SUNDAY, DEC 20, 2020: NOTE TO FILE
The Uncomment
First ignore
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: TRUTH, FROM THE WIRES, JUSTICE, DOING GOOD
Abstract: I comment on a new article by Robert Heinberg published online by Resilience.org, a group (echo chamber?) of the Transition movement. Some claims may have been outside the domain of discourse of the group , i.e. the consensus thinking of the non-profit organization, outside its Overton window. It is a group working to save the world, to do good, in need of protection. Sometimes it takes politics, which seeks consensus. Comments removed.
COOS BAY (A-P) —A link to an article of interest was posted to a group that would have me as a member:
Excellent: 2020: The Year Consensus Reality Fractured, by Richard Heinberg, Resilience, 18 December 2020
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-12-18/2020-the-year-consensus-reality-fractured/
We know something about the past and the present. What about the future?
"A sustainability-oriented worldview would acknowledge the ongoing need for a low and stable population relative to environmental carrying capacity. And it would prize sufficiency, equity, resilience, and happiness above accumulation and ostentatious display."
And I read it.
I thought it excellent too, if short on 'real solutions', and posted a comment primarily to string some quotes and links together, which is something I rarely do (via comments). I'm a slow learner. On second thought, perhaps after reconsidering my indiscretion, I would have deleted it, as I have before, but as I confessed, I'm a slow learner.
All comments or edits to them are monderated. The Resilience.org moderator, after initially approving it, deleted the post some minutes later as I had linked to content on a website, without ads and insignificant numbers of intentional visitors, that I own (by way of referencing quotes/claims made), so the post was marked as spam and went away. Robert Heinberg and others won't see it. Thou shalt not use another's site to promote your own for any reason.
All groups seek to grow, to serve, to give their members more of what they seek. Posting comments that readers may find disconfirming or disconcerting, may not overtly violate any stated policy, but any violation that does may be more likely to be enforced. Have I any bases whatsoever for complaint? No.
The site, those who work for it—paid or as volunteers, will seek to do what is best. They are under no obligation to spread memes that are not consilient with their narrative. The effect is one of self-censorship. That is why I Like what I don't so I will be served more, so as to be exposed to views, e.g. those of ecomodernists, that are smarter than I am (e.g. Steven Pinker, most NCEs and theologians, which doesn't mean they are right) that I have a bias against. In the company of atheists I emphasize that I'm a fideist. Sam Harris once spoke at an Atheist Convention and, not wishing to preach to the choir, he spoke at length about why calling oneself an atheist is absurd. I'm concerned that I might be some sort of Harris ditto-head.
Comment:
As M. King Hubbert noted, "Our ignorance is not as vast as our failure to use what we know." By 1975, a few years after the fine words of the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment of 1972 were agreed to, we knew that repeating the pattern dozens of times as the decades passed would have the same outcome: that meanwhile, "the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed" [David Suzuki]. In 2016, the Paris Agreement is signed with much grinning and nodding of heads, meanwhile... why expect a different outcome?
In 1973 H.T. Odum, by request of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, noted: "What is the general answer? Eject economic expansionism, stop growth, use available energies for cultural conversion to steady state, seek out the condition now that will come anyway, but by our service be our biosphere's handmaiden anew." And he did not add "before the end of the 21st century" or even the end of the decade those wanting to know how to persist lived in. What part of "seek out the condition now" do we still not understand?
That we were well into overshoot, which by definition implies descent/degrowth, was known before Catton summarized our failure to use what we knew in Overshoot 1980. And what's the greatest breakthrough in understanding the human problematique since the 1970s? Trick question: there hasn't been any nor has there been any in climate science. Clugston's Blip of 2019 (foreword by Catton) repeats an updated version of Catton's 1980 summary. Why expect a different outcome?
The human ideasphere is now merely slightly more fragmented and dysfunctional than recent memory may serve. As Hubbert noted in 1981, "The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin."
Without saying good or bad: "The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from the prescientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system. Nevertheless, the monetary system, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is superimposed."
"Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest."
What part of "incompatible" are we missing? Al Bartlett, who gave the same public lecture 1,742 times, noted that "the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." But there is evidence of two exceptions.
At some point humans may start to take an interest in real solutions, which excludes politicized prattle and the belief in political solutions. If recovery from the prior Great Depression had not been possible for biophysical reasons, Hubbert was prepared to stand and deliver as instigator of Technocracy Inc. When the now global growth hegemon falters this century, we now have the better view afforded by Donnella Meadows' Thinking in Systems worldview, an extension of Hubbert's matter-energy systems worldview, much as Einstein's was of Newton's.
What we haven't done yet, the knowledge we're still failing to use, is to act on the fact that there are no political solutions. When a teachable moment comes, as it nearly did in the early 1930s, radical ideas will again become thinkable as the consensus view falters. Thinking in systems, being ruled by natural laws founded on thermodynamics and energy principles, is based on the recognition that humans don't get a vote in terms of deciding what works or how to live sustainably on the planet without presiding over the greatest mass extinction event since the late Cretaceous that could rival that of the Permian. Humans need to stand down, a currently unthinkable thought outside of the matter-energy systems worldview.
Hubbert's proposed Technocracy alternative had no gender or racial barriers, but it was discriminatory: no politicians nor anyone currently active in politics was permitted to join. Updated for the 21st century, Naturocracy would differ, but would also exclude those who believe in political solutions, including environmentalists who will be clearly viewed as being part of the problematique and not any solutionatique, because they are.
We who could "actually think more than a decade ahead" [E.O. Wilson] knew in the 1970s where the BAU system was taking us, We cannot now transition to a steady-state economy. If any would-be handmaidens are to persist, there may be time enough to vote will our feet and form small pockets of sustainable and functional complex society anew, i.e. design and live in a viable ecolate civilization.
But we must "seek out the condition now that will come anyway," late being better than never, which involves a foundational disconnect from the monetary culture and its addictive BAU ways, including all belief-based alleged ways of knowing and thinking and living. Pretending to live in pretend transition towns has a predictable outcome. The GND/RND (Green/Rural New Deal) is BAU in sheep's clothing.
Time to "understand or die" as Wittgenstein noted, and not just as individuals but as a species. The change some may live through will involve those who do not understand, passing away memetically if not genetically. Whether "eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism." [James Lovelock] remains to be determined by Nature, not by clothed apes. But that there may come to be such a human is also the source of my optimism. Listen to Nature who "has all the answers" [H.T. Odum]. Down with humancentric democracy. Up with naturcentric naturocracy. Or die. Anyone for a life-driven purpose?
PS: The resilience.org site allows URL links but the CSS disallows any indication that text is a hyperllink (not underlined nor in a different color...). So I edited so links like [James Lovelock], like all other text, appeared as [James Lovelock-ref] to suggest that mousing over and clicking would go to a link. That is when the moderator marked the edited comment as spam. If Robert Heinberg would have taken no interest in the comment, then no harm done. Was any harm done? I don't know.
