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The death of ideas
Dominic Sandbrook, New Statesman
At this turning point in our political history, when the global economic crisis has made a mockery of the free-market ideology that has dominated western politics since the age of Reagan and Thatcher, and Britain’s Labour government seems to be staggering towards the exit, we should feel we are in exciting times. This, surely, is a moment when the electoral landscape is about to be redrawn and the boundaries and ambitions of political debate established for decades to come, just as they were at the advent of Thatcherism in 1979 or after the Attlee landslide in 1945.
But one thing is missing, perhaps the most important thing of all: the big idea. If we are at a watershed in modern history, where is the torrent of initiatives that will remake our world? Where are the thinkers who will banish the post-Thatcherite orthodoxy and come to define the 2010s as John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman dominated previous political eras? And why do our political leaders – intelligent, thoughtful men and women, educated at Britain’s finest institutions – seem so painfully and embarrassingly short of new ideas?
A cynic’s answer would be that it was ever thus – that when Gordon Brown switches on his robotic auto-response, listing statistics that supposedly show Labour’s achievements, he is merely following in Clement Attlee’s footsteps; that when David Cameron delivers the smooth pieties about change and renewal, he is doing just what Margaret Thatcher did in the run-up to 1979. But that is simply not true.
When Attlee won power in 1945, for example, his Labour government was suffused with crusading zeal and an intellectual mandate to build a “new Jerusalem” on the foundations of Keynesian economic management, full employment and a generous welfare state. And even during the last great watershed in the late 1970s, politics was alive with ideas and ideological division in a way that now seems almost prehistoric. As the late Ben Pimlott once wrote, the Tory revival of the 1970s was driven by ideas – the free economy and the strong state – that “came from outside, creating a groundswell of sympathetic opinion before their adoption by the Conservative Party leadership”. Thanks to organisations such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute, Thatcher’s handbag was stuffed with policies on everything from selling off the family silver to scrapping the NHS and replacing comprehensive education with a voucher system. Many never saw the light of day, but they added up to a formidable laundry list driven by the belief that, as her ally Ronald Reagan put it in his first speech as president of the United States, “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.”
…A common explanation for the death of political ideas is that we live in a post-ideological age, in which grand narratives have been discredited and broken up, much like the heavy industry and public utilities of the 20th century. But surely this is highly exaggerated. It is true that Marxism as a practical economic blueprint lost what remained of its appeal with the fall of the Soviet Union; in a globalised world, a return to state socialism seems even less likely than Brown going down in history as one of the great communicators. Yet even though academics and intellectuals may scoff at the notion of grand ideological narratives, there is little evidence that the general public has lost its appetite for big ideas. One reason for the appeal of the British National Party, after all, is that it offers a simple and compelling story that makes sense to working-class former Labour voters. Moreover, there is no sign of religion dying out as a global force. And in their different ways, the anti-globalisation and green movements reflect the same hunger for ideological commitment and crusading mission – values that have almost disappeared from the arena of electoral politics.
Perhaps a more plausible explanation is simply demographic. Most of Britain’s major politicians came of age – either literally or metaphorically – in the late 1980s, when free-market ideas were carrying all before them and resistance to Thatcherism seemed antediluvian, backward, even futile. It is surely no accident that the likes of Cameron and James Purnell took their first political steps during the Major years, when Thatcherism had lost its shock value and become the new consensus, and when senior figures in both parties routinely dismissed dissenting opinion as “unrealistic” adolescent idealism. It is a rare politician indeed who changes his fundamental ideas after he has reached the top, or even after he has reached his thirties. Even those who famously changed parties, such as Joseph Chamberlain or Winston Churchill, never changed their basic convictions. And it is even more difficult to change your mind, to reach for new ideas, to test new conceptions of state and society, when you are a public figure in the glare of the spotlight, the press ready to pounce at the first sign of inconsistency. Safer, surely, to steer clear of ideas altogether, as Cameron’s opinion-poll lead seems to prove.
