Decline of the Empire

Authentic Hope Versus False (Flatland) Hope

This will be my last post of 2016. Once again there was no indication this year that Homo sapiens can change its aggregate behavior in some positive way. Indeed, bad situations like politics in the U.S. and the state of the climate got considerably worse this year.

My Flatland stuff can and should be viewed as a hypothesis about our benighted species.

With each passing year in which humans fuck-up by failing to address the great anthropogenic problems of the 21st century, Flatland "pessimism" looks more and more realistic. In short, there is more and more confirming evidence supporting the Flatland hypothesis as time goes on.

But you certainly can't tell that to David Grinspoon, who is deeply offended by ... I'll let him tell you.

Currently I feel that spewing misanthropy is just as dangerous as emitting carbon dioxide. It is the opposite of activism. There is a real danger of unintended consequences, of encouraging people to give up. Pessimism, if it becomes a habit, can reinforce a narrative of unstoppable decline. If there is nothing we can do, that releases us from our obligations.

There’s no future in despising humanity. Self‐flagellation may feel good to some, but how does it help move us toward solutions? Surely we can find a way to love Earth without hating ourselves.

There’s more to my argument than just “put on a happy face.” This negativity is suspect, tactically (it doesn’t work) and philosophically (it reinforces Earth alienation rather than identity). It also feeds a false narrative about climate change. Many people see the fight to halt global warming as an impending either/or situation. We’re going to stop it by a certain date or we’re not—and it looks like we’re not.

Some have likened it to an asteroid that is clearly heading for Earth. In some important respects, this is a bad analogy.

In fact, Elizabeth Kolbert, talking about the 6th mass extinction, likened humanity to an asteroid analogous to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Nobody to my knowledge has characterized climate change as an asteroid.

Unlike the path of an asteroid, whose motion is determined by the relatively simple laws of gravitational mechanics, climate is horribly complex. The asteroid either will hit us or it won’t. With climate, it’s not an either/or proposition. It’s a constantly shifting trajectory that will require sustained attention and concern over years, decades, and centuries. Clearly we are not going to shut down all the coal plants in the next 10 years. Just as clearly, they will all be shut down by this century’s end. Between those two boundary conditions lies a huge range of possibilities. Yes, we are putting ourselves at risk, and yes, we must do whatever we can to move ourselves as quickly as we can toward new energy systems.

There's lots more where that came from. All human failures can be placed at the doorstep of pessimists. Follow the link to the Slate article.

To be clear, I am not a misanthrope, although I do admit that my familiarity with our happy species over nearly 65 years has bred much contempt.

Notes On Instinctual Anthropocentrism

You are not aware of your own anthropocentrism in the same way you are not normally aware of the air you're breathing. Only in extraordinary circumstances where the air is very thin or almost absent would you become aware of the invisible oxygen which keeps you alive. On Earth, in the case of anthropocentrism, there are no analogous extraordinary circumstances at this time. The natural world is thus entirely at our mercy with no exceptions until that inevitable time in the future when ... never mind.

Anyway, anthropocentrism is irreducibly instinctual in the human animal.

There is abundant evidence that we are heavily prone to perceiving and interpreting other components of the world, besides ourselves, in anthropocentric terms. As a result, we may impose complexity on a system that lacks it (or at least lacks the kind of complexity we usually attribute to it). In the case of the social brain hypothesis, we may inadvertently have used primates as a kind of tautological instrument: we have told them what we want them to be in order to validate our own view of who we think we are...

An anthropocentric stance is something from which, to a large degree, we cannot retreat: by definition, neither can we see the world in anything other than human terms nor can we describe or discuss it in anything other than ordinary human language.

Inescapable anthropocentrism necessarily implies that humans can only see the natural world in strictly human terms. In particular, humans can only see the natural world as something to exploit for their own purposes. It can not be any other way, as I discussed in the 2nd Flatland essay. Anthropocentrism underlies all the delusional nonsense humans invent when they discuss the fate of the natural world.

Only in recent times did those few humans who "care about" the natural world, or understand its fundamental importance find a way to make that world visible to humans—they put a price tag on nature (Radiolab, season 13, episode 3). And thus we get observations like this at the 11:00 mark:

I want to say, and this is based on my experience working in developing countries, that when you don't put a value on these [ecosystem] services, basically [those services] don't get counted.

That observation holds true in developed countries too of course. And any "sustainable" practices put in place by pre-industrial humans would only have been enacted to safeguard successful future exploitation. 

I would like you to listen to that Radiolab program in the hope that you will experience it in the same way I do. In particular, at no point did the various humans involved manage to take a non-anthropocentric view of the natural world. For example, the host Jad Abumrad keeps referring to the "aesthetic" value of nature, and seems to confuse this with the natural world having intrinsic value. (This is not the same as priceless). But the "aesthetic" value of nature must lie in the mind of the human beholder.

At the end, J.B. McKinnon, who I quoted in the second essay, said this after the 19:45 mark:

Abumrad — Is there another way to think about the value of nature in a way that's not economic and therefore shortsighted and all about us, but also not simply about the aesthetics and the beauty because that can be sort of limiting too. Is there another way?

