Profile in NYTimes magazine of Shai Agassi, an Israeli/American entrepreneur, interesting for a few things.
Agassi, by the way, started a software company that was bought by SAP when he was 30. For 400 million dollars. He was also being groomed for the CEO position, but he resigned to do this.
For the skeptics, the solution to "range-anxiety" and charging times for batteries is at the bottom of the post.
1-"Conscious Capitalism."
'The only way to get consumers to use electric cars, Agassi realized, was to solve the problem of refueling. That meant, to begin with, that some entrepreneur would have to build networks of recharging spots, going country by country. As he crunched the numbers, what really struck Agassi was how lucrative a business like this could be. Powering a car by electricity — even relatively expensive “clean” energy like wind or solar — costs far less than powering it by gasoline. The Tesla all-electric sedan, for example, uses about 1 cent of electricity per mile. A comparable gasoline car uses 16 cents of gasoline per mile. And with the United States market for automobile gas at roughly $275 billion, Agassi figured that a company controlling a world network of charging stations would become so profitable so quickly that it could subsidize its customers’ electric cars, much the way mobile companies give out free phones to people who sign two-year contracts. The electric-car business, in fact, could function like the mobile-phone industry: you could pay, say, $10 for 1,000 miles, $20 for 3,000 miles, or perhaps a few hundred a month for unlimited driving.'
'“If I can give you miles in a more convenient, cheaper way than gasoline, you will take them,” Agassi says. “If your neighbor is driving an electric car and paying me only $30 a week for the electricity, you’re going to buy an electric car, too. If I do it without killing your kids and the planet, then it won’t even matter if it’s cheaper or not; you will just do it.”'
Captitalism isn't changing, it's just meeting some new people. It has always made sense to do things cheaper, that's the essence of the market, efficiency. Concious capitalism comes with the exponentially increasing ease of access and transmission of information; a growing "senstitive" consciousness plugged into global information and concerned about poverty, the environment, human suffering, and with an expanded identity including life in general as well as other groups of humans and a sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of one's self and world; along with the decreasing ease of access/ efficiency and political problems associated with energy use, all added to the existing structures of markets. The tools are the same, the people using them different, more plugged in. As with the cars above, it doesn't work if it doesn't make any money. While this, just a few years ago, would have seemed absolutely contradictory, and even today is only beginning to earnestly emerge, you can make money and save the world at the same time.
'Agassi regards the various gasoline-based “range extenders” in electric cars with undisguised contempt. Indeed, he regards cars that rely on any oil at all with a certain amount of derision — not merely because they cause greenhouse gases, but because from his perspective, oil simply isn’t a very efficient way to store energy. To Agassi, it is enormously wasteful both in terms of physics and of economics. Far better to simply trap the sun’s energy with solar arrays — or wind, which is generated by the uneven heating of the earth by the sun — and put it directly into a car’s batteries.'
This brings us to the second interesting point:
2- "Sustainable means Efficiency."
The history of civilization is based much on how expensive and efficient fuel is. From wood, which had to be gathered by many people or chopped down, to sunlight, which can be converted into electricity at an extreme opposite of human labor per joule, freeing other people to do much more of what they'd like. This is also one reason farming, which is labor intensive, relies so heavily on cheap gas, and also why you see great shifts in the dynamics of a society, especially the relative levels of poor, middle or merchant class, and rich, when there are agricultural revolutions. If we can produce entirely renewable, clean energy we may just be able to actually get the whole world to a decent standard of living, cleaning up our water and air as we go, not as opposed to making a profit, but while making a gigantic one. That's the connection that's been missing. Money is abstract value. The more efficient an enterprise is, the more value they can produce and the less they have to waste on production. If you think of the entire human race as one enterprise, then the connection between energy efficiency and total output becomes clear. With clean energy, we'll be able to make more value than we ever have before, and, just as cotton was once a luxury for want of the massive amounts of labor needed to put into its production, so one day not too far away (the market works quickly) may we be able to forget the days when decent food, a clean change of clothes, and a comfortable house were dreams for huge portions of humanity.
Of course, Agassi's firm itself may not succeed (though if you read the whole article you'll see that they have all the right ingredients) but there are hundreds if not thousands of companies out there trying to be the next big thing in cars, and whichever one gets there first is going to succeed, because it makes economic sense. Here's Agassi's biggest idea:
'...Agassi realized he needed one more breakthrough: some way to rapidly charge a vehicle. No drivers, he knew, will tolerate a two-hour wait to recharge when they’re on a 500-mile haul. Then one day, he and an automotive engineer were chewing over an impractical method for quickly replenishing batteries. The engineer wondered aloud: Wouldn’t the fastest way to charge an electric car be to simply replace the battery?
It was, Agassi says, his “aha” moment. The auto industry’s conceptual error, he says, is in regarding the battery as a built-in component of the car, like a gas tank. Instead, you could think of the battery as more analogous to gas itself — an entity that goes in and out of a car as needed, owned not by the driver but by the company that sells you the fuel. Think of the problem that way, Agassi realized, and the recharging company could refill its customers’ cars using battery technology and the existing electric grid without making any radical new technological innovations. The solution to electric cars lay not in re-engineering the battery but in re-engineering the car.'
Showing posts with label Environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Environment. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
And over the horizon?
Transitions?
An article in the Times magazine about a group trying to organize sustainable communities for what they believe will be an awesome and coming crash of our civilization. It's more interesting as a look at where we are now than as where we may be twenty years in the future.
The thrust of the movement:
'“Sustainability,” Hopkins recently told me, “is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society.” But that assumes our industrial society will keep running. By contrast, Hopkins said, Transition is about “building resiliency” — putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely.'
'For a generation, the environmental movement has told us to change our lifestyles to avoid catastrophic consequences. Transition tells us those consequences are now irreversibly switching on; we need to revolutionize our lives if we want to survive.'
'It was all surprisingly easy to imagine. Lately, an apocalyptic bile has been collecting in the back of America’s throat. Our era has been defined by skyrocketing line graphs, and it’s easy to wonder if we have finally pushed something just a little too far and are now watching everything start to teeter over. Maybe it’s not our dependence on oil, but the carbon we have plugged up the atmosphere with. Or global population. Or credit derivatives. We’re all starting to career down the other side of that hill — which hill, specifically, is up to you. But it’s the shadowy side, and none of us can see the bottom.'
What makes this different from any other apocalyptic movement? Its dovetail with conscious capitalism and rising Level 6 sensibilities in the mainstream.
'...most people in Sandpoint presumably hadn’t heard anything about Transition. But the ones who had often found a way to interpret the movement as extensions of their own visions. Having watched second- and third-home owners, retirees and tourists rush into Sandpoint, many latched on to Transition’s vague promise of building a better, quainter community. A minister told me she was glad that Transition wasn’t “a greenie, hippie, far-out thing.” But Michael Boge, the City Council president, seemed to complain of exactly that, telling me he didn’t understand why the group had to cheapen a good idea by “inventing a new word for it and wrapping themselves in that catchphrase.” (The new word Boge objected to wasn’t “Transition”; it was “sustainability.”) Still, Boge, who owns five drive-in restaurants and is active in a long-distance motorcycling club called the Iron Butt Association, told me that he felt allied with Transition’s ideals. “I’ve bitched about this to my friends for years: we need to make a concerted effort to get off fossil fuels,” he said. “And I truly believe that with the country and God behind us, we can do it.” Transition was a prism, offering a slightly different view of Sandpoint depending on how each person turned it, but always shooting out lots of rainbows.'
As noted above, though, this is does not exactly appear to be an integral movement, but more of a snapshot of what's emerging from (more and more) mainstream 6s.
For example, in response to a woman asking if they couldn't just make a rule to cremate everybody:'“Well,” Millard said, “it takes a lot of energy to cremate people. Besides, now we’re getting into rules.”' Straight-up 6.
There's more in this to believe that this is more of a reaction against the evils of modernity than an actual constructive growth into the future:
'Millard’s sketch happened to look a lot like the master plan of Fourierism, one of the most popular secular utopian movements in American history. In the early 1800s, Charles Fourier, a Frenchman, proposed, in a series of jargon-filled writings, a self-sufficient community model called a “phalanx.” A central estate or “phalanstery” would be surrounded by tradesmen’s workshops, cultural institutions and farmland. Fourier was horrified by what he saw at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. His fears may sound familiar: that dishonest lending and capitalism in general would lead to the enslavement of humans by big companies; “industrial feudalism,” he called it. And, not unlike Transition, he aimed to overhaul society one phalanx at a time. Fourier claimed to have reduced all possible human personalities to a number of essential types. From there, it was simple math. He calculated that if precisely 1,620 men, women and children were collected in a 6,000-acre phalanx, they would — all by merrily following their individual passions — end up satisfying all the phalanx’s essential needs. “The new amorous world,” he wrote, would rise out of “the new industrial world” by the force of “passional attraction.”
Transition insists that initiatives be completely bottom-up organizations. There’s no central oversight, and the movement is expected to evolve slightly differently wherever it springs up. The trajectory of each initiative shouldn’t be controlled too tightly even by its local leaders; Step 11 in the handbook is really more of a mantra: “Let it go where it wants to go.” Like a Fourierian phalanx, a Transition Town should be the product of the passions of its residents — all of its residents, equally. Unlike Fourierism, though, Transition doesn’t claim its method is mathematically guaranteed to succeed. It simply posits that our best hope is to “unleash the collective genius of the community” and hope all the right pieces spill out. “We truly don’t know if this will work,” Rob Hopkins asserts in a mission-statement-like document called the “Cheerful Disclaimer!”'
There's even the sense that the founders of the group want this to happen, which makes sense. Because society today has so recklessly shit in the salad bowl, it's all going to come crashing down, taking everything despicable with it. This is not to say that anyone is consciously aware of this, but 'Transition’s message is twofold: first, that a dire global emergency demands we transform our society; and second, that we might actually enjoy making those changes.' Why in the world would we enjoy this? because humans naturally should enjoy living in this sort of world, so tossing off all of the old barriers to natural humanity would make us all really happy.
Another hallmark of first-tier thinking here is that there's no conception that when things get tough resources-wise, things are going to get rough violence-wise. There's no thought about level 3s coming in to take over whatever sustainable resources a place like this has created; the overall vision is just of people coming together and living peacefully in sustainable communities because that's the way people naturally are. This narrow, if innocently-optimistic-and-lovely-in-its-own-way view of human nature is a call sign of the green 6s. It isn't, however, how everybody is approaching the project: '“Some people on the food group want to feel good,” he told me, “and some people want to figure out how to feed 40,000 people in case the trucks stop rolling.”
