Enoughness and the Age of Consumer Capitalism, part 2

   This is the continuation of my earlier post on Enoughness . . .

Consumerism lies at the heart of our current civilization.  I don't mean we like shopping.  I mean that buying stuff stands at the very heart of our way of life.

A culture can include for its people a vision of a larger project beyond themselves.  Our own civilization has dabbled in grand projects - from Christian missions to the Space Race - from nation-building and modernization - to Manifest Destiny and America as beacon of democracy.

When you look around today, you'll find little in the way of grand visions.  Progress has been variously imagined, but today it has been pruned down to little more than the incremental tweaks of a smart phone obsolescence cycle - or at best, imaginary self-driving cars.

You might well argue that it's not such a bad thing that we set aside grand visions.  Not only have they proven dangerous, they also have rarely been the concern of the average person, who generally prefers to be left in peace to invest their energies into the mundane concerns of working and wooing and raising their offspring.

But no one really escapes the assumptions and demands of their culture, and here in the mundane is where consumerism truly permeates.  In a thousand subtle ways, our society tells us that the very point of our existence is to consume.  If you are poor you have failed in every important way.  You ought to have the wherewithal to buy those things that demonstrate your ambition and commitment to success.

But of course there is no ultimate success - there is only more striving.  Consumerism is not something that has a conclusion.  On the contrary, there is no level you can reach where you will be safe from an army of marketers that is taking aim squarely at whatever potential inklings of satisfaction or satiety or enoughness you might achieve.  Once the needs of life have been met, then production and advertising becomes all about irritation - trying to create an itch that only this product can scratch and soothe.  To distract you from any budding sense that you might actually already have what you need.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each year creating that itch and that lure.  It's commonplace to complain about the oppressive ubiquity of advertising around us - and the way it uglifies and degrades the spaces around us.  But we don't often think about how much of the world we inhabit is designed and built as a stupendous architecture for fueling and enforcing consumerism.   Enoughness must not be allowed to take root.

Human culture is a dynamic inter-reaction between the actual practices of everyday life and a set of guiding ideas, motifs, myths and grand narratives.  What are the implications when our myths are no longer stories that we tell each other, but stories sold to us by vast profit-making corporations?  When we don't sing our own songs to our children and our lovers, but consume them from a music industry?     What does it mean when all of our information about our communities, our political leaders, our collective realities is processed for us by media companies whose sole and overriding goal is to sell our attention to other companies who need us to buy their stuff?

Many of the largest, most familiar, most sophisticated and most profitable corporations in the world don't make their enormous profits from the products they create.  They make their profits by selling us, our attention, our vulnerability and our consumerist potentials to their actual, fee-paying clients.  For Google and Facebook, you are not a customer, but the product they sell to advertisers.  CNN, Fox News, the networks, Clear Channel Radio don't sell their media productions to you.   Those concoctions exist for the sole purpose of luring you away from a life you might be leading in order to keep you in front of that screen absorbing a paid advertisement.  The NBA, NFL, Major League baseball would wither away if they had to rely on ticket sales.  The big money comes from selling all the eyeballs that an entertaining game secures for the sponsors.

I began this essay, by saying that consumerism lies at the heart of the matter.  The powers that be will tell us that this is just our natural, inevitable state, but clearly there is a vast amount of creative and economic energy devoted to molding us into consumers - consumers who just can't get enough.

Next week, I'll continue with some thoughts about the limits and exits from consumerism . . .

Down to the future

This is an old chart that my father drew up over 30 years ago, around the time I was starting in college, and the global population was 4.7 billion.  The brown line at the top represents available natural resources.  The red line represents population, and the green line, available food.  It makes a simple, straightforward and true point - that natural resources don't increase in the way population and food production have, and at some point in the future declining resources meet ascending demands and so population stops increasing.  Depending on the choices we make it could stabilize or crash catastrophically.


This was true then and true today - as global economic growth starts shuddering to a halt; as soil and water resources degrade; as the anthropocene extinction event continues inexorably; and as climate change inserts itself as a destabilizing wild card.

Nevertheless, after drawing up this chart, my father went on to complete his career and settle into retirement without ever seeing the elbow in this graph.  He didn't join a commune or build a bunker.  He worked and paid his taxes - sent his kids off to colleges and graduate schools, watched them get jobs and found families of their own.  He worked as an educator, activist and community leader to create smarter and more resilient communities around himself, but he didn't or couldn't extricate himself from our doomed and destructive way of living.

I study this yellowed and dog-eared piece of posterboard, as I prepare to usher my own son off to college.  I wonder whether I will retire into a society that continues to tread water despite it's unsustainability - or whether I'll come to regret not joining a commune or building a bunker.  I wonder whether I've given my sons enough resilience to deal with what is coming - the elbow in that chart that we still refuse to prepare for.

In the end, I do much as my father did - work to create more resilient people, environments and communities, keep alive a handful of useful skills including gardening, storytelling, and ecology, and engage with the world we have as best I can.  It's even possible my sons will do the same.  The human ability to muddle along is not to be underestimated . . .

For a complementary rumination upon this dilemma I recommend Brian Kaller's eloquent blog.

Looking back at my predictions for 2015

I'll emerge from my blogging hiatus to revisit last year's predictions to see if I can improve on my 2 out of 9 from last year.  In terms of the big picture, my over-arching prediction from the beginning of 2014 has remained accurate.  We mostly muddled along with the status quo and we neither made progress on solving our problems nor did we bring our civilization finally crashing down upon our collective heads.

But I did go out on a limb with 9 predictions for 2015 - Let's see how I fared.  I predicted that:

• It will be one of the three hottest years ever recorded globally.

1 for 1.  Global temperatures began a leap upwards this year, and 2015 will go down as the hottest on record.

• Obama attempts to put ending mass incarceration onto the public agenda.  In particular, the incarceration of non-violent drug offenders.  The possibility of blanket pardons cause the Republicans to go ballistic and half of the Democratic party runs for cover.

1.5 for 2. Half credit.  Obama actually did make the effort, but a distracted media and a dysfunctional Congress ensured that it never took center stage.  Instead, Black Lives Matter emerged as a powerful civil rights movement protesting the slaughter of African Americans by police.

