Op Ed

If humans were smart, we would bet on our ignorance.

That advice comes early in the Hebrew Bible. Adam and Eve’s banishment in chapters two and three of Genesis can be read as a warning that hubris is our tragic flaw. In the garden, God told them they could eat freely of every tree but the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This need not be understood as a command that people must stay stupid, but only that we resist the temptation to believe that we are godlike and can competently manipulate the complexity of the world.

We aren’t, and we can’t, which is why we should always remember that we are far more ignorant than we are knowledgeable. It’s true that in the past few centuries, we humans have dramatically expanded our understanding of how the world works through modern science. But we would be sensible to listen to plant geneticist Wes Jackson, one of the leaders in the sustainable agriculture movement, who suggest that we adopt “an ignorance-based worldview” that could help us understand these limits. [Wes Jackson, “Toward an Ignorance-Based Worldview,” The Land Report, Spring 2005, pp. 14-16. See also Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson, eds., The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008).] Jackson, cofounder of The Land Institute research center, argues that such an approach would help us ask important questions that go beyond the available answers and challenge us to force existing knowledge out of its categories. Putting the focus on what we don’t know can remind us of the need for humility and limit the damage we do.

This call for humility is an antidote to the various fundamentalisms that threaten our world today. I use the term “fundamentalism” to describe any intellectual, political, or theological position that asserts an absolute certainty in the truth and/or righteousness of a belief system. Fundamentalism is an extreme form of hubris—overconfidence not only in one’s beliefs but in the ability of humans to understand complex questions definitively. Fundamentalism isn’t unique to religious people but is instead a feature of a certain approach to the world, rooted in mistaking limited knowledge for wisdom.

In ascending order of threat, these fundamentalisms are religious, national, market, and technological. All share some similar characteristics, while each poses a particular threat to democracy and sustainable life on the planet.

Religious fundamentalism is the most contested of the four, and hence is the one most often critiqued. National fundamentalism routinely unleashes violence that leads to critique, though most often the critique focuses on other nations’ hyperpatriotic fundamentalism rather than our own. And as the prophets of neoliberalism’s dream of unrestrained capitalism are exposed as false prophets, criticism of market fundamentalism is moving slowly from the left to the mainstream.

Religious, national, and market fundamentalisms are frightening, but they may turn out to be less dangerous than our society’s technological fundamentalism.

Technological fundamentalists believe that the increasing use of evermore sophisticated high-energy, advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. Those who question such declarations are often said to be “anti-technology,” which is a meaningless insult. All human beings use technology of some kind, whether stone tools or computers. An anti-fundamentalist position is not that all technology is bad, but that the introduction of new technology should be evaluated carefully on the basis of its effects—predictable and unpredictable—on human communities and the non-human world, with an understanding of the limits of our knowledge.

Our experience with unintended consequences is fairly extensive. For example, there’s the case of automobiles and the burning of petroleum in internal-combustion engines, which give us the ability to travel considerable distances with a fair amount of individual autonomy. This technology also has given us traffic jams and road rage, strip malls and smog, while contributing to climate destabilization that threatens the ability of the ecosphere to sustain human life as we know it. We haven’t quite figured out how to cope with these problems, and in retrospect it might have been wise to go slower in the development of a system geared toward private, individual transportation based on the car, with more attention to potential consequences. [Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back (New York: Crown, 1997).]

Or how about CFCs and the ozone hole? Chlorofluorocarbons have a variety of industrial, commercial, and household applications, including in air conditioning. They were thought to be a miracle chemical when introduced in the 1930s—non-toxic, non-flammable, and non-reactive with other chemical compounds. But in the 1980s, researchers began to understand that while CFCs are stable in the troposphere, when they move to the stratosphere and are broken down by strong ultraviolet light they release chlorine atoms that deplete the ozone layer. This unintended effect deflated the exuberance a bit. Depletion of the ozone layer means that more UV radiation reaches the Earth’s surface, and overexposure to UV radiation is a cause of skin cancer, cataracts, and immune suppression.

