Amtrak as Allegory

The train has jumped the track and is heading off the cliff.  The front of the train is already in the air.

Meanwhile the passengers in the back are arguing about the seating arrangements.  Although there are more than enough seats for everyone, it appears that a few of the passengers have claimed multiple seats for themselves while the rest are forced to sit three and four to a seat or to stand in the aisle.   Things are getting heated and it is only a matter of time before the passengers in the aisle revolt and force a more equitable redistribution. 

Only a matter of time...   

The Machine is in Our Heads (Part 2): Statistics Don’t Feel Pain

The conceptual frame that encases our social institutions, schools, governments, media—our very language in terms of our base metaphors—is derived from the goals of industrial mass production and the obligatory mass consumption that it entails.  Qualitative features of human wellbeing are recoded into quantitative terms and measured according to standards of mechanical output and efficiency.  Statistical indicators, proportions, averages—tools of Wall Street and corporate industry—have long replaced any reference to raw, qualitative human experience.  This frame reinforces the delusion of technological progress and disguises the unrelenting and progressive dehumanization and the deterioration in the quality of human experience that the delusion of progress engenders.

Consider the case of infant mortality, a statistic that is frequently used as a quantitative indicator of the quality of life.  Thanks to humanitarian international policy, modern medical technology, and the fruits of nutrition science—not to mention industrial agriculture—the global infant mortality rate is on the decline.  What does that mean?  From an industrial frame it represents a positive outcome: an increase in the overall quality of life.  However, a positive quantitative outcome in this case does not mean a reduction in human suffering because a decline in global infant mortality does not mean that fewer babies are dying.  In point of fact, more babies will die this year than died 10 years ago.  Or 25 years ago.  Or 100 years ago.   In point of fact, more infants will succumb this one year than in any given 30 year period prior to the agricultural revolution.

“Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

Infant mortality is typically computed as the number of infant deaths per every 1000 live births.   Infant mortality worldwide stands at 44.13 per 1000 live births according to the CIA World Factbook. With a yearly global birth rate of just under 20 babies per every 1000 people, and a global population of 6.8 billion, there are, in raw human terms, 6 million infants who die each year. 

Human global population estimates for the Paleolithic range from fewer than 2 million to not more than 20 million.  Both birth rates and infant mortality were probably lower than they are now.  Women who survived to childbearing age were likely far healthier and more robust than women living today in the third-world.  And family planning takes on quite a different dimension when you are living in a small, interdependent, nomadic tribal group.  But, for the sake of argument, let’s use the numbers found in Uganda and Niger, the countries with the highest birth rates—over 50 per 1000 for Niger, and let’s take the country with the highest infant mortality rate, Angola, at 178.13 per 1000.  If we apply these numbers to the high Paleolithic population estimates, until the onset of large-scale domestication there were fewer than 200,000 babies who died in an average year  (Remember: the increase in global human population since the Paleolithic is a “byproduct” of “progress” in agricultural and industrial technology.) To frame this in the quantitative terms of industrial production:  there are somewhere between 30 and 300 times as many babies dying each year in our technologically advance modern civilization than died 10,000 years ago.             

If you measure suffering from a human perspective, according to the actual experience of individual human beings, technological “progress” brings more suffering, not less—and not just a little more!

But of course future technological “progress” will be able to fix all that…

Delusion (noun): a persistent false belief that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary.

The Machine is in Our Heads (Part 1): Drinking the Radioactive Koolaid

Today I heard someone extolling the virtues of nuclear power.  Nuclear power is “a step in the right direction” that provides a medium for us to “forge ahead” toward “positive outcomes.”  When I asked what was meant by “positive outcomes”—positive in what way, for whom, for how long—and what we might do with the spent fuel rods that will be poisoning the environment for longer than there have been humans on the planet, I was given an answer in kW-hours and long-term return on investment, and told that there have been “great strides” in converting spent radioactive fuel into relatively harmless “products” that can be “safely stored.”  Nuclear disasters like Three-mile Island and Chernobyl and past problems with fissile material storage and disposal were results of “mismanagement and a lack of foresight.”

Products?  Sure, why not?  Consumable output is the whole point of industrial production in the first place.  It’s right there in the word product-ion.  And safely stored?  What, for a rainy day? “Hey, we’re running low on spent fuel rods; could you run down to the supply closet and grab a couple?”    

