I'm a little late on this due to my 24-hour weekend working cycle, but if you hadn't heard about Jackie Chan's recent remarks in China: here's a short debate in the Times about it.
There's a mini-debate in Chinese watching circles about whether or not the word he used would best be translated as "managing," rather than "controlling." The word under discussion, "Guan," (“管”) , usually does mean "managing" but this seems fairly unimportant given the context of insulting Hong Kong and Taiwan for being "chaotic" while speaking to an audience including high-level Central Party members. Certianly the essence was "China needs Authoritarianism."
Much of what I found interesting, as often happens with China blogs on the NYTimes, were the comments. Without getting too much into it, There seem to be two sides of the debate, a sure way to miss the meat of the argument entirely: Chan is a moron (or is in it for the money) and Chinese people yearn to be free, or Chan is right, Chinese people have been successful under the control of the Central Party, and would fall apart if not. Unfortunately, of course, little attention is paid to the arguments themselves, and more is paid to ad-hominem attacks on people writing. Basically, everyone in the comments is either rabidly pro-China, or anti-Chinese government. Notice also the conflation here: most of the pro-Chinas take any criticism of the government by foreigners (in public, published places) as being anti-China, as in the country (something the government actively inculcates), even though among themselves, and in private, they are often quite critical of the government.
All of this friction, for an integral thinker, should point to competing vMemes, through even the debate about whether Chan was cynically only doing this for CCP approval. So what's the deal here? Anyone watching China knows the friction created is largely between the up-and-coming 5s in the country and the authoritarian 4s. Moreso than in most cases, the power of the 4s has been used to help foster in some respects the emergence of the 5s as a powerful new class, and for this often the new capitalists in China are the most vocally in favor of the government. Nonetheless, there are plenty of 5s in the country that see right through this, and Gordon Chang is right when he says that voices of online protesters and self-organized groups to aid victims of the BeiChuan earthquake last year to help the survivors before even the governement did displays the yearning and capability for a more open society.
The biggest mistake in all of this whole thing is locating this with something inherantly "chinese." Chan's words "we chinese" make it seem as if there's some sort of essence in the Chinese people that makes them incapable of democracy (something Beijing promotes against reality and the benefit of its own people) and will always do so.
Of course, some of what he's saying is correct. China is still mostly at an authoritarian 4 level, and much of the country is still at a 2. Creating a "one-person, one-vote" system would be likely disasterous at this point, as one of the commenters notes, drawing comparisons with some African countries, and south-east asian. Democracy is not the cure of all ails. However, it ought to be clear that it is the only successful way to run a fully modern country is through a representative democracy. Even if you cannot establish democracy at the highest levels of government, at the local level it ought to be implemented, something which will give the populace experience with it for later down the road. Of course, for all its unintentional help, the CCP is rabidly anti-democratic, which is to say the small concessions made to democracy in village elections are unlikely to be expanded.
The word "chaos" is also interesting. Here, Chan notes the 4s fear of chaos/anarchy, one made stronger by chinese memories of the cultural revolution. Will China ever be able to embrace the kind of "chaos" Chan finds in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and become stronger as a result, or will the party simply not be able to let go this far? Much of the question of whether or not China will be able to fully transform itself into a modern country rests on this. Control only goes so far.
Showing posts with label Policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Policy. Show all posts
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
A swap in thinking about car batteries, and gasoline.
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.'
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.'
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.”'
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