But wait, the technological fundamentalists might argue, our experience with CFCs refutes your argument—humans got a handle on that one and banned CFCs, and now the ozone hole is closing. True enough, but what lessons have been learned? Society didn’t react to the news about CFCs by thinking about ways to step back from a developed world that has become dependent on air conditioning, but instead looked for replacements to keep the air conditioning running. [Stan Cox, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer (New York: New Press, 2010).] So the reasonable question is: When will the unintended effects of the CFC replacements become visible? If not the ozone hole, what’s next? There’s no way to predict, but it seems reasonable to ask the question and sensible to assume the worst.

We don’t have to look far for evidence that our hubris is creating the worst. Every measure of the health of the ecosphere—groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity—suggests we may be past the point of restoration. As Jackson’s example suggests, scientists themselves often recognize the threat and turn away from the hubris of technological fundamentalism. This powerful warning of ecocide came from 1,700 of the world’s leading scientists:

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about. [Henry Kendall, a Nobel Prize physicist and former chair of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ board of directors, was the primary author of the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity.” 

That statement was issued in 1992, and in the past two decades we have yet to change course and instead pursue ever riskier projects. As the most easily accessible oil is exhausted, we feed our energy/affluence habit by drilling in deep water and processing tar sands, guaranteeing the destruction of more ecosystems. We extract more coal through mountain-top removal, guaranteeing the destruction of more ecosystems. [Naomi Klein, “Addicted to Risk,” TEDWomen conference, December 8, 2010.] And we take technological fundamentalism to new heights by considering large-scale climate engineering projects—known as geo-engineering or planetary engineering, typically involving either carbon-dioxide removal from the atmosphere and solar-radiation management—as a “solution” to climate destabilization.

The technological fundamentalism that animates these delusional plans makes it clear why Wes Jackson’s call for an ignorance-based worldview is so important. If we were to step back and confront honestly the technologies we have unleashed—out of that hubris, believing our knowledge is adequate to control the consequences of our science and technology—I doubt any of us would ever get a good night’s sleep. We humans have been overdriving our intellectual headlights for thousands of years, most dramatically in the twentieth century when we ventured with reckless abandon into two places where we had no business going—the atom and the cell.

On the former: The deeper we break into the energy package, the greater the risks. Building fires with sticks gathered from around the camp is relatively easy to manage, but breaking into increasingly earlier material of the universe—such as fossil fuels and, eventually, uranium—is quite a different project, more complex and far beyond our capacity to control. Likewise, manipulating plants through traditional selective breeding is local and manageable, whereas breaking into the workings of the gene—the foundational material of life—takes us into places we have no way to understand.

These technological endeavors suggest that the Genesis story was prescient; our taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil appears to have been ill-advised, given where it has led us. We live now in the uncomfortable position of realizing we have moved too far and too fast, outstripping our capacity to manage safely the world we have created. The answer is not some naïve return to a romanticized past, but a recognition of what we have created and a systematic evaluation to determine how to recover from our most dangerous missteps.

A good first step is to adopt an ignorance-based worldview, to heed the warning against hubris that appears in the most foundational stories—religious and secular—of every culture. That would not only increase our chances of survival, but in Jackson’s words, make possible “a more joyful participation in our engagement with the world.”

 

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of The Texas Observer. The author is solely responsible for its content.

You’ve no doubt heard a lot about Texas’ $27 billion budget shortfall. And you may have read about Gov. Rick Perry’s attempts to distract everyone by declaring
eminent domain, sanctuary cities and voter fraud as “emergency” issues for the Texas Legislature’s 82nd session. What should really worry you are the issues you haven’t heard about. In a saner world, Perry would have put forward the real emergency item—insurance reform.

Insurance reform isn’t sexy. But, besides the budget, no piece of legislation this session will affect more Texans than the bill to reform the state Department of Insurance. Texas has the highest homeowners’ insurance rates in the nation. We reclaimed the top spot in 2010, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Texas homeowners pay an average premium of $1,460 a year. That’s double the national average.

Texans pay so much to insure their homes because of varied and complex reasons. Our weather is part of it. Hurricanes and tornadoes batter the state and cause millions of dollars in damages that insurance companies must recoup.

