Skybird
12-11-09, 09:16 AM
I am a quite active reader, usually having 3-5 books in the work simultaneously, and this year I had a number of books that all dealt with different aspects of one and the same question, although I did not plan the books to be like that and did not become aware of their similar object of interest: from climate change over shortening resources and intoxication of the environment to financial collapses and economies heading for the centre of the spiral in their stellar debts levels – with our societies and civilisation being that obvious in danger, why is it that we still re-fuse to react with the obviously strongly recommended determination and unity, although doing so would be of vital interest for us, and decisive action would be needed to be agreed upon by all. Or in other words: why is it that we so stubbornly refuse to draw consequences from the past although we could perceive the patterns from past cycles so clearly, if only we look close enough? Why do we not learn in the face of so much opportunity to learn?
I came across several good books, which originally I seemed to have picked by random chance and random opportunity, but now see falling together into just one whole “picture”. I got some new ones, and also re-read two older ones I already had, with a slightly different, more power-political focus. And I would like to nail some summaries and thesis to the gate, since maybe it might be of interest for some. There has been a lot of hacking and slicing over capitalism and competing market philosophies, free thought and opinion, global warming, politics and economic interest, logic and ratio in this forum. So let me add just this contribution to these kinds of debates, and think about it for a moment. I will quote just brief notes about typical key factors for the historic fall of past societies, reasons for why we do not act in the face of threatening amounts of problems, and in how far this has to do with concepts and terms like rational decision-making, egoism and altruism.
I used to describe myself as a realist, and as a rational man. While the first description can support itself, I realised that with the latter I was lacking precision if leaving it to just that label alone, and that without explicitly referring to implications I silently take as natural I nevertheless always attach several supple-menting qualities to it that gives the term “being rational” (or “being reasonable”) it’s final meaning – by adding orientation to it. One thing I thought a lot about in the past weeks and months, was the need to understand that being rational and reasonable, can lead to totally different decisions and behaviour of ours, sometimes for our better, sometimes for our worse. We can work for our survival reasonably and rationally. Unfortunately we can also decide our suicide – for perfectly reasonable and rational and logical arguments that we fully understand. And this is a dilemma, because it seems to cause a major cul-tural deadlock in our global society that prevents the problems from being accepted and properly approached for solving them while there still is (or was?) time.
I do not claim credits for the following material, nor do I claim that the following ideas and thoughts are originally mine, or in any way caused by my mind. Even where I do not explicitly refer to works or authors, you better assume that somebody else has had these thoughts before me already, and that I just summarise it. It would be a deeply discouraging implication for the potential of the human race to assume for even just a second that I really could have been the first to have had these ideas – I was not, and for the most I know that by authors’ names and book titles for sure. But for the sake of more comfortable work and making this text more accessible, I will restrain myself from detailed quoting and cross reference to existing knowledge bases and works, it also increases the workload for me without really adding a big positive effect: after all, this is no paper that must qualify according to formal academic standards. So I throw it all together and hope I succeed in turning it into one overall argument and depiction.
Just keep in mind that I do not claim originality for the thoughts I summarise, and claim no personal credit for them.
Let’s begin with some general statements which may serve as kind of a guiding preamble for the rest where we go a bit deeper into the details.
First some general statements.
1. All human behaviour is egoistical in that even any rational decision-making and weighing of options depends on standards seen as valid by the individual – even where assessing if own standards shall bow to standards (or demands) of others.
2. Rational behaviour tends to be destructive in the long run, since it is based on egoistical mo-tives in the meaning of point 1.), and beyond, it favours the strong at the cost of the weaker. An economy basing on egoism as it’s prime motivation aims at preventing competition, dis-connects itself from it’s service for the community, and ultimately destroys both the com-munity and itself – doing so rationally, and as a result of rational, reasonable decision-making.
3. Rationality therefore needs complementation by altruism to evade destructive effects caused by itself, and ultimately to evade rational suicide. The weighing of altruism versus egoism again includes an egoistic element (see 1.) ), as long as altruism is no represented in a “truly self-less love” for the interest of the other, which “agape” in the understanding of Christian tradition comes the closest to. We want to differ between general altruism and agape, there-fore.
Next, some more specific statements.
4.) Any community, locally or globally, can only survive if it consumes no more resources than can be replaced naturally by the ecosphere the community lives in. The smaller the resource basis of a community, by own fault or as an environmental reality the community was confronted with from it’s beginning on, the worse it’s chance for long-term survival.
5.) A population growth/size beyond a level were sustainable management of natural resources is possible, marks the beginning of a downward spiral that ultimately must end in total collapse, if not being stopped by a decline in population size below the level of then-actual sustainable re-sources management again, which will be a lower level than before, then. If the loss and damage has become too great meanwhile, the environment from some point on cannot recover or cannot replace enough resources as would be needed to supply the population size currently in place, and the temporary losses turn into permanent losses.
6.) Permanent losses minimise future survival chances for later generations, by marking options that are no longer there since they have been consumed. All consummation of resources that do not get replaced by nature within the timeframe relevant for human evolution, like metal ores, oil, gas, are permanent losses, and will never be available again to the present or future mankind. There are resource types that - if consumed - are either sustainable or that are permanently lost from the very beginning on if consumed. Too excessive consummation of sustainable resources turns them into permanently lost resources.
We live in interesting times, to say the least.