But it’s the claim that nuclear “accidents” and past failures to secure nuclear waste were a result of mismanagement and a lack of foresight that is most disturbing to me.  The unquestioned belief that tomorrow’s technology (systems of management are a technology) will be able to compensate for the defects of today’s is a malignant side-effect of the delusion of progress.  Phrases such as step in the right direction, forge ahead, make great strides, achieve positive outcomes, and of course the term progress itself, are frequent players in the rhetoric that feeds this delusion. 

About next week's MLK holiday...

Passive resistance is an oxymoron.

Is "Green" Self-Eliminating?

Garrett Hardin, in his well-known Tragedy of the Commons included a section entitled “Conscience is Self-Eliminating” where he discussed Darwin’s insight that you can’t rely on human conscientiousness to control population growth because the tendency to act on conscience is a variable human trait.  The people who would act on conscience to curtail their reproductive behavior would pass this tendency along to fewer children, and the tendency to act according to conscience would be washed out of the population in just a few generations.  The potent irony with this is that the attempt to tap into our altruistic propensities would actually make things worse in the long run by eliminating those very propensities.  

Ironic and extremely counterintuitive.

I’m wondering whether there is a somewhat analogous dynamic in play with respect to “being green.”  Convincing people to “be green,” conserving gasoline, recycling, avoiding plastics, using energy efficient appliances, reducing consumption, etc., actually buys more time for the global industrial machine.  The more time the industrial machine is allowed to operate unabated, the worse off the planet will be when the machine finally implodes—the larger the dependent human population, the fewer remaining animal species, the more toxic the land, air, and oceans, etc.

Also, “green” behavior provides an outlet for the guilt people of conscience naturally feel over their complicity in the ongoing industrial holocaust.  In what ways might this guilt be harnessed if it were not for the corporate-sponsored mass-delusion that wearing hemp shirts, riding  a bicycle, and buying locally grown organic produce somehow magically helps save the planet?



I think that there might be more potent ways in which to assuage a guilty conscience.

Institutions Don't Bleed

I was recently listening to an administrator discuss the financial state of his institution.  It could have been any administrator in any institution—the fact that it was the chief financial officer of a small liberal arts college is only of minor relevance.  An unspoken and unquestioned premise behind his message was that the good of the institution outweighs the needs of the individuals whose accumulative time, labor, and assent are responsible for the institution’s continued existence.   Individuals are expected to sacrifice—or be sacrificed, if necessary—whenever the “needs” of the institution are in conflict with the needs of the individuals themselves.  This premise is so fundamental that no institution could persist without its tacit and unwavering acceptance.

But the premise is clearly indefensible.  Human beings have needs.  Institutions are abstractions, organizational tools designed to facilitate the ends of individuals.  It is always an open question as to whether the continued existence of the institution is in anybody’s best interest.  And that applies to governments, multinational corporations, and small liberal arts colleges in equal measure.

The inertia of the status quo appears to defy Newton’s laws, unassailable by any external force.  The persistence of institutions, governments, entire civilizations, rapidly becomes an end in itself, and the natural order of things is reversed: a useful tool in the service of human ends becomes human ends entrained to service the “goals” of the tool. 

To dismantle an institution that has ceased to serve human needs, to destroy—by violent means if need be—any tool that threatens our humanity is a moral imperative.

Primitivist Hypocrisy?

“So you call yourself a primitivist, rail against dehumanizing technology, and promote the complete annihilation of industrial civilization.  Yet you own a refrigerator and drive a car and use a computer and a cell phone and actively partake of the technological products of industrial civilization in a thousand ways.   Surely you are aware of the contradiction.  You are a nothing but a hypocrite, and your hypocrisy renders your words vacuous.”

Interesting.  So if a smoker preaches against the dangers of smoking, then tobacco ceases to be a carcinogen? 

I am forced to live a life of contradiction.  It is not a choice.  Failure to participate nominally in the system is lethal.    It is precisely this forced contradiction that I am railing against.   I could drop out of the system to the extent allowed, and live a solitary life pushing my shopping cart from alley to alley, or huddling in the shelter of a freeway overpass.  I could build a cabin in the mountains and survive by eating roots and rabbits.  But these options would only further alienate me from my humanity. 