• Ebola flares up in Asia.  These several thousand deaths rattle the global economy much more than the African outbreak did.

1.5 for 3. No credit.  Ebola slowly burned itself out in West Africa and fortunately gained no foothold elsewhere.

• Americans are shocked when police officers in a major metropolitan area are found to have intentionally singled out and assassinated several critics of police brutality.

1.5 for 4. No credit. The atrocities perpetrated by bad cops continue to mount, but this one doesn't seem to be in the tally.

• Globally, disgust with their political elites continues to bolster support for radical, anti-establishment parties, and in more than one European country they win power, if not for long.

2 for 5. Half credit. Syriza in Greece and the recent up-ending of the status quo by Podemos and Ciudadanos in Spain fall into the spirit of this prediction, but for the most part Europeans didn't rise up to throw the bums out.  

• Occupy re-emerges as a political force among the younger generation - organized around its "debt jubilee" and other efforts to disentangle young people from participation in an economic and political system that is rigged against them.  The Establishment derides them as naive and disengaged.

2 for 6. No credit. The mantle of youthful discontent and economic critique was picked up by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren instead.  

• (Carried over from last year) One of the world's great monoculture crops will mostly fail this year.  Although this will be blamed on a new pest or blight, the failure will actually be due to a combination of narrow genetics, unstable climate and the decline in agricultural research.

2 for 7. No credit. Agriculture plugged along despite its unsustainable and fragile state.

• Kitchen gardens, backyard chickens and other small animal husbandry continue to increase dramatically in popularity and practice in the US.  Grassroots pressure to change zoning and regulatory restrictions continue to find success.

2 for 7. No idea.  I haven't researched it.  Certainly the media isn't talking about it.

• Oil stays below $70 per barrel.  Low gas and oil prices drive several mid-sized energy companies in the US to loan defaults and bankruptcy.  The government organizes a multi-billion dollar bailout of loan guarantees and subsidies to keep drilling operations going, and to keep dreams of Saudi America alive.

2.5 for 8.  Half credit.  Oil did indeed stay below $70 (and is currently under $40 a barrel), and energy companies have been bankrupting themselves, but it hasn't gotten to a crisis stage yet, nor has the government had to intervene.

So, compliments of some slightly generous grading I give myself a 31% accuracy rate, which is a significant improvement over last year's 22%.  We'll see if I can improve on that for 2016.

Fear and foreboding

Ruminating on the tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri, Brian Kaller poses the serious question of why Americans are so afraid.

We're grappling with homicides committed by policemen too frightened to serve the communities they are meant to protect - in Cleveland, St. Louis, and New York City, and communities that are themselves frightened and angry.  But as Kaller notes, fear, paranoia and divisiveness thrive like viruses throughout our society.

What Kaller sees at the root is the breakdown of social and community ties and interactions that used to enmesh people in a skein of fellow human beings.  These lent not only security, but a framework of action and understanding, which individuals and families could navigate with some competence and confidence.  Gradually, that "quilt of community" has been replaced by an anxious dependency on "strangers in distant and possibly unaccountable institutions".

As America's Age of Prosperity breaks down under the twin stresses of an empire in decline and the end of cheap oil, individuals who have little in the way of real social networks are increasingly adrift and worried about being failed by the institutions that have served to take their place.

I think Kaller is exactly right, but like most major trends this one is overdetermined.  There are other forces pushing Americans toward fear and paranoia and away from confident and courageous engagement with the challenges that beset us.

For one, consumer capitalism requires a dissatisfied customer to work upon - an insecure subject who can be bullied into buying things they don't need.  In Kaller's richly interconnected human world entertainment was a thing of human interactions and creativity, where art, gossip, confession, handiwork, story telling and just visiting filled those hours that are now filled by the passive reception of products from a corporate-owned, corporate-sponsored media - an enormous industry whose income devolves almost entirely from marketing and advertising for ever more passive consumption.  As a sideline, its "news" departments spew out an incessant flood of fear-mongering and disconcerting stories that seem custom-designed to erode even further whatever faith and respect we still retain for our fellows or our institutions.

There are other forces at play.  Fear has always been a tool of statecraft, and mature states want docile subjects. Likewise, the corporations who have aligned with the state want a docile workforce.  Up to now, instilling a fear of naked, physical violence has mostly been directed at the marginalized - minorities, immigrants, the poor, vulnerable dissidents - and women.  But fear is also wielded upon everyone else through convenient bugaboos like ISIS, surgent China, Black rioters and Mexican drug lords, which are paraded in front of us on the one hand - and shadowy billionaires, militarized cops, Vladimir Putin and the NSA on the other.  Fear is used to divide us against ourselves as hostile caricatures of race, class, region, faith and politics replace first-hand experience.

In the closing years of the Cold War it was said that the West had been better at leading people around by their appetites than the East had been at pushing people around by their fears.  Today people are not being led anywhere by their appetites, except perhaps in circles.  The aspirations of consumerism are weighted down by busy-ness, anxiousness and clutter.

The Archdruid,  John Michael Greer, maintains that people are, or will be, adapting to the end of material progress for all but a tiny minority, to the reversal of US political ascendancy, and to the broken promises of science and technology.  The resultant breakdown of our guiding religion of Progress is throwing people into spiritual and existential crisis.

I suspect that here is another primary cause of the great American fearfulness and one which serves to give it its particular odd flavor.  Fear can be a helpful and adaptive response when a lion stalks you or an avalanche threatens you.  But the fear among Americans doesn't seem like that sort of response.  We don't seem afraid of any of the things that actually do threaten us.  It is more akin to a neurosis.  The anxieties that accompany neuroses are not constructive, well-directed fears that motivate us to avoid dangers or find solutions.  On the contrary, neurotic fears are promiscuous, misplaced anxieties that come from an unwillingness to confront a reality that we fear and want to reject.

And what we fear is the failure of - for lack of a better word - Progress.  But Progress is a thing so engrained in the American sense of ourselves and our futures that we cannot confront such an idea openly or honestly.  We pretend that our fears apply to other things - like, for example, lazy crazy Blacks or vicious homicidal cops, Islamic terrorists, Frankenfoods or black helicopters.