The planet is crowded with humans like never before. The level of development and living conditions of 15% of the global population – the “happy few” in the industrialised first world, mainly the West – strictly contrasts to those that the lower 70 or 80% of the global population have to deal with, with mil-lions needlessly dying every year from starvation, disease and proxy-wars fought over precious natural resources. The reaction to misery and suffering often is either apathy, or political and religious fanati-cism, fuelling the conflicts of the present and near future. Given resources in food, like fishing grounds and fertile ground for agricultural activity, are disappearing, are eroding or have been overused, we live in a time when we realise that the practical carrying capacity of the planet maybe is much, much lower than the idealistically assumed, most ideal, theoretical carrying capacity. Global demand already seems to be beyond what the natural ecosystem can support and sustain. We have just started to understand that every intensifying of food production also intensifies the contamination of the environment, the stress put on natural resources like natural sweet water reservoirs, functioning ecosystems with their incredibly sensitive, complex balances, and the need to use pesticides and fertilizers. And often the quality of the food is the more inferior the more effort is put into intensifying the production process and lowering the end prices for the Western consumer at the same time. The level of planetary garbage mounting and in-toxication of the environment, from aerial emissions over nano-particles and chemical agents in water, ground, food and breathing air, to swimming plastic waste dumps in the oceans that reach the size of the expanse of Texas each, are already directly life-threatening in certain places, but threaten human and animal health around all the planet, now and increasingly in the future, putting the chances of the next generation more and more into question. We commit physical injury and slaughter of unborn generations.
The more comfort we have at risk, the more we seem to be willing to still doubt the climate change and global warming. – Can we really be sure that the living style we enjoy in the West can be maintained without going at the cost of the many, and ultimately, at the cost of our own future? Can we safely as-sume that it is only a question of more or less comfort when talking about climate change, ignoring that maybe in reality it is the more a question of survival the lower we are positioned in the global hierarchy? Will our thinking about justice and work-earned rewards really make a difference for our fates when we are being faced with vital resources growing thin in the global village we now live in? “If I don’t grab the nugget, then somebody else will”, and “ first let the others demonstrate their good will and best in-tention, then I’ll follow” – are these truly wise strategies – or are they maybe the repositioning of ad-dressing necessities to a place and time after our time on earth, and after our life – into the time of our afterlife? “And after us, the flood…?”
In the work of Joseph Tainter you find the argument that “complex societies” like our current one, but also historic ones that he lists as examples, should be expected to be especially capable to deal with problems and threats to their existence deriving from fluctuations in their material basis, their supply with needed resources, and productivity. Their complexity, he argues, is their problem-solving compe-tence and adaptability. He argues that when a society realises that it is threatened and that there are dan-gerous problems putting it’s survival in question, that then it would start to address the problems and eventually adapt to new conditions, if needed, and he implies that it’s range of problem-solving options is the more diverse the more complex its social and economic structure is. He also follows a thinking that says that crisis occur at times when the economical exploitation of the ecosphere a community is living in, does not produce the revenues anymore of earlier times, and productivity therefore drops.
Obviously, this reflects widespread popular thinking today, but maybe that is only because it is a self-reassuring feedback to ourselves that as long as we do not see ourselves addressing problems, the prob-lems are not really threatening – that’s why we must not act on them! Can we really be sure that we do not follow this thinking for one reason only? Because it reassures us that we do well in not changing, not acting, living in assumed eternal comfort and not being in danger at all? Isn’t that just an all too seduc-tive view on life – our life in the first world? It certainly is the easiest, cheapest and most comfortable way we could imagine for our future.
There is also parallel between Tainter and the thinking of classic economy theory (of capitalism in Anglo-Saxon interpretation), saying that the total quantity of available resources does not really matter, and things really depend on the amount of financial investments in exploitation, and in research to find modified approaches and procedures to do so. In this influential theory, monetary options decide on the material options, the problem is not a shortage in resources, but only a shortage in capital exclusively. The material reality somewhat gets neglected, like the human reality – resources, items and persons all get translated into monetary equivalents. I do not hide that I consider this theory to be very blatant bol-locks, and as being extremely dangerous both for the planetary environment, and human social commu-nities survival, and their members’ self-esteem and dignity as well.
The argument that eventually ecological collapse all alone could cause cultural and civilizational col-lapse as well, Tainter rejects. The problem I have with his position is that he is right in pointing out that the fall of some societies indeed took place under exclusion of explicit environmental factors: several historic and ancient societies as well as the modern Soviet Union could be mentioned. But Tainter tends to say that environmental factors NEVER are sufficient to cause the fall of a civilisation. And I think that is where he is erring.
However, history teaches us many lessons on complex societies that collapsed in times of crisis in gen-eral - as well as in times of explicit environmental collapses in special - although they were equipped with the needed competence and potential that should have enabled them to address, solve and survive the crisis that instead destroyed them. Therefore, Jared Diamond in direct reference and reply to Joseph Tainter focuses on the negative examples of the Easter Island, the Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the Anasazi in Chaco Canyon, the Maya in Central America, the Vikings in Greenland, the genocide in Rwanda, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and the undecided fate and huge environmental challenges of China, Australia and the US state of Montana. The Highland of Indonesia, the island of Tikopia and the Japanese Tokugawa shoguns he gives as positive examples for illustrating why other societies were able to react to self-constructed threats and dooming environmental challenges, and addressing them, surviving crisis and long periods of time therefore. Other examples in positive and negative could be mentioned as well, from the abandoning of the official apartheid in the United States to the fall of the Soviet Union.
But the negative examples lead us to asking this single question: why is it that societies by reasoning and despite no hint and evidence for the disaster unfolding being hidden from them, nevertheless have cho-sen for a path and behaviour that lead to their ultimate self-destruction and extinction of their popula-tion, either by non-acting or by investing into the wrong strategies for acting?
Of the authors I have read this year on these issues - mainly Arnold Toynbee, a bit of Carroll Quigley, Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter – I found Diamond to be arguing the most convincingly, and describ-ing most precisely his observations. Some find his work repetitive – I find it is an overwhelming sum of evidence and precise, wide-spread observations and conclusions supporting his thoughts. I want to ex-plicitly point out that in the following comments I follow the structure of parts of his work very closely. The following 4-point structure in principle is the summary of one chapter from one of his books. I add the historic references as examples of illustrating value only, like he does, but leave it to just mentioning them without explaining them in depth, because that would be beyond the limit of this text. Be aware that the societies and their fate that get mentioned in just one or two sentences, he spent one, two or three chapters on to explain them in full.
