Deep thought – Feb 4

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The True 21st Century Begins
Brunco Argento (alter-ego of Bruce Sterling), Seed Magazine
… We now come to the useful word “precarity,” which is part of the American lifestyle but distant from American politics. “Precarity” is, of course, the condition of existing precariously. The condition of losing one’s safety and security, of losing predictability and the ability to rationally plan ahead, the condition of being humiliated and in danger.

“Precarity” has much to do with the need for a steady income, for predictable hours of work, for a humane respect from one’s employer and a need not to be unjustly fired. Below this thin shell of labor-management relations is the deeper, more primal nature of European precarity. It is found in our time-honored European predilection for abject misery, political extremism, totalitarian violence against the dignity of the individual, and world wars.

Normally Americans and Europeans fail to agree about “precarity”?—?Americans think their precarity is a kind of fluidity and dynamism, while Europeans are lazy featherbedders dawdling over two-hour lunches. But what’s certain is that, whatever its definition, precarity is now global. The wealthy and powerful?—?especially the wealthy and powerful?—?are precarious. They are being flung about like flotsam, and the precarity once reserved for blue-collar workers is now inside the corner office and the corporate boardroom as well.

This means that we all have new chances to see eye-to-eye on major global economic issues such as currency flows and the aging population. Italy is leading the way in aging?—?we’re the oldest country in Europe?—?and business stabilized remarkably when we rid ourselves of the comically useless Italian lira. It’s proof that people can both adapt to the inevitable and make some bold steps.

…In a world so redolent with wonder, how can we allow ourselves to conduct our daily lives with so little insight, such absence of dignity? We should discover that there is no objective need for such precarity; the planet Earth should not be run as a fire sale. Precarity was supposed to be for the little people; when it is for everybody, its absurdity is manifest. Precarity cannot make us a cleaner, better, or more just society. Precarity is not sustainable. It has nothing to do with economic productivity. It does not help us sustain our precious cultural heritage or our natural heritage, the planet’s priceless biodiversity. It is the mayhem of a disturbed ant’s nest.

Once we recognize precarity as an existential threat for all, we will find the means to deal with it. A guaranteed annual income would be a good start. Shorter work weeks give us the chance to rejoin civil society, to re-establish trust with neighbors turned strangers, to engage in some convivial joie de vivre over healthy, genuine cuisine, instead of ridiculous cardboard-packaged fast food.

… After 1989 we enjoyed a strange interregnum where “history ended.” Everyone ran up a credit-card bill at the global supermarket. The adventure ended badly, in crisis. Still, let us be of good heart. In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse?—?a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.

The year to come is best approached as a learning opportunity. It offers a golden chance to bury our dead prejudices and learn how to properly feed the living. Once we stop shaking all over and scolding Americans, we will recognize the tremendous potential this new century offers the people of the world. The sun still shines, the grass still grows, we are still human. If we stopped pretending to be puppets of an invisible hand, we would not fret over the loss of the 20th century’s strings. We might see that life is sweet.

Bruno Argento is an Italian futurist, a cautious optimist, and Bruce Sterling’s twin brother. He lives in Turin, Italy.
(29 January 2009)
Suggested by EB ally Big Gav

The globalisation of addiction
Mike Jay, nthposition
Book Review:
The Globalisation of Addiction
A Study in Poverty of the Spirit
Bruce Alexander
Oxford University Press

Bruce Alexander is best known – though deserves to be much better known – for the ‘Rat Park’ experiments he conducted in 1981. As an addiction psychologist, much of the data with which he worked was drawn from laboratory trials with rats and monkeys: the ‘addictiveness’ of drugs such as opiates and cocaine was established by observing how frequently caged animals would push levers to obtain doses. But Alexander’s observations of addicts at the clinic where he worked in Vancouver suggested powerfully to him that the root cause of addiction was not so much the pharmacology of these particular drugs as the environmental stressors with which his addicts were trying to cope.

To test his hunch he designed Rat Park, an alternative laboratory environment constructed around the need of the subjects rather than the experimenters. A colony of rats, who are naturally gregarious, were allowed to roam together in a large vivarium enriched with wheels, balls and other playthings, on a deep bed of aromatic cedar shavings and with plenty of space for breeding and private interactions. Pleasant woodland vistas were even painted on the surrounding walls. In this situation, the rats’ responses to drugs such as opiates were transformed. They no longer showed interest in pressing levers for rewards of morphine: even if forcibly addicted, they would suffer withdrawals rather than maintaining their dependence.

… The Globalisation of Addiction is Alexander’s attempt to draw out their full implications for our understanding of addiction, and to chart a course towards forms of treatment that can transform their findings into practice.

His analysis begins with a radical reconception of addiction itself. Throughout the 20th century, as the science and treatment of addiction have developed into vast academic and professional industries, its underlying nature has stubbornly refused to coalesce into any sort of consensus. Is it a physiological condition marked by metabolic responses such as tolerance and withdrawal, a condition produced simply by exposure to ‘addictive’ drugs? Or is it a psychological affliction, the product of an ‘addictive personality’ – or, alternatively, a moral weakness

… For Alexander, all these seemingly disparate accounts are united by their focus on the individual addict; but even a cursory historical and cultural survey reveals that the incidence of addiction is essentially a social phenomenon. Many historical and indigenous cultures have lacked even the concept of addiction – but many of these same cultures, once their traditional structures have been disrupted by conquest or colonisation, have been destroyed by it.