Humans are social animals.  We find happiness and fulfillment embedded in a meaningfully woven social fabric.   Mass technology has usurped much of our social thread, and the bonds that connect us are becoming progressively thin and tenuous.  In many cases, the only connection we have to important people in our lives is through technological mediation.  Thanks to Skype, my granddaughter and I can talk to each other’s images in real time through the computer, but we cannot plant garlic together, or sit on the riverbank and throw rocks, or chase the dog through the house.    Mass technology endorses the former and mass marketing attempts to convince us that it is equivalent—or even superior—to the latter.  Years ago, a telecommunications corporation told us that long distance was “the next best thing to being there,” a tagline that at least acknowledged the superiority of face-to-face human contact.   Now we are told that the convenience of virtual conferencing renders actual human-to-human interaction superfluous.

Yes I own a computer (and a cell phone and…).  And I use it, fully conscious of how it along with the corporate infrastructure of which it is but a small part has wedged itself between me and the free expression of my human nature.   But it is not hypocrisy to own a computer and at the same time plot to bring about a world in which computers don’t exist.    

  

The Monkey on our Back (Part 3)

In the end, our addiction to civilization may not be the largest obstacle we will have to scale.  The “substance” of corporate consumer culture is not really all that powerful as an addictive agent.  Ultimately its power derives from the exploitation of our evolutionary hard-wiring for an entirely different kind of lifestyle. 

Our continuing consumption of the substance of consumer culture requires continuous distraction, the unrelenting input of persuasive marketing propaganda, and the distortion of our evolved psychological tendencies.  According to Benjamin Barber, one of the ways that our consumer civilization keeps us addicted to its life-draining products is through the cultivation and promotion of an ethos of infantilization, an “enduring childishness” in which our natural psychological development is intentionally stunted in order to exploit the gullibility, impulsiveness, and narcissism of youth.  Mature adults are able to delay gratification, and understand that things that are truly worthwhile take time and effort.  They prefer to work toward enduring happiness rather than seek out transient pleasures.  They are able to live with ambiguity and appreciate a plurality of individual tastes.  They emphasize public obligation over private entitlement and reasoned deliberation over emotion-driven impulse.  All of these qualities make mature adults poor consumers. 

Disengaging from the superficial, infantilized meanings of consumerism and returning to something more in line with our evolved adult propensities will be, in terms of potency, like switching from aspirin to heroin.  Actually, the drug metaphor makes for a poor comparison in this case.  The change from modern civilization to a lifestyle more consistent with our DNA will be like waking up from a suffocating nightmare to a deep breath of cool fresh mountain air.  Without a corporate system designed to keep us functioning like child zombies, without media and advertising constantly spoon-feeding us messages about how we need to furnish our lives with the latest products that promise but fail to deliver, without the continual and accelerating infusion from the global consumer machine our lifestyles will quickly revert to ones more resonant with the subsistence-living history of our species, our lives will shift rapidly in the direction of our evolutionary default.

We just need to find a way to pull the plug. 

The Monkey on our Back (Part 2)

Thinking about civilization as a kind of substance to which we have developed, both individually and collectively, a powerful addiction helps explain the sometimes very strident reaction people have to suggestions that we should change the status quo, and especially their reactions to the “radical” suggestion that we should be directing all of our energy and intelligence toward eliminating civilization altogether.  A similar reaction might be expected of a drug addict who discovers that his drug supply was going to be permanently cut off. 

Often the drug along with the activities that surround its procurement and use become such an intimate part of the addict’s daily life that it is difficult for the addict to imagine anything different.  The addictive substance becomes an organizing principle, providing an otherwise hollow life with purpose and meaning.  The addiction, despite its clearly negative consequences, provides a level of comfortable certainty and predictability.  To suggest life without the drug is to suggest a different life.  And it’s not just the drug itself, but everything associated with its use.  When heroin addicts run short, many will stab themselves with empty needles, finding some relief in the ritual itself.  In the same way, during an economic downturn many people find enjoyment in shopping for consumer items that they cannot afford to buy.  Buying, consuming commercial products and services, working in exchange for money to spend on commercial products and services, acquiring an education in preparation for a career in order to work in order to be in a position to continue to buy commercial products and services are what gives life its meaning.  We are consumers; it’s what we do.  To suggest that we need to put an end to the status quo and replace it with something radically different, is to suggest that we need to acquire an entirely new sense of purpose, that we find entirely different ways of giving life its meanings, that we abandon our comfortable consumer chains, that we embrace the uncertainty of a life of freely chosen goals, that we become entirely different beings.