Diamond in parts agrees with Toynbee. Both authors see the collapse of cultures also being caused by small elites that failed to govern the community correctly and with at least the minimum of needed bal-ance between egoism (self-centred interests: privileges), and altruism (community-focussed interest that also could include offsprings and the following generations). Both authors also agree that where you want to ensure that governors govern for the sufficient interest and benefit of the people, the people must make sure that those governing them are affected by the consequences of their governing the same way the ordinary people are affected. That’s a practical implementation of the golden rule, do as you would be done by. If governors can avoid negative consequences suffered by the many when choosing for something that benefits their personal interest, the probability that they will do that increases dramati-cally. But different to Diamond, Toynbee like Tainter and many other authors of their branches ignore or minimise the role of environmental factors in the collapse of societies.
Societies would be expected to react when they realise there are problems. But many have not, until their extinction that “not so much was caused by murder, but suicide”, as Toynbee put it.
And I have the very bad feeling – and see it confirmed when monitoring politics, economics and ecology as well as environmental developments - that our global civilisation today just repeats once again this suicidal pattern of not reacting in time – or better: of not having reacted in the past while there still has been time.
An important question therefore is: why is this so, and is the dynamic of the answer to this question still effecting our fate for the worse.
One could point at individual wrong decisions causing collective erratic developments and collective wrong decisions in the aftermath. One could hint at interest conflicts and lobbyism, group dynamics and the self dynamics of actual conditions and processes that already have been triggered, wanted or un-wanted, knowingly or unknowingly.
More systematically, there are four scenarios for why societies do not act in the face of vital problems threatening their existence:
1. A problem does not get recognised before it has become existent.
2. A problem does not get perceived as a problem or does not get realised, although it is real and does exist.
3. After realising a problem, nothing gets done in order to solve it.
4. The attempted solution fails.
Let’s look a bit closer.
1. A PROBLEM DOES NOT GET RECOGNISED OR FORSEEN BEFORE IT HAS BECOME EXISTENT.
1a) It may be because the society has no matching pre-experiences to which it could compare.
Examples are
- the introduction of rabbits and foxes and other foreign species in Australia;
- the Norse in Greenland who saw a vegetation reminding them of that in their home of Scandina-via, but did not know initially that it grew many times slower than in Scandinavia and erosion being a greater problem once they started to chop away the green and tried farming with sheep and cows. The vegetation destroyed grew much, much slower than they used to know from Scandinavia, it was not replaced as fast, the soil was exposed to the elements for longer time. Le-thal starvations in the end were the result when the Viking society collapsed;
- The Norse in Greenland not foreseeing that opening of trading routes from Europe to the Far East made their most precious trading resource, ivory, less valuable;
- The society in Greenland becoming more and more isolated from northern Europe when growing levels of sea ice interrupted shipping during the medieval cooling: Europe to which it tried to stay attached in culture and customs, as well as depending on items and goods from Europe, es-pecially metal.
1b) Earlier knowledge and experience is so old that it got forgotten, or it’s relevance for the actual problem does not get recognised.
Examples are
- the Anasazi in Chaco Canyon falling victim to eroding agricultural soil and a drought in the 12th century, since they had no writing and thus no scriptures transporting experience with earlier droughts from the past to their present;
- the Maya, whose society fell victim to a drought in the 9th century. They had a written tradition – but it exclusively dealt with heroic stories about their kings and priests, and contained no weather reports and agricultural advice;
- the oil crisis from 1973 - and gasoline-wasting SUVs becoming popular just short time later;
- a great drought in the region around Tuscon in the 50s –which was answered by a boom in build-ing golfing resorts that needed ridiculous amounts of artificial watering that caused havoc on ground water levels.
1c) Conclusions basing on false analogies
Examples are
- the Norse in Greenland faced life-threatening erosion of soils (the vegetation looked like they used to know from Scandiniavia, but the ground in Norway was heavier and more made of clay, while in Greenland it was much lighter and contained much volcanic ashes that the wind and the rains and storms could blow and wash away);
- the French Maginot Line in WWII (assuming the Germans would fought the next war by the same tactics and strategies like in the earlier war, without altering them. This wrong assumption was and still is often made in the military: that the next war would be fought the same way like the last one).
2. A PROBLEM DOES NOT GET PERCEIVED AS A PROBLEM, OR DOES NOT GET REALISED, ALTHOUGH IT IS REAL AND DOES EXIST.
2a) The cause of the problem cannot be seen, is beyond perception.
Examples are
- Australia, Montana, Mesopotamia: nutrients in the soil get used up by overfarming or erosion and washing-out; salienation of soil (Versalzung);
- Mining activity releases copper and acid leaches that pollute ground water, sediment layers, etc.
2b) Decision makers are too far away from the location where the action takes place.
- In Montana, woodcutting corporations have not sent their deciding managers to the forests they were farming 800 and more miles away, so they did not see that the high level of undergrowth was becoming a problem that allowed huge firestorms to set ablaze large areas of otherwise high trees that would not have burned as easily by themselves if they would have been surrounded by too dense undergrowth. The result was one of the greatest forest fire disasters in the history of the United States.
- Different to that, the people, living on the very small island of Tikopia (4.66 km2, population 1300) have all areas of their island in sight from everywhere, making clear to every person that whatever happened to the land and effects the one, necessarily must effect all the others, too, and that the land and it’s resources are limited. That’s why sustainability has become the total top priority in their ways of how they use their land for farming and benefiting from replacable re-sources. Strict birth control also is an indispensable precondition for their success.
2c) The problem manifests itself very slowly, in a slowly growing trend with huge fluctuation.
Examples are
- Global Warming; getting negated time and again be referring to not general trends but micro-cycles that represent just natural short-termed fluctuations, or by referring to the actual local weather report;
- the periods of droughts that killed the Anasazi and Maya civilisations;
- the cooling during the medieval age that isolated Greenland and Norse settlers more and more;
- “creeping normality”, meaning a process of yearly averages slowly but constantly falling until the general norm has constantly fallen as well, so slowly that nobody notes it;
- “landscape forgetfulness” (Landschaftsvergeßlichkeit), meaning that human mind does not become aware of constant slow changes in the landscape a person lives in. But seeing pictures of that land-scape how it was 40, 60 years ago, may reveal dramatic changes. One of the most striking examples are disappearing glaciers, or the advance of deserts all around the globe.