… Alexander’s search for the drivers behind the modern explosion in addiction leads him to consider the parallel spread of free market societies. Along with their obvious economic benefits, free markets also bring a widespread increase in what he terms cultural ‘dislocation’. What were once elaborately reciprocated cultural transactions are reduced to simple commercial exchanges, and ‘the competitive marketplace becomes the matrix of human existence’. Social fabrics are loosened as economic winners and losers polarise into their respective ghettoes, and traditional networks of trust are replaced by often brutal demarcations between neighbourhoods and social classes. It is our now endemic culture of competitive, zero-sum individualism that has, in the phrase of Alexander’s title, globalised addiction over the last 50 years.

It is, he acknowledges, too simplistic to blame capitalism itself: the fundamental problem, dislocation, can equally be generated by feudalism , communism or any other political system. Nevertheless, a consumer society systemically erodes the sovereign remedy against addiction which, following Erik Erikson, Alexander terms ‘psychosocial integration’.

… Once addiction is reconceived as a symptom of the dislocation embedded in modern cultures, the practical measures required to manage it become vast in scope. Treatment of addicts needs to become more holistic, and interwoven into a far wider spectrum of social programmes. Education and treatment need to lose their narrow focus on illicit drugs and alcohol, and to encompass addiction in all its forms.
(2009)
Fascinating article with implications for sustainability. Suggested by EB ally Big Gav. -BA

Unwinding Complexity and the Collapse of Societies
Byron King, Whiskey & Gunpowder
My take-away thought about [witnessing the investigations of the “splashdown” of the US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River] was how complex our society has become. There are layers upon layers of complexity and astonishing levels of technical expertise. There are so many different organizations, agencies, groupings of people and assemblages of equipment. It all costs a lot of money and consumes a lot of energy. When something dramatic happens, like an airplane crash, it all mobilizes and comes on-site. That’s OK when major disasters are one-off incidents. But what if several incidents occur in short order or close proximity? What happens when money, if not energy, gets scarce? The whole process could get overwhelmed.

Dealing with Modern Complexity

Of course, New York knows something about dealing with disasters. After all, we were about three blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center. Still, it takes years to hire and train all of these experts. And more years to acquire all this sophisticated gear. It’s a very laborious and expensive process. Just keeping this level of capability on a standby basis requires a massive commitment of resources. When you need it, you need it now. If you don’t have it, you can’t build it up quickly. And when you have it (like New York has some of everything), you don’t want to get rid of it in some frenzy of so-called cost cutting. But still, it makes me wonder.

Societies develop layers of complexity to solve problems. The thing to keep in mind, however, is the historical fact that every complex civilization that has ever lived on this world has collapsed. Bar none. All societies have come to an end. Cultural anthropologist Joseph Tainter documented this in 1988 in his astonishing book The Collapse of Complex Societies.

That is, as societies become more complex, the costs of meeting new challenges increase. Eventually, every society arrives at a point at which devoting extra resources to meeting new challenges produces diminishing returns. Then negative returns. Along comes a systemic shock. The shock might be internal (resource exhaustion, for example) or external (foreign war, for another example). And the shock triggers collapse. When collapse occurs, it almost always occurs rapidly. Things fall apart and quickly decay to a much lower state of complexity. Societies become less complex by collapsing into smaller, much less complex subgroups.

The Western world — certainly, the U.S. — has spent the past century engaged in an arms race of social complexity. And from where we now stand, there’s no gentle “build-down.” The more people who understand that, the better.
(3 February 2009)

Peak oil: a symptom, not a cause
Jeff Vail, blog
Peak oil: a symptom, not a cause
Is peak oil–the inexorable decline in global oil production–a cause of our troubles, or merely a symptom of a deeper cause? I think it’s the latter.

What is the ultimate cause of our troubles? In my opinion, it is the hierarchal nature of our society. As I discussed in my essay, The Problem of Growth, a terrain consisting of competing hierarchal structure requires that these structures continually work to grow and intensify; the resulting symptom of a requirement for perpetual growth drives both our increasing consumption of non-renewable resources and our FIRE-bubble economy (Finance, Investment, and Real Estate); peak oil, in turn, is a symptom of our non-sustainable use of resources.

There is a temptation to say that the financial crisis has debunked peak oil theory, that the financial crisis delayed the peaking of oil production (or is somehow masking it), that the financial crisis was caused by peak oil, etc. In my opinion, it’s much more accurate and informative to point out that both the financial crisis and peak oil are symptoms of a deeper cause, and that this cause–the fundamental structure of our society–is really what must be addressed. The corollary, of course, is that we can’t solve the financial crisis or peak oil because they are symptoms, not causes. Instead, we must search for ways to address our fundamental mode of organization…
(2 February 2009)
An intriguing train of though, but I dunno – the search for the one true engine of history has not been too successful in the past. I personally would look more towards a confluence of hierarchical structure, capitalism, cheap fossil fuels, consumerist culture and some innate human behaviors. But Jeff Vail has just begun, so let’s see what he has to say in future posts.

One wouldn’t expect him to tackle questions like the hierarchical nature of our society. Or to develop a rhizome theory. He is a contributor to The Oil Drum and Energy Bulletin. -BA