Michael Brownlee, the keynote speaker from Boulder, sat silently in his chair during the charter-school meeting. That night, he told me that the unflinching cheeriness of everyone involved made him optimistic. But he also worried that people didn’t yet understand that “just because you’re passionate about a particular issue like transportation or water or local food doesn’t mean that you have the skills to do the research, analysis or planning around that issue.” He later added, “If I knew how to convey how serious, how urgent the situation is without sending people into fear and helplessness, it would take a great burden off of me.”'
All in all, though, despite the limits of level 6, there are quite a few important contributions being made here. After all, we only have one planet:
'Now, maybe because our various crises have escalated, or because it costs so much to disappear into your own parcel of wilderness, opting out no longer feels like a possibility. One of Transition’s more oblique arguments may be that we can’t escape anymore. We have to work together to remake the places where we already live.
Lanphear told me, “As long as we get the work going in the right direction, it doesn’t matter who gets the glory or the credit.” Richard Kühnel chose to see it in an even more positive light. He told me, “I feel whoever wants to participate and whose ideas are aligned with ours, that’s who the Sandpoint Transition Initiative is” — whether those people know it or not.
What Reuter said he felt was wonderful about the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was how quickly it was rejuvenating people’s faith that the changes they craved were worth working for. “To say the group has only created a community garden so far really isn’t sufficient,” he told me. “It’s something really more substantive: they’re bringing people to the process.” It was easy to argue that at the initiative’s core, in place of any clearly defined philosophy or strategy, was only a puff of enthusiasm. But Reuter seemed to argue that enthusiasm is an actual asset, a resource our society is already suffering a scarcity of. “There’s just something happening here that’s reviving people’s civic sense of possibility,” he later said. “Politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ right? I think what the Transition Initiative is doing is expanding what’s possible in people’s minds. It is expanding people’s ability to dream bold. And that’s what we need to do: dream bold. Because people have been limited by their own imaginations.”'
An article in the Times magazine about a group trying to organize sustainable communities for what they believe will be an awesome and coming crash of our civilization. It's more interesting as a look at where we are now than as where we may be twenty years in the future.
The thrust of the movement:
'“Sustainability,” Hopkins recently told me, “is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society.” But that assumes our industrial society will keep running. By contrast, Hopkins said, Transition is about “building resiliency” — putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely.'
'For a generation, the environmental movement has told us to change our lifestyles to avoid catastrophic consequences. Transition tells us those consequences are now irreversibly switching on; we need to revolutionize our lives if we want to survive.'
'It was all surprisingly easy to imagine. Lately, an apocalyptic bile has been collecting in the back of America’s throat. Our era has been defined by skyrocketing line graphs, and it’s easy to wonder if we have finally pushed something just a little too far and are now watching everything start to teeter over. Maybe it’s not our dependence on oil, but the carbon we have plugged up the atmosphere with. Or global population. Or credit derivatives. We’re all starting to career down the other side of that hill — which hill, specifically, is up to you. But it’s the shadowy side, and none of us can see the bottom.'
What makes this different from any other apocalyptic movement? Its dovetail with conscious capitalism and rising Level 6 sensibilities in the mainstream.
'...most people in Sandpoint presumably hadn’t heard anything about Transition. But the ones who had often found a way to interpret the movement as extensions of their own visions. Having watched second- and third-home owners, retirees and tourists rush into Sandpoint, many latched on to Transition’s vague promise of building a better, quainter community. A minister told me she was glad that Transition wasn’t “a greenie, hippie, far-out thing.” But Michael Boge, the City Council president, seemed to complain of exactly that, telling me he didn’t understand why the group had to cheapen a good idea by “inventing a new word for it and wrapping themselves in that catchphrase.” (The new word Boge objected to wasn’t “Transition”; it was “sustainability.”) Still, Boge, who owns five drive-in restaurants and is active in a long-distance motorcycling club called the Iron Butt Association, told me that he felt allied with Transition’s ideals. “I’ve bitched about this to my friends for years: we need to make a concerted effort to get off fossil fuels,” he said. “And I truly believe that with the country and God behind us, we can do it.” Transition was a prism, offering a slightly different view of Sandpoint depending on how each person turned it, but always shooting out lots of rainbows.'
As noted above, though, this is does not exactly appear to be an integral movement, but more of a snapshot of what's emerging from (more and more) mainstream 6s.
For example, in response to a woman asking if they couldn't just make a rule to cremate everybody:'“Well,” Millard said, “it takes a lot of energy to cremate people. Besides, now we’re getting into rules.”' Straight-up 6.
There's more in this to believe that this is more of a reaction against the evils of modernity than an actual constructive growth into the future:
'Millard’s sketch happened to look a lot like the master plan of Fourierism, one of the most popular secular utopian movements in American history. In the early 1800s, Charles Fourier, a Frenchman, proposed, in a series of jargon-filled writings, a self-sufficient community model called a “phalanx.” A central estate or “phalanstery” would be surrounded by tradesmen’s workshops, cultural institutions and farmland. Fourier was horrified by what he saw at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. His fears may sound familiar: that dishonest lending and capitalism in general would lead to the enslavement of humans by big companies; “industrial feudalism,” he called it. And, not unlike Transition, he aimed to overhaul society one phalanx at a time. Fourier claimed to have reduced all possible human personalities to a number of essential types. From there, it was simple math. He calculated that if precisely 1,620 men, women and children were collected in a 6,000-acre phalanx, they would — all by merrily following their individual passions — end up satisfying all the phalanx’s essential needs. “The new amorous world,” he wrote, would rise out of “the new industrial world” by the force of “passional attraction.”
Transition insists that initiatives be completely bottom-up organizations. There’s no central oversight, and the movement is expected to evolve slightly differently wherever it springs up. The trajectory of each initiative shouldn’t be controlled too tightly even by its local leaders; Step 11 in the handbook is really more of a mantra: “Let it go where it wants to go.” Like a Fourierian phalanx, a Transition Town should be the product of the passions of its residents — all of its residents, equally. Unlike Fourierism, though, Transition doesn’t claim its method is mathematically guaranteed to succeed. It simply posits that our best hope is to “unleash the collective genius of the community” and hope all the right pieces spill out. “We truly don’t know if this will work,” Rob Hopkins asserts in a mission-statement-like document called the “Cheerful Disclaimer!”'
There's even the sense that the founders of the group want this to happen, which makes sense. Because society today has so recklessly shit in the salad bowl, it's all going to come crashing down, taking everything despicable with it. This is not to say that anyone is consciously aware of this, but 'Transition’s message is twofold: first, that a dire global emergency demands we transform our society; and second, that we might actually enjoy making those changes.' Why in the world would we enjoy this? because humans naturally should enjoy living in this sort of world, so tossing off all of the old barriers to natural humanity would make us all really happy.
Another hallmark of first-tier thinking here is that there's no conception that when things get tough resources-wise, things are going to get rough violence-wise. There's no thought about level 3s coming in to take over whatever sustainable resources a place like this has created; the overall vision is just of people coming together and living peacefully in sustainable communities because that's the way people naturally are. This narrow, if innocently-optimistic-and-lovely-in-its-own-way view of human nature is a call sign of the green 6s. It isn't, however, how everybody is approaching the project: '“Some people on the food group want to feel good,” he told me, “and some people want to figure out how to feed 40,000 people in case the trucks stop rolling.”
Michael Brownlee, the keynote speaker from Boulder, sat silently in his chair during the charter-school meeting. That night, he told me that the unflinching cheeriness of everyone involved made him optimistic. But he also worried that people didn’t yet understand that “just because you’re passionate about a particular issue like transportation or water or local food doesn’t mean that you have the skills to do the research, analysis or planning around that issue.” He later added, “If I knew how to convey how serious, how urgent the situation is without sending people into fear and helplessness, it would take a great burden off of me.”'
All in all, though, despite the limits of level 6, there are quite a few important contributions being made here. After all, we only have one planet:
'Now, maybe because our various crises have escalated, or because it costs so much to disappear into your own parcel of wilderness, opting out no longer feels like a possibility. One of Transition’s more oblique arguments may be that we can’t escape anymore. We have to work together to remake the places where we already live.
Lanphear told me, “As long as we get the work going in the right direction, it doesn’t matter who gets the glory or the credit.” Richard Kühnel chose to see it in an even more positive light. He told me, “I feel whoever wants to participate and whose ideas are aligned with ours, that’s who the Sandpoint Transition Initiative is” — whether those people know it or not.
What Reuter said he felt was wonderful about the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was how quickly it was rejuvenating people’s faith that the changes they craved were worth working for. “To say the group has only created a community garden so far really isn’t sufficient,” he told me. “It’s something really more substantive: they’re bringing people to the process.” It was easy to argue that at the initiative’s core, in place of any clearly defined philosophy or strategy, was only a puff of enthusiasm. But Reuter seemed to argue that enthusiasm is an actual asset, a resource our society is already suffering a scarcity of. “There’s just something happening here that’s reviving people’s civic sense of possibility,” he later said. “Politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ right? I think what the Transition Initiative is doing is expanding what’s possible in people’s minds. It is expanding people’s ability to dream bold. And that’s what we need to do: dream bold. Because people have been limited by their own imaginations.”'
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Why Isn't the Brain Green? / HAPPY EARTH DAY!/ The Emerging Integral World
(a short apology to those of you who are not familiar with Integral Theory. I try to use as little jargon as possible, but sometimes it doesn't work. I will be putting up posts soon for cross-reference of technical terms.)
Why isn't the brain green?
An article in the New York Times.
The short answer is that while we all have the capacity for global-level concern, most people have not developed to this capacity. Humans 20,000 years ago had no need to think globally, and so biologically there's nothing that would make a human "green." Even asking the question is a little odd; why in the world would we have developed a concern for the environment millennia before we had invented/discovered the concept? Embedded in the question is the assumption that being green is a good thing for the brain absolutely, as if somehow the brain ought to be green, but this is like saying that a bacterium ought to be concerned about the health of the human host. Humans aren't bacteria on the world, of course; it is a comparison of scale, and the difference between the two, that humans have the ability to understand their reality mentally and alter their behavior based on it, is important. Human evolution is primarily taking place not biologically, but conceptually or memetically, or if you insist, mentally, though the last word is not quite precise enough. The brain isn't green because it's not a biological necessity. "Greenness" is something that becomes necessary only when the human organism is acting on a global level. Fortunately, unlike bacteria, we might be able to stop ourselves from being so biologically/physically successful that we destroy the conditions permitting our own physical existence.
And to the article, which has a number of interesting points:
Firstly, nobody seems to care about the environment this year.
'At the top of the list [naming American citizens most pressing worries] were several concerns — jobs and the economy — related to the current recession. Farther down, well after terrorism, deficit reduction and energy (and even something the pollsters characterized as “moral decline”) was climate change. It was priority No. 20. That was last place.'