On the other hand, the Tokugawa shoguns had such an amount of direct control and direct power that they were able to quickly react to the very fast disappearing of forests in ancient Japan. The fast destruction to nature made the dramatic consequences obvious to the observing human eye. Today, Japan’s forests all are managed and cultivated, and cover three quarters of Japan again. Not Brazil, not North America and not Germany or Scandinavia are the most competent and successful forest farmers on Earth, but the Japanese. And their forest lives and prospers although being economically used.
3) AFTER REALISING A PROBLEM, NOTHING GETS DONE IN ORDER TO SOLVE IT.
The various motives listed here are often hard to be strictly differed from each other. Often they are mixed.
3a) Conflicts of interest.
These can result from very rationally concluding that not doing something may be profitable for oneself, although it is costly for the others. The decision not to accept responsibility for some-thing even when one has done it oneself, or not to address a problem for other reasons, therefore can be rational, nevertheless is open to attack by ethical argument.
3b) The perpetrator knows that he will get away with it.
Examples are cost-effect calculations in the face of weak jurisdiction. Again, these are rational considerations that sound logical in themselves, but are open to attack by ethical argument:
- the profit from violating a rule or legal demand may be bigger than the penalty for the violation.
- ineffective economy branches are kept running or do not get modernised, because they receive voluminous subsidies keeping them alive.
- woodcutting companies may sign contracts and pay a lease for using a certain piece of land for a limited time. Logic tells them that in that time they should make as much use of it as possible so they try to achieve the maximum quota of cutting trees. When the contract ends, the owning nation and local people are left to deal with the eroded land and long-term-consequences.
3c) Egoism
“It may be bad for you, but it is good for me.” Examples:
- instead of investing into modernisation and improving working conditions and loans for workers, a board of directors decides to raise it’s bonuses.
- A mining company moves away after giving up a mine and does not pay for cleaning the acid leaches and properties.
- a healthy company gets destroyed and it’s workers betrayed by investments funds in order to give foreign investors a maximum profit by bleeding the company white and exploiting it’s fi-nancial and economic assets beyond what it needs to stay alive and healthy: the so-called “locust plague”.
- “prisoner’s dilemma”, a known motive in social psychology, also meaning the “dilemma of shared property”. This deals with the logic of collective acting creating collective disadvantages. The individual in a group may very well be aware that doing something, like overfishing that communally-owned lake, may be bad for all others as well, but that the persons thinks: “if I do not catch those last fishes in the lake, than the other fishermen will do – I could as well catch the fish myself.”
This one is tough to solve, a solution can be to enforce quotas (but controlling them needs the
ability to project the needed force). That families may be allowed to hand on the possession of a given renewable resource from one generation to the next, may be a better solution, or a com-plementing solution, because then the owning generation has a self-interest to keep the property in good shape so that there is indeed something left that can be handed over. A small community also, as often, is at an advantage, because then everybody can see with his own eyes the dimen-sion of the community’s possessions and resources, and can see how every single man’s actions influence everybody’s ups and downs.
- Interest conflicts of egoism can also emerge if in a given community there are long-term collec-tive interests for maintaining resources, but consumer interests are opposing this and want to consume them quickly no matter long-term maintaining them. This is the classic conflict be-tween environmental protection, and the excessive exploitation of a piece of land by corporations leasing the place for short time only. You can also see it in the sometimes irresponsible mindset of the young that sometimes argues “what do I care for the far away future, I want my fun NOW!”
- Often there are interest conflicts driven by egoism between the powerful and the deciding elites, and the general population and the rest of society – especially if the elite has the means to cut off itself from the negative consequences of it’s decisions. The behaviour of greedy bankers in the finance crisis is the prototype example, or the rich families rallying around a dictator in a banana republic were the people are suppressed by the military. The exploiting of their position for per-sonal gains by the ENRON bosses could be mentioned, or the fight for reputation and prestige of the clan chiefs on the Easter Islands ruining their economy and ecology in the effort to outshine each other by building higher statues.
The probability of this happening could be lowered if making sure that those in power and mak-ing decision cannot escape the negative consequences of their decisions and must face these con-sequences like everybody else.
The reasons mentioned above so far prevented for the most any rational solutions to pressing, vi-tal problems of the present – the advantage of the few prevents them at the cost of the many, and the long-term cost of all.
- Then there is irrational behaviour in general, action and solutions get prevented by
o religion and values,
o uncontrolled population growth
o historical conservatism and traditionalism
o historic self-definition, emotional sentimentality, misunderstood “steadiness”
o the so-called “effect of lost investments”, meaning that one already has invested so much into a wrong strategy that one does not want to change that strategy if that means that all those previous investments are lost and/or cannot create reward. So one continues to in-vest even more into doing the wrong.
o “shoot-the-messengers, ignore the message”
o rejection of everybody who questions what one has grown fond of
o previous false alarms
o conflict between short-termed and long-termed interests (G.W. Bush for example made it governmental policy when he took over that his administration would ignore every prob-lem that would not have the potential to seriously damage the United States within 90 days).
o Mass hysteria
o Lobbyism and it’s propaganda
o The stress of pressure from the outside subjugates members of a group to collectively support decisions instead of thinking individually and questioning these decisions criti-cally.
o What is unpleasant, worrying, intimidating, gets successfully repressed from conscience.
4.) THE ATTEMPTED SOLUTION FAILS
There are three scenarios for that.
- Skills, abilities, resources and potentials that are available, are not sufficient for the task.
- A solution gets rejected because it is too expensive.
- A problem already has progressed too far and can no longer be tackled.
I plan to add some more stuff, on egoism, altruism, agape, reasonability and rationality, but for the moment i am done, and since it nevertheless already is a package somewhat round and complete in itself, for the time being I set up what I have so far.
