Stefan Thiesen
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@Matthew – first of all you made me change my Avatar – to remind me what we are all here for, if anything. What you say is right – we can see our behavior as a recursive feedback system, but the peculiar nature of this system, our mind, is that it is not entirely helpless. There are many examples of humans growing beyond their limitations, and we don’t even have to look far: in this forum the word “we” is generally meant to mean “man” or “mankind” or “the hum an species”. Most people here have some kind of technical and/or scientific training and a certain level of maturity – plus a generally “planetary” view. On want and need… It wasn’t so long ago that the ethos in the West was “You get what you want by… hard work.” Hard work is not a transaction, but something that requires inner strength. The hard work of the craftsman, the farmer, but also the hard work of an athlete, all overcoming their inner inertia. And what is it that we want? Things? Things merely fill the gap, the hollow, the black hole left behind by a lifestyle that keeps that which we want (according to our nature) away from us. Marketing experts know that. Every good TV commercial connects essential human emotional needs and desires to products. At the same time the logics of a debt and credit based economy that collapses without exponential growth are hammered into us, and yet – it is not US. Many realize that it is flawed thinking, certainly from a planetary perspective, certainly when thinking in historical dimensions. We, mankind, are not uniform. There are many traditions where individual success is not measured by riches – or where individual success is not really a category in the first place. There are sectors within our own society where ability counts more and is an end in itself – music for example. I have met few overly materialistic classical musicians. But – hard working they are. Humans can break out their own encrusted feedback loops. Warriors and Soldiers of all times were trained to overcome even their most deeply hard wired instincts – often at a high price. Various contemplative practices teach to virtually – or even literally – get out of those recursive trajectories of thinking and feeling (I actually pictured myself moving out of a Lorenz attractor type system and watching it from the outside). Zen teachers talk about “observing your thoughts like clouds in the wind”, or about “monkey training”, picturing your own thoughts as squirming monkey in a cage. Rigorous, systematic thinking as in science or engineering can help to step out of the system. Knowledge can do that. Training to keep an open mind can do that. And training to stop thinking altogether. What I want to say: we are not helpless. Many stories in Christian tradition make it clear that the Devil only gets a chance when we let him, and in Buddhism there is no Devil – there is Mara, which is our own dark side, our own sloth, laziness, weakness. The interesting thing in Buddhism is the idea that you cannot fight it. It gets stronger by being fought. You can only look it in the eyes with a friendly, compassionate smile – and let it pass. Cloud in the wind. Our entire Western lifestyle however caters to the dark and weak aspects. The feedback mechanisms you mention constantly reward our dark side. “And lead me not into temptation” Christians say in the Lord’s prayer, but our entire western society (built largely by Christians) consists of temptations, our economy is based upon leading others into temptation. I once participated in a marketing seminar where the trainer said that roughly 50% to 60% of all people can be convinced to buy anything, while the remainder cannot be convinced at all, so any effort is wasted on them (i.e. they generally decide based upon hard criteria and in unpredictable ways).
We (mankind) should become more aware of what we are and why we want what. At the beginning of the 21st century we have a rough picture of who and what we are, how and where we evolved and even how the planet and the universe at large came about. We live more than 200 years after Immanuel Kant who said ““Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” (actually he said selbstverschuldete Unmündigkeit, which, in the context, I would translate as “self-inflicted mental dependence”. Sapere aude. It is not done. And all planetary systems of governance have to take into account our tendency to be irrational and caught in illusions – our tendency to escape from reality into dreamworlds and base our decisions and actions upon fantasies. Yet – humans are able to transcend themselves. We can do it. I presume all of us. Potentially. But not all of us can learn calculus. That is just so. -