As yet, people are not being given any vision or any project of future-building that they could embrace in an honest and clear-headed way.  So legitimate fear and neurotic anxieties both build.  Anyone who's ever tried to handle a terrified animal can understand the dangers inherent in such a moment.

It woulda been nice

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I'm in North Carolina this week, talking with people about the nature of government and what role it can play in causing or solving our nation's problems.

But at the moment I'm procrastinating in the hotel room before going out.  Continuing this week's theme of 21st century capitalism's decline and fall, over at my favorite doomer blog, the Archdruid Report, John Michael Greer is once again exploring the mismatch between material decline and our guiding myth of Progress.  He thinks it is going to be a painful and traumatic wrench - one which people are completely unprepared for.  I think he's probably right, but I'd add a few caveats.

As I've related before, when I went to the former USSR as an eager young anthropologist in 1994, I thought I'd be looking at the excitement of the end of an ideology and the beginning of a new one.  But when I got there, no one wanted to talk about any such thing.  They were much too busy trying to keep a roof overhead, keep the daughter in school, the son out of the army and find a place to store 100 kilo of potatoes for the winter.

There's no doubt that many people did not survive the dry run for collapse that was mid-nineties Kazakhstan.  Male life expectancy was dropping to the mid-fifties and most of that had to do not just with material suffering, but the ripping away of life's sureties - salaries, certificates, positions, status all lost their value and that hit middle aged men the hardest.  Vodka and automobiles culled that herd.

But one advantage the Soviet people had was that they'd almost all given up on the monomyth of Soviet progress.  There was no collapse of an ideology to study, because it had been hollowed out to just another bit of habitual theater.

So the reaction (and the long-established practice) was to hunker down, and do their best to ignore anyone who was rash enough to rave about a new myth - capitalism, Islamism, nationalism, socialism or whatever.  The state was happy to encourage that for the most part.

In the current US, as I ignore the pundits and the boosters and talk to regular people, I find very little faith in the myth of progress.  Yes, Greer's analysis is correct that it's the accepted default mode, and people don't really have cognitive alternatives other than to wish for it to be true.  But they don't seem to believe it.  The faith is broken at least when it comes to their little part of the world - and for many, in the big picture as well.

If and when the failure of Progress becomes too obvious to ignore, there will be those who can't adapt.  But I wonder if the majority of people are being eased into decline at a pace that will eventually result in a "well, it woulda been nice" rather than an abrupt collapse of a world view.

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Inflation, unheralded

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A fascinating little article in the New York Times, called "Everything Boom, or Maybe the Everything Bubble," makes the observation that with so much money chasing after too few assets, the assets are expensive even though the returns are low.  What's an investor to do?

One obvious explanation for the quandary is that money isn't worth as much as it used to be. There's a huge unheralded process of inflation going on.  Most things are valued less (because of a decline in demand or because an asset that used to be a good investment isn't any more), but since money is also worth less, it looks like nothing is happening. 

On the other hand, the minority of sought-after assets are holding their value but the declining value of money means more is needed to buy it, and so prices rise.

A good way to think about this hidden inflation is to think about something - a thing or a service that you could get at a high quality a couple of decades ago, but today you notice that the quality has declined significantly.  I have some great old kitchen utensils, spoons and a spatula built to last forever, and I salvage old steel screws and bolts because they don't strip and bend like the ones at the hardware store.  But of course the quality hasn't really declined.  I could replace those steel spoons for $100 or so, and I'm sure there are places to get quality hardware rather than the Chinese scrap.  But if you had to spend a buck fifty on a wood screw that you're used to paying 15 cents for, you couldn't help but notice the inflation.

And then you realize that the furniture couldn't hold a screw even if you wanted it to, since the stuff you can afford is mostly particle board held together with staples and glue.

For investors, however, there is a second half to this story: the end of economic growth.  Investment is the practice of taking one's wealth and buying something that will produce more wealth - regardless of whether the currencies are stable or inflating.  The printing presses of the Central Bankers have been running day and night, in the vain hope that the beneficiaries (bankers and financiers mostly) will invest it in wealth-making activities - factories, buildings, new technologies.  But vast trillions of these quick-spun dollars and euros and renminbi sit, flitting from hand to hand in the markets, eroding in value because investors don't see anything that is going to pay off in real wealth.

Now the peak energy people won't have any difficulty diagnosing this.  Our economic growth has been primarily based on access to more and more cheap energy, almost exclusively in the form of fossil fuels - coal, gas and oil.   Now that the cheap fuels have been used up, we have to pursue, dirtier, less concentrated, harder to extract sources - economic growth begins to slow down.  The economy will eventually go into contraction if it hasn't already.

I suspect there's more to it than thermodynamic destinies.  These things are always over-determined.

21st century capitalism is exhausted.  Marx was perfectly aware that capitalism, left to its own devices will tend toward monopolism and eventually stagnation and self-strangulation.  It's taken longer than he thought, but the sclerotic state of our capitalism is probably terminal - as any entrepreneurial upstart is taken up and ingested.

And if the only solutions are to do something different than what we've been doing, who achieves the levers of power these days?  Are the kinds of people who rise to the top of our broken politics and our bureaucratized corporations really the kinds who are likely to solve the problems, which business-as-usual is bringing down on our heads?

So whatever the underlying cause, pity the poor investor who just wants to put those dollars or euros or renminbi "to work", but sees nothing but bad risks and varying degrees of wealth erosion.  Lo and behold, it turns out he's getting poorer.  Just like the rest of us.

UPDATE:

Krugman has a timely rejoinder to my little sally, Addicted to Inflation.  In it he argues that hidden inflation is a phantasm of the political right that proves their inability to see things as they really are.  Krugman is an economist and I'm not, so take what I say with a grain of salt.  But in my opinion the thing that neither he nor the conservatives he lambasts are willing to contemplate or enter into their calculations is the possibility that the party is ending.

The conservatives were wrong about the printing presses causing the currencies to crash, because though vast sums of money were printed, they mostly sit in cyber vaults un-spent by the banks and billionaires.  Krugman is wrong because, like all mainstream economists, he doesn't seriously consider the geologic, thermodynamic and biospheric limits on the economy.  The normal tools of economic craft don't work when we run up against those limits in the way that we are today.