Something in this is reminiscent of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. You can't be worried about something largely intangible (at this point, at least) if you don't have a job or a house or food to eat, and so in a recession, there's no climate change. The article glosses over this without mentioning this hierarchic (holarchic) aspect. 'Weber’s research seems to help establish that we have a “finite pool of worry,” which means we’re unable to maintain our fear of climate change when a different problem — a plunging stock market, a personal emergency — comes along. We simply move one fear into the worry bin and one fear out." It's not that our pool is finite, though, it's that more pressing physical fears trump the abstract ones, or, SDi level one problems (not having food, say) trump any problems at the higher levels. If you're so hungry you're digging through rancid garbage heaps you're probably not too concerned about expressing the unique snowflake of yourself through romantic photos of the rain.
Of course, much of the impetus of the article is that Climate Change, far from being something abstract and in the future, is coming to a neighborhood near you. Until it does, for most people, it's just not a real problem; that is, "Climate Change" will never be a problem, higher food prices from desertification of agricultural land will be a problem, and even more directly, having less money from spending more on food will be the problem. The higher up the spiral you are, (the higher your cognitive/memetic level) the more real the problem is to you, which is to say no problem is ever abstract. No matter how you try and make the problem seem a problem, without direct apprehension of a problem, there simply isn't one. The article describes this in the following way:
'There are some unfortunate implications here. In analytical mode, we are not always adept at long-term thinking; experiments have shown a frequent dislike for delayed benefits, so we undervalue promised future outcomes. (Given a choice, we usually take $10 now as opposed to, say, $20 two years from now.) Environmentally speaking, this means we are far less likely to make lifestyle changes in order to ensure a safer future climate. Letting emotions determine how we assess risk presents its own problems. Almost certainly, we underestimate the danger of rising sea levels or epic droughts or other events that we’ve never experienced and seem far away in time and place.'
The problem isn't real for most people. Even if they can cognate it, or, say, have an emotional reaction to the idea of their children growing up Mad Max, unless it holds their attention it'll be gone soon, as they fall back into their operative consciousness.
'And even if we could remain persistently concerned about a warmer world? Weber described what she calls a “single-action bias.” Prompted by a distressing emotional signal, we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate — a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor. And that leaves us where we started.'
The "we" in this article used over and over again is intended as "us humans," but I'd propose that it actually shifts back and forth, mostly covering 5th-level rational operating humans, people at around the same basic level as the NYTimes itself, no coincidence. Articles like this could be taken as evidence of the push of a large number of the "East-Coast rational-liberal" demographic, again, NYTimes readers, into the 6th level memes, or at the least as a record of the struggle moving between 5 and 6. The single-action bias noted above is seen when somebody is trying to make a change in their life, and brings us back to the question of the article, "Why isn't the Brain Green?" "We" want it to be, so "we" do a few things to pull us in the direction, though obviously the "we" hasn't fully arrived there yet. One practices and practices and practices behavior one knows is beneficial, and, with persistence, can eventually make that behavior part of their daily consciousness. One tries and tries and tries again over a number of years to eat more healthily, and eventually five years down the road, even if one hasn't reached their original ideal, not only eats more healthily, but does it naturally, without thinking or struggling, enjoying it. This is the process the above is chronicling: people's actions as they try to do something they think is better than what they are but don't yet own it. There are plenty of people who live every decision in their lives with a full environmental consciousness. They just aren't the mainstream.
Interestingly, the title of the article itself relies on an "Overdrive 5" mentality that we are the brain, that all behavior originates in the brain. Of course, had the title been, "why isn't the mind green?" the answer would have been, "because some people's mind's aren't." In either case, "greenness" is something learned/ grown into, it is not a given, except as a potential.
So what do we do as integrals if we don't want the world to warm into hell?
Most often, people think of the problems as technical. But, as climate change is being caused by people's behavior, so must human behavior be the basis for combating it. As logical as that seems, 'the notion that vital environmental solutions will be attained through social-science research — instead of improved climate models or innovative technologies — is an aggressively insurgent view.'
So, what changes are we talking about? Obviously, the more people at a level 6 or higher in the world, the more likely that, naturally, things will be handled in a more environmentally-sustainable way. Equally as obvious: we're not going to get there any day soon. Interestingly, the article takes a rather integral framework for dealing with this problem.
'If you don’t think or feel there’s a risk, why change your behavior? In response, researchers like Leiserowitz have investigated messages that could captivate all different kinds of audiences. Reaching a predominantly evangelical or conservative audience, Leiserowitz told me, could perhaps be achieved by honing a message of “moral Christian values,” an appeal possibly based on the divine instruction in Genesis 2:15 to tend and till the garden.'
To deal with the problem integrally, we need to give incentives to every level of development to create a sustainable (not merely environmentally so) sound community. For 5s, the emphasis can be on the business opportunities of conscious capitalism. As mentioned above, religious 4s could be persuaded that it is God's desire that they take care of the Earth.
This goes back to the beginning and the list of people's priorities of concern: there is no singular problem, there are many manifestations of one problem, and they need to be dealt with as one problem with many heads. Integrally tackling Climate Change means improving our economies and the stability of our societies, it means dealing with energy, and terrorism by helping to cultivate healthy societies in other parts of the world, it even means re-instilling and fostering a sense of moral community, though it would likely look a little different than the ideal of those who answered the above survey with "moral decline," even if grounded by the same basic sentiment.
The author of the article is a little skeptical about this at first, saying that some of these practices being researched (what the main content of the article is) seem to manipulate the natural decision making process, but comes to the conclusion that there is really no natural decision making process; one cannot make a decision in an absolute vacuum. I'd add that the "nudges" the author talks about are done by every society that has ever existed; it's called "acculturation." The difference here is that we are becoming conscious of this, and of how to manipulate this, which most of the best leaders were likely quasi-aware of in any case. One of the biggest factors, the article mentions, is whether decisions are made individually, or in a group.
'The subjects in half of the 50 test groups would first make their decisions individually and then as a group; the other half would make group decisions first and individual ones second. Weber and Handgraaf were fairly confident, based on previous work, that the two approaches would produce different results. In Amsterdam, Handgraaf told me, he had already seen that when subjects made decisions as a group first, their conversations were marked far more often by subtle markers of inclusion like “us” and “we.” Weber, for her part, had seen other evidence that groups can be more patient than individuals when considering delayed benefits. “One reason this is interesting is that it’s general practice in any meeting to prepare individually,” Handgraaf said. Or, to put the matter another way: What if the information for decisions, especially environmental ones, is first considered in a group setting before members take it up individually, rather than the other way around? In Weber’s view, this step could conceivably change the decisions made by a corporate board, for example, or a group of homeowners called together for a meeting by a public utility. Weber’s experiments have also looked at how the ordering of choices can create stark differences: considering distant benefits before immediate costs can lead to a different decision than if you consider — as is common — the costs first. Here, then, is a kind of blueprint for achieving collective decisions that are in the world’s best interests'.
The most interesting of these "nudges," as mentioned above, is the group dynamic.
'“We enjoy congregating; we need to know we are part of groups,” Weber said. “It gives us inherent pleasure to do this. And when we are reminded of the fact that we’re part of communities, then the community becomes sort of the decision-making unit. That’s how we make huge sacrifices, like in World War II.”'
As a more concrete example of this type of thinking:
'In 2005 and 2006, Orlove observed how the behavior of the region’s poor farmers could be influenced by whether they listened to crucial rainy-season radio broadcasts in groups or as individuals. Farmers in “community groups,” as Orlove described them to me, engaged in discussions that led to a consensus, and farmers made better use of the forecast. “They might alter their planting date,” he said, “or use a more drought-resistant variety of seed.” Those in the community groups also seemed more satisfied with the steps they took to increase their yields.'
Some of the feel of this is coming from the transition between level 5 memes, which are individualistic, and level 6, which are communitarian, but the thrust of this seems to be integral: everybody makes an individual decision, there are no decisions mandated by the collective, but one's individual decisions are made in the context of an open, fluid, and continual conversation with the community. It is possible to encourage individual thinking and innovation without devolving into groupthink, a staple of an unhealthy manifestation of level 6.
Another interesting quote:
'“Remember when New York tried to enforce its jaywalking laws?[...]You can’t enforce stuff that people don’t believe should be done.”'
This sums up much of the article: unless it's organic, change, and policy to help produce it, doesn't work. Taking a much wider view, all of this is natural, just as the nudging is a natural part of the decision making process. Societies get to a certain point, then they clean themselves up. There's nothing you can do to push that process along artificially. This, however is often taken as a level 5 mantra when confronting environmentalism: business will naturally get cleaner, just leave it alone! That is the thrust of the following Op-Ed from John Tierney, also from the Times: "Use Energy, Get Rich, and Save the Planet!" Of course, the backlash is also natural, that is, the environmental movement itself is natural, not simply some freakish reactionary outgrowth to late stage-capitalism, a point the Tierney Op-Ed doesn't make explicitly.
While this is and has been true, we're not dealing with relative levels of environmental cleanliness between countries, we're dealing with one non-interchangeable world. In the past, a country could clean up after industry became cleaner, because the pollution could be diffused throughout the rest of the planet and eventually eliminated through natural cycles, like plants cleaning air. The scope, now, is bigger. Not only are we (as a planet) making pollution on a much larger scale than one hundred years ago, we are doing it as a whole planet, not individual countries, and the worry is that there will be a point beyond which the life on the planet won't be able to clean it up again, and that this point will be here before the 2060 that Tierney says could well be the end of carbon even without policy pushes. Additionally, when rich counties got richer, they often got cleaner not just from cleaning up industry, but from moving it to other areas of the world. But where do high-polluting factories go when China and India get rich? And then after that?
What die-hard level 5s often miss in the environmental debates is that when a canary dies in a mine, nobody is worried ultimately about the canary. The difference between the canary, and, say, the 400 or so dead zones on the ocean floor, is that we have no choice but to go on living in the mine.
So, there will be a day when everybody up and down the spectrum of humanity feels the environment is, in one way or another, the biggest issue we have to deal with. That's what we're trying to avoid.
'“Increasing personal evidence of global warming and its potentially devastating consequences can be counted on to be an extremely effective teacher and motivator,” she wrote, pointing to how emotional and experiential feelings of risk are superb drivers of action. “Unfortunately, such lessons may arrive too late for corrective action.”'
Why isn't the brain green?
An article in the New York Times.
The short answer is that while we all have the capacity for global-level concern, most people have not developed to this capacity. Humans 20,000 years ago had no need to think globally, and so biologically there's nothing that would make a human "green." Even asking the question is a little odd; why in the world would we have developed a concern for the environment millennia before we had invented/discovered the concept? Embedded in the question is the assumption that being green is a good thing for the brain absolutely, as if somehow the brain ought to be green, but this is like saying that a bacterium ought to be concerned about the health of the human host. Humans aren't bacteria on the world, of course; it is a comparison of scale, and the difference between the two, that humans have the ability to understand their reality mentally and alter their behavior based on it, is important. Human evolution is primarily taking place not biologically, but conceptually or memetically, or if you insist, mentally, though the last word is not quite precise enough. The brain isn't green because it's not a biological necessity. "Greenness" is something that becomes necessary only when the human organism is acting on a global level. Fortunately, unlike bacteria, we might be able to stop ourselves from being so biologically/physically successful that we destroy the conditions permitting our own physical existence.
