore, deficit creation is an activity to be avoided over the long run. It is also true that certain populations and segments of populations will have to reduce their “standard of living” – greater austerity, if you like. The totality of human consuming activity on the planet must be reduced.

What is not true is that it is necessary for the whole of austerity to be delivered to the already economically stressed, though it is easiest for the wealthy to abuse the poor. The ‘austerity for others’ class is using its wealth power (trade advantage power) and access to military power to force all but a tiny few into greater and greater extremes of austerity while collecting princely and kingly situations for themselves. This is the simple and correct understanding.

Increases in austerity will have to be accepted by large parts of the populations of the US and Europe and the elites of the poorer nations. But few will give up advantage without a fight. The ‘austerity for others’ class is using the conditions of the Trade Trap to get the slightly, to somewhat, advantaged middle classes of the world to, for the moment, support their thieving from those very supporters; even as they construct the collapse of those middle classes into a condition of serfdom and extract a huge one-time infusion of wealth with which they hope to ride out the coming economic and environmental storms.

The middle classes and the poor need to realize that they are true partners in the confrontation with the ‘austerity for others’ class; they are only separated by small numbers economically, 10 or 20 to 1. The greater differences are found in education and expectation, but, significantly, not in so many primary values, and no difference in the capacity to live life and to act in the world. It has been to the advantage of the ‘austerity for others’ class to attempt to divide the poor, races and ethnicities, white collar, blue collar, other economic divisions and any other identifiers. There is some evidence in the Occupy Movements that these artificial distinctions are weakening.

The dilemma is that almost all humans are in the individual version of the Trade Trap, they must trade their living time and their labor for life’s essentials; supporting the ‘austerity for others’ class is required. This is the game; no tweaking of the rules will change it. I think it fine to know the details of who is playing and their stats. But this game is rigged; there is no solution to be found in sorting endlessly through the game films, but becomes part of the game itself. The only solution is to walk away, as impossible as that seems to those in the trap, and leave the players in an empty stadium.

[1] Humans are easily confused about what constitutes the biological unit of adaptation. The most common error is to identify the individual genetic unit with that unit – this is actually rare. If, for example, we assume that the interaction of individual arthropods in a forest glen is the model, then it is a desperate and dangerous world indeed, but if we look at the interaction of species from all the kingdoms of life in the same glen it is world of exquisite harmonies. We humans have used our great capacities to be dangerous to each other; we now must use those capacities to discover how to control our integration into the world’s ecologies and how to design our communities to give value to the living of life rather than the accumulation of the material consequences of uninhibited human action.

An Evening at Lake Meredith, Texas

2011-10-14T13:05:00.004-06:00

Sitting on the rim of the canyon that contains the Canadian River – when there is a river – I look across the broad flat bottomland that would be covered by Lake Meredith – when there is a lake. It is a long canyon, a mile wide, lined on either side by cliffs a hundred feet high. The river cut this canyon over many hundreds of thousands of years. Melt water from glaciers in the Southern Rockies and the more abundant rains of the Pleistocene ice age carried the land away bit by bit, across what is now Oklahoma to the Arkansas River and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico.

A dam several miles to the northeast would not have been here then and the river would have made its own course wandering back and forth in the wide flat bottomland, flooding grandly from time to time and always cutting its way down through the ancient stone layers so clearly displayed today in the canyon walls, still holding the river – when there is a river – to its main course.

I put my binoculars to my eyes expecting, as I do every time (immune to either learning or disappointment) to see a river and its inhabitants as I have instantly constructed them in my mind: 15 thousand years ago; the trackways of the megafauna crisscrossing the valley. The river – always a river – snaking its way, in wide meanders, across the green valley floor; in places it would form channels of liquid lace, large and small rivulets punctuated with beaver ponds, taking most of the valley from steep side wall to steep side wall – and these were not ordinary beavers, but 6 feet or more long with a head as big as a bear's. In places where the valley bottom was more plain than river channel or willow forest, I imagine groups of the bigheaded, short-legged horses of the really old west; fifty in that clearing, a hundred in another.

Of course, when the binoculars touch that spot just below my eyebrows where they rest, and as I focus them and my eyes, the image is just the one that I was looking at a moment ago, only 8 times closer. Unlike an astronomical telescope, they will not look into the past.

Today there is no river. 2 months ago there was no river and the remains of the lake was even smaller, in the rainless 110º heat, than it is now. I don’t know when the river was last a river, but the National Park Service has taken to calling the southwest end of the valley a wetland, not a river or a lake. New Mexico has not been a reliable source for rain or snow and also the water flowing out of that region is corralled on its passage in Conchas Lake and Ute Lake, as well as being taken for various domestic and agricultural uses.

I search in vain with the binoculars, having given up on them as a time machine, for signs of rivulets and flows strung together sufficiently that a river might be speculated or imagined. There were some places where water had flowed in miniscule proportion from a recent rain. The bottomland sands were a wet tan and not an almost bone dry white; but no secreted away little channel wending its way as some final trickle of the mighty Canadian River.

Over half a mile away a little finger of shallow water from the lake wetted the sand to a real brown. On the water were 300 or more birds, perhaps ducks – not the Pleistocene horses, but I thrilled a bit as I saw them. I knew a man long ago who would have been able to tell what they were even from here; to me what are no more than black specks, some with flicks of white showing as they moved. There was a pair of large white birds further away sitting on, or near, a small bar well out in the water; swans by size, though maybe not. Several great blue herons took up their solitary posts along the waters edge. And various other birds in small groups: a few white specks gathered in one place and a few black specks gathered in another.

I present this inventory because I first take an inventory, looking through my time-locked binoculars, as part of the comprehension of the place,. Denied the ancient megafauna, I’ll make do, even seek fulfillment, in present reality; and I enjoy being reminded of Sievert’s supernatural skill at identifying birds from the smallest clue – in the comparison of my incapacity to do so.

Then again maybe they are not ducks. There was a flight of the birds, for reasons that birds do these things, and they took off and circled away like shore birds. Perhaps the water there is only inches deep and the birds are wading. So now I wonder if they might not be willet sized shorebirds and not small ducks at all. The big white birds are still swans, at least they are not pelicans; I’m still just happy to watch them. A tiny black dot at the head of a water comet pacing slowly along in the smooth water near the shore is almost certainly a grebe.

As the sun moved lower in the sky, the angled light defined the smooth bottomland sands and I could make out small trackways tracing out from the valley edges: coyote, deer, mastodon?

(Later in the night, in the bright darkness of the full moon, some of these questions were answered. Flights of many tens of ducks circled up the valley along the steep edges, lead and followed by frenzied calling. Since I was sleeping, at least at this point lying down, right on the valley rim the birds flew close by. At one point I tried to see them with the binoculars and was shocked to focus, quite by accident, on no more than ten birds filling the field of view – shallow rapid wing-beats of quick moving ducks flashed by in an instant and were gone. I could easily imagine hungry coyotes harassing the ducks in the shallows, sending them in the duck version of angry noisy circles of flight.)

I knew, as I fell asleep, that soon I would need to incorporate this experience and others like it into the other images of the trip, the giant gas-drilling rigs and gas collection facilities that spread like black Mad Max time cities along the low upland ridges, the land plowed to raw dirt from horizon to horizon, the little towns with empty buildings at their centers, the helpful and friendly people all along the way… It was like with the birds and coyotes; all too far away to see clearly and too dark, even in the light of the full moon, to make out the details: all clues to the present and the future; a world with which we must all come, individually and collectively, to grips.

Gratuitous motorcycle traveling photo

We Are Entering the Zone

2011-10-06T06:32:00.003-06:00

As I enter the zone – of absolute certainty that only a tiny few years remain for the existence of my conscious awareness – I see how my reflections on my own mortality, across the years, relate to the way in which societies understand their ‘mortality.’ In essence, societies do not and cannot comprehend their own end; they are always in the condition of the young, because they are continually replenished by new young. But societies become decrepit in their institutions and forms when they either lose contact with the realities that inform them or are unable to respond with adaptive forces: the young drive on; the society’s systems strain and fail.

The fantasy of eternal life has almost always been built around the rejuvenation of the body – it is usually the body that fails, leaving the mind to flounder helplessly without the support needed for its exercises. Individually we most often scale back our expectations, but with regret.

In my own experience, I have refused to accept the aging of the body, which then must keep up with the desires and demands of a youthful mind, and am in that way like a society; the institutions, the public ideas, the social values have all gone stale and sclerotic and yet are still driven onward by each new youthful infusion who can know no better. But, the most basic condition of the body or society is not improved by the youthful demand or wish; it may only appear so for a time: me on my motorcycle riding across the country and my nation spending its energies on wars of choice and the destruction of its own people. It seems that neither one of us will stop until the end.

The present boiling over of frustration, anxiety and fear for the future is the bubbling up of the youthful mind without regard to age of the body. Of course, it has no direction; and, of course, the powers-that-be desperately want ‘the movement’ to proclaim its demands, its policies, so it can head them of at the pass, so it can put its professional sophists to work distilling and diluting the messages in its Big Lie Brewery.

But the youthful minds have reached the end of their capacity to accept the twisted reasoning and actual twisting of their lives to fit into the failing world – so clearly failing as families begin to move from foreclosed homes into the public campgrounds, as middle aged, middle class and middle-valued men and women hold signs on street corners proclaiming, not a demand, but an entreaty for work.

I’ve been traveling again; watching and listening. I heard and watched my camp neighbor get up and leave the free camping area at 6 am to drive the 2 hours to work. The well-dressed gentleman holding the sign on a corner near an exclusive restaurant, it begged simply, “Work.”

The bubbling up and boiling over of America’s youthful mind is not yet frightening to the economic elite; they have us all by the _____(add our own diminishing sexual reference) don’t you know! Once they fully realize that the incipient demand is that they cease and desist, that they join the rest of humanity, then you will see a reaction. You will see the real reaction, not the foolish, lying condescension that passes for honest awareness in the media.

But this body-politic will not be rejuvenated by a youthful mind, though it is pleasant for a time to try. This is a struggle that will come to blows, and there must be a real death of the old body and the birth of a new one with all the primal reality that such changes entail.

How Much is Too Much?

2011-10-02T11:33:00.001-06:00

How much wealth is too little, too much and just right? Lets us dispense immediately with the argument that there is no amount that is too much, that societies, and their governments, have no business setting lower and upper limits.

The entire purpose of societal mores and rules, enforceable through governing institutions, is the stability and health of the society. Individual members of a society devote much of their effort to recognizing and following social rules…and they also devote a significant portion of their effort in discovering how to express personal desires by circumventing and defying of those rules. The stability of a society requires the balancing of these agreeable and disagreeable tendencies by the tricky process of setting limits.

The health of a society is somewhat more difficult to consider, but is obviously as important as stability. Stability can be attained by stasis, but health only by homeostasis. A healthy society is one in which all of its parts are in functional relation, no part can be said to be dominating or irrelevant. Think of a living body: Where would be the brain without the liver? Could the intestinal wall survive without the sweat glands? To follow on with this analogy: fat is the storage of energy against future need and in that way resembles wealth. It might seem, in the most simple analysis, that one could, therefore, not have too much of it. But clearly that is wrong since the whole functioning of the body is damaged by excessive concentrations of fat – the fully functioning homeostatic relationship is distorted and many different destructive and damaging conditions take control of the body; just as in a society, concentrations of wealth will disorient and distort social functioning to the detriment of the society’s health.

At the minimum, a stable and healthy society must be broadly understandable to its members, from the street sweeper to the college professor, from the employee of a nail salon to a bank president. Though the community sets expectations, the interests of the members of the community must have clear and established routes of influence. The society should be seen as a need-meeting system from which the individual can explore the vicissitudes of life, and even more importantly, it should actually be that! A society that parasitizes some of its members for the benefit of other members is not in homeostasis and is not healthy [1]. Concentration of wealth is the primary source of such imbalance.

So, there can be too much wealth, not only held by individuals and collective entities, but by the society as a whole; by this thinking, a pure collective society could have too much wealth, though not as readily as a capitalistic one. The other end of the scale is obvious: there clearly can be too little wealth held by individuals, collective entities and societies as a whole; first defined by biological want and then by the social imbalances of exploitation and deprivation of the needed wealth to function fully within the social order [2].

It follows that if there can be too much of a thing and if there also can be too little of it, then there must be an amount or a range of amounts that are functionally “just right.” This is the basic principle of homeostasis; the ill effects of too much trigger a mechanism for slowing down, while the (different) ill effects of too little trigger a mechanism to speed up. Human societies are biological entities and must also follow these rules or fall to dis-ease.

Beginning with the easy and proceeding to the disputable: Too little has a clear floor of biological insufficiency; too little food, water, protection from the elements, safety and so forth. Humans, like any animal, fight back when forced into these conditions as they attempt to establish the basic minimums for survival. They can be successful when they fight back as coherent communities.

When is an individual responsible for basic biological essentials or at what point is the society to been seen as the primary force in the supplying and withholding of these essentials? If the individual is completely responsible, then societies (collections of humans) are always at the near edge of anarchy and exist only as a momentary comfort. If, on the other hand, human communities are recognized as the human unit and it is the community that is seen as the primary adaptive agent supplying both resource and order, then the society that doesn’t function to make it possible to acquire a minimal level of wealth to fully function in that society, is dysfunctional.

Land based communal societies all around the world clearly define this minimum and the varieties of social structures that support and enliven them. They share a general form: materially simple, several levels of property rights and responsibilities with communal property as primary, interpersonal relations and obligations as the binding social glue. The poor of every society always end up replicating this design in the ways available to them; it is not necessary to have a plan, humans are the plan. These ways of organizing and living can be beautiful as well as brutal; the world abounds with example.

At the opposite extreme, as wealth begins to accumulate in a community, the disposition of it becomes the issue. For this problem there are no innate guides; great accumulations of material surplus have never been a condition of human evolution and are only recently a concern. And, just as with the excess of fat in a body, the excess of wealth in a community presents it with problems for which it has no ready solution.

Human societies are, like bodies, ‘flow through’ systems; when the flow of energy and material stops the system dies. “Wealth”, when it is distributed in the ecosystem where every detail is exploited and magnified in an adaptive design billions of years in the making, can be tapped on an as needed basis – as long as in kind compensations are faithfully made. But when material accumulations are pulled from the ecosystem, walled off from it and made part of a closed system that refuses to compensate the source, then a sclerosis begins that spreads into both the biophysical systems and the wealth based human societies.

The full range of consequences that follow from either accumulating wealth primarily as communal property or as discrete packets of accumulation in the control of individuals or collective entities is not my subject here, but must be touched on. When the accumulation of material surplus comes into the control of individuals and collective entities rather than assignable to the community as a whole, the situation is easy to understand: those who have control of accumulated material surplus enjoy the consequences and will fight to maintain their position. Those who have too little for security and comfort will naturally go to where the surplus is and try to take from it sufficient to ease their condition.