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Midwestern Sojourn

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The blog has fallen quiet lately, I know.

For the past week and more I've been traveling on the Great Plains.  I landed in Milwaukee last Friday and circulated down into Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and now back up into Iowa.  Tomorrow is northern Illinois.

Mostly I have been driving the back roads and talking to farmers about sustainability.  The project is for one of the major progressive lobbying groups working to change the food system.  They feel they have pretty good ways of communicating with regular people, but they haven't felt like they communicate as well as they should with farmers and farming communities.

So that's why I'm on the road being an ethnographer of agriculture.

When I manage to track down a farmer - or someone who's mixed up in farming somehow, I tell them the conversation will only take 4 or 5 minutes and occasionally it will, but more often 30 minutes later we are still there, talking about all of the themes that tangle up with agriculture - families, aspirations, compromises, money, the earth, fears, futures and presents and pasts.

Six hours on the roads and I'll have only spoken to eight or ten people, but I've filled many more pages of my notebook.

But back at work, they still need my input on other projects, so in the evenings at whatever hotel I've found - I'm editing video or completing analysis or dealing with logistics for the next research trip or trying to track down my other field workers.

All that's to say, I haven't found time to write in the blog.  I haven't forgotten my Love Note to 2014, and springtime on the plains has certainly inspired me.

But tomorrow night I need to be in Milwaukee again to meet my videographer - because he and I will spend the week talking to Wisconsinites about politics and taxes.  But maybe I'll be able to carve out some blogging time at some point . . . .

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Consuming our Problems

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I've written before that our current civilization has the familiar reek of a speculative bubble whose days are numbered.  Whenever any of our leaders talk about our future, the combination of bad math, delusional happy talk, and faith that this time it's different just confirms the conclusion.

As far as John Michael Greer is concerned, the decline of cheap energy, combined with our unwillingness to change course until it is far too late, have doomed our civilization to join the many, many others that have fallen hard and left their people to find a way through the hard times and dark ages that can follow.  The destruction of a civilization can take centuries, but in fact it is already under way and has been for decades - a lived experience that more people are starting to intuit.

I have tremendous faith in humans' ability to muddle through, (which is why I gravitate toward Greer rather than many other doomsayers who envision a universally sudden, catastrophic and even extinctive collapse).  But there are reasons to think that our current crop of Americans are exquisitely ill-prepared to deal with the twin calamities of an end of the American Empire and the decline of Industrial Civilization.

I think there are numerous reasons for our terrifying inability to grapple with our upcoming problems.  One ingredient of our current recipe for incompetence is what (in our research work) we call the consumer stance.  The consumer stance stands as an antithesis to the engaged citizen or practical problem-solver and shows up regularly as a obstacle for advocates who are engaged with various public issues.  The consumer creates nothing - neither the end product nor the underlying conditions, but instead chooses among options that are presented to them.  However, in an ironic twist, consumer choice is mythologized as the proper expression of power and individuality.  Wherever you may be in the hierarchies of life, when you are the customer you are the one who holds the cards and the one who has to be catered to.  This delusion of power (trumpeted in each of the thousands of advertisements we face every day) can hide people's actual powerlessness.

In fact, most people don't get much practice anymore in creating their own things and social spaces.  Our tastes, our hobbies, our ways of defining ourselves may seem like they come from a kind of infinite buffet, but they are increasingly commodified and pre-packaged for us in ways we don't even perceive.  From the playground, to the workplace, to leisure, to the community organizations that used to be so central to daily life, most people have been maneuvered into being passive recipients rather than active producers and organizers.  

When it comes to politics, we don't get much practice in being producers of power, compromise, and collective problem-solving.  The problem of the consumer stance has been at the forefront of my mind in recent weeks, as I was researching in California, interviewing chance-met people about their thoughts on government.

There are all sorts of themes that come up, which I won't go into here, but one of the most unsurprising findings is that people do not participate in a democracy as creative, constructive citizens.  Instead they are classic consumers, forever electing between Brand X and Brand Y, and if one brand is mostly useless and the other poison, they don't see what they can do about that.  Vote against the poison or protest their lousy options by not voting at all.  Rather than considering their potential to meet challenges collectively through public, collective institutions, the average American is a dissatisfied customer increasingly giving up on democracy and its unreliable barkers.

In another project we research into how to communicate to farmers and their allies about sustainability.  Normally farmers are an unreceptive audience when it comes to progressive policies, since they skew heavily conservative and tend to regard government with scorn.  But interestingly, when it comes to sustainability they are much more "progressive" than regular people.  

Farmers have been producers and they are much more clued into how and whether systems can be sustained over a year, a lifetime, or through the generations.  They have some inkling about what is involved in protecting or maintaining the generative foundations that we all rely on.  Although they are trapped in an increasingly unsustainable food system and being sidelined themselves, unlike regular people they understand enough to be seeking for a way to keep things going over the long haul.

When I look around at the so-called solutions to climate change, fossil fuel depletion, unsustainability, and economic contraction, I see marketers hawking various bottles of snake oil (e.g. fracking our way to energy independence, SUVs driving on windmill electricity, productivity apps for our phones), but only in those cases where someone sees a way to turn a profit on us consumers.  Otherwise there is a deafening silence, and a population that doesn't fully grasp how and why it isn't being served.

A common thread among the problems we aren't solving - is that we need to consume less and do more for ourselves. We need to use less energy, consume fewer goods, participate in democracy and community (rather than delegating it to others).  We need to wind down the consumer-capitalist juggernaut that is quickly destroying its own foundations.  As long as Americans remain habituated to their consumer stance, and fail to become active agents, we're doomed to the sad spectacle of our current lemming-march toward multiple fiascos.

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Ethnography in California

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I was taking a break from interviewing on the streets, sitting in a tiny Burger King in Central Los Angeles, drinking a soda and dribbling ketchup onto hot french fries.  I wasn’t hungry, only thirsty.  

The mentally ill man who rearranged all the chairs warned me that there was a fry at my feet.  He begged pardon before sweeping something only he could see from the aura above my head. 

I sat beside a red-haired dwarf and her friend, a fat man in cut-off sweatpants with a shaved head.  They were talking together sadly in Spanglish, while little Korean girls in sparkly shoes skipped around a father’s legs.