And to the article, which has a number of interesting points:
Firstly, nobody seems to care about the environment this year.
'At the top of the list [naming American citizens most pressing worries] were several concerns — jobs and the economy — related to the current recession. Farther down, well after terrorism, deficit reduction and energy (and even something the pollsters characterized as “moral decline”) was climate change. It was priority No. 20. That was last place.'
Something in this is reminiscent of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. You can't be worried about something largely intangible (at this point, at least) if you don't have a job or a house or food to eat, and so in a recession, there's no climate change. The article glosses over this without mentioning this hierarchic (holarchic) aspect. 'Weber’s research seems to help establish that we have a “finite pool of worry,” which means we’re unable to maintain our fear of climate change when a different problem — a plunging stock market, a personal emergency — comes along. We simply move one fear into the worry bin and one fear out." It's not that our pool is finite, though, it's that more pressing physical fears trump the abstract ones, or, SDi level one problems (not having food, say) trump any problems at the higher levels. If you're so hungry you're digging through rancid garbage heaps you're probably not too concerned about expressing the unique snowflake of yourself through romantic photos of the rain.
Of course, much of the impetus of the article is that Climate Change, far from being something abstract and in the future, is coming to a neighborhood near you. Until it does, for most people, it's just not a real problem; that is, "Climate Change" will never be a problem, higher food prices from desertification of agricultural land will be a problem, and even more directly, having less money from spending more on food will be the problem. The higher up the spiral you are, (the higher your cognitive/memetic level) the more real the problem is to you, which is to say no problem is ever abstract. No matter how you try and make the problem seem a problem, without direct apprehension of a problem, there simply isn't one. The article describes this in the following way:
'There are some unfortunate implications here. In analytical mode, we are not always adept at long-term thinking; experiments have shown a frequent dislike for delayed benefits, so we undervalue promised future outcomes. (Given a choice, we usually take $10 now as opposed to, say, $20 two years from now.) Environmentally speaking, this means we are far less likely to make lifestyle changes in order to ensure a safer future climate. Letting emotions determine how we assess risk presents its own problems. Almost certainly, we underestimate the danger of rising sea levels or epic droughts or other events that we’ve never experienced and seem far away in time and place.'
The problem isn't real for most people. Even if they can cognate it, or, say, have an emotional reaction to the idea of their children growing up Mad Max, unless it holds their attention it'll be gone soon, as they fall back into their operative consciousness.
'And even if we could remain persistently concerned about a warmer world? Weber described what she calls a “single-action bias.” Prompted by a distressing emotional signal, we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate — a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor. And that leaves us where we started.'
The "we" in this article used over and over again is intended as "us humans," but I'd propose that it actually shifts back and forth, mostly covering 5th-level rational operating humans, people at around the same basic level as the NYTimes itself, no coincidence. Articles like this could be taken as evidence of the push of a large number of the "East-Coast rational-liberal" demographic, again, NYTimes readers, into the 6th level memes, or at the least as a record of the struggle moving between 5 and 6. The single-action bias noted above is seen when somebody is trying to make a change in their life, and brings us back to the question of the article, "Why isn't the Brain Green?" "We" want it to be, so "we" do a few things to pull us in the direction, though obviously the "we" hasn't fully arrived there yet. One practices and practices and practices behavior one knows is beneficial, and, with persistence, can eventually make that behavior part of their daily consciousness. One tries and tries and tries again over a number of years to eat more healthily, and eventually five years down the road, even if one hasn't reached their original ideal, not only eats more healthily, but does it naturally, without thinking or struggling, enjoying it. This is the process the above is chronicling: people's actions as they try to do something they think is better than what they are but don't yet own it. There are plenty of people who live every decision in their lives with a full environmental consciousness. They just aren't the mainstream.
Interestingly, the title of the article itself relies on an "Overdrive 5" mentality that we are the brain, that all behavior originates in the brain. Of course, had the title been, "why isn't the mind green?" the answer would have been, "because some people's mind's aren't." In either case, "greenness" is something learned/ grown into, it is not a given, except as a potential.
So what do we do as integrals if we don't want the world to warm into hell?
Most often, people think of the problems as technical. But, as climate change is being caused by people's behavior, so must human behavior be the basis for combating it. As logical as that seems, 'the notion that vital environmental solutions will be attained through social-science research — instead of improved climate models or innovative technologies — is an aggressively insurgent view.'
So, what changes are we talking about? Obviously, the more people at a level 6 or higher in the world, the more likely that, naturally, things will be handled in a more environmentally-sustainable way. Equally as obvious: we're not going to get there any day soon. Interestingly, the article takes a rather integral framework for dealing with this problem.
'If you don’t think or feel there’s a risk, why change your behavior? In response, researchers like Leiserowitz have investigated messages that could captivate all different kinds of audiences. Reaching a predominantly evangelical or conservative audience, Leiserowitz told me, could perhaps be achieved by honing a message of “moral Christian values,” an appeal possibly based on the divine instruction in Genesis 2:15 to tend and till the garden.'
To deal with the problem integrally, we need to give incentives to every level of development to create a sustainable (not merely environmentally so) sound community. For 5s, the emphasis can be on the business opportunities of conscious capitalism. As mentioned above, religious 4s could be persuaded that it is God's desire that they take care of the Earth.
This goes back to the beginning and the list of people's priorities of concern: there is no singular problem, there are many manifestations of one problem, and they need to be dealt with as one problem with many heads. Integrally tackling Climate Change means improving our economies and the stability of our societies, it means dealing with energy, and terrorism by helping to cultivate healthy societies in other parts of the world, it even means re-instilling and fostering a sense of moral community, though it would likely look a little different than the ideal of those who answered the above survey with "moral decline," even if grounded by the same basic sentiment.
The author of the article is a little skeptical about this at first, saying that some of these practices being researched (what the main content of the article is) seem to manipulate the natural decision making process, but comes to the conclusion that there is really no natural decision making process; one cannot make a decision in an absolute vacuum. I'd add that the "nudges" the author talks about are done by every society that has ever existed; it's called "acculturation." The difference here is that we are becoming conscious of this, and of how to manipulate this, which most of the best leaders were likely quasi-aware of in any case. One of the biggest factors, the article mentions, is whether decisions are made individually, or in a group.
'The subjects in half of the 50 test groups would first make their decisions individually and then as a group; the other half would make group decisions first and individual ones second. Weber and Handgraaf were fairly confident, based on previous work, that the two approaches would produce different results. In Amsterdam, Handgraaf told me, he had already seen that when subjects made decisions as a group first, their conversations were marked far more often by subtle markers of inclusion like “us” and “we.” Weber, for her part, had seen other evidence that groups can be more patient than individuals when considering delayed benefits. “One reason this is interesting is that it’s general practice in any meeting to prepare individually,” Handgraaf said. Or, to put the matter another way: What if the information for decisions, especially environmental ones, is first considered in a group setting before members take it up individually, rather than the other way around? In Weber’s view, this step could conceivably change the decisions made by a corporate board, for example, or a group of homeowners called together for a meeting by a public utility. Weber’s experiments have also looked at how the ordering of choices can create stark differences: considering distant benefits before immediate costs can lead to a different decision than if you consider — as is common — the costs first. Here, then, is a kind of blueprint for achieving collective decisions that are in the world’s best interests'.
The most interesting of these "nudges," as mentioned above, is the group dynamic.
'“We enjoy congregating; we need to know we are part of groups,” Weber said. “It gives us inherent pleasure to do this. And when we are reminded of the fact that we’re part of communities, then the community becomes sort of the decision-making unit. That’s how we make huge sacrifices, like in World War II.”'
As a more concrete example of this type of thinking:
'In 2005 and 2006, Orlove observed how the behavior of the region’s poor farmers could be influenced by whether they listened to crucial rainy-season radio broadcasts in groups or as individuals. Farmers in “community groups,” as Orlove described them to me, engaged in discussions that led to a consensus, and farmers made better use of the forecast. “They might alter their planting date,” he said, “or use a more drought-resistant variety of seed.” Those in the community groups also seemed more satisfied with the steps they took to increase their yields.'
Some of the feel of this is coming from the transition between level 5 memes, which are individualistic, and level 6, which are communitarian, but the thrust of this seems to be integral: everybody makes an individual decision, there are no decisions mandated by the collective, but one's individual decisions are made in the context of an open, fluid, and continual conversation with the community. It is possible to encourage individual thinking and innovation without devolving into groupthink, a staple of an unhealthy manifestation of level 6.
Another interesting quote:
'“Remember when New York tried to enforce its jaywalking laws?[...]You can’t enforce stuff that people don’t believe should be done.”'
This sums up much of the article: unless it's organic, change, and policy to help produce it, doesn't work. Taking a much wider view, all of this is natural, just as the nudging is a natural part of the decision making process. Societies get to a certain point, then they clean themselves up. There's nothing you can do to push that process along artificially. This, however is often taken as a level 5 mantra when confronting environmentalism: business will naturally get cleaner, just leave it alone! That is the thrust of the following Op-Ed from John Tierney, also from the Times: "Use Energy, Get Rich, and Save the Planet!" Of course, the backlash is also natural, that is, the environmental movement itself is natural, not simply some freakish reactionary outgrowth to late stage-capitalism, a point the Tierney Op-Ed doesn't make explicitly.
While this is and has been true, we're not dealing with relative levels of environmental cleanliness between countries, we're dealing with one non-interchangeable world. In the past, a country could clean up after industry became cleaner, because the pollution could be diffused throughout the rest of the planet and eventually eliminated through natural cycles, like plants cleaning air. The scope, now, is bigger. Not only are we (as a planet) making pollution on a much larger scale than one hundred years ago, we are doing it as a whole planet, not individual countries, and the worry is that there will be a point beyond which the life on the planet won't be able to clean it up again, and that this point will be here before the 2060 that Tierney says could well be the end of carbon even without policy pushes. Additionally, when rich counties got richer, they often got cleaner not just from cleaning up industry, but from moving it to other areas of the world. But where do high-polluting factories go when China and India get rich? And then after that?
What die-hard level 5s often miss in the environmental debates is that when a canary dies in a mine, nobody is worried ultimately about the canary. The difference between the canary, and, say, the 400 or so dead zones on the ocean floor, is that we have no choice but to go on living in the mine.
So, there will be a day when everybody up and down the spectrum of humanity feels the environment is, in one way or another, the biggest issue we have to deal with. That's what we're trying to avoid.