That’s not what anyone wants to hear—especially this time of year when meaningless material consumption becomes a religious imperative.  

Viewing our problem as one of “civilization dependence” provides a way for us to understand the unyielding support of our dehumanizing and unsustainable civilization even as its malignant tendrils wend increasingly deep into the tissue of the biosphere.  The dependence metaphor also provides a potentially useful way of anticipating people’s reactions to the civilization-dismantling process and the dramatic life changes that will be necessary if we are to pull it off. 

A psychologist by the name of James Prochaska and his colleagues developed a theoretical model of the process of change, originally designed for use by addiction counselors.  The model has application beyond substance addiction to virtually any circumstances in which personal change is involved.  The theory views change as a five stage process: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance.  In the precontemplation stage, the thought of change is not being actively entertained.  During this stage the person does not recognize that there is a problem to begin with.  Or if the person does acknowledge that a problem exists, it is seen as something minor, not serious enough to do anything about.  This stage is marked by deep denial.  For addicts at this stage, the positive benefits of the drug outweigh any perceived consequences, or if there are perceived consequences, they are not seen as directly relating to the use of the substance.  For some addicts, the largest hurdle to cross is the transition from precontemplation to the next stage, the contemplation stage, to the realization that there is a problem and a need to take some action to change things.  Unfortunately, just knowing and accepting that there is a problem and wanting to fix it is not sufficient to bring about change.  And acquiring insight into the causes of a problem might be an illuminating experience, but insight by itself is not enough to fix the problem.  What is missing at this stage is a meaningful commitment to change.  During the preparation stage the person has committed to change and is in the process of putting together a strategic plan of attack.  Acceptance of the severity of the problem is accompanied by a willingness to do whatever it takes to change.  The action stage involves the actual enactment of the plan; this is where the “rubber meets the road” and the person begins to change his or her behavior.  The final stage, the maintenance stage, is one of continued vigilance following successful change.  The stages of this process are sequential and obligatory.  A person can’t jump straight from contemplation to action, for example.  And regressive periods in which a person “relapses” back to previous stages are typical and to be expected.  Also, the time course of each stage varies widely from person to person and situation to situation.  Some people can spend years in the contemplation stage, where they know there is a problem that they need to address, and yet never advance to the preparation or action stages.

As a society, we are collectively in the precontemplation stage both with respect to making changes necessary to deal with our addiction to global consumer culture and with respect to our civilization’s impending disintegration. 

Hmm.  Maybe what we need is a large-scale “intervention” in which the collective social consciousness is forced to acknowledge that there is a real problem.  What would such an intervention look like? 

The Monkey on our Back (Part 1)

People are willing to invest more energy and expense in maintaining the status quo, whatever the status quo happens to be, than they would have been willing to invest to bring those conditions about in the first place.  Psychologists call this lopsided valuation of our current circumstances status quo bias.   In its simplest form, status quo bias reflects a natural distaste for change, as if our present situation carries a kind of psychological inertia.  It’s easier to keep doing the same thing than it is to try something different—even if what we are doing isn’t working out so well for us.  So we put up with a job that is not entirely satisfying, or a marriage that is not entirely fulfilling.  Our willingness to allow the continuation of our present civilization, however, is something more than just an aversion to change.  It is something more closely akin to an addiction.  It’s as if we are addicted to civilization, hooked on consumption, and, as a result, entirely willing to ruin our personal health and the health of the planet in single-minded pursuit of our drug of choice. 

In his book, Consumed, Benjamin Barber suggests that addiction plays a major role in corporate consumer society.  Powerfully addictive substances and behaviors, tobacco, alcohol, sugar- and fat-saturated foods, television and movies, video games, are major consumer items whose use is supported by an enormous amount of corporate advertising.  In addition, the act of consumption itself has been turned into an addiction by corporate marketing, much of which is aimed at children, the most vulnerable segment of the population. I would go one step further.  It’s not just consumption, but the whole of our consumer civilization that we are addicted to. 