There was something wrong with the handsome man with the billygoat beard, though he looked perfectly normal.  But some human sense is triggered by invisible aberrations.  His short girlfriend could not help herself, but repeatedly reached up to touch and rearrange the heavily greased curls that that he wore.

I recalled how years and years ago in college Felipe and I used to wander out into the human mazes of Philadelphia and find such scenes and such people.  And how exotic and bizarre those nights were, filled with the colorful and the damaged and the mad.  We laughed and marveled and considered ourselves adventurers into the human panoply.

I had been interviewing people around this barrio – and behind the broken English, and dented lives there were passionate people with intelligent and observant things to say and contribute to the discourse I’m researching – about what the point of government is - and what's gone wrong.  

I didn’t feel ashamed of our old adventures, because it didn’t feel like mockery at the time, but something about the recollection made me feel old.  I can follow enough Spanglish to know that the little woman and her friend were discussing an old high school acquaintance who’d been struggling with illness.  The crazy man held the door politely for me as I left.  He had a dusty roll of paper towels under his arm.

Last I heard Felipe was one of the top neurosurgeons in the Southwest.

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A Diatribe on the News

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I'm fascinated by world events.  At times I'm a voracious news-consumer, at other times I turn away in disgust, boredom or despair.  I don't have a television, so most of my news comes from the on-line versions of newspapers.  My morning set of bookmarks go in order: New York Times, Talking Points Memo, The Guardian, Die Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Irish Examiner, Караван, and El Colombiano.   The New York and Munich papers have the best grasp on world events, and the Guardian has the best commentary about North America.  TPM's obsession with US politics at every level gives a hint of what may be bubbling up in the next news cycle, if I care to know - which lately I mostly don't.  Караван ("Caravan") and the Irish Examiner are ways to check in on places I have lived and maintain an affection for: Almaty and Cork.  The Medellin paper, El Colombiano I occasionally read in order to learn some Spanish.

My RSS feed brings me articles from a handful of more specialized sources - on climate change, energy, and cultural politics.

I skim, which is why I can no longer watch television news at all.   In reading I can ignore all the groundless speculation about the Malaysian airliner (of course it fell into the ocean!) or the politics of Obamacare (of course the Republicans are going to lambast it!).  The specialized blogs hammer away at their familiar obsessions.  So, even in my queue of newspapers and blogs I read only a smattering.

Lately, day to day reporting has interested me less and less.  Crimea is a case in point.  I can empathize with Crimean friends without needing to master the minutiae of the situation.   Putin has it, isn't going to give it back, it's neither very surprising nor outrageous, and it's not really our problem - at least in the ways that the media discuss it. (That is, the idea that the US and Obama have to - but can't - project their power abroad, that they have to hold the line on sovereignty, that sanctions need to be imposed, etc. is all entirely predictable and pointless.)  I might be interested in a discussion about the global collapse of liberal democracy and our conservatives' unabashed admiration for Putin, or how fossil fuel constraints underly Russia's assertiveness and Europe's passivity - but I'm not interested enough to wade through all the other nonsense, since the best case scenario is usually to hear something I've already worked out in my own analysis.

When Egypt (or the rest of north Africa) lurches toward anarchy, it will be because they have too many young men and not enough wealth, and the geopolitical influence (and oil money) that allowed them to navigate into that cul de sac - are gone.  Who has the megaphones and who is suffering and dying at the ends of the truncheons will not be the crux of the matter, though the stories will all be about that.  If people come up with a different way out - then that would be news!

When India starves it will be because they put their economic faith in globalization instead of building a country that could look after itself - not because of the political clowns who organize the pogroms.  When Japan retreats to isolationism and China re-orients its empire away from supporting the global economy - not only will none of this surprise me, but the undercurrents of culture, economics and energy, which make it all seem so likely (if not inevitable) will remain outside of the stories that the media are willing to tell.  In the US, the combination of a destroyed and eviscerated public political practice, combined with economic decline and elite predation makes the rise of our own Vladimir Putin seem probable, and I'm interested in analyses that speak to that - but for that you have to wade into the blogs.

On the other hand, something that caused my ears to prick up was that the mainstream media actually conveyed the IPCC's assertion that the food system is at risk from climate change.  Here is one of those basic underlying dynamics that we have to understand if we are going to make sense of what happens in Egypt or Syria or California.  Agriculture (and thus civilization) relies on a climate that is predictable enough to raise enormous quantities of food.  We're getting the first impacts of destabilization, and the scientists (who understand the scale of the future impacts which are already built into the system) are beginning to panic.  The stakes are being raised.  Responses, political and material, are being called for with a new urgency, even as the fundamental rigidity of the status quo remains in place.

But that's news!

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Back into the fray

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A week ago we returned from our travels in Costa Rica, back into the teeth of a winter still going strong.  After a few hours sleep I was at work, leading phone research calls among Midwesterners about sustainable agriculture.  And the week since has intensified the pace.

We have three projects wrapping up, none of which I'm involved in, except for sporadic editing of drafts as they pass by.  But we are ramping up 5 active research projects that I'll be managing.  One on sustainable agriculture, one on money in politics, one on how to craft a progressive model of government, and two over-lapping ones on matters of budgets and taxation, with the first focused on Washington state and the other national.

Gardening has gone completely off the rails.  I don't even have my seeds yet, and I'm going to have to scramble for seed potatoes depending on what I find in the cellar.  But on the bright side, the ground is still frozen, so at least I'm not gnashing my teeth like all the other gardeners.  This weekend I'll rake the raised bed and put on some cold frames to start warming up the soil for when I do have something to plant.

I still haven't unpacked my suitcase.  I'll probably be traveling for a week or so to Wisconsin (on a taxes and budgets project) as well as to the Midwest (on the sustainable agriculture project).  There are another 4 such trips to another 4 states on the governance project - but I'll have to hire ethnographer(s) for most or all of those.  Mix in a trip to California to see Porter at the end of April and it may be that gardening never gets back on the rails.  And the bees had best look after themselves.

Nico may have to start pulling his weight around here . . .

A Tarot Reading for 2014

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A commenter noted that my predictions from New Year's Eve, were kind of depressing.  Of course, any good pessimist can always simply claim to be a realist.  And I do.