'“Increasing personal evidence of global warming and its potentially devastating consequences can be counted on to be an extremely effective teacher and motivator,” she wrote, pointing to how emotional and experiential feelings of risk are superb drivers of action. “Unfortunately, such lessons may arrive too late for corrective action.”'
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Unintended Consequences
An article on National Geographic.
Real quick: unintended consequences. Any system is in a constant state of cyclical flux, (feedback loops, if you will) that is in balance at any point in time. The more complicated the system, the less obvious the connections between individual constituents of the system. For example, the dynamic of a two-child family is more complex than the heating system of their house, and the operation of their society is infinitely more complex than the family.
The more complex the system, the less likely it is that consequences of changing one element can be predicted.
We're seeing this across the board when it comes to climate change, which is why certain pundits now prefer the phrase "global weirding" to "global warming."
Again: 1- the earth's ecosystems are about as complex as they come.
2- We are seriously screwing with them.
3- Anybody who does not take this uncertainty (or, looking at historical examples of assuredness in the face of complete unknowability, the relative certainty of disaster) as the number one most important thing in any talks about climate change has the race handicapped poorly.
Of course, we're not just fudging with one or two things at a time here. We are fudging with everything in the global ecosystem, upon which humanity is precariously balanced. Who knows what's going to happen? Nobody. But, rather than write it off and say, "well, whatever happens isn't likely to be that big," we should be saying, "we're in a balance that has suited us well for thousands and thousands of years, and the likelihood of a new balance being in our favor is probably small."
It's ironic that this conservative value is so outside the mindset of the majority of today's political conservatives.
And, though this is an environmental example, it relates to almost every human choice. At the outset, options may appear clear, but one can never correctly judge what the consequence of the first choice will be. Instead of blindly trudging forward through ever changing circumstances, we need a much more flexible way of operating, one that makes a choice, looks at what happens, and only then moves on. Kaizen: my favorite Japanese word.
Real quick: unintended consequences. Any system is in a constant state of cyclical flux, (feedback loops, if you will) that is in balance at any point in time. The more complicated the system, the less obvious the connections between individual constituents of the system. For example, the dynamic of a two-child family is more complex than the heating system of their house, and the operation of their society is infinitely more complex than the family.
The more complex the system, the less likely it is that consequences of changing one element can be predicted.
We're seeing this across the board when it comes to climate change, which is why certain pundits now prefer the phrase "global weirding" to "global warming."
Again: 1- the earth's ecosystems are about as complex as they come.
2- We are seriously screwing with them.
3- Anybody who does not take this uncertainty (or, looking at historical examples of assuredness in the face of complete unknowability, the relative certainty of disaster) as the number one most important thing in any talks about climate change has the race handicapped poorly.
Of course, we're not just fudging with one or two things at a time here. We are fudging with everything in the global ecosystem, upon which humanity is precariously balanced. Who knows what's going to happen? Nobody. But, rather than write it off and say, "well, whatever happens isn't likely to be that big," we should be saying, "we're in a balance that has suited us well for thousands and thousands of years, and the likelihood of a new balance being in our favor is probably small."
It's ironic that this conservative value is so outside the mindset of the majority of today's political conservatives.
And, though this is an environmental example, it relates to almost every human choice. At the outset, options may appear clear, but one can never correctly judge what the consequence of the first choice will be. Instead of blindly trudging forward through ever changing circumstances, we need a much more flexible way of operating, one that makes a choice, looks at what happens, and only then moves on. Kaizen: my favorite Japanese word.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Barack Obama, and Freedom
Fair enough to say that no one will know exactly what last week's election means for a long, long time. Perhaps this is part of the reason that I've had such trouble articulating what effect it has had on me, and what it has made me feel, beyond an incredible giddiness, and an outpouring of emotion. I think I have finally figured out just why Barack Obama moves me as much as he does, and it starts with the words in his victory speech that moved me the most, playing with Lincoln's (second?) most famous excerpt from the Gettysburg address, that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," has not perished from the face of the Earth.
There were other moments, seeing the first-family-elect step onto the stage for the first time was another, but this moment made me choke up the most. I think this is why:
I believe in American exceptionalism. I think that America introduced something new into world politics, something fundamentally new. This does not mean, of course, that I support every interpretation of this, far from it. I think most of the problems we get into involve some romantic idea of American righteousness, and so while I don't and cannot support "my country right or wrong" thinking, I do think that America introduced something critical for the future wellfare of mankind, something that no other country could have, and something that is slowly leaking out elsewhere (I do not think another country in the world could have elected Obama, (or an equivalent) for those who disagree with the "slowly" part of that) and something that is overwhelmingly beneficial for humankind and civilization.
Obviously, I am an idealist.
Over the last eight years, my idealism has been tempered by a great deal of cynicism and skepticism, (not two words for the same thing, though there are overlaps in certain situations) two other modes of thought that I am quite comfortable with, despite my core of idealism. What the idealist loves about our country, the cynic/skeptic is terrified we are losing, or have already lost. This has not been partisan (i.e., I'm not simply "anti-republican") rather it has been the fear that certain philosophies of governing embraced by the current administration have been threatening to government for the people. The road to fascism is paved with good intentions. Fascism, here, means government that uses its power to subjugate its own people. Not culturally, mind you: I would argue that conformity to cultural practices and, say, death camps, are two entirely different phenomenon. Culture is, at the same time, much more benign a form of "subjugation," if you wish to call it that, and much more insidious, built into the fabric of what people's identities are. But it is not being billy-clubbed for talking negatively about the government. I am following Naomi Wolf here. For a laundry list talk about the road to fascism, watch the following, or read her book, "The End of America."
In any case, for me, this has been the most important thing about the Obama candidacy, and the election. It is the key element that holds everything else in together: the appearance of an unabashedly rational, intellectual candidate; the major step taken for civil rights; the potential return of moral and political authority to america; returning america from the brink of modern-day laissez-faire economics; the face of america returning as being young, optimistic, inclusive, practical, idealistic (at the same time,) humble, etc. etc. opposed to the face we've seen in the last eight years; the excitement and participatory level in politics; the understanding of the importance of issues (the economy, energy, and the environment,) as trumping divisive politics (and the media, by the way;) the emergence of an interconnected citizenry plugged into the media but not dependent upon it: all of these aspects, and more, I see as the natural outcome of a (relatively) free and (relatively) open society in crisis.
Had McCain won the election despite the popular push for Obama apparent in everything and in nearly every demographic and the above, it would have been a symbol to me that the American Dream, not of a chicken in every pot, but of the enshrined ability to say and be and feel whatever one wants, and the belief that this leads to a better world for all, was either being threatened by the powers that be, or was dead already, killed when we all weren't looking.
It is, in a word, the ability to freely agree or disagree without repercussion.
America brought the sense that a country and its government are separable, and that patriotism is not love of government, but love of country, something, under the Bush administration, that was smeared two hundred years into the past. In China this has been one of the most dumbfounding aspects for me, that there is no separation, theoretically or practically, between what "the government" is and what "the country" is. There's an awareness, sure, and a line I often get from people who start interrogating me about how America could be so stupid (often a line of questioning starting with Iraq and Bush) is that "okay, okay, American people are good people, Chinese people are good people, but governments everywhere are bad." Of course, what I couldn't say, because I had had no evidence for it, was "when the people are good, and allowed a large degree of participation, the government can't but be good as well." I have some evidence for that now.
Are we being hoodwinked? Is Obama a Manchurian candidate working to support a global elite against (an important word) the citizens of the planet? A quick reversal of tone and policy by his administration in the areas that Bush has done the most and potentially permanent damage to the fabric of the country would do much to silence those two voices, skepticism and cynicism, so essential to freedom, and well-trained in the last eight years.
It is up to us to keep watch, and our power to keep the world moving towards an open and free society, inclusive and supportive of all. It is our power. And power concedes nothing.
There were other moments, seeing the first-family-elect step onto the stage for the first time was another, but this moment made me choke up the most. I think this is why:
I believe in American exceptionalism. I think that America introduced something new into world politics, something fundamentally new. This does not mean, of course, that I support every interpretation of this, far from it. I think most of the problems we get into involve some romantic idea of American righteousness, and so while I don't and cannot support "my country right or wrong" thinking, I do think that America introduced something critical for the future wellfare of mankind, something that no other country could have, and something that is slowly leaking out elsewhere (I do not think another country in the world could have elected Obama, (or an equivalent) for those who disagree with the "slowly" part of that) and something that is overwhelmingly beneficial for humankind and civilization.
Obviously, I am an idealist.
Over the last eight years, my idealism has been tempered by a great deal of cynicism and skepticism, (not two words for the same thing, though there are overlaps in certain situations) two other modes of thought that I am quite comfortable with, despite my core of idealism. What the idealist loves about our country, the cynic/skeptic is terrified we are losing, or have already lost. This has not been partisan (i.e., I'm not simply "anti-republican") rather it has been the fear that certain philosophies of governing embraced by the current administration have been threatening to government for the people. The road to fascism is paved with good intentions. Fascism, here, means government that uses its power to subjugate its own people. Not culturally, mind you: I would argue that conformity to cultural practices and, say, death camps, are two entirely different phenomenon. Culture is, at the same time, much more benign a form of "subjugation," if you wish to call it that, and much more insidious, built into the fabric of what people's identities are. But it is not being billy-clubbed for talking negatively about the government. I am following Naomi Wolf here. For a laundry list talk about the road to fascism, watch the following, or read her book, "The End of America."
In any case, for me, this has been the most important thing about the Obama candidacy, and the election. It is the key element that holds everything else in together: the appearance of an unabashedly rational, intellectual candidate; the major step taken for civil rights; the potential return of moral and political authority to america; returning america from the brink of modern-day laissez-faire economics; the face of america returning as being young, optimistic, inclusive, practical, idealistic (at the same time,) humble, etc. etc. opposed to the face we've seen in the last eight years; the excitement and participatory level in politics; the understanding of the importance of issues (the economy, energy, and the environment,) as trumping divisive politics (and the media, by the way;) the emergence of an interconnected citizenry plugged into the media but not dependent upon it: all of these aspects, and more, I see as the natural outcome of a (relatively) free and (relatively) open society in crisis.
Had McCain won the election despite the popular push for Obama apparent in everything and in nearly every demographic and the above, it would have been a symbol to me that the American Dream, not of a chicken in every pot, but of the enshrined ability to say and be and feel whatever one wants, and the belief that this leads to a better world for all, was either being threatened by the powers that be, or was dead already, killed when we all weren't looking.
It is, in a word, the ability to freely agree or disagree without repercussion.