Oh, and the material I had on mind when doing this:
Jared Diamond: Kollaps: Warum Gesellschaften überleben oder untergehen
Jared Diamond: Arm und Reich: Die Schicksale menschlicher Gesellschaften
Samuel Huntington: Kampf der Kulturen
Herrfried Münkler: Imperien. Logik der Weltherrschaft
Carroll Quigley: Katastrophe und Hoffnung. Eine Geschichte der Welt in unserer Zeit
Joseph Tainter: The Collapse of Complex Societies (partly, no German edition available)
Arnold Toynbee: Der Gang der Weltgeschichte: Aufstieg und Verfall der Kulturen
I came across several good books, which originally I seemed to have picked by random chance and random opportunity, but now see falling together into just one whole “picture”. I got some new ones, and also re-read two older ones I already had, with a slightly different, more power-political focus. And I would like to nail some summaries and thesis to the gate, since maybe it might be of interest for some. There has been a lot of hacking and slicing over capitalism and competing market philosophies, free thought and opinion, global warming, politics and economic interest, logic and ratio in this forum. So let me add just this contribution to these kinds of debates, and think about it for a moment. I will quote just brief notes about typical key factors for the historic fall of past societies, reasons for why we do not act in the face of threatening amounts of problems, and in how far this has to do with concepts and terms like rational decision-making, egoism and altruism.
I used to describe myself as a realist, and as a rational man. While the first description can support itself, I realised that with the latter I was lacking precision if leaving it to just that label alone, and that without explicitly referring to implications I silently take as natural I nevertheless always attach several supple-menting qualities to it that gives the term “being rational” (or “being reasonable”) it’s final meaning – by adding orientation to it. One thing I thought a lot about in the past weeks and months, was the need to understand that being rational and reasonable, can lead to totally different decisions and behaviour of ours, sometimes for our better, sometimes for our worse. We can work for our survival reasonably and rationally. Unfortunately we can also decide our suicide – for perfectly reasonable and rational and logical arguments that we fully understand. And this is a dilemma, because it seems to cause a major cul-tural deadlock in our global society that prevents the problems from being accepted and properly approached for solving them while there still is (or was?) time.
I do not claim credits for the following material, nor do I claim that the following ideas and thoughts are originally mine, or in any way caused by my mind. Even where I do not explicitly refer to works or authors, you better assume that somebody else has had these thoughts before me already, and that I just summarise it. It would be a deeply discouraging implication for the potential of the human race to assume for even just a second that I really could have been the first to have had these ideas – I was not, and for the most I know that by authors’ names and book titles for sure. But for the sake of more comfortable work and making this text more accessible, I will restrain myself from detailed quoting and cross reference to existing knowledge bases and works, it also increases the workload for me without really adding a big positive effect: after all, this is no paper that must qualify according to formal academic standards. So I throw it all together and hope I succeed in turning it into one overall argument and depiction.
Just keep in mind that I do not claim originality for the thoughts I summarise, and claim no personal credit for them.
Let’s begin with some general statements which may serve as kind of a guiding preamble for the rest where we go a bit deeper into the details.
First some general statements.
1. All human behaviour is egoistical in that even any rational decision-making and weighing of options depends on standards seen as valid by the individual – even where assessing if own standards shall bow to standards (or demands) of others.
2. Rational behaviour tends to be destructive in the long run, since it is based on egoistical mo-tives in the meaning of point 1.), and beyond, it favours the strong at the cost of the weaker. An economy basing on egoism as it’s prime motivation aims at preventing competition, dis-connects itself from it’s service for the community, and ultimately destroys both the com-munity and itself – doing so rationally, and as a result of rational, reasonable decision-making.
3. Rationality therefore needs complementation by altruism to evade destructive effects caused by itself, and ultimately to evade rational suicide. The weighing of altruism versus egoism again includes an egoistic element (see 1.) ), as long as altruism is no represented in a “truly self-less love” for the interest of the other, which “agape” in the understanding of Christian tradition comes the closest to. We want to differ between general altruism and agape, there-fore.
Next, some more specific statements.
4.) Any community, locally or globally, can only survive if it consumes no more resources than can be replaced naturally by the ecosphere the community lives in. The smaller the resource basis of a community, by own fault or as an environmental reality the community was confronted with from it’s beginning on, the worse it’s chance for long-term survival.
5.) A population growth/size beyond a level were sustainable management of natural resources is possible, marks the beginning of a downward spiral that ultimately must end in total collapse, if not being stopped by a decline in population size below the level of then-actual sustainable re-sources management again, which will be a lower level than before, then. If the loss and damage has become too great meanwhile, the environment from some point on cannot recover or cannot replace enough resources as would be needed to supply the population size currently in place, and the temporary losses turn into permanent losses.
6.) Permanent losses minimise future survival chances for later generations, by marking options that are no longer there since they have been consumed. All consummation of resources that do not get replaced by nature within the timeframe relevant for human evolution, like metal ores, oil, gas, are permanent losses, and will never be available again to the present or future mankind. There are resource types that - if consumed - are either sustainable or that are permanently lost from the very beginning on if consumed. Too excessive consummation of sustainable resources turns them into permanently lost resources.
We live in interesting times, to say the least.
The planet is crowded with humans like never before. The level of development and living conditions of 15% of the global population – the “happy few” in the industrialised first world, mainly the West – strictly contrasts to those that the lower 70 or 80% of the global population have to deal with, with mil-lions needlessly dying every year from starvation, disease and proxy-wars fought over precious natural resources. The reaction to misery and suffering often is either apathy, or political and religious fanati-cism, fuelling the conflicts of the present and near future. Given resources in food, like fishing grounds and fertile ground for agricultural activity, are disappearing, are eroding or have been overused, we live in a time when we realise that the practical carrying capacity of the planet maybe is much, much lower than the idealistically assumed, most ideal, theoretical carrying capacity. Global demand already seems to be beyond what the natural ecosystem can support and sustain. We have just started to understand that every intensifying of food production also intensifies the contamination of the environment, the stress put on natural resources like natural sweet water reservoirs, functioning ecosystems with their incredibly sensitive, complex balances, and the need to use pesticides and fertilizers. And often the quality of the food is the more inferior the more effort is put into intensifying the production process and lowering the end prices for the Western consumer at the same time. The level of planetary garbage mounting and in-toxication of the environment, from aerial emissions over nano-particles and chemical agents in water, ground, food and breathing air, to swimming plastic waste dumps in the oceans that reach the size of the expanse of Texas each, are already directly life-threatening in certain places, but threaten human and animal health around all the planet, now and increasingly in the future, putting the chances of the next generation more and more into question. We commit physical injury and slaughter of unborn generations.