And to see that addiction in this instance is not just a metaphor, consider how professionals diagnose substance dependence, the clinical term for addiction, defined in the DSM-IV-TR (the diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals) as “[a] maladaptive pattern of substance use, leading to clinically significant impairment or distress […].”  There are seven criteria for substance dependence listed in the DSM.  The first criterion is tolerance, the need for more of the substance to produce the desired effect, or a diminished effect with the same amount of the substance.   We quickly develop tolerance for the material accessories of our consumer society.   And it doesn’t take long before we need more and bigger and faster.  The average size of new homes, for example, has grown dramatically in the last few decades.  And once we’ve actually attained more than we had previously, the positive psychological effects don’t last long.  Research on the change in life satisfaction reported by lottery winners, for instance, has found that the initial euphoria dissipates rapidly, and in a short time the person returns to pre-winning levels of life satisfaction.  Something similar happens following the purchase of expensive consumer goods.  And then there is the cliché of the power hungry corporate executive who is never satisfied with any amount of wealth and power.  Affluence and material wealth are easy to get used to, and the desire for more is proportional to the amount that you already have: the more you have the more additional it takes in order to get the same psychological boost. 

The second criterion is withdrawal, where the person experiences uncomfortable (in some cases life-threatening) physical symptoms when they stop taking the substance.  Force an adolescent to give up their cell phone or favorite video game for a week, and you are sure to see symptoms of withdrawal that would rival a hard-core junkie going cold turkey.  Pick any modern convenience and ask yourself how you would react if it were no longer available to you.  As victims of earthquakes and hurricanes quickly discover, the lack of running water is something more than just a minor inconvenience despite the fact that indoor plumbing is an extremely recent addition to the human experience.  And what about something as central to every facet of our civilized existence as oil?  What would happen if petroleum were suddenly unavailable?  Not only would most all transportation and industrial manufacture cease immediately, but we would also lose access to numerous products that are now necessities, many pharmaceuticals and plastic components used in the health-care industry, for instance, on which people’s lives quite literally depend.  The withdrawal symptoms of our oil addiction are in actual point of fact life threatening.          

The remaining criteria for substance dependence are equally easy to apply to the products of modern civilization.  The third criterion involves the person taking more of the substance than originally intended, or taking the substance for a longer period of time than originally planned.  To see how this criterion applies, we need look no further than that embodiment of a systemic inability to delay material gratification: the credit card.  Many people have managed to rack up so much in the way of personal debt that it is no exaggeration to say that they are living lives of indentured servitude to banking corporations.  The fourth criterion involves the person wanting to quit or cut down but being unsuccessful at curtailing the use of the substance.  Our inability to reduce carbon emissions fits here, as does our reluctance to transition away from gasoline powered automobiles.  The fifth criterion is that the person spends a lot of personal time engaged in activities involved in obtaining the substance or in recovering from the effects of using.  Shopping malls have become entertainment centers.  Buying things, thinking about buying things, shopping in all of its forms represents the primary activity of many Americans.  So much so that we no longer call ourselves citizens; we are consumers.  The sixth criterion is that the person has given up or reduced participation in important activities as a result of substance use.  What we have given up in our quest for ever-increasing consumption is no less than our freedom and our humanity.  We spend more time interacting with things, with our consumer products, with our cell phones and our automobiles and our games and our entertainment centers and our computers, than with the important people in our lives. 

And the seventh criterion—and this is a diagnostic clincher for many addiction counselors—the person continues to use the substance despite “knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been caused or exacerbated by the substance.”  Our civilization is destroying the planet and us along with it.  The reckless pursuit of our number one drug of choice has is rendered a substantial proportion of the planet toxic to life.  Anthropogenic global climate change is more than likely already beyond anything we can do to reverse or even meaningfully ameliorate.  Global warming skeptics aside, we are very aware of the causes of the accelerating environmental degradation that is occurring all around us.  Our industrial civilization is vacuuming the planet of all of its irreplaceable resources while the polar ice caps melt and species after species disappears forever, and yet we do nothing.  It’s business as usual.  We drive.  We shop.  We consume.  We wage wars that indiscriminately kill men women and children by the millions and litter the environment with depleted uranium munitions to protect our access to oil so that we can continue to drive, to shop, to consume. 

With respect to consumer civilization, we appear to meet all of the criteria for substance addiction.  Moreover, it should be noted that for a person to be diagnosed with substance dependence according to the DSM, only three of the criteria need to be satisfied—any three.  We clearly have a dependence problem.