Those with surplus will trade some of it away as a means to gain the help of a few of the less wealthy and these people will become dependent on the wealthy for their needs as they become the protectors of the rich. But in giving some wealth away it becomes clear that they will need more to have more and to protect the more that they have.

Control of the surplus begins to be seen by both those who have it and those who do not as an attachment of the surplus to its controllers; it becomes associated with them in the ways of both classical conditioning and instrumental learning; such an arrangement begins to seem natural when, in fact, it is completely contrived.

Undefined assignment of resource and wealth to community leads to the problems that Garrett Hardin discusses in his much misinterpreted 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons.” The key, of course, is the designation, ‘undefined.’ The solution is really not so difficult: define the resource. Mitigating the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ effect can be achieved by a community regulation or by assignment to an individual overseer – what is different is where power is vested and the form of the consequences.

But let us not forget where from comes the concern in the first place: the accumulation of surplus in the community. All communities, human, other species and ecosystems exist in a world of surplus, it is being stored and renewed in the biophysical and ecological cycles. Most organisms only store tiny increments of extracted surplus as fat in their bodies, caches of food and labor products like beaver’s dams; and this is vital, they have all evolved instinctual (genetic) inhibiting regulator structures that organize, in exquisite detail, the ecosystems in which they live.

This is where and why it is necessary to discover the levels of wealth that lead to social dysfunction and then work out the design of social ‘homeostatic’ mechanisms that limit the total amounts of wealth that can be extracted from the environment and stored outside of environmental systems. It is vital we (a critical mass of opinion setters) understand that humans have evolved an adaptive tool of great power, a tool that has slipped the bonds of the controlling agency of the Living System of Order; a tool that must, using its own agency, come into control of itself.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the present order is unraveling from both its internal design and its consequences on the environment and especially the ‘free services’ supplied by the environment. I believe that it is more important to develop a conceptual structure that can respond to and from a variety of social and structural conditions than to try and develop a detailed plan for getting from our exact present state to some proposed ‘new’ one. Our present state has become a kaleidoscope of forms, each an almost random result of the last set of events driven only by the wealth powers and no other vision.

It is to the end of setting a foundation for a vision of the future that I make these arguments. The first necessity for limiting total societal wealth is the storing of primary extracted wealth as communal property. Private wealth as a base model will always create an exponential accumulation of excess with all the dysfunctional manifestations of our present condition.

Economic systems need to be localized so that total accumulations are within the capacity of the communities to comprehend and control. Levels of property rights must form so that individuals and family-like units have control of tools and other basic materials empowering self-reliance and responsibility [3]. “Business” must return to being a community-controlled function. No individual should control more wealth than can be understood by the community as appropriate for community benefit. The ethic must become that wealth is to be left in the ecosystem, only withdrawn as needed and with a clear expectation that the ecosystem will be compensated in meaningful ways for the taking.

These proposals contain great dangers, but certainly no more than the economic and environmental collapse, exacerbated by the possibility of nuclear Armageddon resulting from political collapse of nuclear nations, that we currently face. I can think of many arguments against such proposals ranging from them being impossible (certainly true currently) to their creation of small warring city-state like entities clashing over resources and fundamentalist principles. And there will be no testing of them or others like, and unlike, them until the present concentrations of wealth and power have exhausted themselves, but those living then will need some models from which to go on.

[1] In ecosystems ‘mutualism’ is the model. The typical analogies from animal behavior for aggressive wealth accumulation, the lion and wolf, are really functional elements in the maintenance of ecosystem health; they have powerful instinctual inhibitions against attempting to collect excess using their great capacities as predators.

[2] An evocative presentation of this distinction can be seen in the Italian film, The Bicycle Thief.

[3] One of the great ironies of capitalism – especially as manifest in the present rhetoric – is that the ‘workers’ are supposed to be mature, responsible citizens trading their labor to the owners, but without any control over any of the conditions of their work, their lives while working or the terms under which they make the trade.

The Crime of Wealth

2011-09-27T15:08:00.000-06:00

Just as we have concentrations of wealth, which imply concentrations of poverty, we have concentrations of security, which imply concentrations of insecurity. Of course, these are not amounts of fixed-quantity objects, but there is a strong general tendency to put effort in one place and relax in another; leading to the implication that ‘if more here, then less there.’ “More” everywhere has proven to be a myth in service of having only localized concentrations of “more.”

The idea that both wealth and security have been increasing in the world is largely an illusion of truncated measurement; it comes from measuring only how high the stick (or building) goes and not bothering so much with how deep it goes on the other end (the real and full costs). Measuring the developed world, calling that world standard and ignoring the rest as aberration, incompetent, unnatural and even sub-human is the great biological crime of the post-Medieval Period; it is perhaps the greatest crime ever committed on the earth [1].

Apparently humans have been exterminating competing species, as well as competing cultural traditions of our own species, for a long time – at one time there were at least 3 and perhaps 5 species of the genus Homo on the earth at the same time. Any one of those species probably had significant adaptive advantages in its environment and would have done very well without the marginal pressures of another aggressive form of the genus reducing, even ever so slightly, their range and resource base. But this was evolution in action – a particularly rapid evolution driven, as it was, by the incipient Consciousness System of Order (CSO) energizing adaptations to greater and greater environmental detail: biological evolution none-the-less.

The transition from a Homo sp. world to a Homo sapiens world was, and is, as ‘tectonic’ an event as the break up of Pangaea, the K-T event or even the recovery of liquid water surface temperatures following the snowball earth of 700 million years ago. Nothing has ever changed the surface of the planet so much in so short a time. These changes have been driven primarily by the way that wealth accumulation has interacted with the present iteration of human nature and process [2].

I make the assertion that there is no more degraded or damaged (and damaging) condition of the human species than an individual or a collective entity that has accumulated from the environment and the labors of their fellows more material wealth than is required to allow them to be reasonably safe from the most basic challenges of life. Regardless of the rhetoric used by those who take solace in wealth, such accumulations always come at the expense of others: other humans, the living world or biophysical integrity. I make this assertion with some considerable trepidation since, in such stark form, it is not well supported by the accumulated wisdom of human thought.

There is a vast literature, complex and interwoven systems of belief and behavior and a physical, economic, political infrastructure – a Gordian Knot of cultural tradition – supporting and energizing “wealth creation” and accumulation. I prefer to visual it all as a giant hair and bone pellet strangling us as we both try to retain it and expel it from the body-humanity [3].

But this strangely comforting image does nothing – beyond tying together the loose ends of the cat-o’-nine-tails flogging clear thinking – to actually ease the torment of human lives delivered by the distortions of wealth values. They are inescapable; they are insidious.

Wealth accumulation has been questioned and argued over from its earliest iterations: Buddhism recognizes, quite simply, that in the normal course of life some people will accumulate material goods and some will not; it speaks not to the accumulation, but to human spirit and potential and the positive and negative role both wealth and poverty have on that potential.

Present day interpretations of these ideas, steeped as they are in a wealth besotted society, often focus on statements like: “Clearly, the Buddha saw prosperity and financial security as a good and appropriate activity for laypeople;…” (Lewis Richmond, Buddhist teacher) What fails to receive sufficient attention and understanding in much of our present interpretation is that wisdom must guide (regulate) abundance rather than the remarkably self-serving belief that abundance will both create and guide wisdom.

Taoism (which strongly influenced Indian Buddhism as it traveled north on its way to Japan all those many years ago) produced this argument from the Tao Te Ching (The book of the Way and Virtue):

Ch 46 (translation of a very early version by Robert Henrick [4])

[…]

Of crimes – none is greater than having things that one desires;

Of disasters – none is greater than not knowing when one has enough.

Of defects – none brings more sorrow than the desire to attain.

Therefore, the contentment one has when he knows that he has enough is abiding contentment indeed.

It should be noted especially for the narrowly capitalist reader that the writing of the Tao Te Ching began about 2500 years ago as both an observation of the psychology and ethics of Chinese society and an attempt to construct the Way (Tao) for how human beings should most effectively behave, act with virtue (Te), in the world. The writer(s) was (were) not driven by envy!

The early Greek view, from the same period of time (and, I think, from very similar motive forces), is more analytical while the Chinese are more prescriptive, though they both deal with the same issues. Wealth is treated as a behavior requiring understanding and limitation. For the Greeks wealth is based on desire; it is the desire that is suspect rather than wealth. The way that the polity organizes and uses wealth is a major issue for Plato and defines political states as plutocracies, tyrannies and democracies.

H. P. P. Lötter makes the case for Plato arguing in The Republic (1) that justice, in the sense of the morality of individuals and societies, is far more important than the acquisition of wealth. (2) that moderate wealth is important for its function to enable humans to live a moral life. (3) that poverty and excessive wealth have negative consequences for both individuals and societies, and (4) that desiring and possessing excessive wealth disrupts and destroys moral integrity and internal harmony in individuals and societies. [5]

The ideas around wealth were remarkably similar in that seminal period when human beings were forming the first Neolithic/bronze age societies out of the Neolithic agricultural communities of the last several thousand years. These people, east and west, were confronting many of the same forces of population growth, technological change, the formation of governing institutions (in both domestic and military forms) and the possibility and actualization of the accumulation of material goods. These forces and changes were more starkly contrasted with long established human community and social tradition than ever before or since.

The basic elements of the issues have been in human thought, therefore, for millennia, but wealth has been changing in its relation to both humans, their institutions and the ecosystems from which it ultimately derives. For most of post-agricultural civilization the “average” human economic unit (family, extended family, clan) and the wealthy economic units (religious order, political entity) had functional wealth differences of the order of perhaps 10 or 20 to 1. But also during these times most places in the world had an underclass or a slave class to do the really dirty and dangerous work; those people have always tended to live in poverty.

The lives of the wealthy were distinguished by such luxuries, plainly obvious to everyone, as being carried or riding rather than walking, servants, more abundant food, larger more secure dwellings, more desirable clothing and a variety of ultimately trivial symbols of status. The lives of the wealthy, however, were part of the direct and daily experience of the ordinary, and vice versa. The differences, while clear, were not so stark as to be beyond understanding.

Today we have a different set of circumstances. The dangers of wealth recognized by the ancients have come to pass in their own abundance. And along with the increasing amounts of difference have come whole industries to both define and hide the differences. The seemingly benign and even useful ideas associated with property, wealth, economic growth and work have become the tortured servants of the concentrations of power and material: narrow property ideas beget wealth; wealth desire begets growth; growth requirements begets distortions of the idea of work. And together these movements conflict with ecological and human reality.

A universal desire ‘to be rich’ drives this paradigm and serves especially well those who break out of the average levels of acquisition and actually become rich. Becoming rich and maintaining wealth requires that many people also want to be rich; because of that desire, which has a small positive probability of coming true, they behave in ways that support the actual rich. Large wealth requires the constant movement of tiny increments of wealth, from which those strategically placed can extract small amounts from each transaction. A society in which the great mass of people have no desire for personal surplus abundance and who are self-sufficient and conservative in their uses of material, energy and other people produces lowered opportunity of amassing great wealth. A society in which the great mass of people feel the desire to be rich and who, therefore, can be led to behaviors that mimic the truly rich are a ripe source of those transactions that produce great wealth for the few.

Such is the reason for the incredible deluge of propaganda in support of riches as the goal of life. Fifth grade boys no longer want to be firemen; they want to be rich. We all constantly see and hear in our daily lives the media devised images of wealth’s benefits and persuasions. Arguments and real data questioning wealth accumulations are credited to ignorance, insanity or criminal political beliefs.

But when we look at the arguments supporting “getting rich” we find them of basically two types, and questionable: 1) I want wealth so that I can do and have whatever I wish (it is a relaxation of responsibility) and 2) wealth is a social good since it functions as a motive for progress, discovery and increases in material wellbeing. A third argument, based out of the second, is often heard, that wealth is a (the) solution to poverty. But this one is disingenuous since, in fact, wealth accumulation, more often than not, is about extracting surplus in material and labor from the impoverished under the claim that they are being ‘given’ employment. Such employment is actually forced by disrupting historical land-based and sustaining cultural economic systems. Finally, the “God says it’s right to seek wealth” and “becoming wealthy is a measure of God’s favor” are variations on the ‘I want it’ argument by asking permission for what is desired to do from an imaginary friend.

The first argument is easy. It is selfishness, a common human condition that we are supposed to outgrow as we assume adult responsibilities in the community; though this is less so in the infantilizing conditions of modern life. The human capacity for selfishness-driven sociopathology, especially when formed in intelligent “adults”, is very nearly beyond normal comprehension; it grows, explores and expands as we speak. But it is ultimate mundane, like plants in the tropics, it simply responds to positive conditions of nurturance. The second is the big lie, the sophisticated lie.

The calculus is all wrong for wealth building as an indisputable social good: damage the lives of many thousands of people to accumulate a fortune so that the lives of a smaller number can be “improved” to some varying extent; the entropy relation always has to come into play. And just what do we mean by ‘improved’ or progress, discovery and wellbeing? I would agree that the drive to wealth is an important engine for the speed of our “progress,” but would also contend that much that we call progress has been so labeled by wealth-drive’s passion for controlling the message as well as the more difficult task of creating new things.

The simple fact is that the discovery and creation of material benefits have not been made from the desire for wealth; only the exploitation of those discoveries is driven by the wealth motive. In other words, the speed with which we humans change the world around us by our inventions would be reduced by social expectations that wealth be limited and that ecological and community values be held as superior to personal wealth accumulation, but the arts and science would continue, technologies discovered and changes made for the better and the worse, and all at a slower pace.

In total, the kinds of and the way that wealth is held in the control of private individuals and entities may drive our rates of change faster and faster, but also in less and less beneficial and responsible directions. The vast amount of stuff that we make, the great digging and leveling, burning and cutting, polluting and poisoning is the product of wealth-drive, not real human need. The collective human intelligence wouldn’t stand for the world having its habitability reduced for the benefit of a few, who driven by greed and especially the competitive greed of the rich, trying to be richer,… if that collective human intelligence still had or could find its voice.

[1] Crimes come with the CSO. The imaginings of future outcomes, the planning and execution of those outcomes in grievous violation of the “other” principle, better known as the Golden Rule, are the bases of all crimes. When the outcomes are the wholesale destruction of cultures, ethnicities and genetic traditions (human and non-human), the crimes are substantial.

[2] It is patently absurd to argue that humans do not have a nature derived from their evolution, the complexity of that nature or the role played by the CSO in creating its almost endless constructions notwithstanding.

[3] Birds of prey ‘cough up’ pellets of indigestible materials that accumulate in their stomachs. My image is of some birds hunting and eating insatiably, trying to rid themselves of the more and more massive pellets and gluttonously trying to hold to them at the same time.