The more comfort we have at risk, the more we seem to be willing to still doubt the climate change and global warming. – Can we really be sure that the living style we enjoy in the West can be maintained without going at the cost of the many, and ultimately, at the cost of our own future? Can we safely as-sume that it is only a question of more or less comfort when talking about climate change, ignoring that maybe in reality it is the more a question of survival the lower we are positioned in the global hierarchy? Will our thinking about justice and work-earned rewards really make a difference for our fates when we are being faced with vital resources growing thin in the global village we now live in? “If I don’t grab the nugget, then somebody else will”, and “ first let the others demonstrate their good will and best in-tention, then I’ll follow” – are these truly wise strategies – or are they maybe the repositioning of ad-dressing necessities to a place and time after our time on earth, and after our life – into the time of our afterlife? “And after us, the flood…?”
In the work of Joseph Tainter you find the argument that “complex societies” like our current one, but also historic ones that he lists as examples, should be expected to be especially capable to deal with problems and threats to their existence deriving from fluctuations in their material basis, their supply with needed resources, and productivity. Their complexity, he argues, is their problem-solving compe-tence and adaptability. He argues that when a society realises that it is threatened and that there are dan-gerous problems putting it’s survival in question, that then it would start to address the problems and eventually adapt to new conditions, if needed, and he implies that it’s range of problem-solving options is the more diverse the more complex its social and economic structure is. He also follows a thinking that says that crisis occur at times when the economical exploitation of the ecosphere a community is living in, does not produce the revenues anymore of earlier times, and productivity therefore drops.
Obviously, this reflects widespread popular thinking today, but maybe that is only because it is a self-reassuring feedback to ourselves that as long as we do not see ourselves addressing problems, the prob-lems are not really threatening – that’s why we must not act on them! Can we really be sure that we do not follow this thinking for one reason only? Because it reassures us that we do well in not changing, not acting, living in assumed eternal comfort and not being in danger at all? Isn’t that just an all too seduc-tive view on life – our life in the first world? It certainly is the easiest, cheapest and most comfortable way we could imagine for our future.
There is also parallel between Tainter and the thinking of classic economy theory (of capitalism in Anglo-Saxon interpretation), saying that the total quantity of available resources does not really matter, and things really depend on the amount of financial investments in exploitation, and in research to find modified approaches and procedures to do so. In this influential theory, monetary options decide on the material options, the problem is not a shortage in resources, but only a shortage in capital exclusively. The material reality somewhat gets neglected, like the human reality – resources, items and persons all get translated into monetary equivalents. I do not hide that I consider this theory to be very blatant bol-locks, and as being extremely dangerous both for the planetary environment, and human social commu-nities survival, and their members’ self-esteem and dignity as well.
The argument that eventually ecological collapse all alone could cause cultural and civilizational col-lapse as well, Tainter rejects. The problem I have with his position is that he is right in pointing out that the fall of some societies indeed took place under exclusion of explicit environmental factors: several historic and ancient societies as well as the modern Soviet Union could be mentioned. But Tainter tends to say that environmental factors NEVER are sufficient to cause the fall of a civilisation. And I think that is where he is erring.
However, history teaches us many lessons on complex societies that collapsed in times of crisis in gen-eral - as well as in times of explicit environmental collapses in special - although they were equipped with the needed competence and potential that should have enabled them to address, solve and survive the crisis that instead destroyed them. Therefore, Jared Diamond in direct reference and reply to Joseph Tainter focuses on the negative examples of the Easter Island, the Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the Anasazi in Chaco Canyon, the Maya in Central America, the Vikings in Greenland, the genocide in Rwanda, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and the undecided fate and huge environmental challenges of China, Australia and the US state of Montana. The Highland of Indonesia, the island of Tikopia and the Japanese Tokugawa shoguns he gives as positive examples for illustrating why other societies were able to react to self-constructed threats and dooming environmental challenges, and addressing them, surviving crisis and long periods of time therefore. Other examples in positive and negative could be mentioned as well, from the abandoning of the official apartheid in the United States to the fall of the Soviet Union.
But the negative examples lead us to asking this single question: why is it that societies by reasoning and despite no hint and evidence for the disaster unfolding being hidden from them, nevertheless have cho-sen for a path and behaviour that lead to their ultimate self-destruction and extinction of their popula-tion, either by non-acting or by investing into the wrong strategies for acting?
Of the authors I have read this year on these issues - mainly Arnold Toynbee, a bit of Carroll Quigley, Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter – I found Diamond to be arguing the most convincingly, and describ-ing most precisely his observations. Some find his work repetitive – I find it is an overwhelming sum of evidence and precise, wide-spread observations and conclusions supporting his thoughts. I want to ex-plicitly point out that in the following comments I follow the structure of parts of his work very closely. The following 4-point structure in principle is the summary of one chapter from one of his books. I add the historic references as examples of illustrating value only, like he does, but leave it to just mentioning them without explaining them in depth, because that would be beyond the limit of this text. Be aware that the societies and their fate that get mentioned in just one or two sentences, he spent one, two or three chapters on to explain them in full.
Diamond in parts agrees with Toynbee. Both authors see the collapse of cultures also being caused by small elites that failed to govern the community correctly and with at least the minimum of needed bal-ance between egoism (self-centred interests: privileges), and altruism (community-focussed interest that also could include offsprings and the following generations). Both authors also agree that where you want to ensure that governors govern for the sufficient interest and benefit of the people, the people must make sure that those governing them are affected by the consequences of their governing the same way the ordinary people are affected. That’s a practical implementation of the golden rule, do as you would be done by. If governors can avoid negative consequences suffered by the many when choosing for something that benefits their personal interest, the probability that they will do that increases dramati-cally. But different to Diamond, Toynbee like Tainter and many other authors of their branches ignore or minimise the role of environmental factors in the collapse of societies.