McKinnon — The best I was able to do in thinking about this was, when it struck me that in a way, all this biological diversity that's out there, all these wonderful and amazing and alien things that other species can do, is like an extension of our own brains. There's so much imagination out there that we simply could not come up with on our own, that we can think of it as a pool of imagination and creativity from which we as humans are able to draw. 

And when we draw down on that pool of creativity and imagination, we deeply impoverish ourselves. In a sense we are doing harm to our own ability to think. And to dream. 

There you go—inescapable anthropocentrism.

Catch-22

Here I am staring at this blank page trying to figure out what I might say about anything.

Obvious flatland fuck-ups were on display everywhere you looked this year. I am still sometimes surprised that I need to point them out to get a few humans to notice them. That's important to me, for others to see the same train wrecks I'm seeing. Only human after all.

I suppose that's why I kind of lost it when I read that, for humans—

Developing situational awareness ... will not require altruism or idealism or self-sacrifice, only accurate self-perception and enlightened self-interest.

Sounds easy! No need for altruism! No need for self-sacrifice! Really, we humans just need a nudge in the direction of "accurate self-perception" and "enlightened self-interest".

And then I remembered how hard I've worked on this blog with very little tangible reward to develop "situational awareness" in a few thousands of humans. And most of the time it didn't take.

I'm not talking about awareness that humans are fucking up the biosphere—that's easy, Robert Scribbler can do that, even David Grinspoon can do that—but awareness that humans are the problem. That's the only "situation" that matters if you're looking for solutions.

The "catch-22" here is that if humans are the problem—if humans do not have the required capacity for "accurate self-perception"—there are no solutions. And they do not have the required capacity, or so it seems to me. That's what I mean when I say humans are  "whistling in the dark."

If you truly understand what I'm talking about, then you will also see that the human world necessarily consists of an endless stream of socially motivated filtered bullshit, something like this—

And that's what I see everywhere I look. Good lord, if you didn't see the primates in 2016, you never will.

Because it wasn't us, right? Russia did it 

This is not "nihilism" as some humans would have it. That's reality. If some humans want to interpret that as nihilism, well, be my guest. Humans can misinterpret anything and almost always do. (Sometimes they get it right like a broken clock that's right twice a day.)

Have a nice holiday weekend. Try to enjoy yourself. It needn't be a nihilistic weekend.

Our Foolish Species

Astrobiologist David Grinspoon, whose book Lonely Planets sits on my bookshelf, has a new take on the Anthropocene, which can be defined as the era of human dominance of the Earth. (Geologists argue about the dating.)

Those few thousands of people (out of 7.4 billion) who understand the importance of maintaining a livable planetary environment regard the anthropocene as a total disaster for the non-human biosphere and, eventually, for Homo sapiens itself.

Not Grinspoon. He is "a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and an adjunct professor of astrophysical and planetary science at University of Colorado. His popular writing has been featured in The New York Times, Slate, and Scientific American, among others. His latest book is Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future (2016). He lives in Washington, DC."

Clearly Grinspoon has been a great social success among the humans.

But, an astrobiologist who lives in Washington D.C? Maybe we've identified the problem right there.

Learned Helplessness

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that my Flatland model of how humans work was born of an ongoing sense of learned helplessness as my life progressed. What is learned helplessness?

It is the existential experience that nothing good can or will happen. It is utter hopelessness, the very real experience that your choices don't matter much, or a recognition that you're not even making choices at all—you're locked in.

I was taken aback when J.D. Vance used the definition above in his excellent Ted Talk America's forgotten working class (video below). But before I get into that, let me illustrate learned helplessness as I experience it. No doubt most (if not all) of you have had similar experiences.

The 2016 Election In One Map

I was reading Ronald Brownstein's How Carbon Emissions Explain Trump's Win, which was just published in The Atlantic. Let's get right to it.

Trump’s polarizing appeal has deepened the existing geographic and demographic fault lines in American politics into a chasm so imposing it could mark the border between two countries.

On one side, Hillary Clinton routed Trump in the racially and culturally diverse metropolitan centers that are helping forge a globalized, information-based, and low-carbon economy.

On the other, Trump posted crushing margins in the places that feel eclipsed, or threatened, by all of those trends.

Later, Ronald refers to this Hillary's utopia—a globalized, information-based, and low-carbon economy—as the "post-industrial" economy.  Needless to say, such an economy does not exist and can not exist at a global scale.

We need to change one word in that sentence describing the Trump dystopia.

On the other, Trump posted crushing margins in the places that feel were eclipsed, or threatened, by all of those trends.

Much better. What a difference a single word can make.

Can We Save The World?

Here's the last part of Tormod V. Burkey's essay Can We Save The World? (Stanford's Millennium Alliance for Humanity and Biosphere, December 13, 2016).

“Can we save the world?” should be an important enough question to justify submitting it to our best thinking and a thorough review of everything we know that has bearing upon it. Perhaps it is one that we have shied away from, for fear that a negative answer would breed despair and passivity and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet it is hard to see that compiling everything we know in an accessible manner could be a bad thing, and realistically assessing the mechanisms that hamstring us when we want to save the world may help us find ways to get around them.