[4] Lao-Tzu Te-Tao ching, translated by Robert G. Henricks from the Ma-wang-tui Texts. Ballantine Books, New York, 1989

[5] H. P. P. Lötter, The significance of Poverty and Wealth in Plato’s Republic, South African Journal of Philosophy, 2003, 22(3)

The Welfare State, part 4

2011-09-19T14:24:00.001-06:00

part 1, part 2, part 3

The preceding three essays make the case for the welfare state (for the welfare of the member/participants of the state being the prime responsibility of a community collective) more in the manner of a blind man playing darts than the laser-like incisiveness of a syllogistic argument. Yet, the pattern of the argument is more honest in the sense that it models the complexity of this often contentious region of social concern. What has been left out is the full measure of the attitudes, arguments and strengths of those people, and their supporting institutions, who believe (and those who purport to believe) that the function of the community collective, the state, should have little or no interest in the personal welfare of its citizens.

The basic argument is that the state should be a substrate, like agar-agar, for the society to grow on. It should not interfere with what grows on it, but only supply the most essential conditions for that growth: a simple set of rules, protection from invasion, a means of adjudicating property related conflicts and an unbending enforcement of the simple rules and adjudicated consequences. Much as a bacteriologist might put several different bacterium in a Petri dish, letting them grow to see what will happen.

Such a system is supposed to offer True Freedom to the individual to fully express potential without the inhibiting influence of an overweening and coercive state welfare apparatus. Such a system recognizes the reality that the world is not fair, that personal talent and accident combine to make success or failure and that the attempt to interfere with this deep reality is a fool’s game, ultimately harmful to all the members of the society even as such a view may appear uncompassionate on its face.

If each person attempted to maximize the options presented to them in life, without regard to others and following the simple rules of a personally indifferent state, then the society would progress even as ‘the world’ sloughs off those who, through either accident or personal insufficiency, can’t keep up. These would be the rules; everyone would know them and failure within them would be an individual and not a social issue. In this way the resources of the agar-agar, the state, would flow to those who can best use them and not be wasted on those who… At this point the argument begins to breakdown for me since I’m not sure what the goal of life – growing successfully on the agar-agar – is supposed to be in this model, but I’ll get back to it.

I think it pretty clear that those who are, by particular forms of talent and fortuitous accident, benefited by their position on the agar-agar and are able to collect to their own uses large amounts of nutrient, these people will find the above argument more compelling than those who are for those same reasons – nature of talent and accident – marginalized or even in danger of being sloughed off. This alone should alert us to the potential difficulties with such a view, that the majority of the world’s people find it questionable at best.

But, of course, the majority can be wrong, evidence the history of scientific discovery. We need to clarify and, as well as possible, come to some common understanding of the purpose of being on the agar-agar in the first place. But, of course again, this is a very sticky wicket. Just as it is abundantly clear that there is only one reason for the earth in its orbit around the sun containing the property of life; one reason that among those things living at least one species is aware of its life; one reason that humans have attained their supremacy and immense powers of creation and destruction; it is exactly what that one reason is that is in the greatest contention.

The distinction is, however, not so much among the differing practices of the world’s religions – these are pretty uniform, regardless of underlying belief systems, in supporting the welfare of the members of their communities – but it is between differing visions of how to allocate abundance: if wealth is “naturally going to pile up”, then where should the piles be; in the commons or in the control of individuals? I have made my case for the answer in the previous 3 essays and will not repeat those arguments here. I will only answer that, I believe, we are on our agar-agar for reasons unlike why and how bacteria are on theirs: we are not on the earth to just grow as far and wide as we can before we use up the available resources and die; we have the Consciousness Order capacity to auto-adapt, unlike any other creature of which we are aware. We can manifest relationships with each other and the natural world more complex and directed than a bacterium. I contend that the welfare state is an essential part of such an adaptation.

Broadly there are two sets of initial concerns: 1) finding designs that might work with the practical realities of our numbers, technology, human nature and present relationship to the earth’s ecosystems, and 2) the present beliefs, habits, expectations and in-place human infrastructure that either can’t support or would actively work against changes that would allow the creation of an effective ecologically integrated welfare state (must be ecologically integrated and functionally adaptive in the environment as well as adaptive to economic realities or there is no point).

The first concern, finding designs that might work, has two conditions that must be met:

• The distribution of the human product must be done in a way that connects behavior with the meeting of needs.

• The human product must have guidance based on an ecologically sound ethics as to its form and consequences and not be completely open-ended, limited only by the technical capacity of the moment.

Our present conservative (reactionary) corporatists are right that people should not be given a “free ride,” but they then use the argument to further say that the people shouldn’t have a fair share of the human product at all; the reason is uncomplicated greed for having more of that product for themselves. But the attitude complicates the deeper issue of how to distribute the gains of human action in the environment.

Which goes straight to the second condition: what should be the levels and types of gains that we make from the environment? It has become completely clear to all but those same reactionary corporatists (and may actually be clear to many, thus the speed of their greed) that we must slow and even reverse many of the impacts that our efforts at gain have had and continue to have.

In this formulation it becomes completely clear that these two issues are intimately related: what we do with the one will have powerful influences on the other. They can work in synergy as we try to solve the real challenges to our survival and the continuity of the present biological assemblage of the earth; or the challenges from the forces opposing their understanding and influence on our behaviors can be allowed to disarticulate them and discredit the misrepresented pieces in order to maintain power and wealth.

Here are just some of the challenges to the second initial concern: the beliefs, habits and in-place systems that would function in opposition to making a state sized human collective in which all the members work together to support the community:

• No political system or economic system in use and currently available can support the welfare state that is required. All current systems are based on private property in ways that drive individual accumulation of the human material product. Belief systems and expectations are woven around accumulation in such a way that doing with minimum needs and focusing on the human non-material product is literally unthinkable.

• The organizational strength of the economic elite weakens the state’s willingness and capacity to protect all of its citizens, allowing the elite to increase both the amount and rate of their material acquisition.

• There is a great disconnect between what is needed to be known and understood and what is known and understood by the masses. This was not always the case. The masses have been the source for guidance of action through most of our history. It is only recently (last few thousand years) that fate and future have been left to ‘leaders.’ Leaders in the past helped summarize and organize the informed opinions of the masses as opposed to today when they more often lie to the masses and act to empower an elite. The conditions that move us to need leaders and to give to them authority of life and death have got to be reexamined.

• The critical mass of injustice in the world inures the people to all but that which falls on them and those close to them.

• The consequences of a fully functioning welfare state operating in an ecologically responsible manner would involve changes that almost everyone would initially be uncomfortable with, and that the wealthy would fight with all the considerable force at their disposal; with a significant number of the masses joining them. There would have to be an acceptance of the need to live within the boundaries of both ecological and community standards; and there would have to be knowledge-based ways of establishing those limits.

• The material and energy requirements for 7 billion people to live in minimum comfort and safety with adequate nutrition and logistical support for some level of equitable distribution of the human creative product, while leaving alone a sufficient amount of the earth’s productive capacity to maintain biodiversity and the integrated functional ecological relationships, is beyond the available energies, materials and processes, and the human willingness, currently available on the earth. This would make huge demands on a welfare state to not only distribute the human product with some equity, but to also reduce that product with equitable distribution of those consequences. Neither action has an available intellectual or behavioral model for us to go by in the present moment.

These challenges should make it clear that there is no “mechanical”, engineering or legalistic fix based on our present situation (laws, rules, expectations, habits and beliefs). We cannot begin with our current position and design a path to an effective and reasonable future; if we could, we would have several such plans laid out before us. We are “all in the same boat” with a mad captain and crew, frightened and cowering passengers who can’t run the machinery and whose only ‘hope’ is that the boat runs aground, offering the opportunity to start over with what remains, rather than sinking at sea. There is no point in preparing for the worst, preparing for the best is the only sane option; that means to create the ideas that allow for a future regardless of how impractical they may seem in the moment.

These ideas must be spoken again and again. They must be first tantalizing and then understood; They must spread, at first as curiosity, then as imaginable; they must be embellished and then grown until they seem possible, for then they are possible. And when they are possible the “same boat” that we are in is made anew.

Here are just a tantalizing few of the changes that could meet the needed conditions:

• Localization of economic action so that economic distance is reduced, so that the consequences of economic action can be seen and included in community understanding and adaptation.

• The development of the expectation that everyone will meet some significant proportion of their own personal needs (food, water, shelter, safety) by their own direct efforts; that these expected actions cannot be bought off, money would have no efficacy against this expectation.

• Property redefined into environmental commons (that which is not to be touched except as the human animal), public property (our community and social territory and the site for our technological and commercial activity), users property ( most present titled property, though limited to what a family like entity can actually use) and private property (that which we ‘put our hand to’).

• The reinvigoration of the expectation that no one would live in luxury while another starved, the forming of this value as a central economic tenet to replace the notion of unlimited desire as an acceptable human motive.

These will seem foolish to some, but only because they don’t believe them.

The Welfare State, part 3

2011-09-12T13:09:00.002-06:00

part 1, part 2

“It is the caring of one person for another that matters: this is the easiest thing when it comes easily and the hardest thing when it comes hard. We have been taken over in much, even most, of our ways by those for whom it does not come easily. They fill those human needs with making it hard for others; they fill those needs by taking up as much of the world as they can, hoping that somewhere in all that they gather to themselves they will find what is missing, even as they deny that there is anything missing at all.”

It works like this: I say the most stupid shit and you are required to include my smelly connivings in your presentation even if it is only to rebut them (there is a devilishly clever pun in there for those with a strong enough stomach for it). Thereby, my terrible self-serving brain drool begins to take on some standing in the world of ideas. If elements of my offerings are found to be useful, or even just fail to flush, they can become important in the support of some peoples’ immediate benefit – and so it is that bad ideas become institutionalized as standard wisdom. Getting rid of them is like trying to stamp out worms.

Among the bad ideas with which we are currently infested: individualism, private property, wealth as a positive value, greed as an economic organizing principle, God-spirits as superior to human spirits, human exceptionalism in the living world, natural and necessary economic growth and ‘progress’, that communism and socialism are inherently evil and anti-human… With these ideas as the forming basis of many of our actions, we can hardly go anywhere that isn’t wrong; to get to right we have to overcome the force of societal gravity. It is amazing that we do as well as we do.

The natural outcome of these ideas working in synergy is unrestricted greed, war, enslavement of the masses and environmental destruction, in other words, modern life when we look worldwide [1]. The moments of weak and regional reprieve from the running of the Four Horsemen, times like several years following WWII in the US, Europe and Japan, come because the horrors are unmasked for a time – the bad ideas were seen for the floaters that they are, but only for a time and then it’s back to the Wisdom of the Fools.

In a properly functioning welfare state there would be some proportional relationship, and, vitally, a mechanism for the assignment of that proportionality, between the actions of the members of that society and its material community product. Small “natural” communities do this as a major function of their design: “everyone” knows who works for the community and who works for themselves and the community as a whole passes judgment on each distribution of resources. This can happen because natural human communities are small enough for everyone to know everyone else, everyone knows what excess looks and feels like and everyone knows what deprivation looks and feels like. The tasks of community life are understood for their requirements of skill, perseverance and difficulty. It could even be said that the community exists to give basis for the human experience and to distribute the material and spiritual resources that make that experience possible.

We have tried to do this proportionalizing with wages and prices in capitalistic economies, which have been rather well tested in various forms, and with various welfare schemes in socialist economies, not so well tested since they have been under constant attack by capitalist economies that see straightforward social functioning as a danger to the capitalist design.

We should have learned by now, and I think we have which is why it is so unrelentingly supported by the economic elite, that capitalism, unless strongly regulated by a socialist polity, will always resolve the distribution of resources into monopolies of abundance with the masses having nothing beyond what they can gain with the most incessant effort.

The rise of the middle class in America from the 1940s to the 1970s was not the consequence of capitalism’s success, but rather a regulated capitalism running as the firebox and steam generator in the semi-socialist engine of the New Deal and the realized power of the ‘common man’ coming out of WWII. But this was anathema to those humans who would be Gods in their own minds and Kings among their fellows. The ascendancy, since the 1980s, of the capitalist lie that everyone can be a God and a King is producing the expected result: the middle and poorer classes have been stolen from and the material wealth of the community is collected into fewer and fewer hands.

A certain type of human aberration can, by violating the natural behavioral and emotional design of the human species, advantage themselves greatly for a time in a society that flirts with unfettered capitalism. This ultimately destructive economic and “social” construction can, however, only either self-immolate or be replaced with a properly functioning welfare state.

A democratic socialist welfare state regulates everyone just as the chemical and physical reactions in a living body are all thoroughly regulated; just as every society regulates its members. But the living body is not regulated by a totalitarian control center – it is regulated by the process of life; it is regulated on a model of collective sufficiency. A cell that “wants to be free” of the restrictive controls of its parent organ and the living genetics kills the whole body by its “freedom.”

This is the freedom that is cheered at Tea Party rallies, this is the freedom that is demanded by the corporate collective, this is the freedom that is cynically chirped by political marionettes. There is no such freedom, there has never been such freedom and there cannot be such freedom – the freedom to do anything that one wishes with one’s ‘own’ body and “property.”

The instant such a regime of this libertarian freedom is formed, the world is turned into those who serve it and those who are indulged by it – for the moment. The poor, the untouchables, the immigrants, the black, the brown, the yellow, the red, the white, women, children, the sick, the displaced, the Muslims, the Christians, the Hindus, the Jews, the Irish, the Poles, the Gypsies, those who stray from sexual purity, all, and many more at one time or another, have been selected to act in service to the vision of someone else’s “freedom.” If I have complete freedom of my own person, then someone must be designated to move out of my way.

What then can be, must be, the nuts and bolts of a proper welfare state in today’s reality? That is the question these words have been tracking down like a hunter stalking elusive game. The beginning of that answer has to be that significant changes must be made. The first and most important is the infusion of the idea that the only remaining repository of human sanity is in the masses. The wealthy are hopelessly mad; they would destroy life on this planet to have a Bugatti Veyron, a bottle of Dom. Romane Conti 1997 and a supply of Yubari melons.

The second is that, as dangerous and unreliable as it is, science is the only source of knowledge that can be counted on for the time being. Studies show that the differences among human “races”, ethnic and other groups are all built from prejudice not reality. The poor and other common folk are just as genetically gifted as the rich; almost certainly more so, since they are vastly more numerous and therefore the ‘tails’ of the normal distributions that contain them extend out much further [2]. There are thousands of well-established research findings that, if put into practice, would remake many of the difficulties that we face living, as we do now, in the thrall of a brutal and corrosive “tribal” economics.

If we can find, at least, some basis in sanity and some basis in knowledge, then we can go on to number three: Power needs to be vested in community. Distributed power is essential, concentrated power will always go mad and bring suffering to the many. Lord Acton was not the first to say it, but he said it well and true [3]. Only in fully formed communities can the psychopathic, the greedy, the antisocial and the mad, in general, function beneficially; in large groups they gather together and form governments, corporations and the clergy, and we can see the result of that!

These are devilishly difficult, even seemingly impossible, steps to be taken, but they are both essential and possible since they can be made just like real steps, incrementally, one at a time. Each person who understands, each conversation that spreads the idea is a step. If the Great Many can believe in their own value and power, if they have a foundation of knowledge that actually comports with reality and if some semblance of community begins to form (these are all the powers associated with unions and workers’ collectives) then the many can begin to demand and get something approaching their fair share of the community product.