Societies would be expected to react when they realise there are problems. But many have not, until their extinction that “not so much was caused by murder, but suicide”, as Toynbee put it.
And I have the very bad feeling – and see it confirmed when monitoring politics, economics and ecology as well as environmental developments - that our global civilisation today just repeats once again this suicidal pattern of not reacting in time – or better: of not having reacted in the past while there still has been time.
An important question therefore is: why is this so, and is the dynamic of the answer to this question still effecting our fate for the worse.
One could point at individual wrong decisions causing collective erratic developments and collective wrong decisions in the aftermath. One could hint at interest conflicts and lobbyism, group dynamics and the self dynamics of actual conditions and processes that already have been triggered, wanted or un-wanted, knowingly or unknowingly.
More systematically, there are four scenarios for why societies do not act in the face of vital problems threatening their existence:
1. A problem does not get recognised before it has become existent.
2. A problem does not get perceived as a problem or does not get realised, although it is real and does exist.
3. After realising a problem, nothing gets done in order to solve it.
4. The attempted solution fails.
Let’s look a bit closer.
1. A PROBLEM DOES NOT GET RECOGNISED OR FORSEEN BEFORE IT HAS BECOME EXISTENT.
1a) It may be because the society has no matching pre-experiences to which it could compare.
Examples are
- the introduction of rabbits and foxes and other foreign species in Australia;
- the Norse in Greenland who saw a vegetation reminding them of that in their home of Scandina-via, but did not know initially that it grew many times slower than in Scandinavia and erosion being a greater problem once they started to chop away the green and tried farming with sheep and cows. The vegetation destroyed grew much, much slower than they used to know from Scandinavia, it was not replaced as fast, the soil was exposed to the elements for longer time. Le-thal starvations in the end were the result when the Viking society collapsed;
- The Norse in Greenland not foreseeing that opening of trading routes from Europe to the Far East made their most precious trading resource, ivory, less valuable;
- The society in Greenland becoming more and more isolated from northern Europe when growing levels of sea ice interrupted shipping during the medieval cooling: Europe to which it tried to stay attached in culture and customs, as well as depending on items and goods from Europe, es-pecially metal.
1b) Earlier knowledge and experience is so old that it got forgotten, or it’s relevance for the actual problem does not get recognised.
Examples are
- the Anasazi in Chaco Canyon falling victim to eroding agricultural soil and a drought in the 12th century, since they had no writing and thus no scriptures transporting experience with earlier droughts from the past to their present;
- the Maya, whose society fell victim to a drought in the 9th century. They had a written tradition – but it exclusively dealt with heroic stories about their kings and priests, and contained no weather reports and agricultural advice;
- the oil crisis from 1973 - and gasoline-wasting SUVs becoming popular just short time later;
- a great drought in the region around Tuscon in the 50s –which was answered by a boom in build-ing golfing resorts that needed ridiculous amounts of artificial watering that caused havoc on ground water levels.
1c) Conclusions basing on false analogies
Examples are
- the Norse in Greenland faced life-threatening erosion of soils (the vegetation looked like they used to know from Scandiniavia, but the ground in Norway was heavier and more made of clay, while in Greenland it was much lighter and contained much volcanic ashes that the wind and the rains and storms could blow and wash away);
- the French Maginot Line in WWII (assuming the Germans would fought the next war by the same tactics and strategies like in the earlier war, without altering them. This wrong assumption was and still is often made in the military: that the next war would be fought the same way like the last one).
2. A PROBLEM DOES NOT GET PERCEIVED AS A PROBLEM, OR DOES NOT GET REALISED, ALTHOUGH IT IS REAL AND DOES EXIST.
2a) The cause of the problem cannot be seen, is beyond perception.
Examples are
- Australia, Montana, Mesopotamia: nutrients in the soil get used up by overfarming or erosion and washing-out; salienation of soil (Versalzung);
- Mining activity releases copper and acid leaches that pollute ground water, sediment layers, etc.
2b) Decision makers are too far away from the location where the action takes place.
- In Montana, woodcutting corporations have not sent their deciding managers to the forests they were farming 800 and more miles away, so they did not see that the high level of undergrowth was becoming a problem that allowed huge firestorms to set ablaze large areas of otherwise high trees that would not have burned as easily by themselves if they would have been surrounded by too dense undergrowth. The result was one of the greatest forest fire disasters in the history of the United States.
- Different to that, the people, living on the very small island of Tikopia (4.66 km2, population 1300) have all areas of their island in sight from everywhere, making clear to every person that whatever happened to the land and effects the one, necessarily must effect all the others, too, and that the land and it’s resources are limited. That’s why sustainability has become the total top priority in their ways of how they use their land for farming and benefiting from replacable re-sources. Strict birth control also is an indispensable precondition for their success.
2c) The problem manifests itself very slowly, in a slowly growing trend with huge fluctuation.
Examples are
- Global Warming; getting negated time and again be referring to not general trends but micro-cycles that represent just natural short-termed fluctuations, or by referring to the actual local weather report;
- the periods of droughts that killed the Anasazi and Maya civilisations;
- the cooling during the medieval age that isolated Greenland and Norse settlers more and more;
- “creeping normality”, meaning a process of yearly averages slowly but constantly falling until the general norm has constantly fallen as well, so slowly that nobody notes it;
- “landscape forgetfulness” (Landschaftsvergeßlichkeit), meaning that human mind does not become aware of constant slow changes in the landscape a person lives in. But seeing pictures of that land-scape how it was 40, 60 years ago, may reveal dramatic changes. One of the most striking examples are disappearing glaciers, or the advance of deserts all around the globe.
On the other hand, the Tokugawa shoguns had such an amount of direct control and direct power that they were able to quickly react to the very fast disappearing of forests in ancient Japan. The fast destruction to nature made the dramatic consequences obvious to the observing human eye. Today, Japan’s forests all are managed and cultivated, and cover three quarters of Japan again. Not Brazil, not North America and not Germany or Scandinavia are the most competent and successful forest farmers on Earth, but the Japanese. And their forest lives and prospers although being economically used.