@John Merryman: I wonder whether complexity per se is inherently unstable. A complex system me be held in equilibrium by means of redundant sub systems. Homeostasis and resilience also are hallmarks of complex systems – as are chaos, instabilities, back propagations or phase changes. The Yin and Yang of complexity, so to say. My statement that “we” (humans) are unstable of course was not very precise. There have been – and are – human societies that have been stable for long time periods. If I interpret anthropologists and ethnologists correctly it seems that we evolved to optimally function within certain environments connected to certain lifestyles. Sitting in an office in front of a computer screen for 10 hours a day handling dozens of partly complex and highly intellectual partly boring and repetitive parallel tasks while constantly being interrupted and to live up to father and mother and husband and wive roles in the spare time is not what evolution prepared us for. As a result we tend to – if you forgive my sloppy language – go bonkers. Mental and emotional ailments have reached epidemic proportions in Western countries, and probably elsewhere, too, only the statistical data base doesn’t exist. When I read studies of native people, for example Helena Norberg Hodge’s book “Ancient Futures, Learning from Ladakh”, I get the very strong impression that humans are not naturally unstable – they only become unstable when not in their natural environment, and that’s a small village, not a corporation and a suburb. And no matter how much it tries: even the most well meaning company cannot do more than simulate the village feeling. It always remains nothing more than an emulation, an illusion. It still is about money. It still is about leasing our thoughts and ideas and basically our lives to someone else. And we still know that we can get fired, tomorrow. And nothing prepared us to function in a world of constant information overload and constant demands doing things that are not even our own. I somewhere recently read that a single weekend edition of the NY Times contains more information than a Victorian peasant had to process in his entire life. No surprise that most of us are constantly dizzied and half spaced out. But the main issue, if I am asked, is a feeling of insecurity. To use an example from pop-culture fiction: the people in Star Trek are dealing with complex tasks comparable to ours and face life threatening dangers day in, day out, and yet everyone is nearly as relaxed as Zen monks. Of course it is fiction, but I could imagine that real people would be nearly as relaxed if they would not face any existential and especially emotional insecurities. Usually nobody is fired from Starship Enterprise and even if so, nobody would loose their house and have to move to a tent city. That’s why they can be relaxed. The village community feeling is real and not fake. I suppose that’s also a part of the appeal of religious communities, of fan-clubs, of sports clubs, of “secret lodges” – you name it. The search for the real family, the real village spirit. The search for Terra Firma, for a steady, rock solid motionless guiding star.
My entry is part of a brain storming process. My impression is that many of the fundamental propositions upon which the modern globalized western society and economy are built are entirely wrong. Your perception of time question is an interesting approach. In the context of our (human) evolutionary stage however I think it is helpful to look into both “directions” of time and see us as what we are: one stage, at one point, in an ongoing development. One step of evolution, and in an evolutionary stage largely unfit for the type of world we have created for ourselves. And yet the future is not before us – in a way it is even funny to consider something that does not even exist as being “before” us. That’s not even a really good metaphor. It is a cultural construct. The future is unfolding. A bundle of untied ends of trajectories of possibilities and probabilities cut off by the laser sharp knife we call the present.
Religion is vision, you said. Vision… to see, or foresight? Doesn’t good government require foresight, i.e. the ability to anticipate the result of actions? Management necessitates a framework within to manage, and that framework should be related to the common goals of society, of – in the big scheme of things – the population of planet earth. Who are we? What is good for us? How can we live on without causing too much harm to ourselves and our fellow earthlings? I see such vision in all religions – but also a lot of unhelpful structures and outright nonsense. But the simple questions who and what are we, how do we want to live, and what actually is going on, feel legitimate to me. We are not divine, not the crown of creation, nothing special. Just another animal, one that knows a bag full of technological tricks. It has a talent for gadgets. Otherwise it is pretty mediocre and tends to drastically overestimate its own understanding (that I know from experience!).
The current state of affairs is, for example, that an economic analysis of a country usually is carried out without paying much – if any – attention to its culture, history, ethnicity, its religion, its traditions. Very intelligent people behave unintelligibly… we desperately need integrative thinking and analysis on every level of science, technology, economy and policy making. Visions. Birds eye views. That should help ending diseased delusions of constant exponential economic growth, of constant acceleration – the logics of a system that has to grow merely to keep the system growing. We….need….to….slow….down.