There is, of course, no perfect solution, if by perfection is meant that no one suffers, there is no injustice, virtue is rewarded and honest fully compensating relationships are formed with humans and nature. But we can do much better as the power to initiate and limit action is more and more vested in the many and removed from the few. It is only in the sanity of the masses and the knowledge revealed by the scientific method that veridical action is possible. Properly compensating everyone and everything that contributes to the production of society’s wealth must be among the first goals for the application of these principles. The next and last essay in this series will look at some problem issues not yet properly considered.

[1] Most (all?) reading this live in a bubble of exceptional abundance, but a dribble compared to the multi-millionaires and billionaires of global wealth, though still a highly distorted position in the world of $2.00 a day subsistence and utter powerlessness in the face of totalitarian political and economic conditions – the way of life for fully half of the world’s people. More people live in greater distress today than in the history of the world, and the number will be greater next year and the next; this is also a measure of our progress.

[2] In a normal statistical distribution of chance probability the unusual is, of course, rare. If a particular talent tends to occur in the population at about a thousand to one, then you would expect that among a thousand people there would be one person with that talent; among a million people there would be a thousand, but among that thousand a few would have that talent in some incredibly supreme form. In a billion people a million would have that talent, a thousand or so would have it an incredibly supreme form and among that thousand a tiny few would have it in ways incomprehensible to all but themselves (since for every “wealthy” person there are thousands of poor and ordinary people, the greatest talent pool on earth is among the ordinary). Wealth tends to select for the talents of mental compartmentalization and cruelty, not for the talents of compassion, intelligence and generosity of spirit; these remain among the poor and ordinary souls.

[3] The more complete text of Lord Acton’s famous observation: “I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did not wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” Acton said many things of equal clarity. This is both heartening and dismaying: the former that the truth can be seen and the latter because it has had so little consequence.

The Welfare State, part 2

2011-09-08T15:54:00.000-06:00

“A rich man can always find someone to tell him what he wants to hear; a poor man will always find someone to tell him what he doesn’t!”

The first part of this essay ends with these words: “Once it is fully realized that the wealthy, even those with social responsibility, have acquired their abundance by fraudulently taking from the efforts of a great many and, without proper compensation, from an environment which ‘belongs’ to all life, then the question is not whether to have a welfare state, but how to organize a state in which the contributions of all the citizens are appreciated and compensated.”

To further clarify our present condition, it is important to realize that the dominant belief systems do not realize the fraudulence of wealth accumulation, but remain deeply impressed with the sophistries developed over the years to explain what are – when viewed from sufficient distance and objectivity – unjustifiable inequities. We will never get it right until we think about it correctly. As long as the sophistries of the rich form the basis of our thinking, the conclusions are foretold. Since the first priests and kings began to create the explanations for their special privilege, ways of thinking have been honed that diminish the many in favor of the few.

The essence of our present situation is that a small group of people have taken advantage of essentially random opportunity to collect to themselves an inordinate amount of the community product – and then used that undeserved largesse to preserve and increase both their ability for gain and their justifications for that gain. The greatest number in the community, in such a situation, have their powers diminished as greater and greater amounts of the community product is collected by the few.

That a disproportionate amount of the gain goes to a few is related only to a combination of chance and a willingness to exploit the opportunity; it has no other natural explanation regardless of the post hoc justifications. When laid out plainly such justifications ring hollow: God given right, more talent than others, really a hard worker, “our” sort are just better, more clever, sly and stealthy. And then the always appreciated, “I’ll take what I want or kick your ass.” Any critical analysis always comes back to random opportunity, cleverness, ass-kicking and a willingness to act in self-interest over community interest, all allowed and supported by community infrastructure, social organization and the general environment.

Humans have the capacity to recognize opportunity, but not generally, especially as individuals, to recognize the need to compensate all the contributors, including the environmental resource base. This results from the ability to see positive force, but not so easily realize the power of the loss of the services of the community or the environment, which are somehow seen as eternal. The consequence is that human societies have been going through faster and faster cycles of growth and decline. The sociopathic segment of a society gathers community wealth until the community (and/or the environment) refuses to continue supplying uncompensated services; at which time the society goes into decline with all the destruction that has become familiar to those with a knowledge of history. A properly designed welfare state is, therefore, not a luxury, but a necessity if we are to slow the cycles of social disintegration which now endanger our relationship with the ultimate biophysical support of life itself.

Our present situation is further exacerbated by a new addition to the “game” being played by corporatists and their marionettes, that, for a variety of reasons, the little wealth given back to the masses is desired by the elites who are running out of places to gather wealth that is not well protected (also the ascendancy of that part of the economic elite that directly preys on the masses using the tax system and the structuring of the political system as a wealth concentrating device). To this end the ‘self-reliant argument’ is accentuated: the pittance returned from the original theft is called a handout, the willingness to accept it is called moral turpitude and the anger and fear created by the threat of ending the “handouts” are being criminalized.

Self-reliance is made to mean that one should not ask to be compensated for what has already been stolen or what continues to be stolen by the economic elites. It is a simple paradigm: I come to your house, take things you need to make a living and then yell at you for not being competent to take care of yourself. I then give you back some little percentage of what has been taken from you, just enough for you keep going, and claim that your acceptance of the pittance is proof of your degradation. It gets lost in the machinations of these processes that the originating engine is the theft of work in the first place. It is this theft and the concentrating of wealth into a few hands that creates both the sense of and the reality of power to manipulate the economic system for even greater gains.

These facts leave us in considerable difficulty. It is necessary to begin any attempted changes from presently existing designs and beliefs; there is simply no way to engage a number of people in structures that are entirely new. Yet the present designs are almost all terrible distortions of the realities that have to be realized and built from.

The present design of the distribution of the community product is almost completely distorting of the incentive structures that would satisfactorily organize community life. The antisocial rich gather an inordinate share without doing direct work in the production. The actual producers have been led to feel that their contribution is insignificant – this as a way to justify the theft of their labor. Those in the community who have been driven into extreme poverty are told that they are worthless, a drain on the rest of the community and are “given” what they themselves see as a grudging ‘handout’ that has no sense of compensation for their actual and existential contributions to the community product. This is about as royally screwed up as any situation could be.

“The obstinate two-sided problem we face is this: how can we mitigate the penalties of misfortune and failure without undermining the incentives to effort and success?” This is Henry Hazlitt’s (a founding board member of the Mises Institute) formulation of the issue from 1969. The statement lays out the problem in the underlying bias of that and this time. The chapter [1]from which it comes points out, not only the faults with the Negative Income Tax solution to welfare (which will be looked at in a moment), but, without intending it, the faults that are created by the bias itself.

Reframing the issue gives it quite a different complexion: How do we institute in common thought the clarity that the community product is contributed to by the whole community, that the distribution of the benefits of that product must be spread to everyone? Misfortune and failure, as are effort and success, a misunderstanding of how the community product originates.

Hazlitt is certainly correct that it is the distortions of incentive that create these problems, but the incentive to get something for nothing attributed to those in poverty is not the real concern, it is the incentive to get and keep to one’s self, and private uses, the community product that drives the dilemma.

This clarification, however, doesn’t solve the problem; we are still left with all the issues that plague us. We have disconnected the natural relationship between the support that the many give to the production of community products and the wealth created by those products. Wages and prices are the bones of the economic creature, but offer none of the flesh and nuance of the fully functioning economic animal. Humans function as complex motivational systems, not as single function economic variables driven by greed (only economists and psychopaths seem to fulfill the conditions required of economic theory).

When the natural compensation due to people for their contribution to community production is withheld, siphoned off by an elite as their own wealth, and some small part given back as either the beneficence of the rich or as some grudging pittance to rectify the ‘incompetence’ of the poor, then the system is broken and cannot be expected to have ameliorative outcomes.

Because of these distortions, the critiques of the welfare state are often true, at least in the narrow perspective, though sweeping indictments of the poor are obviously false. And the attempts at solutions consistently create disincentives for life success in one way or another. The Hazlitt chapter cited above goes into detail pointing out the structural and incentive failures of the Milton Friedman version of the Negative Income Tax “free market” welfare proposal, the essence of which is a base income paid to everyone from taxes at about ½ of survival levels. As the recipients of the payment do work to add to their income, the welfare payment is reduced in a progressive fashion that allows for an increasing income up to somewhat above poverty at which point the payments end; there is, in this plan, no minimum wage, unemployment or healthcare, and eventually all social services would be reduced to the bare minimum possible or ended. It is the ultimate anti-welfare plan presented as a welfare proposal.

Current welfare systems all suffer from some form of potential for fraud, bureaucratic complexity and intrusiveness and disincentive for what is called productive work. But these critiques are not all equal. We have allowed productive work to be defined by the economic elite; work has come to mean an activity that increases elite wealth. A family garden, repairing your own car, walking to store or work, performing as entertainment for friends and a whole host of other activities are not considered productive work no matter how beneficial to personal and community life. An equitable distribution of the community product would allow such work to increase, reduce dependence on so-called productive work and make employers more likely to have to ‘sell’ their jobs to the masses; and so, are actively not supported in the options for welfare design.

The conclusion that I have come to is that there is no way to design our way to a reasonable welfare state without significant shifts in our underlying beliefs and understandings of work and the origins of production. Social Security, Medicare and a number of healthcare programs in other countries come about as close as we can get in the present paradigm – which is why they are under such unrelenting attack.

The corporate elites have gone to extreme lengths to control these ideas in the public space. Economists and social scientists who understand these things must become like the climate scientists as they are beginning to move toward public activism. Socialism and Marxist economics have to become again part of the common currency of ideas, to be measured and tested in the free flow of ideas. This is primarily a matter of fearlessly speaking them as valid and meaningful contributions to the debate.

The welfare state is the only kind of state that can sustain: a community that is organized to support the welfare, the wellbeing, of all of its members. We know how to do these things. All the ideas are there. We must understand, yet again, that individualist, free market economics is an aberration, an insanity that forms naturally in the human brain during an unnatural time of exponentially increasing excess, but that must wither and die when growth ends. These transitions have always been and apparently will continue to be horrific. The next essay will look more closely at our present transition.

[1] Man vs. The Welfare State (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969, pp 84–100; available in PDF

The Welfare State

2011-09-02T15:50:00.000-06:00

The Self-inflicted Wound Theory of state coddling of the poor, that they are robbed of their self-reliance by handouts, is not entirely incorrect, but only in very selected ways – which will be gotten to. The more important issues have gone, as is often the case, largely unrecognized. If poorer people and the rest of ordinary folk are to be self-reliant, take the bull by the horns and ‘make something of themselves,’ just what is it they are to make? What ‘bull’ is it that they are to take by the horns?

It is obvious that those who make the ‘state coddling’ argument are suggesting that the common person should take a mercantile position; they should look for those entrepreneurial opportunities offered in their communities and exploit them. In this way they are supposed to pull themselves out of poverty or at least climb up a bit from the lower rungs of the ladder, create employment for their fellows and supply goods and services to their neighborhoods and beyond.

There is, however, an important caveat: the entrepreneurial activities must be done by the rules and laws set down by ‘their betters’ and must, therefore, support the superstructure that depends in large part, for its power and wealth, on the common folk remaining powerless and poor. Most business building requires attachment to the banking system, meeting official standards and acceptance by some government authorization process – very often controlled by those already in the relevant businesses. The poor should become self-sufficient, but without actually gaining in the real power to control their own destiny because that would, of necessity, interfere with the elite’s control of their destiny: the poor and the ordinary do the work and the elite do the calculating – in large measure, calculating how to collect to their own uses as much from the work of the poor and ordinary as possible. The poor and ordinary may be encouraged to become entrepreneurial in work from which the elite also gain, but only rarely should they aspire to the calculating classes.

I am reminded of an article from Life Magazine, it must have been in the 1950s. (By way of context, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee had turned America into Paranoid Nation.) I remember being upset by the article, knowing that I was expected to see its protagonist as a hero, but was only able to see him as a man without feeling and a thief. It was supposed to represent the best of Americanism, to wit:

A successful businessman went out to live on the bum. Dressed appropriately, he moved into the hobo ‘towns’ and adopted the hobo life. This was not a story of growing empathy for and comprehension of, primarily, men ‘down on their luck;’ it was the story of ‘hobo makes good’ by applying the principles of self-reliant (anti-communist, thus anti-commons) thinking and practice. Our hero noticed that the hobos left messages, on the equivalent of bulletin boards in the hobo jungles, about where to get handouts and other services. He began to catalogue these messages; he reproduced the messages and began to sell them to the other hobos. I don’t remember the details anymore, but it is not unreasonable that he might have begun to pay small amounts to both collect the information and, subtly, inhibit its free posting.

The upshot was that our hero became hobo-wealthy selling information that was once, admittedly, inconsistent but free. He emerged from hobodom having proven the superiority of capitalism, that you just can’t keep a good capitalist down and that there was something degenerate about those ‘others’ who didn’t seize the opportunity to raise themselves out of their miserable circumstances. I remember seeing only a heartless thief taking information from the commons, hoarding it and selling what was once free. His claims of having improved the lives of the hobos by giving them a superior survival tool seemed nothing more than happy-talk drivel intended for the impressionable masses [1]. There was, at the time, a growing recognition among the elite that the people had to be moved away from the ‘common man’ spirit of the New Deal and WWII; and Life Magazine was doing its bit for the cause.

The great mass of people are not capitalists; they are not hoarders; they are unwilling to ‘buy low and sell high’ when it harms their fellows. A capitalist is some one who has collected wealth sufficiently, most often from the work of others, to use that wealth to gather more wealth by controlling the work of those others. This may be what we have become, but it is not where we began: The human animal is a cooperative species, the distribution of information, goods and services has been an essential survival behavior for the millions of years that our genus as been on the earth. This is our context, this is who we are.

But it can be said that, today, the great mass of people live in a capitalist system which means, referencing the above, that their world is controlled by capitalists. It is also true that the barriers to wealth are or have been lowered in capitalist systems for those who are willing, like the capitalist hobo, to violate human principles of cooperative life. And so, our underlying habits of interaction have been under great pressure for a long time.

It is becoming clear: the bull that is to be taken by the horns is our human collectivist nature, our cooperative spirit. Self-reliance is to be self-promotion over, rather than in support of, others. We are to make something new of ourselves; we are to make someone who sees other people’s work as a source from which to extract some gain; we are to see other people as consumers of information, goods or services that we have brought, using inventiveness, stealth, the laws or raw force, under our control. We are to see other human beings as a resource to be used for our own advantage.

Michael Dawson, proprietor of The Consumer Trap web site has been documenting this transition from human being to capitalist. Rather than attempt to replicate his good works, go there for multiple examples of this process in action. My concern is the process and its toll on both those people who are unable to fight off their species humanity and those who can.