I suggest we organize a seminar series with experts that have worked on mechanisms that hamper our efforts, and people with experiences with existing efforts, to ask the question: “Can We Save the World?”

The results from such a seminar series should be contained in an edited book of the same title. Anyone willing and able to help make Can We Save The World? happen—whether it be planning, fundraising, organizing, participating, facilitating, brainstorming, providing a venue, publishing, whatever—please get in touch.

Should I get in touch?

Bonus Video

Shoot The Messenger

Climate scientists feel threatened. For good reason, I might add.

Elizabeth Kolbert introduces today's topic. (I added the link.)

Next week, the American Geophysical Union will hold its annual conference in San Francisco. The A.G.U. meeting is one of the world’s première scientific gatherings—last fall, some twenty-four thousand experts in fields ranging from astronomy to volcanology attended. This year, in addition to the usual papers and journals, a new publication will be available to participants. It’s called “Handling Political Harassment and Legal Intimidation: A Pocket Guide for Scientists.”

The guide is the creation of a group called the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF). One of the group’s founders, Joshua Wolfe, and its executive director, Lauren Kurtz, made the decision to write it on the day after the election. “There is a lot of fear among scientists that they will become targets of people who are interested in science as politics, rather than progress,” Wolfe told me in an e-mail.

With each passing day, that fear appears to be more well founded. The one quality that all of Trump’s picks for his cabinet and his transition team seem to share is an expertise in the dark art of disinformation...

I am not going to get into the gory details of Trump's appointments and actions to date. Do the appropriate Google searches.

Advice For You Liberals Out There — Grow A Pair!

I will quote from Rolling Stone's Trump's Presidency Is Shaping Up to Be an American Tragedy—

 Add it all up, and what do you see? A child who reacts to the slightest perceived attack with vicious vitriol. A vengeful president who is willing to violate basic rights. A government run by incompetents, racists, bullies and conspiracy-mongers.

It's a formula for tragedy.

No one can predict the future – we learned that lesson the hard way a month ago. But if you were to imagine what impending American fascism would look like, you couldn't place the pieces on the board any more neatly than they've been placed in the last year.

There is no reason to believe Donald Trump understands or will accept the checks on an American president's power. There is no reason to believe he won't trample over the Constitution when it suits him. How far will he go? Is it impossible to imagine that the man who talked about "opening up" libel laws could start tossing journalists in jail? How about the guy who makes fun of him on SNL? Or anyone who criticizes him?

How confident can we be that a man who spreads lies about illegal voters giving his opponent the popular-vote win and talks endlessly about rigged elections will give up power in four years if he loses? Or in eight years, just because some amendment says he's supposed to?

Who will stop him from grabbing power he's not entitled to? The madmen he's surrounded himself with? The weak-willed leaders of the Republican majority in Congress who have yet to provide hardly any resistance to the things he's said and done, no matter how outrageous or un-American?

OK, that's enough. This language expresses cowering fear. Yes, I know things look very, very bad. 

But c'mon, are you going to just stand by and watch Donald Trump grab power he's not entitled to? And then complain about it?

I have some advice for you liberals out there, you Hillary voters, you Democrats. You fucked up and you had better fucking acknowledge it. Do you remember Hillary telling Goldman bankers that the financial industry should regulate itself, and telling those same bankers that Dodd-Frank was enacted only because, politically, it was necessary to appease the American people? 

What do such contemptible views mean to the people of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio?

Nothing. You had nothing to say to them. And now you've got Donald Trump to deal with.

Here's a message for you. Life goes on. Maybe. Are you going to just stand by and watch Trump trample over the Constitution when it suits him?

In short, are you going to fuck up again? There's every indication that you're going to.

Hence this post.

I have called the people who will be running the country reptiles, and what do you do in a fight with reptiles?

You liberals think of yourselves as the "reasonable" ones but there was nothing reasonable about the economic policies you pushed, the very same policies that screwed the people of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio. So get over it! You're not "reasonable" at all. You're better than reptiles, but that's setting the bar pretty damn low.

Let me tell you about your reptile problem. That will take all of 21 seconds.

You liberals keep blaming Russia for your own fuck-ups. You keep complaining about the California popular vote.

STOP IT.

If you want to survive, GROW A PAIR.

Fact-Checking In Flatland

Remember, I do not make this stuff up. This is a brief follow-up to Are We In The "Post-Truth" Era?

OK, let's work through this. Here are two Flatland premises.

1. In important realms like politics and economics, humans are inveterate bullshitters. They can't help it. Bullshit is the default case. Facts don't matter, or matter only in so far as they can't be used as weapons to push some largely unconscious agenda.
2. In so far as fundamental behavioral changes are impossible for humans, they characteristically assume that technology solves all problems. In Flatland, applying technology to everything is a feature, not a bug.

Given these premises, how would humans go about fixing their so-called "fake news" problem?

3. Use technology to detect bullshit 

And thus we have The Atlantic's Algorithms Can Help Stomp Out Fake News.

And I quote—