But Texas also has high rates because the state has continually refused to regulate the homeowners’ insurance market. Large companies such as State Farm Insurance, Farmers Insurance and USAA have virtual free reign. They can raise rates whenever they want without permission. They simply have to notify the Department of Insurance that prices are going up. If the rates are too high, regulators can ask insurers to lower them or can take them to court. Those mechanisms have rarely worked. State Farm, the state’s largest insurer, has defeated state regulators in court repeatedly since 2003, when the Legislature last attempted insurance reform.

This session, the Insurance Department is up for sunset review—a process in which the Legislature studies and reforms state agencies every 12 years. Consumer advocates are pushing lawmakers to strengthen regulation of homeowner policies and require the commission to approve rate hikes before they take effect. That seems a common-sense reform. But Republicans in the Legislature have consistently opposed it, yielding to intense lobbying by the insurance industry.

That pattern must change this session. GOP lawmakers have repeatedly opposed tax increases because, they argue, Texas families can’t afford it. If Republicans genuinely want to save Texans money, they should impose stricter regulation on insurance companies.

Isn’t it nice to know that whenever America faces a big issue, Americans can count on members of Congress to be there? For themselves.

Take health care. Corporate-funded front groups churned out a mess of lies to foment public opposition to Obama’s modest insurance reform, demonizing it as a “government takeover” of our health care system. It was no such thing, but that hasn’t stopped Republican lawmakers from making a theatrical show of trying to repeal Obama’s reform and “save” the people from the horrors of socialized medicine.

Yet in all their blathering, none of them has offered to save themselves from the horrors of taxpayer-provided health care. Congress critters get Cadillac coverage at our expense, plus they have their own in-house bevy of government doctors. Why don’t they vote to eliminate this privileged bastion of socialism?

Then there’s the horror of gun violence that exploded most recently in Arizona. In response, members of Congress rushed forward with creative solutions. It’s all about public safety, they exclaimed—by which they meant saving themselves from the public.

Republican Rep. Peter King of New York showed what he’s made of by introducing legislation making it a federal crime to carry a gun within the vicinity of a congressperson. Rep. Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican, proposed an emergency job-creation program that would consist of sealing off the House gallery with bulletproof glass. A couple of members took a bold stand for individual responsibility by announcing that they would henceforth show their respect for constituents by packing pistols when going out amongst them.

Don’t they do enough damage shooting off their mouths? I don’t know about you, but I don’t think members of Congress should be trusted with real guns.

When I first got involved in left/radical political organizing in the 1990s, I don’t recall any of us referring to our efforts as “phone activism” or calling ourselves “fax activists.” A friend who started organizing in the early 1960s assured me that he never heard the term “mimeograph activism” in those days. We used telephones, fax machines, and mimeographs in our organizing work, but the machines didn’t define our work and we didn’t spend a lot of time arguing about the implications of using them.

Today the terms “online activism” and “internet activist” are common, as are discussions about the positive and negative effects of computer-mediated communication (CMC) on left/progressive political organizing (See interview with Joss Hands on “Activism in a digital culture.”  Is CMC so dramatically different, or is the left simply caught up in the larger culture’s obsession with life online? I will start with observations that likely are not controversial, and then step back to frame the question in ways that may not be widely accepted.

Two basic points:

First, CMC makes possible the distribution of information to a larger number of people at lower financial cost than previous technologies (though the ecological cost of a communication technology that creates highly toxic e-waste and consumes enormous amounts of energy may make this technology prohibitively expensive in the long run) and allows for easier and faster feedback from the recipients of that information.

Second, while the technology is too new for definitive assertions, there is a seductive quality to CMC that leads some groups and individuals to spend too much of their time and resources online, even when there’s ample reason to suspect that expense of energy isn’t productive.

Two corollary cautions:

First, political information is not political action. Being able to distribute more information more widely more quickly does not automatically lead to people acting on that information. The information must be presented in ways that lead people to believe they should act, and there must be vehicles for that action.

Second, what appears to be wasting time online is not always a waste of time. Just as we solidify bonds with people face-to-face by chatting about the mundane aspects of our lives, we sometimes do that online. Political organizing — like all of life — includes such interaction.