The myriad forces that have moved us to our present madness include all the usual suspects: the various forms and distortions of competition created by the direct and indirect consequences of population increase; the qualities and quantities of power available to individuals and small groups allowed by technological developments; the special influence on the human peculiarity, consciousness order, by communication technology; the sheer magnitude of the abundance of which human collective action is capable, and the depths of deprivation we are willing to allow (or force) others to descend into.

The great mass of people feel these pressures as disconcerting currents and eddies as they ply their way in life traveling with the humanity that still remains in our communities and our cells. But the allure of abundance, the distortions of competition, the outsized powers of communication and direct force, all in a world of millions and billions of people, are taken up by a small percentage of people who are not as well formed as most, who give up the birthright of species humanity.

In a sane world the antisocial rich would be ostracized if they could not be persuaded to rejoin common society. The central value would be the wellbeing of community, not the accumulation of material goods for private and often damaging uses. The entire sophistry built to justify and glorify self-interest, material accumulation and antisocial behavior is deeply dishonest and flies in the face of the several million years of the development of instinctual intuitions and social habits of our genus.

The bright and shiny attract us to be sure, and the ease and the power to do just as we wish when we wish. But most of us outgrow such infantile motivations and become more farsighted and community oriented. The best and the brightest of us become good human beings just as one might expect. Jack Welch, Angela Braley, Hank Paulson, Herbert Fritch and some thousands of others like them are not the best and the brightest; their salient quality is the willingness to ignore their humanity and the value of life for immediate personal gain [2]. Such behaviors that we would not allow at table are glorified as exemplary – how crazy is that? “Isn’t is wonderful that Johnny is stealing food from his little brother? He is so talented!”

And so, with this context we return to the “coddled” poor. First and foremost, the accumulations of the rich are really the accumulations allowed by community order and infrastructure, created by the community as a whole from the community commons; the wealthy are the beneficiaries of prior human achievement and the willing and unwilling contributions of their contemporaries. That they have contrived ways to exclude a great many from the sharing in the abundance generated from the multitudes is their only real achievement. Payments to the poor are, in most cases, a government enforced sharing of what should have been theirs in the first place. The real question is not ‘should it be done’, but how best to fix a broken system in ways that cause as little distortion of natural human economics as possible.

An obvious solution would be for the social standard, enforced by the righteous indignation of the masses, to be that no one have a wealth accumulation in excess of about 3 to 10 times (the figure needs to be researched for efficacy) the average wealth of the poorest 20%. Such a political and economic condition would have to be come to by a variety of routes, political, social and revolutionary, and I am not suggesting that it would be easy or even possible. This is not a solution to our present issues, though it remains in my mind as a most effective eventual state that would contribute positively to many of our difficulties.

Once it is fully realized that the wealthy, even those with social responsibility, have acquired their abundance by fraudulently taking from the efforts of a great many and, without proper compensation, from an environment which ‘belongs’ to all life, then the question is not whether to have a welfare state, but how to organize a state in which the contributions of all the citizens are appreciated and compensated. This will be the topic of the next essay.

[1] It should be noted that there is an “ecology” to the sources of help. The distribution of information would adapt to the rates at which the help could be delivered. Spreading the information widely and rapidly would shift the patterns of attempted use and thus availability. While our hero may have ‘enriched’ himself, it was almost certainly done with some level of destruction to the informal delivery systems that helped out these men. But, when the goal is to exploit an opportunity, the consequences of the exploitation only create more opportunities; how lives are affected is not an important issue and only given lip-service.

[2] Just a few of the ‘billion dollar’ CEOs and related types. Google “highest paid CEOs” or some similar search to become really annoyed.

Meaning of Specieshood

2011-08-31T12:03:00.002-06:00

What is it that we should aspire to in life? What could possibly compare to completely manifesting the potential of our specieshood?

Every species is evolved both in and to an environment. It is important to understand “environment” correctly; it is not a static set of conditions, but a dynamic presentation of all the events and processes of a region and a time. From a human point of view (that is, a very limited conceptual structure) this means all things, known and unknown.

Each individual of each species is formed from an informational template created by the evolutionary process in completely interpenetrating integration with environment – the “two” are really a common process. As a result, every species has (is) an ecological and behavioral description as defining as the structure and physiology of its body. In other words there is a way that each species lives; the term that I am using for the total physical/ behavioral/emotional formation of a species is specieshood.

While we recognize the truth of the above assertions for all other organisms – amply evidenced by any collection of taxonomic data: ecological relations and behavioral descriptions are included as diagnostic – we are confused as to our own specieshood: we seem, to ourselves, not to have diagnostic environments and behaviors. There are reasons for that spurious observation.

The most obvious and therefore the most difficult to recognize (studying all of those Zen Koans has taken its toll) is that we are embedded in ourselves – fish, should they be sufficiently intelligent, would have a devil of a time realizing the ocean. It is in the perception of difference that our talents lie.

The environment, in the largest sense, in which and to which we evolved – and therefore in which our full specieshood could find expression – has been replaced in our formative and functional experience by the consequences of our exceptional adaptations. We increased our numbers and our modifications of environmental relations more rapidly than any other creature in our beginnings and have continued that process following the unrelenting mathematics of the positive exponent to the condition today where we have been doubling world population and technological capacity in terms of a few generations and, more recently, even single generations.

We, therefore, have been convinced by the combination of our limitations and our vast capacities that we make our own behaviors. The greatest thinkers have struggled with this problem (it is not new) largely concluding that our experience creates our worldview and behavior, that there is no human specieshood per se; it is a difficult conclusion to avoid – except for the fact that it is untrue.

In a sense we are like a complex layer cake made of very ordinary and not terribly interesting batter, but covered over with the most delicious frosting (that would be for me a variety of lemon frosting, you may chose for yourself). We are so absorbed in the covering that we fail to realize that, without the cake structure, the frosting would be a somewhat sickening mess on the plate. We take this structure for granted – until it fails.

But we are far too busy today to get it right. We have wars and famine, climate change and Godliness, my power verses your power, obscene wealth and obscene deprivation. Indigenous people have the audacity to live, and to have lived for thousands of years, on the land that has ‘our’ minerals and oil. We seem confused by the fact that a few thousand people have amassed control of more material possessions and the power to gather such possessions than over half of the world’s people (billions of people); we cannot seem to understand the obvious, that a few having almost everything denies the many having anything.

And yet the one thing that we all have and that would make all of the difference in the how we live our lives, both personally and ecologically, we almost uniformly ignore or deny possessing at all.

I recently read an essay by a well-known and consistent contributor to the debates about our present condition. His essay offered a number of suggestions for actions that were needed to begin the process of recovery from our present troubles. I wrote to him suggesting that, while his suggestions were excellent and necessary ones, he had left out the most essential, that we know where we hope to go before we begin our trip; otherwise we will end up right back where we are now, only with different players.

He kindly wrote back to say, in essence, that this was too difficult a question and would make his essay unwieldy. I understand his point of view, but reject it.

Discovering specieshood individually gives the person an attachment to realities that can sustain a sense of wellbeing and purpose in times of comfort and adversity – doing in Reality what religion does in illusion. And discovering specieshood as a social process would allow populations to recover themselves, as well as reattach elements of our behavior to environmental realities.

As with any species, humans have only a limited number of ‘ways to be’ that can fully express the biological, instinctual, intuitional and consciousness order processes that we are each born with. But today there is no one way to discover/recover how to make these processes manifest. We are each tossed at random into situations that challenge and distort the developmental sequences and mature conditions that support specieshood, and so, all have unique ‘beginnings.’

But we humans are all of the species, share 99.99% of our genetics with the rest of humanity, 97-98% of our genetics with the great apes and over half of our genetics with dandelions. The DNA in your own personal body has been in continuous and unbroken replication from the beginning of life on the earth nearly 4 billion years ago (if there had been a break in the sequence of replication, that which has become you would have ended then and there). Such an understanding can help.

Every human infant born ‘expects’ – has the biological/instinctual preparations to receive – the primate pattern of developmental experience: being held for a year, life in a close community of relatives, orderly patterns of discipline and instruction. This understanding can help.

An individual human being alone in the ‘wild’ (natural) world without community and without tools (tools are but one form of community) is almost certainly doomed to a quick end from predators, starvation or madness. This understanding can help.

Finally, however, it is the feelings in one’s own body, the recognitions of unrightness, that are most convincing. Once the infantile confusions have eroded away – Santa Claus and God are recognized as controlling stories and not as living truths – we are faced with being a remarkable animal living in beliefs and actions that violate the unique magnificence of each life. The instant that that sensation is felt the insistence of specieshood is (re)formed.

It doesn’t matter that others may not be convinced; the more the merrier, but proselytizing is not a goal. Again a Koan: you cannot find specieshood without a community and if you try to find specieshood in community you will fail [1].

So, how is specieshood to be recovered? This is not a new question. With the invention of writing, just about the first subject was the problem of living and acting correctly; there is no reason to wonder about how to do something right unless doing it wrong is an issue. We humans have been at this for a long time with very limited success.

Perhaps a place to begin is to look at a time when people didn’t wonder about how to live correctly. I am not suggesting living in a tepee, people often make the mistake of form as a substitute for substance. The question is what were the salient conditions of specieshood. Here are a few of them:

•A largely meditative existence in which several hours in a typical day are spend paying close attention to everything at once, to the wind, the smell of the air, the sounds, the movement of the light – these were the detail of a Reality from which came every good and bad thing. The human nervous system is designed for this integrative, meditative function.

•A daily life in which each person both feels and is competent to act on life’s big and little issues. Individual needs are meet with actions completely interconnected with community needs. And community needs are integrated into the ecology in ways that make so much sense that they go completely unnoticed.

•It would be a great help to be raised from birth on the primate pattern in intimate communion with human community and nature, but since most of us don’t have experiences that meet that goal, it needs to be reproduced to some extent. Being properly parented is the salient condition, but failing that we need to reparent ourselves. There is a large literature on the subject; I am uncomfortable with it, but recognize both the necessity and utility of the activity.

•Being personally in charge of one’s community relations. This means not just being a part of a community, but being integrated into community. Most groups, organizations and collectives, today, do not have the necessary properties because they are special purpose entities rather than the primary human structure in interaction with the world at large. My own community includes both living humans and dead ones whose thoughts are of the greatest immediacy in my relationship to the world.

•A daily intimacy with Reality: weather, diurnal cycle, exercise, exertion. These are the expression of the earth’s processes in our immediate experience and are not to be avoided.

•Regular challenges combining the physical and mental worlds. An example is getting lost and finding one’s way. I like to do this in wild country; walk for a couple of hours or more, exploring the country off of established trails and then return by some alternate route, discovered during the exploration. Some of the same effect can be had by getting lost in a city.

•There is more.

These things and more can to be done in “modern” life. Humans have gathered much valuable information about the world. I would not do away with science, philosophy, literature, art or the basic nature of modernity; though we must also learn to live with these discoveries, not by denying our specieshood, but by rediscovering, fully embracing and learning how to integrate our specieshood as a guiding principle of modernity.

This is the cusp upon which we sit at the moment. The present trajectory has only been guided by the position of the last instant energized by some unprecedented new discovery or event – like the whirligig fireworks from a roman candle. No species of life can long survive on such a ‘plan.’ We will either come into (re)possession of our specieshood, individually and collectively, as a guiding principle or we will burn out like a firework. All of our other options are fantasies.

[1] I believe that the origin of the Koan is recognition of the loss of specieshood 3 thousand years ago in China and India, and the attempt to find ways (Tao) to recover.

Most Things Must Be Explained Together:

2011-08-16T11:36:00.001-06:00

It is a most basic principle of the epistemology of science, that scientific theories must explain all relevant data points with a integrated coherent set of ideas – ad hoc additions are seriously frowned upon. This is done for two very good reasons: it just makes sense in a natural world, a world that seems to work by basic sets of rules, that the understanding of those rules should apply broadly to a very wide variety of processes. And secondly, that this generalizing of processes as theory supplies the basic understandings that have actually worked to explain and, to some extent, control the behavior of the events of the world.

Devising theories about humans, as we function in our present societies, would be like trying to create Newtonian Mechanics with gnomes planting tiny black holes and high gauss magnets at random through out the measuring apparatus: a pattern might be suggested by the data, but pinning things down would be impossible. Before anything serious could be done, the gnomes and their activities would have to be discovered and accounted for.

We humans are our own gnomes. Our behavioral systems have gotten away from us and are functioning quite out of either the recognition or control of our “intelligent design:” for every apparently planned design, there are thousands of gnomic events that go unrealized or that we largely ignore. But that does not mean that there is not some discoverable and orderly process afoot, only that we have been, as yet, unsuccessful in ‘pinning it down.’

I have been using a conceptual framework for many years that seems to bring much of the confusing and hazy behaviors of my fellows into apparently sharper focus. The following uses that framework to look at the underlying principles that should be informing our understanding and actions around “regulating”, especially, our economic and political behavior.

* * *

The Living System of Order (the LSO: we often just call it ‘life’, but it is a system of order) is really a biophysical platform for the storage and movement of particular categories of information. Its corporal forms are tiny moments in that flow, each one representing and holding a vanishingly small fraction of that information – but the information, the total information, resides with the whole of the living world. Communication of information is the very essence of the Living Order. The central core communication is structured around the DNA/protein nexus, but every operation of life is a communication, especially the controlling communications that organize and limit the chemical and physical behaviors of the thousands upon thousands of different types of reactions that sum together into the living state. The most basic organizing principle is called ‘negative feedback:’ a living state action produces some products that, as one of their effects, inhibit the reaction that created them.

There are basically two types of feedback, reaction products that influence the process that created them: positive feedback in which certain reaction products increase the rate or volume of the originating reaction and negative feedback in which certain reaction products decrease the rate or volume of the reaction that created them. Left alone and with unlimited reactants a positive feedback system would grow ever bigger, ever faster; such a system could never be alive (without unlimited reactants it would use up the reactants without stint and suddenly end). Negative feedback systems set into motion will rundown and stop even in the company of unlimited resources; such a system could not be alive. It is the combination of motivating and inhibiting systems, properly arranged, that allows the chemistry and physics of life to function.

It would be the very essence of foolishness to argue that negative feedback systems are unduly inhibiting the production of this or that chemical product. Too much sugar in the blood and the brain speeds to a dysfunctional oblivion; too little sugar and it slows to stop functioning altogether. Keeping that critical condition just right is accomplished with multiple negative feedback systems attached to the basic self-generating chemical reactions. Maintaining the appropriate concentration of sugar is just one example among thousands; In fact, negative feedback systems can be considered the most essential of all the essential chemical designs of life.

In other words, the LSO is dependent on negative feedback systems in very special ways. Positive feedback systems tend to function on their own once started, like a fire. Negative feedback systems must be constructed and attached at exactly the right point and with the appropriate rates of inhibition so that the necessary chemical reactions will take place at the right time and in the right amount. It can be made as a general proposition that no system of order can sustain in a universe of limited resources (any universe that we know about) without negative feedback systems as a primary part of its design.