America brought the sense that a country and its government are separable, and that patriotism is not love of government, but love of country, something, under the Bush administration, that was smeared two hundred years into the past. In China this has been one of the most dumbfounding aspects for me, that there is no separation, theoretically or practically, between what "the government" is and what "the country" is. There's an awareness, sure, and a line I often get from people who start interrogating me about how America could be so stupid (often a line of questioning starting with Iraq and Bush) is that "okay, okay, American people are good people, Chinese people are good people, but governments everywhere are bad." Of course, what I couldn't say, because I had had no evidence for it, was "when the people are good, and allowed a large degree of participation, the government can't but be good as well." I have some evidence for that now.
Are we being hoodwinked? Is Obama a Manchurian candidate working to support a global elite against (an important word) the citizens of the planet? A quick reversal of tone and policy by his administration in the areas that Bush has done the most and potentially permanent damage to the fabric of the country would do much to silence those two voices, skepticism and cynicism, so essential to freedom, and well-trained in the last eight years.
It is up to us to keep watch, and our power to keep the world moving towards an open and free society, inclusive and supportive of all. It is our power. And power concedes nothing.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
A way of thinking about Dennett's theory of consciousness: a vote, and decision making.
I was just thinking about an article I wrote about here when I thought of a much better (and topical) metaphor for the way consciousness works in the human brain according to Daniel Dennett.
For the non-clickers:
(From Dennett:)
'"I claim that consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or "quale" caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations. The losers—lacking "political clout" in this competition—quickly fade leaving few if any traces, and that’s the only difference between being a conscious content and being an unconscious content."'
(From myself:)
"Basically, there is no "little man" of consciousness sitting in your brain, editing what comes in and then sending it up to "you," a separate medium, to become conscious content. It is the sum total of the activities of the neurological system that is consciousness itself."
It was the term "political clout" that got me thinking about this, along with a few weeks of staring at polls every day, and a metaphor popped into my head, more helpful perhaps than the negative example of the little man in explaining what (I think) Dennett means: the vote for president.
What Dennett is saying, with this analogy, would be, "the final determination of who becomes the next president of the United States (the outcome of the process, or "consciousness,") is not some extra capital "V" vote, (quale or aura,) it is the activities of millions of voters voting. This may seem like no more than a tricky accounting method, but the distinction is important. It is also fairly obvious when talking about a vote, but perhaps not so much when talking about our own consciousness. There is no president in your head, no controlling piece that decides what to do and what to show, what becomes conscious and what not, but millions of separate components all clamoring for attention (millions of voters with their own individual preferences and requirements.) When they reach a critical mass, they "monopolize certain cortical resources," and you become aware of something.
In fact, when we choose a president we are basically doing what everybody intuits we are doing
and what Dennett says we are precisely not doing: putting a "little guy" in charge of it all at the top of the head who makes the decisions. We choose an arbitrary point (the first Tuesday in November on a four-year cycle) to gather the input of all these little contributors, and then, ceremoniously and ritually assign, for the next four years, the one person that was able to align himself most broadly with the contributors, the voters, to the job of "decider."
There is some feedback, in terms of media and public opinion polls, but for the most part this is not what is happening in our brains: it's what we think is happening. What is really happening, according to Dennett, is more as if there were a constant election, not for a representative but on issues of state, and whenever a person decided to throw his or her vote in a different direction, her or she would do so, and whenever a voting level reached some critical threshold, it would be enacted, or changed, say, at 65% approval a new law would be passed, or at 30% disapproval something would be revoked.
In this way, the brain is a tyrannic democracy.
Some other random thoughts that sprang from this idea:
In this light it becomes much more apparent how ritualized government is, how we try to approximate power and make it more practical and benificial to the most people, and how that changes over time due to the evolution of social and religious (ritual) beliefs, as in how a King, standing in for God, makes decisions that are the best for everyone in the kingdom in aggregate top-down, versus how a president, standing in for a symbolic unity of the country and the opinions of the people, makes decisions informed by the will from below (the people) and not imposing them from above (this is an ideal, obviously a certain current president feels somewhat more like a king according to this way of thinking, at least at times.)
Similarly, what we call the "ego," is no more than a fiction we put in place as a shorthand way of understanding the millions of little bits of information inside, outside, and created in the relation between inside and outside. As noted in my earlier blog, this is why I think buddhist philosophy would be quite comfortable with Dennett's work.
This is why government is ritualistic, the ultimate power is never coming from it, it is legitimized only in so far as it reflects the will of God, or the will of the people, the ultimate powers. What we call the ego is a puppet standing in for the real thing, standing in for "will," (wherever you think that is coming from, an entirely different discussion) acting out ritually as if in a play. It is, first and foremost, an abstraction.
This idea of a threshold being met that changes everything is rather prevelent in nature, and seems to be one of the key ways in which things work. (Chronicled from a slightly different angle in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink.) Neuron firings are a good example. Neurons constantly exchange ions coming in and out of their cell bodies, and electrical gradients are constantly changing, without triggering a change in the cell. But as soon as a critical charge is reached, as soon as the electrical gradient is overwhelmingly positive, for example, the electron fires.
Anyone who has watched a baby grow or learned something new him or herself (especially as an adult, when you tend to be more aware of these types of things) would likely be familiar with this as well. Practice (as discussed in the book Mastery) alternates between brief periods of incredible progress, followed by long plateus where nothing seems to change. I have noticed this playing the guitar, and also learning Chinese, as well as in practicing tai ji/ qi gong. Every day for four months it seems like I can't string two freaking sentences together, and then, as if by magic, two weekends ago, I'm babbling along without stopping, my accent got better exponentially, and my accessible vocabulary improved. I had, of course, been working on all of these things the whole time, but they didn't show any tangible improvement, or any steady improvement, until they all did all together all at once.
Think of it this way, perhaps: you are on a certain "level" of your practice, and there are 100 buttons. You need to push 70 of them to move on to the next level, but you also need to learn a certain technique to push each one individually, and learning each takes time and practice, and the buttons only stay depressed a certain amount of time. As you get better and better at pushing certain buttons individually, more and more stay depressed, until finally it "clicks," you've gotten 70 of the buttons depressed simultaneously and suddenly you're in a whole new world, you're on another level, and you have to start all over again exploring from here. Of course, on this new level, the options open to you are much much wider. And, of course, this is a only a silly analogy, though there may be some truth to it.
The worry about global warming stems from this idea. People aren't concerned that gradually, over the next hundred or two hundred years, things will change. Those concerned are worried because in a comparative instant, thousands of species will go extinct, the earth will become five degrees warmer, sea levels will rise in the meters, and floods will inundate lands. Again, not in isolated and separate incidents, but basically all together. The havok that this will wreck on civilization is one thing, but it may knock out the whole species. We just don't know, we don't know what will happen after the moment of change.
There's a variety pack for you to chew on.
For the non-clickers:
(From Dennett:)
'"I claim that consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or "quale" caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations. The losers—lacking "political clout" in this competition—quickly fade leaving few if any traces, and that’s the only difference between being a conscious content and being an unconscious content."'
(From myself:)
"Basically, there is no "little man" of consciousness sitting in your brain, editing what comes in and then sending it up to "you," a separate medium, to become conscious content. It is the sum total of the activities of the neurological system that is consciousness itself."
It was the term "political clout" that got me thinking about this, along with a few weeks of staring at polls every day, and a metaphor popped into my head, more helpful perhaps than the negative example of the little man in explaining what (I think) Dennett means: the vote for president.
What Dennett is saying, with this analogy, would be, "the final determination of who becomes the next president of the United States (the outcome of the process, or "consciousness,") is not some extra capital "V" vote, (quale or aura,) it is the activities of millions of voters voting. This may seem like no more than a tricky accounting method, but the distinction is important. It is also fairly obvious when talking about a vote, but perhaps not so much when talking about our own consciousness. There is no president in your head, no controlling piece that decides what to do and what to show, what becomes conscious and what not, but millions of separate components all clamoring for attention (millions of voters with their own individual preferences and requirements.) When they reach a critical mass, they "monopolize certain cortical resources," and you become aware of something.
In fact, when we choose a president we are basically doing what everybody intuits we are doing
and what Dennett says we are precisely not doing: putting a "little guy" in charge of it all at the top of the head who makes the decisions. We choose an arbitrary point (the first Tuesday in November on a four-year cycle) to gather the input of all these little contributors, and then, ceremoniously and ritually assign, for the next four years, the one person that was able to align himself most broadly with the contributors, the voters, to the job of "decider."
There is some feedback, in terms of media and public opinion polls, but for the most part this is not what is happening in our brains: it's what we think is happening. What is really happening, according to Dennett, is more as if there were a constant election, not for a representative but on issues of state, and whenever a person decided to throw his or her vote in a different direction, her or she would do so, and whenever a voting level reached some critical threshold, it would be enacted, or changed, say, at 65% approval a new law would be passed, or at 30% disapproval something would be revoked.
In this way, the brain is a tyrannic democracy.
Some other random thoughts that sprang from this idea:
In this light it becomes much more apparent how ritualized government is, how we try to approximate power and make it more practical and benificial to the most people, and how that changes over time due to the evolution of social and religious (ritual) beliefs, as in how a King, standing in for God, makes decisions that are the best for everyone in the kingdom in aggregate top-down, versus how a president, standing in for a symbolic unity of the country and the opinions of the people, makes decisions informed by the will from below (the people) and not imposing them from above (this is an ideal, obviously a certain current president feels somewhat more like a king according to this way of thinking, at least at times.)
Similarly, what we call the "ego," is no more than a fiction we put in place as a shorthand way of understanding the millions of little bits of information inside, outside, and created in the relation between inside and outside. As noted in my earlier blog, this is why I think buddhist philosophy would be quite comfortable with Dennett's work.
This is why government is ritualistic, the ultimate power is never coming from it, it is legitimized only in so far as it reflects the will of God, or the will of the people, the ultimate powers. What we call the ego is a puppet standing in for the real thing, standing in for "will," (wherever you think that is coming from, an entirely different discussion) acting out ritually as if in a play. It is, first and foremost, an abstraction.
This idea of a threshold being met that changes everything is rather prevelent in nature, and seems to be one of the key ways in which things work. (Chronicled from a slightly different angle in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink.) Neuron firings are a good example. Neurons constantly exchange ions coming in and out of their cell bodies, and electrical gradients are constantly changing, without triggering a change in the cell. But as soon as a critical charge is reached, as soon as the electrical gradient is overwhelmingly positive, for example, the electron fires.
Anyone who has watched a baby grow or learned something new him or herself (especially as an adult, when you tend to be more aware of these types of things) would likely be familiar with this as well. Practice (as discussed in the book Mastery) alternates between brief periods of incredible progress, followed by long plateus where nothing seems to change. I have noticed this playing the guitar, and also learning Chinese, as well as in practicing tai ji/ qi gong. Every day for four months it seems like I can't string two freaking sentences together, and then, as if by magic, two weekends ago, I'm babbling along without stopping, my accent got better exponentially, and my accessible vocabulary improved. I had, of course, been working on all of these things the whole time, but they didn't show any tangible improvement, or any steady improvement, until they all did all together all at once.