3) AFTER REALISING A PROBLEM, NOTHING GETS DONE IN ORDER TO SOLVE IT.
The various motives listed here are often hard to be strictly differed from each other. Often they are mixed.
3a) Conflicts of interest.
These can result from very rationally concluding that not doing something may be profitable for oneself, although it is costly for the others. The decision not to accept responsibility for some-thing even when one has done it oneself, or not to address a problem for other reasons, therefore can be rational, nevertheless is open to attack by ethical argument.
3b) The perpetrator knows that he will get away with it.
Examples are cost-effect calculations in the face of weak jurisdiction. Again, these are rational considerations that sound logical in themselves, but are open to attack by ethical argument:
- the profit from violating a rule or legal demand may be bigger than the penalty for the violation.
- ineffective economy branches are kept running or do not get modernised, because they receive voluminous subsidies keeping them alive.
- woodcutting companies may sign contracts and pay a lease for using a certain piece of land for a limited time. Logic tells them that in that time they should make as much use of it as possible so they try to achieve the maximum quota of cutting trees. When the contract ends, the owning nation and local people are left to deal with the eroded land and long-term-consequences.
3c) Egoism
“It may be bad for you, but it is good for me.” Examples:
- instead of investing into modernisation and improving working conditions and loans for workers, a board of directors decides to raise it’s bonuses.
- A mining company moves away after giving up a mine and does not pay for cleaning the acid leaches and properties.
- a healthy company gets destroyed and it’s workers betrayed by investments funds in order to give foreign investors a maximum profit by bleeding the company white and exploiting it’s fi-nancial and economic assets beyond what it needs to stay alive and healthy: the so-called “locust plague”.
- “prisoner’s dilemma”, a known motive in social psychology, also meaning the “dilemma of shared property”. This deals with the logic of collective acting creating collective disadvantages. The individual in a group may very well be aware that doing something, like overfishing that communally-owned lake, may be bad for all others as well, but that the persons thinks: “if I do not catch those last fishes in the lake, than the other fishermen will do – I could as well catch the fish myself.”
This one is tough to solve, a solution can be to enforce quotas (but controlling them needs the
ability to project the needed force). That families may be allowed to hand on the possession of a given renewable resource from one generation to the next, may be a better solution, or a com-plementing solution, because then the owning generation has a self-interest to keep the property in good shape so that there is indeed something left that can be handed over. A small community also, as often, is at an advantage, because then everybody can see with his own eyes the dimen-sion of the community’s possessions and resources, and can see how every single man’s actions influence everybody’s ups and downs.
- Interest conflicts of egoism can also emerge if in a given community there are long-term collec-tive interests for maintaining resources, but consumer interests are opposing this and want to consume them quickly no matter long-term maintaining them. This is the classic conflict be-tween environmental protection, and the excessive exploitation of a piece of land by corporations leasing the place for short time only. You can also see it in the sometimes irresponsible mindset of the young that sometimes argues “what do I care for the far away future, I want my fun NOW!”
- Often there are interest conflicts driven by egoism between the powerful and the deciding elites, and the general population and the rest of society – especially if the elite has the means to cut off itself from the negative consequences of it’s decisions. The behaviour of greedy bankers in the finance crisis is the prototype example, or the rich families rallying around a dictator in a banana republic were the people are suppressed by the military. The exploiting of their position for per-sonal gains by the ENRON bosses could be mentioned, or the fight for reputation and prestige of the clan chiefs on the Easter Islands ruining their economy and ecology in the effort to outshine each other by building higher statues.
The probability of this happening could be lowered if making sure that those in power and mak-ing decision cannot escape the negative consequences of their decisions and must face these con-sequences like everybody else.
The reasons mentioned above so far prevented for the most any rational solutions to pressing, vi-tal problems of the present – the advantage of the few prevents them at the cost of the many, and the long-term cost of all.
- Then there is irrational behaviour in general, action and solutions get prevented by
o religion and values,
o uncontrolled population growth
o historical conservatism and traditionalism
o historic self-definition, emotional sentimentality, misunderstood “steadiness”
o the so-called “effect of lost investments”, meaning that one already has invested so much into a wrong strategy that one does not want to change that strategy if that means that all those previous investments are lost and/or cannot create reward. So one continues to in-vest even more into doing the wrong.
o “shoot-the-messengers, ignore the message”
o rejection of everybody who questions what one has grown fond of
o previous false alarms
o conflict between short-termed and long-termed interests (G.W. Bush for example made it governmental policy when he took over that his administration would ignore every prob-lem that would not have the potential to seriously damage the United States within 90 days).
o Mass hysteria
o Lobbyism and it’s propaganda
o The stress of pressure from the outside subjugates members of a group to collectively support decisions instead of thinking individually and questioning these decisions criti-cally.
o What is unpleasant, worrying, intimidating, gets successfully repressed from conscience.
4.) THE ATTEMPTED SOLUTION FAILS
There are three scenarios for that.
- Skills, abilities, resources and potentials that are available, are not sufficient for the task.
- A solution gets rejected because it is too expensive.
- A problem already has progressed too far and can no longer be tackled.
I plan to add some more stuff, on egoism, altruism, agape, reasonability and rationality, but for the moment i am done, and since it nevertheless already is a package somewhat round and complete in itself, for the time being I set up what I have so far.
Oh, and the material I had on mind when doing this:
Jared Diamond: Kollaps: Warum Gesellschaften überleben oder untergehen
Jared Diamond: Arm und Reich: Die Schicksale menschlicher Gesellschaften
Samuel Huntington: Kampf der Kulturen
Herrfried Münkler: Imperien. Logik der Weltherrschaft
Carroll Quigley: Katastrophe und Hoffnung. Eine Geschichte der Welt in unserer Zeit
Joseph Tainter: The Collapse of Complex Societies (partly, no German edition available)
Arnold Toynbee: Der Gang der Weltgeschichte: Aufstieg und Verfall der Kulturen