Humans live in the world of the Living System of Order but also in a new system of order that has been constructed evolutionarily and adaptively ‘on’ them: the Consciousness System of Order (CSO). In brief, this is an information storing and moving system that did not exist before its formation and growth on the human substrate [1]. It collects and stores varieties of information never before collected and combines them in ways never before combined. Humans have the capacity to manifest many of the possibilities so created and, thus, create processes, objects and powerful arrangements of order that could never before have existed. This system of order must also function with negative feedback systems if it is to sustain (and if humans are to sustain).

As indicated above, negative feedback systems are complex and often special purpose devices, not easy to “design” or build. In the living order trillions of trillions of trial and error events have gone into the evolution of the negative feedback controls of life’s many thousands of chemical and physical reactions. Each species evolves its own special rates and set points from the basic pattern.

The Consciousness Order evolved and adapted under the influence of the Living Order and was ‘spared’ much of the need for negative feedback systems since a good bit of its behavior could piggyback on the Living Order. But some negative feedback systems based entirely in the Consciousness Order were required, such things became social mores and the pantheistic religions. However, even these had the physical environment and the Living Order as their informing source since this was the ‘world’ in which humans lived.

It is a mighty leap from that time to now, but it is one that must be made. It is a leap from a real form and place; we did not spring forth from ‘no beginning.” All the same rules apply, that is the way of science theory. The rules apply until their predictions fail, and then the theory is revised or chucked and new theories that explain the data more completely, more elegantly, replace them.

Making the leap to now, we find the Consciousness Order disconnected from the substance of its origin, yet still operating on the same principles as it did when it was primarily a powerful support function for adapting to the natural world. In essence, a wide variety of experiences (perceptions and memories) are collected from contact with the world, the members of a community of shared experience act out different behaviors in response to those experiences and through the process of action, observation and community ‘story telling’, more or less, standard behaviors are adapted to environmental conditions. Certain behaviors are of truly survival importance and these get special stories attached to them, stories with a punch and often a consequence. Such stories constitute important negative feedback systems.

When associated with a constantly correcting natural environment to which the community is obligatorily attuned, the motivating forces and the inhibiting forces of the Consciousness order stayed in relative balance; the stories were tested in the domain of all relevant information, though often beyond the general awareness, just as we attempt to test our science theories today in the contest of ideas on paper.

But the vast majority of humans no longer live in a natural world that supplies the informational foundation for their behavior. That world still exists and still is the ultimate reservoir of both information and consequence, but our daily experience is removed from it by several layers of the behaviors of other human beings. The result is that we have been applying the tools of the CSO to the immediate experiences that surround us, experiences that have become more and more randomized and with very narrow and short-term with weakly related informational content.

Such an environment offers very poor conditions for the development of negative feedback systems. And so, human behavior spreads in form and space directed only by opportunity and the capacity of the CSO to imagine new options. This is not a good thing for all the reasons discussed and suggested above.

The manifestation and expansion the products of the Consciousness Order without any inhibition from negative feedback systems is the basis of our present experience. While an analysis like this one can’t make direct changes, it is important to have an understanding that fits into the larger theoretical frameworks supplied by sound physical, biological and psychological theories. The negative feedback model must be incorporated into the incentive systems that we create in our economics and politics – up to now we have almost exclusively created designs that rewarded or punished. Both reward and punishment have tended to be build on the simpler and more direct models of positive feedback – they tend to create more of themselves [2].

We are in the process of evolving, biologically, negative feedback systems into the Consciousness Order. One of the steps in that evolution is looking like it will involve the failure of the current economic and political systems, the rapid reduction of human life and the variety of other life on the earth. But the CSO has the potential to self generate its own adaptive processes and designs, that is the cusp we are approaching: will the human species discover the means to regulate its activities through Consciousness Order negative feedback systems or will the species rely on the Living Order processes that make “judgments” on survival of whole species as its blunt-instrument tool?

The regulation of political and economic action and power – as the country’s founding thinkers attempted – is a vital first step. Such a step might both buy us the time and set the stage for the recognition of the need and the focus to reform those structures that can begin to create the larger range of negative feedback systems that a fully functioning system of order requires.

[1] This system of order might well be set into motion in some non-human context. The dangers involved would be prodigious. Similarly, Living Order processes can be abstracted and set to motion as with genetically modified bacteria or complex chemical reactions mediated by “artificial” enzymes and nano systems, both much more dangerous than seems to be currently realized.

[2] Competing positive feedback systems are not negative feedback and using resources to exhaustion is not negative feedback.

The American Patient

2011-08-09T13:02:00.002-06:00

A number of years ago I saw a movie that seemed to contain a kernel of an essential human truth, albeit presented with some silliness. I recently saw it again and see more clearly my relationship to it, and perhaps a larger meaning.

In The English Patient, a movie about love and death in the Libyan desert, Count Almasy and Katharine Clifton are two people drawn together by forces natural to humans, deeply natural to humans, and yet seldom fully enacted; and so we do not understand them even as, on the rare occasions of their occurrence, we fall into their spell. It is difficult not to be drawn into the extra-dimensional space that such forces weave around the other person and it is almost impossible when mutual. Nothing else matters. I know it is hard to believe if you have not experienced it, but it is true: nothing else matters.

I know about these things because they happened to me. The English Patient is especially poignant for me since the woman who so powerfully attracted me and Katharine Clifton were named in so similar a fashion; it is almost the same name in my mind. And Kristin Scott Thomas, plays the part of Katharine, even to the shape of her eye lids and the incredible charm of the slight curve at the corners of her mouth, looked much the same in face and form. The woman in my life was, though, more lovely, more tender, more incomprehensibly appealing. It has been nearly 40 years since I last saw her and I can still make real, instantly, in my mind the sensation of a light summer dress moving on her thigh, the soft weight of her breasts as she playfully and tantalizingly brushed by me in a store.

She also, as was Katharine, married to a good human being. She also struggled with the attraction that was beyond attraction – that was occurrence, that was certainty. Some combination of writers, director and actors must really have understood; when she says, “Here, I am a different kind of wife.” It was the same; it was the same.

No, she did not die alone in a cave in the North African desert and I was not burned by real flames as my plane was shot down by German flak. But that was the only difference. And, of course, I was not a German spy.

It is not about something called love pulling us together that brings me back again and again to those days, those experiences, those feelings; love is a different thing. There was something so primal, so cellular, that all of society became arbitrary. That is what brings me here again and again.

There was never a greeting or a leaving over two years in which she didn’t look at me with wonderment and pleasure, a look that transcends the details of the face. I never looked at her without the pleasure of the experience seeming to show to the world like an actual glowing of some unidentifiable energy.

Even as the German flak began to fill the sky – no, that is the movie; even as the denial of society’s arbitrary conditions began to explode around us with all the power and pettiness of the rejected, the feelings remained and remained in all of their original power; even as it was clear that the world outside demanded to reenter, demanded to be included, and so would bring an end to what was terribly more real than the world outside our communion could ever be; even then we were together until that actual moment when we were not.

Count Almasy and Katharine Clifton’s primal passion, to use an alliterative simplification, was as star-crossed as mine and my “Katharine’s.” But this is not a morality tale. It is about a world that, while it often is not, has the potential to be generous with these kinds of experiences, a world that doesn’t deny or ignore what is best and most appealing in our species.

I bring this up now, in an essay surrounded by other essays about a politics gone mad, an economy in ruin and a social order struggling in a kind of savage hunt for safety and security, if not salvation, because of how easy it is to forget what social justice, economic equity, generous education and human communion can accomplish in individual lives.

Powerful emotional and physical connections with other members of our species should not be trivial afterthoughts set aside so that one can fit into political and economic constructions. But that has become the reality. The most appealing emotions and feelings, the most fructifying relationships are diminished so that time, effort, attention and value can be devoted to material accumulation, bullying others to act as one wishes and a general infantilized selfishness – and the vast machinations of coercive order to support and justify these behaviors.

It doesn’t matter if the story of my “Katharine” is true or not; it is your attention and sympathy of feeling that I am after. It might be that my attachment was not to a woman, but to a place; an attachment that formed me, was me. It is all of these that we must give up today. Our most deeply held feelings for our children must be set aside as we go to war or to work. The value and importance of what we feel for those most dear to us, or for the places dear to us, is challenged by demands for what is being called success, patriotism and wealth.

Think about what this society, today’s American society, can withhold and ration as it demands the denial of our full and magnificent selves: a magnolia tree grown in a narrow space between buildings still and always trying to make its huge and primal flowers have an existence. Of course, wealth is rationed, that is only natural, but time is rationed and joy is rationed. Happiness and satisfaction are rationed. Love and passion are rationed. They must all be purchased by giving them up.

It can be so clear that the human animal is formed to exist in bonds of feeling and yet our society honors and attempts to emulate the psychopath. The attachments ‘that matter’ must be mercantile, measurable in a money cost or established in a power relation. Only then by denying primal human attachment feeling can ‘acceptable’ attachments be made. The lie is perpetuated that desire for and the feelings of human attachment are dishonest, immature and unworthy. The depth of natural human feeling is thereby drained and filled with dry desert sand.

As the world around us begins to accelerate its changes, demanding more and more sacrifice of the human mechanism, perhaps it is time for those of us who can still recall, at least in some measure, our human selves to get them out, dust them off and defy the forces that deny them.

We have been trying to fight the massive madness of our society – Republican sociopathology and greed driven corporate collective behavior [1] – with the same weapons that they use. And we are losing. It may be time to stop fighting ‘back,’ but to rather fight sideways, fight around, fight beyond. A good place to begin is to become clear about what it is we are fighting for in the first place.

If everyone believes that the same things are valuable and it is only a matter of who has them and who does not, then there must be a scheme for acceptable distribution or a war; equity or abundance and deprivation. But if what is valuable can be attained and maintained with only limited and controlled association with the more toxic elements of the crazy world, then options can be formed, options that can challenge the crazy world by denying it the services of those who reject it. If enough reject the crazy world, it will be changed.

I have avoided two words until now, but can avoid them no longer: spirit and specieshood. Consider the difference: one lives in pursuit of the commercial goal and succeeds, and in the process fails their emotional life or one lives in pursuit of specieshood and comes as close to the fulfillment of the human spirit as possible in this time, and in the process collects only enough wealth to live simply. What would be the effect of millions of people recognizing their humanity, living simply and demanding that the world’s human generated wealth be devoted to the human species not to the exclusive uses of an infantilized insane minority?

There is little chance of such a thing, but if there is any chance at all it begins with realizing the exaltation of human communion and its absolute supremacy and consistency compared to arbitrary social expectations arising from political and economic expediency.

[1] It is like uranium: in the natural form uranium is mildly dangerous only if you associate with it in excess, but if its most toxic forms are concentrated, even brief exposures are damaging and once it reaches the level of critical mass its behavior can quickly spiral out of control and run its course without the possibility of intervention. In human terms, there are certain arrangements of people in certain activities that are toxic. Groupings of people engaged in the accumulation of wealth are almost always dangerous and increasingly so as they are centrifuged by the corporate spinning into greater and greater concentrations of pathology.

More Thoughts From The Road

2011-07-30T11:55:00.001-06:00

This is not so much a taut string of a story as it is many pieces of twine, rope, lamp cords, bits of rags and so forth tied together ad hoc; taking whatever is available to try to get the job done.

It is the story of the disconnect between the events of importance that ultimately control our lives and our daily movements. We have been separated from, at least in our minds, the designs and devices that can influence the forces that have power over many of the important decisions that dominate our lives. This is a hunt for an understanding of that disconnection.

Traveling around this country, talking with people in restaurants and other places, meeting people in camp grounds and generally paying attention to what there is to see creates a dissonant contrast to the news in the media, left, right and ‘center.’

This trip I rode state roads and farm roads as much as I could; camped in out-of-the-way areas. Toward the end of the first day I checked out a lake in the middle of the Texas panhandle; most of the lake was gone, dried up to half or less of its former size. Boat ramps ended like luckless roads in fields of weeds. Campsites looked out over the dry lake bottom that had the feeling of unfurnished rooms.

I rode on, finally stopping at a little ‘recreation area’ on Dead Indian Lake (in the Black Kettle National Grasslands, if you know the history, the irony stings) 5 miles from a town of less than 100 people. I was the only human there. I heard coyotes singing love songs. Bullfrogs, owls and herons did a little R&B. A raccoon raided my food, politely taking only one small package of cheese, but didn’t stay for a chat.

The news on my iPhone told of plutocrats working to damage my children’s chances to fulfill their goals for their future and to make the acceptable poverty of careful choices that I have chosen for myself into an a nearly unlivable poverty of deprivation.

None of this was obvious on the road. In the middle of the afternoon heat (103º F) I had stopped in Channing, Texas under ‘the’ tree. A few mostly empty buildings gathered around two secondary roads that across at right angles with a train track paralleling one of the roads. A big pickup truck, clearly headed away from me, hesitated and then made a deliberate turn in my direction. The man offered to open a nearby building to get me water if I needed.

The waitress in a tiny, well populated café in Watonga, Oklahoma preformed exactly as she had when I was there 4 months ago, and as she had for the last 25 years would be my guess. I got the normal stares owed to an old man stranger in a motorcycle riding suit, nods of appreciation from some men, often looks of mild displeasure from some women for stirring the wanderlust, one more time, in the men who nodded. It was life as usual, not any life that you would see in our society’s stories, but still the life that most people lead.

Let me expand on that: All of these people have real lives with real stories, but the stories of our society no longer include those lives. So, real lives are lived in the shadow, or better, the glare of the impossibly unreal stories that have become our society. Amy Winehouse died during my trip, but so did my mother’s brother. Harry: merchant marine in the Big War, deepwater sailor all his life, rider of the rails in the Depression, a man who lived when stories mattered. I was camping near Okemah, Oklahoma on Okmulgee Lake when uncle Harry died. Okemah was where Woody Guthrie was born and lived until 1931; Guthrie, a man who told the stories of people like the man who went out of his way to check on me, the middle aged waitress and my uncle Harry.

As my trip began, my society’s story was of “conservatives” and “liberals” fighting over a Federal budget on the brink, Midwestern heat wave, Google + was challenging facebook, an English prince got married with everyone wearing some really swell clothes, terrorists were doing something really bad somewhere, a new illegal war in Libya, wikileaks as evil, Rupert Murdock’s media empire doing illegal things (and lying about it), someone on TV did some really ‘something’ thing…

All of this with the often ignored sub-text stories of 9% unemployment (a nearly 20% real unemployment), wealth (and income) inequities at record and increasing levels challenging the economic and physical safety of ‘regular working people,’ environmental disregard dangerously impacting biospheric integrity and capacity, the armies of my country occupying other lands, wikileaks as good, Fukushima’s continuing radiation release… It was just all too much. There was not one thing that offered an action to be taken. When the tornados came through, at least, people could hide in their storm cellars.

From the motorcycle the world rolling by me was intensely real: ancient sand dunes in eastern New Mexico, horizon to horizon rolling plains of the Texas panhandle, the thoughtful and the thoughtless fellow humans on the road. The hundred and then a thousand houses with various and often inexplicable accouterments of the living inhabitants: from plaster lawn deer to home made dirt-track cars, miscellaneous antique farm equipment to different forms of trash – all displayed on hundreds of miles of more or less mowed lawns. Almost every house in a little town in Oklahoma had what looked like most of the major appliances along with other furnishings on their front porches; now what was that about?