Think of it this way, perhaps: you are on a certain "level" of your practice, and there are 100 buttons. You need to push 70 of them to move on to the next level, but you also need to learn a certain technique to push each one individually, and learning each takes time and practice, and the buttons only stay depressed a certain amount of time. As you get better and better at pushing certain buttons individually, more and more stay depressed, until finally it "clicks," you've gotten 70 of the buttons depressed simultaneously and suddenly you're in a whole new world, you're on another level, and you have to start all over again exploring from here. Of course, on this new level, the options open to you are much much wider. And, of course, this is a only a silly analogy, though there may be some truth to it.
The worry about global warming stems from this idea. People aren't concerned that gradually, over the next hundred or two hundred years, things will change. Those concerned are worried because in a comparative instant, thousands of species will go extinct, the earth will become five degrees warmer, sea levels will rise in the meters, and floods will inundate lands. Again, not in isolated and separate incidents, but basically all together. The havok that this will wreck on civilization is one thing, but it may knock out the whole species. We just don't know, we don't know what will happen after the moment of change.
There's a variety pack for you to chew on.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Chinese Photo Essay
Good photo essay in Mother Jones on China.
My favorites are probably the workers at lunch, the sand crawling up on the door, and the man jumping with joy and a briefcase in an advertisement behind a pedestrian.
There's also an interesting article there, more on this perhaps tomorrow.
My favorites are probably the workers at lunch, the sand crawling up on the door, and the man jumping with joy and a briefcase in an advertisement behind a pedestrian.
There's also an interesting article there, more on this perhaps tomorrow.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Eatin' Meat
I am not a vegetarian, though I have recently sworn meat off again excepting dinners with friends (excluding my girlfriend,) because I am in China, after all (no more than a rationalization) but a recent article in the NYTimes makes the plain case that our meat habits (both growing and eating, which are, of course, connected) are wreaking havoc on just about everything indiscriminately.
To wit:
-"...assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains," leading to "the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests."
-"...an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production," which also "generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation." (Fortunately, with all those gases in the atmosphere, the percentage of land that's ice-free should be growing rather conveniently.)
-"...2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days."
-"More meat means a corresponding increase in demand for feed, especially corn and soy, which some experts say will contribute to higher prices." As mentioned later, while this is inconvenient for wealthier countries and people, for the not-so-fortunate this can spell famine.
-"Agriculture in the United States — much of which now serves the demand for meat — contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in the nation’s rivers and streams..."
- The "administration of antibiotics is routine, so much so that it can result in antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten the usefulness of medicines that treat people."
-"...grain-fed animals, in turn, are contributing to health problems among the world’s wealthier citizens — heart disease, some types of cancer, diabetes."
-"...hog production [yes, 'production'] facilities that resemble prisons more than farms ... pollute streams and groundwater. (In Iowa alone, hog factories and farms produce more than 50 million tons of excrement annually.)" An excised passage provides the technical term for the "manure lagoons."
And this is not even comprehensive, as most of this has nothing to do with how animals are treated in such facilities, or the squeeze rising food prices puts on starving people. (both of which the article and this blog, below, cover.)
Interestingly, the article goes on to say that "[p]erhaps the best hope for change lies in consumers’ becoming aware of the true costs of industrial meat production."
I have not seen much of a better explanation of the emerging ethos that is called "conscious capitalism." (Be wary of that label, though; I feel many people who use it may not be particularly "conscious," or "capitalist.") The basic idea is that with an increasingly open information economy, people can choose to support companies whose values they share, even if it means the product is slightly more expensive, basically underwriting one's values. (Buying organic steak is a simple example of this.) In a way, of course, this is a natural extension of capitalism (buy the things you like that you can afford,) adding only a sort of moral sense or duty, and it is already what has been emerging in the last ten to fifteen years, though it is not exactly main-stream. It is still to be seen whether this ethos will have any sort of effect, whether it's a trend of the baby-boomer and post-boomer middle-class generations, or whether the general apathy of people will vote these businesses into bankruptcy with their dollars.
But it shouldn't be surprising that what works extremely poorly for one reason would also be a disaster in every other arena, which is basically what I take from all of this. As I've said, this blog is a way for me to start testing out ideas and to get some feedback on them, to say a few things and ask a number of questions. A friend asked me recently what I believed in, and I replied that it was hard to pin down, but that basically I believed that things are, and that works. There is a basic underlying reality in everything, and everything is an expression of this, and so, as is relevant here, if anything is wrong, it is never wrong for any one reason, but for an infinite amount of reasons, all of which are really only reflections of that thing's "wrongness." This is far from being comprehensive, and I do also believe that ultimately terms like "wrong" are meaningless, but at this level of discussion, on our subjective planet, basically, something that is bad for humans is likely bad for the planet, something bad for the planet is likely bad for humans, something bad for pigs is probably bad for humans, something bad for pigs is probably bad for the economy, (this may need an entire different post to defend if anybody wants to take an easy objection to this) etc, etc. Everyone wins, or everyone loses. With our factory farming, it is clear that everyone is losing.
But there's got to be a reason for factory farming, right? It's economical, and so how would it have become the dominant model unless a) capitalism is terrible, or b) it's just the best way? Somebody's making big.
From the Times article: "factory farming is ‘optimal’ only as long as degrading waterways is free. If dumping this stuff [that is, billions of pounds of manure] becomes costly — even if it simply carries a non-zero price tag — the entire structure of food production will change dramatically."
Basically, free pollution, not having to concern oneself with the by-products of one's production, is a sort of subsidy for this whole process. On an old farm, or, as the article notes, even 50 years ago in Seacaucus NJ, manure was used as fertilizer for local farms. Here's another chain of problems caused by one broken link: well, if pig farms are centralized and removed from vegetable farms, how will we fertilize vegetable farms? Aha! Dangerous chemicals. And what to do with the manure? Ummm, let it sit! (Not the only broken link, of course, as is well known, antibiotics must be used extensively on pigs b/c the manner in which they are crammed together makes them crazily bite each other's rumps raw, and makes chickens peck each other silly, though the consequences of these reactions are preempted by antibiotics and the removal of the pigs' tails/ soldering of the chickens' beaks, and if you think this is evidence of less intelligence on the animals' parts, imagine what you would do if your whole life you were on an elevator with twenty people. Yeah, it's where you go to the bathroom too. And eat.) Part of the idea above, that everything done wrong (or right) is not simply wrong/right for one reason, but for an infinite number of them, is that, since everything is in this elaborate conjoined dance, anything that disrupts the natural flow of this dance is detrimental. Solve one "problem," cause a thousand far-reaching ones. I do not have the space to write more about this, so let it suffice to say that I am not, however, a back-to naturist (not permanently at least, though someone who doesn't spend some time in forests might not be human,) far from it. Man is not unnatural, though we do some odd things.
Anyway,
There's another and possibly more important reason factory farming is economical, if you don't buy the pollution argument (after all, 50 million tons isn't that much, right? and Iowa's a big state, with lots of farms!) and that's subsidies. Meat is heavily subsidized, as is all agricultural product in possibly every country in the world (I cannot authoritatively say that it is every country) and accounts for 31% of farmers' incomes. Removing subsidies on meat makes all of the extra expenses required for factory farming much less attractive, not to mention that grain subsidies make feed (unnatural food for these animals) more expensive. But if the cows, for example, produced more than just T-bones, it would still make sense (as it always has) to raise them in pastures.
And, in any case, why the hell, if I find the idea of eating a steak morally repugnant, am I paying for a part of yours anyway? Why is that coming out of my (let's assume pleather) wallet? This is a historical relic.
Of course, politically, the odds of removing subsidies are running about even with the odds of having our first atheist anarchist trans-gendered president.
But, as mentioned above, consciousness on these issues may just pull off the end of factory farming anyway (growth from below) along with some other changing circumstances challenging the model.
"'If price spikes don’t change eating habits, perhaps the combination of deforestation, pollution, climate change, starvation, heart disease and animal cruelty will gradually encourage the simple daily act of eating more plants and fewer animals.'" An expert is quoted in the article as saying.
Animal cruelty? Well, yes, though only mentioned briefly before, these factory farms are hard on a lot of things, the workers, the environment, our hearts (corn leads to more damaging heart marbled fatty meat than grass, which tastes better anyway,) but probably most of all the animals.
Who cares?
Something of a lucky coincidence that this article appears online at the same time in the Times, an article about eating dog-meat in China. (For my cellphone text messaging the number one collocation for the character 狗，or "dog," is 肉，or, meat. 狗肉。Dogmeat.) If you don't read the article, the point here is, what makes it so cruel to torture a cat or a dog if you can do the same to any number of other animals?
Now, as an ex-avid meat-eater myself (still an occasional meat-eater, just without any of the militarism) who is to say that you shouldn't eat meat? Nobody, and that is another rather important point. Conscious capitalism is the economic equivalent of soft power. As a teenaged meat-eater, I always found vegetarians noxious, a cult of self-satisfied whiners and values snobs. Since I've grown up a bit, I realized that this is only the most militant brand of vegetarianism (emphasis on the -ism) but still, it makes it difficult for vegetarians to have a serious conversation without being branded as these people, like I'd imagine it makes it difficult to identify yourself as "Christian," without being lumped in with Jerry Falwell. But, crusade you must, the manner in which you do it can be much more effective, though. Patience backed by fact is perhaps the strongest tool in the teacher's shed. It may not be as sharp as the hedge pruners, but it's as heavy and inexorable as a sledgehammer, when wielded on the side of what is true and obvious. It takes time for people to accept rational arguments in the face of their emotions, but in time, without shouting, or belittling people (this is an especially strong turn-off) it works.
Of course, it wouldn't work in Soviet Russia, but we don't live there, and this displays a requirement of conscious capitalism: the open and unrestricted flow of information without edit or censorship. Given the facts, people will make the right decisions. This has always terrified governments. We're perhaps not quite there now, though that's a whole other topic, the point is, we're certainly close enough to start moving.
In any case, it's perfectly imaginable that eating meat will be around for as long as there are humans, and no matter how much you hate it, it's not within the scope of your power to change any one else's mind about this without their permission, but with an ideally open society, the concept is that what will naturally happen will be the best for everybody, just as in evolution, what does not work, does not pass, as in economics, if you can do an equivalent service cheaper, your competitor will go out of business, as in everything, what is, is, and that always works. (Maybe not for your perceived benefit, but that's another conversation.)
And finally, for those die-hard meat eaters out there, (you ought to understand that I've got nothing against you as people,) the counter to the age-old protein argument.