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John: It is clear that a buddhist approach to the world would make a huge difference. The German catholic abboty and Zen Master Willigis Jaeger once suggested that we all have to become mystics in order to survive. He meant by this, of course, that we have to become integrated individuals that grew beyond their desires and understand fully who and what they are. I’d say that is a stark challenge if mankinds survival would depend on it. A few years ago I asked Rupert Sheldrake for his opinion about this statement, and he (drawing from his experience of living in India) thinks it is unlikely that a significant fraction of people will ever achieve that – or will want to do so. I am currently in a loom and doom mood, because I have a closer look at the situation in the Philippines, which already has a population way beyond the countries carrying capacity even for rice production, and hardly anyone is aware of it. A prominent Bishop recently announced publicly that the Typhoon that hit Mindanao Island this fall and killed hundreds was sent by God as a punishment for discussing a health reform (including laws regulating abortion and contraception) in parliament – and that more than 40 years after a man saw the Earth rising from another planetary body, and more than 20 years after “The Pale Blue Dot” was photographed. I recently read a report stating that 1/3 of the world population has never even heard about global climate change, and the majority in Asia and the former Soviet Republics consider it either a hoax or irrelevant. In other populations, including the US, the attitude towards the issue appears to be more fashion than knowledge based, at least in part due to massive dis-information by the notorious interest groups. So one seed that is to be sown most likely was sown by the Buddha in the Kalama Sutta. Explore yourself! Develop your own opinion. Open mindedly. And without fear. Another stark challenge because all too often we only seek what confirms our bias and/or calms our emotional monkey circus. What disturbs me deeply is that, as I mentioned, the insight is ages old and the warnings echo through millenia, and yet “civilization” mainly focuses at material gain. It is like a hungry individual who starved a long time and then focuses on feeding, but somehow fails to stop when an age of abundance arrives. Our entire civilization reminds me of my grandfather, who was an ordinary soldier in Stalingrad, a cable layer, and who later was one of the few who survived almost a decade in a Siberian Gulag. For the rest of his life he would collect things. Every nail, every small piece of metal sheet was incredibly valuable to him. When he died his house was a collection of careful stored and kept things other people would consider garbage, beginning with thoroughly straightened and cleansed rusty nails… Back in Siberia his survival could depend on one small thing he kept. In his later life of abundance his collecting habit suffocated him and his family. And somehow our modern economic system reflects this habit of collecting in bad times. More. Ever more. Even when there is more than enough. And even if it means to actually degrade life. I always recommend the book “Learning from Ladakh” by Helena Norberg Hodge in this context. The movie is online, too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvlqR2908TE
The following is taken from “Chang Po Tuan: Understanding Reality”, written approx. 1000 years ago and translated by Thomas Cleary.
“If you do not seek the great way to leave the path of delusion, even if you are intelligent and talented, you are not great. A hundred years is like a spark, a lifetime is like a bubble. If you only crave material gain and prominence without considering the deterioration of your body, I ask you, even if you accumulate a mountain of gold: can you buy off impermanence? The realm of dust is the world of sound and form, the land of name and gain, where misery is taken for pleasure, where the artificial is taken to be real. Diminishing vitality, wearing out the energy, destroying essence and life, in it there is death only.”
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This is, of course, a dangerous question. Another question: how democratic is the system we now have? When did populations ever vote on whether or not they want fractional reserve banking? Democracy suffers from a similar flaw as neoclassical economic theory: it only works properly if it can be assumed that all actors are fully informed – and aware – of all facts and implications. This is, quite simply, never the case. The difficulty begins with defining what we mean by “democratic”. Are America or the EU countries democratic nations? There are many arguments that suggests they are not – or only superficially so. Perhaps MORE democracy actually could do the trick, as currently the true power seems to be in the hands of corporate interest groups, especially the finance sector. We often here that this or that law is int the interest of the “economy”, which suggests we live in an “Econocracy” – or perhaps a Timocracy. “It’s the economy, stupid.” I am not sure if true democracy can work. We are in a situation where we basically have to unify the long term interests of an entire planet of 7 billion people. It is safe to say that this is historically unprecedentd. And nobody ever worked out how to even make an individual country happy in the long run… I really don’t know. But we gotta try. Perhaps the net can help. Or a new form of representative democracy. I seem to recall that Arthur C. Clarke once suggested parliaments comprised of randomly selected members from the general public. Why not?