…But there is another reason that says something rather depressing about the nature of modern politics. By and large, political leaders have always been heavily dependent on others for their ideas…
..The irony, therefore, is that as politics has become more ostentatiously open, with cameras recording Commons debates and committee sessions, so it has become increasingly populist, with politicians keen not to advertise their intellects in case they appear to be lording it over the voters. Overtly intellectual politicians, such as Lord Adonis or David Willetts, are generally kept away from the cameras, and are an increasingly rare breed anyway. What we are left with is a political scene that seems a long way from the bitter ideological debates of the 1930s, or even the great Gladstone-Disraeli clashes of the Victorian age, but is unavoidably reminiscent of the 18th century – a world of “patronage, self-promotion and mutual back-scratching”, as Campbell puts it, “where there is nothing at stake but the achievement and retention of office and the opportunities for personal enrichment that it brings”. In many ways this offends our instinctive sense of what politics should be about. Whatever happened to politics as the battleground of ideas, the clash of ideological forces, the collision and resolution of deeply opposed class or sectional interests?..
(6 August 2009)
Economics is not natural science
Douglas Rushkof, Edge.org
We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems.
…The marketplace in which most commerce takes place today is not a pre-existing condition of the universe. It’s not nature. It’s a game, with very particular rules, set in motion by real people with real purposes. That’s why it’s so amazing to me that scientists, and people calling themselves scientists, would propose to study the market as if it were some natural system — like the weather, or a coral reef.
It’s not. It’s a product not of nature but of engineering. And to treat the market as nature, as some product of purely evolutionary forces, is to deny ourselves access to its ongoing redesign. It’s as if we woke up in a world where just one operating system was running on all our computers and, worse, we didn’t realize that any other operating system ever did or could ever exist. We would simply accept Windows as a given circumstance, and look for ways to adjust our society to its needs rather than the other way around.
It is up to our most rigorous thinkers and writers not to base their work on widely accepted but largely artificial constructs. It is their job to differentiate between the map and the territory — to recognize when a series of false assumptions is corrupting their observations and conclusions. As the great interest in the arguments of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens shows us, there is a growing acceptance and hunger for thinkers who dare to challenge the widespread belief in creation mythologies. That it has become easier to challenge the supremacy of God than to question the supremacy of the market testifies to the way any group can fall victim to a creation myth — especially when they are rewarded to do so.
…In their ongoing effort to define and the defend the functioning of the market through science and systems theory, some of today’s brightest thinkers have, perhaps inadvertently, promoted a mythology about commerce, culture, and competition. And it is a mythology as false, dangerous, and ultimately deadly as any religion.
…Both science and technology are challenging long-held assumptions about top-down control, competition, and scarcity. But our leading thinkers are less likely to provide us with genuinely revolutionary axioms for a more highly evolved marketplace than reactionary responses to the networks, technologies, and discoveries that threaten to expose the marketplace for the arbitrarily designed poker game it is. They are not new rules for a new economy, but new rules for propping up old economic interests in the face of massive decentralization.
While we can find evidence of the corporate marketplace biasing the application of any field of inquiry, it is our limited economic perspective that prevents us from supporting work that serves values external to the market. This is why it is particularly treacherous to limit economic thought to the game as it is currently played, and to present these arguments with near-scientific certainty.
The sense of inevitability and pre-destiny shaping these narratives, as well as their ultimate obedience to market dogma, is most dangerous, however, for the way it trickles down to writers and theorists less directly or consciously concerned with market forces. It fosters, both directly and by example, a willingness to apply genetics, neuroscience, or systems theory to the economy, and of doing so in a decidedly determinist and often sloppy fashion. Then, the pull of the market itself does the rest of the work, tilting the ideas of many of today’s best minds toward the agenda of the highest bidder.
(11 August 2009)
From the website:
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is a media analyst; documentary filmmaker, and author. His latest book is Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back.
Renewable Transition 2: EROEI Uncertainty
Jeff Vail, The Oil Drum
In the first part of this series, I discussed the practicality of a future transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources—specifically renewable sources of electricity such as solar and wind power. One little-discussed hurdle is the fact that, because we must invest energy in renewables up front, a rapid transition threatens to greatly impact near-term demand for energy resulting in unwanted economic and political effects. Another is that, because we will initially use fossil fuels to build our renewable infrastructure, the transition to renewables will result in a short-term increase in carbon emissions. The extent to which both of these impacts will be significant, even their potential to foreclose the possibility of such a transition, will turn on the net energy, or Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), of available renewable energy technology.