"The argument that meat provides useful protein makes sense, if the quantities are small. But the “you gotta eat meat” claim collapses at American levels. Even if the amount of meat we eat weren’t harmful, it’s way more than enough. We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources." 'Likely' is almost propaganda here, there are vegan triathletes, for god's sake.
Not to mention that an overload of protein has been linked to higher-rates of cancer. (sorry, but you'll have to search on that page, I'm not so tech-savvy yet.)
So, what's beneficial for you is probably beneficial for everyone else, not in the sense that if a bath is good for Reggie, you need one, but in the sense that if Reggie bathes, you don't have to smell him.
Pay attention.
ALV
P.S. I am planning on writing a number of "Google Knols," since so much of what I think on the small things is wrapped up by what I think on the big issues, so I'd like to get those big issues down as reference, so that I can simply offhandedly refer to one of these upcoming links if somebody would like the reasoning behind the reasoning behind something, and I can just write straightforwardly about the task at hand. I'll keep you updated.
The first article, if you wish to look it up and it's no longer there, was called, "Re-thinking the Meat Guzzler," It's by Mark Bittman, and it first appeared January 27th, 2008.
To wit:
-"...assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains," leading to "the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests."
-"...an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production," which also "generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation." (Fortunately, with all those gases in the atmosphere, the percentage of land that's ice-free should be growing rather conveniently.)
-"...2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days."
-"More meat means a corresponding increase in demand for feed, especially corn and soy, which some experts say will contribute to higher prices." As mentioned later, while this is inconvenient for wealthier countries and people, for the not-so-fortunate this can spell famine.
-"Agriculture in the United States — much of which now serves the demand for meat — contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in the nation’s rivers and streams..."
- The "administration of antibiotics is routine, so much so that it can result in antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten the usefulness of medicines that treat people."
-"...grain-fed animals, in turn, are contributing to health problems among the world’s wealthier citizens — heart disease, some types of cancer, diabetes."
-"...hog production [yes, 'production'] facilities that resemble prisons more than farms ... pollute streams and groundwater. (In Iowa alone, hog factories and farms produce more than 50 million tons of excrement annually.)" An excised passage provides the technical term for the "manure lagoons."
And this is not even comprehensive, as most of this has nothing to do with how animals are treated in such facilities, or the squeeze rising food prices puts on starving people. (both of which the article and this blog, below, cover.)
Interestingly, the article goes on to say that "[p]erhaps the best hope for change lies in consumers’ becoming aware of the true costs of industrial meat production."
I have not seen much of a better explanation of the emerging ethos that is called "conscious capitalism." (Be wary of that label, though; I feel many people who use it may not be particularly "conscious," or "capitalist.") The basic idea is that with an increasingly open information economy, people can choose to support companies whose values they share, even if it means the product is slightly more expensive, basically underwriting one's values. (Buying organic steak is a simple example of this.) In a way, of course, this is a natural extension of capitalism (buy the things you like that you can afford,) adding only a sort of moral sense or duty, and it is already what has been emerging in the last ten to fifteen years, though it is not exactly main-stream. It is still to be seen whether this ethos will have any sort of effect, whether it's a trend of the baby-boomer and post-boomer middle-class generations, or whether the general apathy of people will vote these businesses into bankruptcy with their dollars.
But it shouldn't be surprising that what works extremely poorly for one reason would also be a disaster in every other arena, which is basically what I take from all of this. As I've said, this blog is a way for me to start testing out ideas and to get some feedback on them, to say a few things and ask a number of questions. A friend asked me recently what I believed in, and I replied that it was hard to pin down, but that basically I believed that things are, and that works. There is a basic underlying reality in everything, and everything is an expression of this, and so, as is relevant here, if anything is wrong, it is never wrong for any one reason, but for an infinite amount of reasons, all of which are really only reflections of that thing's "wrongness." This is far from being comprehensive, and I do also believe that ultimately terms like "wrong" are meaningless, but at this level of discussion, on our subjective planet, basically, something that is bad for humans is likely bad for the planet, something bad for the planet is likely bad for humans, something bad for pigs is probably bad for humans, something bad for pigs is probably bad for the economy, (this may need an entire different post to defend if anybody wants to take an easy objection to this) etc, etc. Everyone wins, or everyone loses. With our factory farming, it is clear that everyone is losing.
But there's got to be a reason for factory farming, right? It's economical, and so how would it have become the dominant model unless a) capitalism is terrible, or b) it's just the best way? Somebody's making big.
From the Times article: "factory farming is ‘optimal’ only as long as degrading waterways is free. If dumping this stuff [that is, billions of pounds of manure] becomes costly — even if it simply carries a non-zero price tag — the entire structure of food production will change dramatically."
Basically, free pollution, not having to concern oneself with the by-products of one's production, is a sort of subsidy for this whole process. On an old farm, or, as the article notes, even 50 years ago in Seacaucus NJ, manure was used as fertilizer for local farms. Here's another chain of problems caused by one broken link: well, if pig farms are centralized and removed from vegetable farms, how will we fertilize vegetable farms? Aha! Dangerous chemicals. And what to do with the manure? Ummm, let it sit! (Not the only broken link, of course, as is well known, antibiotics must be used extensively on pigs b/c the manner in which they are crammed together makes them crazily bite each other's rumps raw, and makes chickens peck each other silly, though the consequences of these reactions are preempted by antibiotics and the removal of the pigs' tails/ soldering of the chickens' beaks, and if you think this is evidence of less intelligence on the animals' parts, imagine what you would do if your whole life you were on an elevator with twenty people. Yeah, it's where you go to the bathroom too. And eat.) Part of the idea above, that everything done wrong (or right) is not simply wrong/right for one reason, but for an infinite number of them, is that, since everything is in this elaborate conjoined dance, anything that disrupts the natural flow of this dance is detrimental. Solve one "problem," cause a thousand far-reaching ones. I do not have the space to write more about this, so let it suffice to say that I am not, however, a back-to naturist (not permanently at least, though someone who doesn't spend some time in forests might not be human,) far from it. Man is not unnatural, though we do some odd things.
Anyway,
There's another and possibly more important reason factory farming is economical, if you don't buy the pollution argument (after all, 50 million tons isn't that much, right? and Iowa's a big state, with lots of farms!) and that's subsidies. Meat is heavily subsidized, as is all agricultural product in possibly every country in the world (I cannot authoritatively say that it is every country) and accounts for 31% of farmers' incomes. Removing subsidies on meat makes all of the extra expenses required for factory farming much less attractive, not to mention that grain subsidies make feed (unnatural food for these animals) more expensive. But if the cows, for example, produced more than just T-bones, it would still make sense (as it always has) to raise them in pastures.
And, in any case, why the hell, if I find the idea of eating a steak morally repugnant, am I paying for a part of yours anyway? Why is that coming out of my (let's assume pleather) wallet? This is a historical relic.
Of course, politically, the odds of removing subsidies are running about even with the odds of having our first atheist anarchist trans-gendered president.
But, as mentioned above, consciousness on these issues may just pull off the end of factory farming anyway (growth from below) along with some other changing circumstances challenging the model.
"'If price spikes don’t change eating habits, perhaps the combination of deforestation, pollution, climate change, starvation, heart disease and animal cruelty will gradually encourage the simple daily act of eating more plants and fewer animals.'" An expert is quoted in the article as saying.
Animal cruelty? Well, yes, though only mentioned briefly before, these factory farms are hard on a lot of things, the workers, the environment, our hearts (corn leads to more damaging heart marbled fatty meat than grass, which tastes better anyway,) but probably most of all the animals.
Who cares?
Something of a lucky coincidence that this article appears online at the same time in the Times, an article about eating dog-meat in China. (For my cellphone text messaging the number one collocation for the character 狗，or "dog," is 肉，or, meat. 狗肉。Dogmeat.) If you don't read the article, the point here is, what makes it so cruel to torture a cat or a dog if you can do the same to any number of other animals?
Now, as an ex-avid meat-eater myself (still an occasional meat-eater, just without any of the militarism) who is to say that you shouldn't eat meat? Nobody, and that is another rather important point. Conscious capitalism is the economic equivalent of soft power. As a teenaged meat-eater, I always found vegetarians noxious, a cult of self-satisfied whiners and values snobs. Since I've grown up a bit, I realized that this is only the most militant brand of vegetarianism (emphasis on the -ism) but still, it makes it difficult for vegetarians to have a serious conversation without being branded as these people, like I'd imagine it makes it difficult to identify yourself as "Christian," without being lumped in with Jerry Falwell. But, crusade you must, the manner in which you do it can be much more effective, though. Patience backed by fact is perhaps the strongest tool in the teacher's shed. It may not be as sharp as the hedge pruners, but it's as heavy and inexorable as a sledgehammer, when wielded on the side of what is true and obvious. It takes time for people to accept rational arguments in the face of their emotions, but in time, without shouting, or belittling people (this is an especially strong turn-off) it works.
Of course, it wouldn't work in Soviet Russia, but we don't live there, and this displays a requirement of conscious capitalism: the open and unrestricted flow of information without edit or censorship. Given the facts, people will make the right decisions. This has always terrified governments. We're perhaps not quite there now, though that's a whole other topic, the point is, we're certainly close enough to start moving.
In any case, it's perfectly imaginable that eating meat will be around for as long as there are humans, and no matter how much you hate it, it's not within the scope of your power to change any one else's mind about this without their permission, but with an ideally open society, the concept is that what will naturally happen will be the best for everybody, just as in evolution, what does not work, does not pass, as in economics, if you can do an equivalent service cheaper, your competitor will go out of business, as in everything, what is, is, and that always works. (Maybe not for your perceived benefit, but that's another conversation.)
And finally, for those die-hard meat eaters out there, (you ought to understand that I've got nothing against you as people,) the counter to the age-old protein argument.
"The argument that meat provides useful protein makes sense, if the quantities are small. But the “you gotta eat meat” claim collapses at American levels. Even if the amount of meat we eat weren’t harmful, it’s way more than enough. We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources." 'Likely' is almost propaganda here, there are vegan triathletes, for god's sake.
Not to mention that an overload of protein has been linked to higher-rates of cancer. (sorry, but you'll have to search on that page, I'm not so tech-savvy yet.)
So, what's beneficial for you is probably beneficial for everyone else, not in the sense that if a bath is good for Reggie, you need one, but in the sense that if Reggie bathes, you don't have to smell him.
Pay attention.
ALV
P.S. I am planning on writing a number of "Google Knols," since so much of what I think on the small things is wrapped up by what I think on the big issues, so I'd like to get those big issues down as reference, so that I can simply offhandedly refer to one of these upcoming links if somebody would like the reasoning behind the reasoning behind something, and I can just write straightforwardly about the task at hand. I'll keep you updated.
The first article, if you wish to look it up and it's no longer there, was called, "Re-thinking the Meat Guzzler," It's by Mark Bittman, and it first appeared January 27th, 2008.
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