But if I'm being honest, I also admit that I have a superstitious reluctance to make rosy and optimistic predictions, especially about my life or the lives of people I care about.  There's an old and well-established tradition that talking with confidence about future good things will "jinx" them.  It's a tradition that is alive and well in my own upbringing.

If I were just a little more superstitious I could avert the problem by humbly knocking on wood. 

I don't "believe" in such things intellectually.  It seems preposterous to me that the universe at large would care if I get hubristic in my pronouncements about good things coming my way.  On the other hand I do "believe" such things in the sense that the reluctance exists and persists in me.  (Sometimes, in fact, my intellect will relent and allow the superstitious part of me knock on wood for a tiny dose of irrational peace of mind.)

A time tested way to get around this problem is to consult an oracle, so this morning I cast the cards for a New Year's reading.  This is how they fell:

It's my familiar deck, the Mythic Tarot, cast in a traditional Celtic Cross. 

The significator is Strength, with the Three of Pentacles as the crossing card.  This indicates that our strength is being blocked by the things we have created in the material world - our own success and prosperity.  As we try to understand this conflict at the conscious level, the crowning card is the Six of Cups, a card that symbolizes looking back and dwelling upon the past - while in the position of the more unconscious base of the matter is the Four of Pentacles, the miser card.  By focusing on the past rather than the  future, and trying irrationally to hold onto what we have, we thwart our own strength.

The card of where we've been is the Queen of Swords, which is the powerful, but uncomfortable blending of icy intellect, emotion and the grounding of the feminine.  In the position of where we are going is the Two of Pentacles, which is the card of getting down to work and creating something in the world.

The resource card is the Ace of Wands, which is the inexhaustible fire of creativity and passion that gives energy and drive to action.  It is a card without preconceptions, but only the desire to create something.  The next card is how the situation is seen by others.  In this case the Seven of Pentacles represents the challenge of making decisions - of forethought and planning.  So while the common view is that we have choices to make, the reading as a whole puts the emphasis less on planning and selecting options, and more on inventing and doing.  

The hopes and fears card is the Queen of Cups - who symbolizes a more integrated, but also more limited or focused way of being than her counterpart the Queen of Swords.  The Queen of Cups experiences and embodies her emotions and the slippery element of water, where the Queen of Swords manages it all through intellect and control.  In this contrast, there is hope and reluctance to set aside some of the directing force of reason in favor of emotional depth and honesty.

The outcome card is the Nine of Pentacles, which is a card of material prosperity and reward for work and effort.

If I wanted to offer an antidote to the intellectual pessimism of yesterdays predictions, I couldn't have asked for a more straightforward and complementary reading.  As I said yesterday, I don't believe that 2014 is the year that we begin to honestly tackle the problems of our unsustainable ways of living.  But in its inimitable, affirming way, the tarot lays out the case that as we eventually come to extricate ourselves from the material and intellectual pitfalls we have fallen into, we have the resources and the clarity of motivation to invent for ourselves a new, satisfying way of living.

That's why, in spite of my reasoned pessimism about where our civilization is trending - I still raise a family, learn to keep bees, travel, make plans and make friends.

Happy New Year, people!

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The Year to Be - Nine Predictions for 2014

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Medellin, Colombia

As the physicist once said, prediction is hard, especially about the future.  But as the New Year is about to open, I think I'll try my hand at this fools' game.

In general, I think 2014 will continue a time of great caution and lack of vision among those who hold political and social power.

Japan

The status quo has become more brittle due to a bundle of interrelated issues including,

the over-exploitation of the seas, soils and biosphere

the destabilization of the climate

the plateauing of fossil fuel production

the impending cresting of economic growth

the dissatisfaction of global publics who cannot be allowed democracy or democratic discourse

and last but not least, the dishonesty and intellectual bankruptcy of the cult of Progress and infinite growth.

Paradoxically, the very fragility of the status quo, the lack of imaginable alternatives, and the fact that no one wants to overturn the boat, mean that we will muddle along without much in the way of change this year.  Still, things will happen, and here are nine predictions I'm willing to make . . .

Caldas, Colombia

Tokyo, Japan

• In US politics, Republicans will spend another couple of months convincing people that their greedy insurance companies are actually Obamacare, before they pivot and take credit for all of the things that are popular about the program.   

• Democrats will get some credit for successfully pushing for minimum wage increases, and Republicans will mostly get out of the way eventually.  Life will improve slightly for millions of people and small businesses.

• Having disappeared almost entirely from the political and media discourse, climate change will be back in the news as hot weather, drought, and sea level rise continue to intensify.  Notably, it will be treated not as a problem to be solved, but rather as an inevitability that must be adapted to.  The solution that dare not speak its name (i.e. changing our way of living) will continue to be tabu.

Quito, Ecuador

• Among the Chinese, there will be unrest in 2014 stemming from ecological degradation -- especially pollution in the air, soil and food.  The Chinese government will react by purging some high-profile officials and when that doesn't settle things, it will look for a pretext to stir up the distraction of a nativist backlash against the Japanese, Tibetans or Uighurs. 

• Energy production will limp along at a plateau, just enough to keep the global economy sputtering, while food prices will be kept just low enough to avoid riots and revolutions.  Predictors of doom and predictors of a new prosperity will both be disappointed.

• On the tech front, Google Glass and smart watches will fail to extend their reach beyond the chic geek digerati.  But late in the year there will be the first incarnations of true digital assistants - programs that can adapt to individuals and manage their social networking and digital connectivity.  The nimbler of the telecoms will get on board and start working on these new digital PA's.

Quito, Ecuador

• The Sochi Olympics will be a fiasco impressive even by Russian standards.  The one upside being that few people will go in person so the inadequacies and brutalities of the effort won't become as notorious as they might have.

• One of the world's great monoculture crops will mostly fail this year.  Although this will be blamed on a new pest or blight, the failure will actually be due to a combination of narrow genetics, unstable climate and the decline in agricultural research.

• On the global spiritual front, the push by Pope Francis for a more modest, non-consumerist and even ascetic spirituality will be echoed in popular movements within religions around the world, including evangelicals, muslims and others.  Governments will be unsettled and ambivalent about this development.