As I alluded to last time, while there are many EROEI numbers floating about for solar, wind, etc., these numbers are far less accurate or verifiable than is, I believe, commonly assumed. I’ll argue that our measurements of EROEI are fundamentally flawed, at least for some purposes. Most EROEI studies serve as a tool to compare different technologies or to gauge advances in technology–a role for which they are generally well suited. However, when viewed from a complete systems perspective, current EROEI figures fail to provide an inclusive measurement. I’ll argue that, for purposes of planning a civilizational transition, a meaningful meansure must be inclusive of all energy inputs. Finally, I’ll propose a possible proxy-measurement to address the methodological issues surrounding EROEI.
…The problem with calculating EROEI: Why the need for two sets of EROEI calculations? Why not just use one fundamentally “true” measurement methodology and call it a day? The answer is that measuring EROEI is far more challenging than is commonly presumed because of (among several reasons) the following question: how attenuated an energy input is necessarily included in our calculations? Certainly the electricity and natural gas used in a turbine manufacturing plant must be included. What about the energy used to build that plant? What about the energy used to build the machinery used to build that plant? What about the energy used to build the plant to build that machinery, ad infinitum? This is just the tip of the iceberg, but already you can see where this is going: we must draw an artificial boundary if we hope to actually count these energy inputs, but by so doing we necessarily exclude a portion of the actual energy inputs—inputs the significance of which are unknown and unknowable (because we can only know their significance by actually counting them—which brings us back to our initial problem). The outcome of these methodologies, while admittedly the result of actual counting of measurable inputs and outputs, remains but an estimate.
…This calculation of a truly inclusive, systemic EROEI for renewable energy sources stands at the very core of our society’s ability to transition to renewable energy. Compare, for example, results of input-output vs. process-analysis EROEI figures from existing studies of wind EROEI at Meta-analysis of net energy return for wind power systems by Kubiszewski, et al.
…Ultimately, energy can neither be created nor destroyed. As a result, in any closed system, the energy flows within that system must come into unity. The more pertinent question here may be “what artificial boundary to draw when considering questions that affect human society as a whole?” I argue that, ultimately, we must draw the boundary at our planet, a system that, at least on human-relevant time scales, tends to operate in relative stasis given the continuous input of solar energy. As a result, EROEI of civilization must balance out to roughly 1:1 + the rate of growth of human society. While that may seem like a tautology at first, and is used by some to argue that “systemic” or “inclusive” EROEI measures such as those I suggest here are pointless, I think the reverse is true–while 0.8 or 1.2 may seem like minor differences, they fundamentally represent the difference between a shrinking global civilization (and quite possibly a declining foundation of ecological support and resiliency) or one that is growing.
We have been able to expand and grow our global civilization based, recently, on savings of “ancient sunlight” accumulated over geological time. We have empirical proof that the EROEI of these sources was significantly greater than 1 due to the sustained growth of human civilization. Now, any attempt to replace that vast inheritance with renewable technologies must address that same systemic question: when ALL the energy inputs are considered, will civilization have the energy to expand energy, maintain, or reduce the energy consumed per capita? The answer to that question will largely guide the future of humanity–as such it is critical for us to understand if the “systemic” EROEI of modern renewable energy technologies are actually, as I suggest, an order of magnitude lower than advertised.
…I would also like to address one attempt to reconcile this problem: Howard Odum’s “emergy” concept. While I applaud his recognition of this problem, and his efforts to address it, “emergy” really doesn’t address the accounting impossibility highlighted above. While “emergy” recognizes the need to account for all energy inputs, it provides no methodology to get around the process of actually counting them, as we regress infinitely step-by-step back from the assembly line itself. As a result, “emergy” calculations must either draw an artificial boundary somewhere (resulting in the same long tail of unknown significance) or must resort to mere guesses about the inputs. (I recognize that Odum’s “emergy” also addresses the cost of transformation between different energy qualities–this doesn’t eliminate the problem caused by the “long tail” of energy inputs where such transformation must be considered, and where Odum presents no accounting theory or proxy measurement methodology to measure these inputs in aggregate.)
(10 August 2009)
YOu can find the first part of this series here.