Two gentlemen came by where I was camped in eastern Oklahoma to empty trash from a nearby garbage barrel – they were not ‘garbage-men,’ they were improving the place for all those in the area. After normal rituals of greeting we spoke of the heat, which was considerable. One of the men was quick to point out that while it may feel hot no records of any kind had been broken; that was, of course, completely untrue, but is what happens when one’s politics is in uncomfortable confrontation with the reality of a thermometer.

At another campsite my neighbors were biologists collecting bats and various rodents for genetic population studies. They wanted to talk biology. They wanted to show me their collected specimens. It was seldom that they camped near someone interested in talking about the difference between the genetic and biological concept of species. For me it was a fascinating ‘blast from the past.’

Along much of the road other realities pressed their way forward. Giant, multistory drilling rigs – smart rigs that can drill down and sideways, ‘errorless’ drilling avoiding all hazard to surface dwelling man and beast. These towers are set on a footprint of about 2 or 3 acres with supporting portable housing, materials, equipment and utility yards. The air around them smelled of oil, and I assumed that that breath-catching smell was fracking chemicals.

Mile after mile of production wellheads with surrounding tanks and pipes spotted the fields along side the road. Humans were busy beavers here: farming, drilling, truck driving, digging. How then to explain the nearly empty little towns, the main streets with every storefront empty except for the antique shop (most often closed) where the drug store used to be.

It was my hope that compressing all of these moments and observations into units of time that typically make sense would somehow also make the compressions make sense; I assumed, and still assume, that a collection of events, real and related in space and time, form the evidentiary basis for reality. All I was doing was trying to slice across the behavioral landscape in a different way, exposing the layers of interaction not usually seen.

All of these people and all of these places seemed to me to need the same things, things stolen from them by crimes of wealth, the lies of media and the afflictions of power. I could almost grasp it, felt that I could almost discover the words.

There are so many of us. We are so various. What is needed to be done is so foreign to our present beliefs and understandings: just as our numbers and our powers are unnatural, so what we must do and how we must live in this present time with those numbers and powers must also be unnatural to immediate individual desires and habits.

That is the overpowering sensation, repeated over and over again: Mostly original short-grass prairie and a plowed field; the plowed field and the drilling rig; the gentle kindness of people and the incredible pain delivered and about to be delivered onto the Great Many, here and around the world, by plutocratic humans and general circumstance; the little towns grown from mutual and local exchanges of goods and services and killed off by the erosion of mutual interest; thin lines of “nature” snaking through farms and towns, streams and creeks struggling to keep the land alive in a world increasingly covered with lawns and concrete.

It is clear; nothing will do but communication, understanding and wise planning. The status quo is first of all impossible – there is no status quo, there is no present condition, only processes of change. In a remarkable reversal of the earth’s most powerful forming forces, it is now that great motive force of change, humanity, that is the ‘creature’ in need of protective conservation, while the technological and environmental forces that we have set into motion surge around us, a powerful machine out of our control.

There is a great longing for sense and order in every one I’ve talked with, but they don’t seem to have the tools to create them; they try to acquire them ready made mistaking religion, money, guns and even education for solution. That man who drove out of his way to offer me water, he and I were in complete sympathy in our interaction, but I suspect that he might have taken exception to my attitude toward Christianity; we could share the water of life and the good-will of one human for another, but reject each other based on different views of an anachronistic system of belief that has gone through thousands of iterations in 5000 years.

To the biologists, smart and dedicated people, but possibly also too comfortable in their certainties and uncertainties, my thoughts are similar: take the tissue samples, plot the distribution of genetic variation and correlate to biological species variation, write another paper on the details of evolutionary process in a particular group of animals, but also stop in Watonga and try the Spanish omelet – and tip the waitress like she was your sister.

The Tower of Babel story is wrong. We built it and have continued building it until it now does reach heaven – and we have found heaven empty except for our projected hopes that there would be someone there to take responsibility other than us. And now the tower and its many relations are in danger of falling under their own weight. We dare not knock them down since their uncontrolled falling would destroy us and we dare not leave them up since they will surely fall on their own soon enough. And then I realized one source of my fascination: the road is just the tower laid flat over the ground.

The Wind And The Stone

2011-07-23T13:24:00.004-06:00

At first blush it seems that there are two basically different stances that a human being can take in the confrontation with the daily data of living – but are really the opposite ends of a continuum. On the one end, a person can accept a fully formed set of propositions, values, rules and possibilities: a known world, lived in with known parameters for action. New data is shaped to fit the existing ‘truth.’ With expectations clear, reality in a bottle, a small industry forms to adapt any reluctant data into the accepted forms.

This can be metaphorically summarized as the Stone Sculpture model: the sculptor has a vision of what the sculpture is to be (or what the client requires it to be) bounded by the stone’s form, the surrounding stone is removed, losing the preexisting form, detail and expansiveness contained in the original, until the desired shape is obtained – make no mistake, under the right hand, the product can be exquisite and even evocative of grand vision.

At the other end of the continuum the forming propositions are understood to be in constant flux. Values, rules and possibilities change in response to the ‘tectonic’ forces of population density, energy availability and type, technological development, social innovation and idea. A person living on this end of the continuum considers as much of the salient data of life as possible, and is flexible with what is called past experience, really seeing it as new data of a different form brought to each new moment of choice.

The metaphorical model for the fullest expression of this way of living I take from a recent motorcycle trip. I’ll call this the MTFH (Motorcycle Trip From Hell) model. The rider enters the road as the wind begins to blow at speeds equal to the bike speed: swirling, coming from right or left, front or back, other vehicles change the patterns, all without predictability. Nothing from the past matters other than that you are still wheel-side down and still riding; nothing from the future matters beyond the visible traffic and the invisible wind. The exhilaration is magnificent and the exhaustion profound.

It should be clear, especially from the metaphors, that both approaches are limited and limiting in their own ways. It should be clear that different situations are best served by different approaches – if this sounds a bit like a version of the second model, I’m sure that is true – and shows a major failing of the first model. It is also clear that in the second model only the most salient data can be considered fully and only for a short period of time: comfortable expectations met with predictability must still be a major part of life or we would literally die of stress and exhaustion, which points out a major failing of the second model.

The struggle becomes then, not so much between the full range of extremes, but a tug-of-war closer to the middle. We all admit that some principles are needed as fixed points and we all admit that changes are part of life. It is the primacy and balance of these views over which we argue and contend.

Returning to the continuum extremes should make clear that there are circumstances when one view effectively predominates the other. Carving a stone sculpture by responding to every shift of perception or thought would result in a pile of pebbles and stone dust. Riding a motorcycle in heavy wind with a rigid set of preprogrammed expectations and action… let’s not go there!

The views from the extreme ends of the continuum are very different. The MTFH model has no trouble accepting the Stone Sculpture model for this moment and then for that moment; it would just never occur to the MTFH thinker that any one notion should be dominating for more than the moment immediate forces focus on it. The Stone Sculpture model on the other hand has a lot of trouble with the MTFH model: it is just wrong almost all the time, and is wrong without redemption. Staying upright in heavy winds of change doesn’t compute as a primary goal. In fact, the MTFH model from the Stone Sculpture model perspective is not just unsatisfactory, it is destructive and evil and must be made to be fixed in the correct sculptural configuration.

Another important difference is that the MTFH model accepts as natural that everyone would have their own MTFH model details; there would be no way for one person to tell another exactly what to do in a given situation other than to give your absolute attention, then hang loose and go with the flow. Specific applications of the Stone Sculpture model, however, would reject even the details of other practitioners of their same art as foolish, wrong and incompetent, even as they accepted their methods (but would be shocked that theirs was a method and not just the only way).

A well functioning community is made up of both these views and all the points of lesser extreme along the divide. In a community where obligations of observation supply much of the information used in relationships and decision-making, the extremes are forced into some level of respect, sometimes grudgingly, but sometimes profound. The danger for us humans comes when the extremes become isolated and self-reinforcing: unmodulated by successful consequences delivered by the opposite view, the most extreme positions just keep on marching further and further into wonderland [1].

But it is here the symmetry fails. The MTFH model can only go so far, it is by its nature bounded by immediacy, which is another way of saying Reality. Its major defining quality is given by how far it reaches back toward the center, back toward more and more ordering principles. The Stone Sculpture model is, on the other hand, largely unbounded when not forced to periodically reevaluate in light of some immediate and overwhelming reality, and even then its institutional guardians have full sway to interpret all events in the fixed terms of expectation and principle.

The Stone Sculpture model underlies religious fundamentalism – of all varieties –including capitalist fundamentalists, Marxist fundamentalists, free market, free trade, racial fundamentalism: those who tie their behaviors and prospects to absolutist positions in general. Without the natural restraint supplied by MTFH model thinkers, Stone Sculpture model habits come to be ascendant given their self-justifying and unbounded nature; they are also self-organizing and often aggressively spreading.

The two extremes only exist in symmetry when an environmental order has preeminence over the system of which they are a part, as in small, materially simple communities or possibly in the systems that humans, especially of the MTFH model habit, might create in recognition of our unavoidable and eventually undeniable human nature.

We have tried building walls against our biology, our nature; it is now time, again, to discover how to live within our biology’s ebbs, flows and swirling winds.

[1] MTFH model habits of thinking and acting have been largely excluded from public discourse. We are only seeing choices offered among competing “certainties.” The arts, literature, creative science (as opposed to technology application) and the speculative processes in general are largely invisible in today’s public world. The tendency of the Stone Sculpture model toward meanness – it must reject a great deal in a changing and uncertain world – is becoming more manifest.

Since every living thing must act, over the long run, in compliance with biophysical reality, and since it is the interplay of these two extremes in socially supported symmetry that is the human method for comporting with that reality, we really had better get our shit together.

Explaining Job Creation

2011-07-20T14:12:00.006-06:00

I just had a humbling, even humiliating, conversation with my 90-year-old mother – she is the only 90-year-old person that I presently know and while she doesn’t stand for all old people, she is somewhat typical of a segment of them. She never recovered from two powerful forces: the events of the depression and its apparent swoop into WWII, and the confusion and burdens put on southern womanhood.

Being from the Deep South, she grew up as a Democrat, but was converted by my father’s father, a very political man and a Republican from West Virginia– all Civil War related selections. I know that such choices, driven by ‘ancient history,’ seem of no present consequence, but many are still driving significant parts of, especially, rural and southern political positions.

So my mother said, unwisely if she wanted a quiet breakfast: “Without the rich people there would be no jobs; ‘it’s the rich people who create the jobs.’”

Now, I have matured, slightly, in my 68 years so I didn’t throw things or hold my breath until she took it back. Rather, I recognized an opportunity to have a go at explaining the error of her ways; a practice session, if you will, for other hard cases. Old people (I don’t so designate myself yet) are slippery in matters of the mind: they have accumulated lots of tricks as well as can pull the ‘I’m too old to understand’ routine. I was prepared: hadn’t I played checkers with this lady since I was 5? Hadn’t I argued every cause from civil rights and Vietnam, through Reagan being a fool, to George Bush being a fool?

I tried, “Now, just how do rich people create jobs?” I hoped to spark some reflection on the process of job creation, but got the predictable, “They are the ones with the money to hire people.” Her stare began to get a little vacant and I couldn’t tell if she was reflecting on the possible logical fallacies she was toying with or if she had recognized the trap I was setting and preparing an escape.

“Why would they hire someone in the first place?” I asked. She noticed right away that the game had been changed from creating jobs to the actual act of hiring a person and played for time with the ‘I don’t understand economics’ argument. I would have none of it. It was not a question that she wanted to answer and so we moved on into the land of the simple and hypothetical.

“Imagine that you are a shop keeper.” I knew that she was ahead of me and had, at some level, capitulated when she didn’t ask what kind of shop. “Imagine that you are a shop keeper and you have very few customers, will you hire an employee?” “Of course not, that would be foolish.”

“Now imagine that customers start coming to your shop and you can’t effectively handle them all, would you hire some one?” “Oh yes, you would have to.”

“So, are you creating the jobs or are the increasing numbers of customers forcing you to hire help? Certainly, you are important in creating the environment in which hiring can take place, but can you really say that you are creating the jobs?” “I see that more customers require that people be hired.” There seemed to be, to my mind rewarding, cognitive dissonance bouncing around in her head.

“And the people hired are doing the work needed, they are producing the result, not just you, so shouldn’t they receive reward in proportion to their contribution?”

(I have left out that near the beginning of this conversation she told me of her father working for a steel foundry in the south, working with management, where the laborers lived in company houses, were paid in script and were effectively captives of the company.)

She sort of coughed up a semi-noncommittal agreement.

“Now suppose that you hired an accountant because your time was needed in the shop, and that the accountant told you that you could make more money by paying your employees less, that you could get rich; would that create more jobs or only make you wealthier?” She didn’t respond, but adopted a pensive look.

“No one would think it inappropriate for you to take more money from the profits than the employees since you created the environment in which profits were made, but you did not do it all; the others who work with you also have an interest in the shop and should be compensated in proportion to their contribution.” “Yes, I see that.”

From there the conversation went to ‘The Spirit Level’ by Wilkinson and Pickett. She thought it a very sensible and understandable observation that inequity results in social instability. She was surprised that the U.S. was one of the most unequal countries in the developed world.

I was feeling pretty good by now.

I gave her Bernie Sanders’ statistic: “Have you heard that, in this country, the 400 richest families control more wealth than 150 million of the least wealthy people?”

“Wow, we better keep those 400 here!”

“What do you mean?”

“Those 400 richest people must really create a lot of jobs.”

It’s The Ignorance, Stupid

2011-07-12T13:43:00.002-06:00

Here is one for you: How uninformed can people be allowed to be in a free society? How misguided? How ignorant? How stupid? Before you knee-jerk the answer that people have the right to be as uninformed as they wish, listen up:

There are many places where ignorance is not allowed. Just try to play sandlot football with 17 to 23 year olds in Jacksboro, Texas without a reasonable grasp of the game! Or try going fishing on a group charter and fail to learn or otherwise ignore the rules of etiquette. Go to a sports bar and, while watching a basketball game, loudly proclaim that a player should be put in the penalty box for moving before the snap.

Are the sailors on a submarine allowed to be ignorant of functions in their areas of responsibility? Imagine being on a shooting range with someone who knows and cares nothing about gun safety. Is it OK to put rat poison next to the condiments in a restaurant? Is it OK to lie about the bridge being out just around the blind curve?

This is not a solutions essay; it is about hair-pulling, screaming, fit-having exasperation. Really, just how stupid can people be allowed to be, and its corollary, how much dishonesty (an important ingredient in ‘stupid soup’) can be mixed with ‘free speech’ before it kills you?