Rhode Island, US

So, if there is still an internet at the end of 2014, I will revisit these predictions and we can see how prescient I was or wasn't . . .
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Economy Boosting Jobs

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I'm a cultural anthropologist.  In particular I study the cognitive and cultural models that people use to think about various public policy issues.

Two years ago, one of the largest non-profit foundations in the country gave our small outfit the task of re-making the public discourse in ways that could promote a broad array of policy initiatives to make things better for working families.

We sifted through and tested all the various frames and ways of talking about the issues of low wage work and the working poor.  And we found and reassembled and streamlined and jettisoned and edited the things that advocates have to say about the topic, and refined it into a story that resonates with the widest possible audience.

It is a story that makes improving the lives of working people seem like the most obvious common sense, and it is summarized in the video  below.

In the intervening months, as this story in its many variations has percolated more consistently through the culture, I have seen people reaching out and picking up on this narrative not as something new and shocking, but as though it were just simple, obvious common sense.  

And that is a kind of change that matters.

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What Humans are Capable of

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the great museums of the world.  What is astounding about the place is not only the expanse of its "encyclopedic"collection, but the quality of the objects there.  You really are walking among the masterworks of the species.

Last weekend I spent three days as an ethnographer at the Museum.  This entailed wandering the museum observing people and striking up conversations with them about their experience of the museum.  It's all part of a larger project by the Met's to understand their visitors better.

The first day I spoke to about 30 people in conversations that ran from 3 minutes to 40.  At the beginning you are gathering the "top of mind" stuff - the stuff that is easy for people to articulate - for example, how they learn so much about history and other cultures or how inspiring they find the beautiful things in this beautiful place, or how we can't understand ourselves without understanding these roots and these capacities on display here.  How the place is a refuge.

By the second day, you've heard that, and you are paying attention to the moments when their articulateness breaks down, or where the eyes widen slightly and the hand gestures intensify.  You are on the hunt for the deeper moments that bind people to this place.  When a person got so absorbed in an object's craftsmanship - in the hours and days of labor and attention that must have gone into it - that they passed through that object to a connection to a real person who lived in another time and place.  Or when a person viscerally felt that they were not looking at a carving in a museum, but standing in ancient Egypt, seeing the chiselers hand, and hearing the flakes fly.  When they felt themselves torn from their normal now-ness and pinned down as just another pinpoint in the human panoply.  Or when a person driven to the breaking point by the mundane injustices of daily living came away from the Museum cleansed and re-calibrated with their sanity preserved.

On the third day, you continue with this, another 30 or so conversations, but also observing the visitors - watching to see what hints there are of the experiences and discombobulations that people confide.  It's fascinating, tiring work, and my little notebook was filled with jottings by the end.  

Now the challenge is to make sense of it all.  Or enough of it, at least.

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Honeyguide Bird

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image by Colin Beale

There is a species of bird in Africa called the greater honeyguide (Indicator indicator), which likes to eat beeswax, the only vertebrate to do so.  It will also eat bees, bee larvae, and wax moths if it can get access to an open hive.  But it's a small bird and beehives are notoriously well-defended, so the species has a unique adaptation.  It knows every hive in a 200 mile radius.  If it finds humans within a few kilometers of a hive it will fly up to them, calling and flitting back and forth, flashing its tail.  If the humans are willing to grab an ax and follow the bird, it will lead them to the colony.  (Some traditional African honey-hunters blow a loud whistle, called a fuulido before they set out in search of honey in order to solicit a honeyguide.)  Once the humans have broken into the hive (usually a hollow tree) the bird can feast on the wax and the grubs.

The behavior is innate rather than learned - an evolved behavior.  By analyzing the difference between subspecies scientists calculate that the behavior is at least 3 million years old.

There are two theories about how it came about.  The first is that it co-evolved with the honey badger, who will use their claws to tear open a hive if they can find one.  But in 30 years of trying scientists have never been able to observe the birds interacting with a badger, so they remain skeptical.  A honeyguide was once observed to solicit baboons, but the baboons weren't interested.

The other theory is put forth by the anthropologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham.  He believes that the behavior evolved with human ancestors.  Wrangham's primary interest is in human evolution, and in particular he believes that the most important innovation which enabled the development of Homo sapiens was the mastery of fire.  He studied chimpanzees and noted that they spend fully half of their waking hours chewing.  He himself tried and failed to subsist on their raw diet.   The ability to cook food frees up nutrients that are otherwise inaccessible and this increase in the amount and quality of nutrients allowed human evolution to take it's unique path -- a shrinking digestive tract and a shrinking jaw, but most importantly that large, extremely energy-intensive brain.  

Cooking food is what enabled our human ancestors to support and feed those ever larger brains, and gave them the time and energy to be human.

But hominid brains have been growing for over two million years and there is no archeological evidence of fire use back that far - so Wrangham isn't able prove that cooking had anything to do with kicking off brain growth.  

This is where the greater honeyguide comes in.  Wrangham observed that chimpanzees love honey, but can't get it.  Humans love honey, and they can get it.  The difference?  Fire.  The use of fire and smoke is universal among honey hunters to confuse the bees and derail their defensive behaviors.  If honeyguide birds have been bringing humans to beehives for three million years, then it stands to reason that humans and their ancestors have probably had fire for the past three million years to help them despoil the hives.

It's not an air-tight case by any means, but I love this story of a magical partnership between a meddlesome wax-eating bird and these honey-loving, torch-wielding hominids - a partnership that has stood the test of a whirlwind millions-years ride from ape to human.

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Constructing a Kid: Schooling and Playing

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A friend of mine has been writing about her experience putting her free-spirited 5-year old into the local public school Kindergarten.  It's an anxious and heartbreaking time, made more difficult by the ways that schools have been changing.  School's entire purpose is to shape and mold our children, but where does that leaves us when we doubt that they are up to the task -- or even worse -- when we fear that the schools may be designed to shape them in malign or destructive ways?  Is elementary school really just designed to crush their spirits into something more tractable -- to create subjects for our hierarchies?  

School has never been a utopia of creative freedom of course, and Kindergarten has always been a kind of academic boot camp.  It is and has been the place where you learned to stand in line and wait your turn.  You learned that time is divided up into regimens of minutes and activities.  You learned to be a consumer of orders and knowledge delivered by authority, and so on.