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My experience is that whenever I talk to numerate academics (including economists) I can quickly reach common grounds with them where it becomes clear that perpetual economic and population growth cannot be sustained. But it becomes a “sigh, sigh” situation where nobody acknowledges that this is an issue we somehow have to address NOW. Also everyone seems to believe that much of the Limits to Growth report in the meantime was outdated or debunked. Most never bothered to read it. in any case for the “general population” the situation is different – similar to climate change discussions. People leave the house in the morning, thinking “global warming? so why does it snow? All nonsense!”. Humans cannot easily abstract from their own personal experience and sensory perceptions. For scientists it is normal to cope with the very big, very small, very new, very old, very fast and very slow. We are used to think in deep abstractions and complex long term scenarios. Non-scientists are not. And even among scientists few are able or willing to think and look broadly across disciplines. As Freeman Dyson noted at least two decades ago: we need less analysis and more synthesis. I myself adore Schrödinger for his introduction to his Dublin lecture on “What is Life” in 1943. Perhaps you know it, but I will post it anyway, because I consider it very important:
“… We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge. The very name given to the highest institutions of learning reminds us that from antiquity throughout many centuries the universal aspect has been the only one to be given full credit. But the spread, both in width and depth, of the multifarious branches of knowledge during the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum-total of what is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has come next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it. I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true aim to be lost forever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them, and at the risk of making fools of themselves. So much for my apology.” -
Thanks for the link, Prof. Hake. Who was it again who said that “the biggest shortcoming of man is his inability to comprehend exponential equations.” I originally studied Geo systems sciences and astrophysics but venture (at my old age of 45) into economics now. Currently I am working on developing a scenario of 100% renewable energy supply for the Philippines, but it already feels like a futile effort. Population there rose from 16 something million in the early 20th century to over 100 million now. Doubling time is in the range of 35 years. The country already turned from a major rice exporter to the world’s largest rice importer, and more people live in absolute poverty now than have been around 50 years ago in the first place. It is clear that there isn’t much room for growth anymore, and yet grow the population does. The situation is rather unstable – it only takes a moderate shock to world food markets to throw the country into famine. And, I’m afraid, this is only the beginning – a canary in the mine. In the end the Earth itself, too, also is merely an island and nobody out there to send us extra supplies. A few years ago had the pleasure to interview Michio Kaku in Switzerland for an article revolving around energy, evolution, growth and the great filter, and he, too, predicted that we will only begin to move when we experience major shocks… Sad. But history suggests the same. So does psychology.
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@Aleksei: Well – your arguments largely hold, but only under certain circumstances, which include (that’s an old hat, of course) direct and hidden subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear. “We need it” is not a good argument. We need fossil fuel, because we have a fossil fuel driven exponential growth economy? Which we have because fossil fuel is cheap and available. So somehow we end up with the circular argument that we need it because we have it. Now if we look at some of the more extreme scenarios – say Jim Hansen and his Venus effect (plausible enough for me as a trained astrophysicist): how can risking the very existence of the biosphere be justified on economic grounds? Maybe financial analyists living in the little sphere of artificial illusions can think that way – but the greater public should rather not. The risks only seem controllable as long as we adhere to deeply diseased neoclassical economic thinking where an accident like the Macondo incident in the Mexican Gulf either causes financial damage with clear price tags or non at all. Economically the total destruction of huge sections of Earth surface and habitats can well be seen as “no or little damage”. So that is the one side. Need vs. damage. It is the need of the drug addict for the next shot. Until the final one.
But need is also relative. Here in Germany we seem to “need” much less carbon per capita than in the US. I know both countries well, have lived in both, and I do not see that the living standard and social services in the US are any better than over here in Western/Northern Europe. Need therefore also depends on efficiency. Another no brainer. Demand side management. The company I work for just opened its second passive house office building. It needs next to no heating fuel. Some cities in Germany plan to be energy independent by 2020. A few smaller towns already are. The intermittent nature of renewables is not much of a problem with proper power distribution, smart grid technology, demand side management and hierarchical storage solutions. What will change is transportation. In any case from a point of view of global risk management I do not see how we can justify global environmental and socio-economic degradation, all the way to potential large scale biospherical collapse, by merely stating “we need it”. For… keeping the status quo alive?
Having said that I do agree that there is very little in terms of international political action that could encourage optimism. I do not see really unsolvable technological problems. But I also do not see much happening, globally. There are many promising small scale and regional projects and approaches, but no big leap in sight. And that big leap necessarily would have to address our economic system. No way out there. -
Just a word on “most people know”: I recently saw a report on public TV here in Germany (sorry – cannot properly source adhoc) about a global survey on global climate change attitudes and perceptions. Result: 1/3 of mankind never even heard of it, and in Asia and Russia the vast majority of those who did believed it was either a hoax, irrelevant or natural. Here in Germany where the vast majority had no doubt about global climate change and its anthropogenic contribution the tables are slowly turning and years and years of disinformation slowly show an effect. There are a small number of apparently well funded individuals and pseudo-institutions that manage to sneak their views even into the more serious and critical media, and casting the shadow of doubt is all they need to do. When lengthy and very complex scientific works are published that deny the entire existence of even the radiative forcing effect itself that are later crushed by experts that still comes across as “different scientific opinions” and “the scientists themselves cannot agree”. The approach is like that of an attorney defending a murder suspect. Raising doubt. And it is a sinister tactic, since it cannot really be countered. The defender of truth always looses when the judge (the public) is unable to identify trustworthy independent experts. It is a loose, loose situation. The same happens when the prevailing economic model (the main culprit of all and everything) is criticized. Immediately come accusing cries of Leftist! Socialist! Marxist! Communist! along with scenarios of masses of people herded into Gulags. Loose, loose.
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