I know that this opens a can of worms, even invites whole new species of worms that have never been captured and put in cans. But as I said this essay is not about solutions; it is about anger and fear.

A specific example, the one that got my blood up: I often read the writings of climate change deniers, supply side economists and general purveyors of the so-called conservative set of mind; they are, while not the primary source of our troubles, the main proponents of our staying in trouble.

I recently ran across a thing called, “There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998”, written by a smarmy character named Bob Carter. Now, I have no serious problem with smarmy or sarcasm (actually I do), but the ignorance or dishonesty, most likely a combination of both, is intolerable: he cannot play on my team, must leave the sports bar and is not to be allowed in the kitchen. I can’t think of another way to deal with this.

I went to the original Temperature Anomalies data and ran the numbers. Mr. Carter was simply wrong, intentionally or otherwise wrong. The data clearly show that global temperature has risen approximately .2º C every 10 years since 1980. Carter’s piece was written in 2006, but one still hears the same arguments on rightwing radio every day (if you listen everyday). There are a number of sources for the summarized data and they are the same as the averages that I calculated from the anomaly raw data.

More than that, the data show a trend of increasing rates of global average temperature increase in both atmospheric and ocean temperature over the whole range of time that reasonably accurate global records have be collected, from 1880 to the present.

This is not a ‘he said, she said’ argument. Usually when the media report a “disagreement” on such issues the matter is left with: ‘Mr. Keye says that temperatures have increased while Mr. Carter claims that global temperature stopped increasing in 1998 and the climate change supporters have no explanation.’

Here are some of his words, “Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).”

That sounds authoritative, but what was Carter actually ‘drawing on’? 1998 had the greatest deviation to that date from the standard base comparison period (the global temperature averaged for the years 1951 to 1980). The years following 1998 have slightly lower deviations, but still consistently higher than the any of the years before 1998. This comparing of single data points is, well, pointless.

1981-1990	0.193
1991-2000	0.31
2001-2010	0.546

These are the increases that I calculated; global average temperature increases in degrees Celsius from the standard of ‘0’ increase of 1951-1980. The 2001-2010 value has been reported as 0.61 in another source. The average value from 2001 to 2005, data available to Mr. Carter, was 0.45, significantly higher than, 0.38, the average for the previous five years (which included 1998) [1].

Here are the increases over the 1951-1980 zero set point for the 10 hottest years since 1880 up to 2005 (there have been 3 years hotter than 1998 since 2005):

rank	year	º C
1	1998	0.53
2	2005	0.48
3	2002	0.46
4	2003	0.46
5	2004	0.44
6	2001	0.41
7	1997	0.37
8	1990	0.3
9	1995	0.3
10	1999	0.28

It is that the five hottest years on record after 1998 are 2001 to 2005 that Mr. Carter is calling a cooling trend – though to his credit he does point to its insignificance as cooling. It is almost impossible to believe that someone could be so ignorant or even intuitively challenged that he could make such a claim with honesty. But let us not be too critical of Mr. Carter and assume that he is just plain stump stupid and not a dishonest slimeball.

But this is not an essay on global climate change or even on the arguments surrounding it; it is about uninformed, ignorant, stupid and dishonest, and just how much of them we can tolerate in a society that seems to make ignorance a viable personal choice protected by law. The same kinds of arguments and deceptions, based in ignorance, could be drawn from the economy, election malfeasance, political machinations, corporate corruption and more.

I am sick to death (not rhetorical since I am old and am pushed toward death by every new stress!) of the extent of the failure of public understanding for issues that are clearly settled [2]. No one with the capacity to read Mr. Carter’s piece should be accepting of it. They should know enough to, first, suspect its disingenuousness and then be able to test its presentments.

I know, I know, that is asking too much of the average, overly busy, hard working, blah, blah, blah citizen. But that is bullshit. We get what we demand. When I was teaching, mid school, high school, college, it didn’t matter: I got the result that I demanded. I simply refused to accept that any student was incapable of learning what I had to teach and refused to accept even the thought that what I wanted them to learn wasn’t very important for them to know. This was not done 25% of the time and relaxed at other times; it was done 100% of the time in every single interaction – and the students came like puppies to bacon, even the ones that didn’t believe that they could do it, because they could feel that I believe in them and they liked the feeling. It is my experience that people like becoming competent and knowledgeable [3].

This doesn’t mean that people will agree on all things, but it does mean that it is possible for most people to agree on beginning with the same basic facts. Humans are not made to be a stupid animal; our shtick is knowing what is going on.

If you are in a boat with 20 other people, maximum “safe” capacity, anyone claiming that they, and you, are standing on dry land would be considered crazy. They would not be allowed to be part of any decision making process; if, say, some swimmer came to your boat and asked for a place on board, the ‘dry lander’ argument that there was plenty of room would be seen for the insanity that it was. There are times when ignorance and also insanity just aren’t allowed. No matter how the deliberations progressed every one would be expected to begin by acknowledging that they were in a boat at or near capacity.

Should we demand any less of the regular folks around us in our political and economic life? Obviously, all human failing can’t be outlawed, but human communities have always set standards for the responsibilities of individuals. With the withering of community we have been left with no enforceable (by social pressure) codes for what a person needs to know to be an effective participant in society.

No, you may not have your own opinion of the carcinogenic qualities of tobacco smoke, not if you are going to live in a community of others. And no, you can’t decide on what is correct science without addressing the issue in the rules of science just as you may not use a baseball bat in a board game.

And yes, far too many people are painfully ignorant of how to work the most basic skepticism useful for survival, much less the details and facts of our economic and political situation. Of course, it is mostly a matter of ‘garbage in garbage out.’ The vast majority is not willfully uninformed, but they are uninformed and that’s what matters.

It is time to fight back. You can’t expect that others will do what you will not do. Challenge the Bob Carters, they are just hacks being paid to twist the facts into a form that suits a political and economic interest. And don’t let a friend drive (or vote) ignorant, tell them what you know because you have done the work to know something worth telling. Even be in their face if necessary, and ready for the consequences.

Ignorant and stupid must be made unacceptable; in a pickup game of football or in the making of national decisions that determine the quality of our lives. And I don’t think this needs be parsed too closely, you know, the ‘people defend their attitudes when challenged’ stuff. Just do it, challenge and inform from a position of knowledge. You can’t expect that others will do what you will not do. Repeat yourself if you think it important.

[1] Here is an example from another kind of data collection that will help to make clear Mr. Carter’s disingenuousness. Each year in the spring I start riding my road bike on a timed loop recording each day’s time and average speed. The times get better and better as I get into shape, but they don’t improve evenly from ride to ride. I will always post a time on an especially good day that I will not better for a week, even two. It in no way means that I am not getting faster by not bettering that unusually good time the next time out; my times following that day will be improvements on the average for the precious week and averaged together will show a pattern of consistent change. That is what is happening with the 1998 temperature measurement and Mr. Carter either knows it and is lying or is willfully uninformed, neither of which should be acceptable.

[2] Clearly settled doesn’t mean universally accepted or happy about. It is clearly settled that leopards will attack children let to wander from the village. People in the village can argue about it all day long without changing the behavior of leopards. We see this with the climate change “arguments”; the military, insurance and other affected institutions are all making plans for global warming and other consequences even as they are often the supporters of climate change deniers.

[3] I realize that not accepting lack of capacity and disinterest is, even if effective as a teaching tool, a rigid position and that I am arguing against rigidity in favor of a fluidity in understanding, adapting to realities. It is, however, also an empirical position based on the reality of student success in overcoming self-generated inhibitions to learning – they just needed to be believed in. Of course, it didn’t work with everyone, but it worked better than anything else.

It Is Really Pretty Simple

2011-07-09T13:06:00.005-06:00

For all the complexities that we face in this crazy world, there are still general patterns of simplicity that can be discovered. There are many examples, but these two give the flavor:

•The millions of substances of the universe are combined from the 90 or so natural elements by quite simple rules systematized for clarity in the Periodic Table of Elements.

•Millions of extant and billions of previous species of living things are, or were, organized into integrated systems of interaction called ecosystems, and all by the very simple and easily comprehended principles of natural selection functioning through the DNA/protein information nexus.

But what about the political and economic confusion that we presently endure, to which we respond in an ad hoc process that seems to carry us deeper and deeper into trouble and uncertainty? Might there be an understandable organizing principle, a comprehensible simplicity that, while it may not give us the tools of control, could help us avoid the gravest dangers? I think there is, though it is not so simple as the theories of electron structure and evolution.

Comprehending the overall simplicity our human muddle can come from understanding that every species has characteristic behaviors, often as, or more, defining of the species as physical characteristics. Therefore humans have an expected behavioral set. Secondly, the behavioral characteristics of a species are evolved to a defined environment. Therefore humans have expected conditions of environment to which and in which their behavioral set is evolved. And thirdly, organisms living in environments to which they are not evolved either die outright or adapt their evolved behaviors in ways that almost always are destructive of both the species and the environment. Therefore humans, by creating their own ‘environments,’ are adapting a behavioral set evolved to the environments of their origin in ways destructive of themselves and the earth.

This is really pretty simple. What makes the application of such simplicity very very complicated is the aberrant behavior that forms as adaptive product from evolved behaviors in inappropriate environments; there are no real limits to the variety of such adaptive behaviors, these are behaviors that arise without orderly underlying principles. Sociology and psychology find patterns, correlations, but no satisfying unifying principles. Freud tried. Skinner tried. Maslow tried. Others tried. But they were attempting to organize aberrant behavior into coherent species-consistent principles. This would be like trying to find the underlying principles that generate baseball, poker, field hockey, chess, clue, chicken, marbles, war, ‘cowboys and Indians’, etc. Wittgenstein tries to explain this one: we “know” that there are combining qualities, just not what they are.

In a perverse symmetry, the more complex the understanding required the more numbingly empty the attempts to understand. So that today’s thousand generations of efforts and distortions are reduced to “God is in his Heaven” and “greed is good.” We must do better.

Often a metaphor helps: Imagine a regulation pool table with 16 balls on it. With sufficient accuracy of measurement, the behavior of the balls could be well described through many changes. If the size of the table were to be increased to that of a basketball court with the number of balls corresponding, detailed description becomes more difficult, but only by the addition of the number of interactions; each interaction remains in the strict service of the laws of motion. Nothing is changed by moving to a ‘table’ the size of a city, a small nation or a continent.

But what if somehow the balls contained a ‘memory’ of the regular sized pool table, if table size and ball number were important in developing the orderly response to the laws of motion, and that the ‘memory’ influenced the way that the balls performed the motion laws – with great accuracy on the regulation table, but less and less so as the table grew larger and larger. On the basketball court sized table the balls began to ‘forget’ how to exchange momentum, began to vary the elasticity of collisions and vector collisions developed subtle confusions of angle. These affects increased with increasing ‘table’ size until regions of the ‘table’ functioned by regional pragmatically adopted rules of motion attempting to give order to less and less well ordered interactions. The ‘memory’ was sufficient to realize that there was something to remember, just not what it was.

In such a situation there could be only one form of solution; to recreate the essential cues of the regulation size table. The most obvious way would be to cut the huge tables down to “natural” size, but there would be other ways also. Balls could spend a certain amount of time on regulation tables, return to the big tables with the restored ‘memories’ for a time until they began to forget how to perform the physical laws again. The big tables could be sufficiently demarcated into regulation sized areas that most of the balls most of the time retained reasonable behavior.

It is possible that some balls, once having lost the capacity for exact correspondence with the physical laws of motion, might never recover; they would need to be kept away from the others on the table since orderly interactions would always be disrupted by them. They would be easily identified on a regulation-sized table, but not necessarily recognized at all on a huge one.

If the metaphor is appropriate, then we need to define the size and nature of our human informing space. It is becoming clear that our present expanded world will not give up its secrets of order – because it has no secrets of order. I believe that we must begin by looking at the Paleolithic and prePaleolithic forms of human organization and at the patterns of behavior that are found in those primates most like us. If that informing space can be reasonably guessed at and tested for its consequences, an option to our madness is possible.

This, of course, has already been done and for thousands of years. Looked at in terms of the metaphor above it can be imagined that some balls, by chance, would find themselves in appropriate spaces and regain the capacities for “normal” function; then try to ‘report’ (interact by the rules) this to others. But the telling of ordering and purpose is not feeling it and only the feeling of it is informing; the telling is just another story among a thousand stories.

This is so important that I am going to, perhaps, over explain. If you are confident that the meaning and application of the metaphor are clear to you, then just skip to the end.

What are the parts of this metaphor in the natural and unnatural history of our species? We are, of course, the balls and are generally of common form and function. Humans are formed by the same biological process of development as every other living thing: a set of instructions stored in the form of a DNA/protein structure. But, and this is vital, no information that is stable and readily available from other sources will be stored as the DNA/protein instructions, but will be ‘stored’ in the stable and consistent surrounding conditions. In terms of the metaphor, there is no reason for the memory of the balls to include the dimensions of the table if tables were always of regulation size; however, the information for properly relating to physical laws would require the regulation sized table to be properly expressed. The table is the environment in which our form and function are expressed.

When we make large and self-generating changes in the environment, we remake and remove the essential conditions for the development and expression of our specieshood. And so, our relationship to the very conditions that inform and allow life to exist begins to fail.

There is no way to recover our true understanding or integrating behaviors by “understanding” our present functioning. Only by having a sense of specieshood can a perspective be had and maintained that will guide the Many toward the behaviors of organized demand and sacrifice that can restabilise both our material and behavioral relationships with the planetary surface.

The first and most important step is to localize power. The consequent distortions of national and international power relations cannot be incorporated into any meaningful action for the recovery of either environmental stability or psychological health. A new book, A Perfect Moral Storm, by Stephen M. Gardiner (Philosopher, Univ. of Washington) purports to struggle with these very issues.

Somehow a significant number of us must discover ways of ‘returning to our roots.’ You see, we have known this all along! The ‘easy way’, like taking up the plow and raising chickens, however, will not do for enough people to make a difference beyond those that actually raise the chickens.

We have overshot too far for the landing to be soft. But that doesn’t mean that we must despair as the only or even first emotion. There are ways to discover how to live the life the human animal was born to; given the press of the future perhaps some of us had best get to it. It is only in the act of real self-preservation, as a functioning member of the human species, that there can be a future for our species and for many others.

Such a way of life sees the present Randian capitalist/fascist thinking for the insanity that it is. Being fully human is a community based life, meditative and active. And today it must be scientific – not supplicant to the science establishment – in respect for the processes of skepticism and discovery.

A species values, that is, evolves its behaviors and material actions for, its young above all else; even a digger wasp has a longer functional ‘sense’ of generations than modern human institutions. The most difficult concepts to put into action in the present economic environment (a very big pool table), concepts of present restraint in support of generational fecundity, are natural to communities of affection and responsibility (the regulation table).

It is really pretty simple after all. We can understand and we can decide for ourselves to make the effort to become sane and retain sanity. Build and find community. Seek the clues and guides to living as a human, what I call specieshood. And if there are enough of us, we might even become the barbarians at the gates of the Mad Empire.