Up until the recent past, however, the force of this potentially Goffmanesque institution was diminished in three very different ways.  

The first was the fact that teachers were mostly craftspeople, who tended to see themselves not only as enforcers of a necessary discipline and focus, but also as nurturers of individual students with individual interests, skills and destinies.  Everyone remembers bad teachers, and for most of us they were the ones who focused only on the first, but not the second task of teaching.  Unfortunately, there has been a decades-long assault on the craft of teaching.  It's orchestrated from the top -- where federal and state mandates have consistently ordered schools to focus on rote, standardized fact-learning - mostly with a laser-like devotion on multiple-choice testing - and have doled out nothing but punishment for teachers and schools who devote too much time to nurturing students in other ways.  And it comes from the bottom where anti-tax rhetoric and the breakdown of communities has more and more resulted in underfunded schools with over-stressed, under-appreciated and demoralized teachers.

And so we are in the process of losing one of the great humanizing aspects of school -- or to put it in more critical-sociological terms --  we are losing one of the ways in which the state's desire (or the institution's desire) to create docile subjects has been thwarted.

A second, related way in which schools seem to grow less benign has to do with their changing place within a class system.  In Amy's description of discovering her son's Kindergarten, she steps into a different class milieu than the educated, middle class settings she was more comfortable in.  Our society has few qualms about imposing harsh discipline on the poor and working classes.  Schools and other institutions that contain them are not expected to nurture individuality, but rather to break poorly socialized kids of their bad habits, colorful distractions and ugly accents and transform them if possible to more appropriate citizens - for their own good, and our own good.  

As long as schools contained a full range social classes, they had to be more than just that kind of institution, however.  They also had to nurture full, well-rounded, creative and expressive human beings.  Well-educated, middle class citizens expected it and had enough influence to insist on it.   My question would be, as first the upper classes and then the middle classes have begun more and more to abandon the public schools, does this means schools devolve more fully toward the kinds of authoritarian, unsympathetic institutions that we are happy to inflict on the lower classes?  I suspect it does.

The third troubling trend doesn't have to do with changes in schools per se, but with the loss of the greatest counter-balance to the shaping power of the institution -- namely unstructured, peer-based play.  A recent article, The Play Deficit by Peter Gray, lays out in evolutionary terms how play with peers is absolutely central to the human process of learning and developing into culturally functional human beings.  He goes into detail about what we lose when kids are given less and less opportunity for play, (and the whole article is worth a read) but I wanted to note a couple of things.  He mentions that for older generations school wasn't as overwhelmingly important to kids lives.  It was one of several powerful socializing settings in which kids developed.  There's a sense among many parents that kids aren't getting what they need, but the response -- namely driving them around to lessons, events, sports practices, and other adult-regulated extra-curricular activities -- isn't actually what they need.  They need to be let alone to run and roam and negotiate games outside of the power of the adult world.  It's only through that that we grow up.

If our kids don't have that, then school is left standing as an increasingly powerful shaping force in our children's lives.  (Well, that and consumer culture, but that is grist for another post!)  The stakes are that much higher when our schools become dysfunctional.

I think there is tremendous dissatisfaction among parents and other community members about the state of our schools and communities, but the dynamic needs to be turned away from the current pattern of disappointment, criticism and abandonment and redirected toward a constructive revitalization of our commitment to our public schools and the communities they serve.  Amy is trying to elbow her way into her son's classroom to make it better.  She has very sharp elbows, and I hope she can make an impact.  It's one of my main regrets about our lives here in Rhode Island that we couldn't and didn't, but instead joined the outflow from the public school system.  An unfortunate side-effect of looking at the Big Picture is that the trends can look too powerful.  I've considered going to the school board meetings, but it felt like I would be going to do penance rather than out of any sense that I could change something.  But I think I should try.  Kids like Amy's little Ray deserve that.

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Unwinding Progress

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A dragonfly studies me from the clothesline

The conversation about Progress as a civil religion continues at the Archdruid Report.

In the spirit of his critique that Progress is falling, I'll no longer refer to Progress as a grand narrative, civil religion, or ideology.  Instead I'll start calling it a "tradition." As in, 

"traditions of progress are being increasingly called into question by young people, who want more practical and up to date ways of dealing with the world." 

Or, 

"steeped in the time-worn traditions of Progress, nation-states were woefully unprepared to deal with a changing world."

There's something elegant about using a tradition’s own most insidious insinuations against it.

This week, the Archdruid continued his lecture about the difficulties of unwinding our traditions of Progress, making a target of scientists, who are arguably some of its high priests and beneficiaries.  As the broken promises about jetpacks and flying cars become an iconic refrain for an anxious population, he argues that big, institutional science is liable to go down with its church.

This was my rejoinder:

A couple of years ago I was research director for a project that looked into to how to build support for the arts as a public good. One of the striking findings was that the old narrative of the arts as central to “culture” (in its original sense of something that grows and progresses) had vanished from the public consciousness almost without a trace (in the Midwestern US in any case). This formerly widely held idea that arts could lead to a kind of moral or other kind of “elevation” survived only among a small stratum of the elite. For the rest, the arts might be interesting or entertaining or a chance for people to show off a skill, but it wasn’t a public matter and certainly not important to the “development” of your city or your nation. In effect, “Progress”, had died out in this realm practically without the public noticing.



In order to rebuild a sense of arts as a public good, we found that talking about the “ripple effect” of arts in a community brought people back on board. That is, art events – whether you cared to be there or not – made your community a better place to live, knit people together and enriched a shared conversation, and so on. It is a pivot that will warm an art booster’s heart, but it no longer has anything to do with Progress.



My point with this tangent, is that I strongly suspect that Progress is going to slip away from science as well, perhaps similarly unremarked by the public at large. And to the extent it persists, science, practical, useful science will be valued not as the heroic engine of Progress, but as a practice, and a method, and a toolkit that can make that community and that place that you value, better.

I’m a bad gardener, because I’m a bit too much of an experimenter, and tend to value a lesson learned more than a full basket of cucumbers -- but I’m sure if I had to buckle down I could use some science to create some more constructive ripples in my gardening community.

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