So, it’s true that the things we do with a computer online are often like the things we do, or did, with telephone calls, faxes, and mimeographs; the question is how to most effectively apportion our time, energy, and resources on these machines as part of a larger organizing strategy. In that sense, deciding whether to focus on an email or a door-knocking campaign is a straightforward calculation about resources and the likely outcomes of using those resources in different ways.

It’s also true that we should be more critically self-reflective about our use of computers for political organizing, lest we be seduced by how productive we imagine we are being online simply because of the speed and reach of CMC. Because an email campaign can reach more people quickly, we are tempted to believe it will lead to the more effective outcomes, though the patient work of door-knocking may yield better long-term results if it builds deeper support that endures.

As our organizing tools change rapidly, these calculations of the likely success of different tactics are not always easy to make, but they are relatively simple questions to formulate. Much more vexing are questions about the complex changes in the world in which we are organizing. We like to say the internet has changed everything, perhaps in as dramatic a fashion as the printing press changed the act of reading. But the world of the 15th century was not changing at anything like the speed that the world is changing today. We need to think about the “everything” in which our email messages are bouncing around. We need to be clearer about the scale of the problems we face, the scope of the changes necessary to address the problems, and the time available to us for creating meaningful change. To illustrate these issues, I’ll talk about the state of the ecosphere.

 

Scale of the problems

For many years activists focused on “environmental problems,” offering ways that humans could adjust the way we live to cope with problems of dirty air, dirty water, and dirty land. The assumption behind those projects was that an environment consistent with long-term human flourishing was possible within existing economic, social, and political systems.

That assumption was wrong, and evidence continues to pile up that the ecosphere cannot sustain billions of people when even a fraction of them live at First-World levels. Look at any crucial measure of the health of our ecosphere — groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity — and the news is bad and getting worse. And we live in an oil-based world that is fast running out of oil with no viable replacement fuels. And we can’t forget global warming and climate instability. Add all that up and it’s not a pretty picture, especially when we abandon the technological fundamentalism of the culture and stop believing in fantasy quick fixes for deeply rooted problems.

Our troubles are not the result of the bad behavior within the systems in which we live but of the systems themselves. We have to go to the root and acknowledge that human attempts to control and dominate the non-human world have failed. We are destroying the planet and in the process destroying ourselves.

 

Scope of the changes

So, we either abandon the industrial model of development based on the concentrated energy in fossil fuels or we face a significant human die-off in a grim future that is within view. Abandoning that industrial model means a sudden shift in human living arrangements that would be unprecedented in history. We have to redefine what it means to live a good life, dramatically lowering our energy use and reducing our expectations about the material goods we consume.

That means that we not only won’t be getting a new flat-screen television, but that we won’t be amusing ourselves with new Hollywood movies and TV. It means not only that we won’t be able to buy an SUV, but that we won’t be using cars for routine personal transportation. It means a whole lot less of everything, and such changes in living arrangements are impossible within capitalism. While capitalism is not the only unsustainable economic system in history, it is the system that structures the global economy today, and it has to be scrapped. If a transition to a sustainable economy is possible, it also means we will have to abandon the nation-state as the primary unit of political organization and find functional political systems at a much lower level.

These changes in economic, social, and political systems mean significant changes in how we understand the nature of the self, the relationship to other humans, and the human place in the larger living world. When we redefine what it means to live a good life, we will be defining what it means to be human.

 

Time available

No one can predict the trajectory of a full-scale ecological collapse, in part because it is complex beyond human understanding and in part because how we act in the present can affect that trajectory. But even without the capacity to predict with precision, we have to make our best guesses to guide our choices in organizing. The best-case scenario is that we have a few decades to accomplish these changes. The worst-case scenario is that we are past the point of no return and that the systems in place will exhaust the ecosphere’s capacity to sustain human life as we know it before we can adjust.

If ecological collapse is either coming soon or already in motion, then traditional organizing strategies may be obsolete. The problem is not just that existing economic, social, and political systems are incapable of producing a more just and sustainable world, but that there isn’t time available for working out new ways of understanding our self, others, and the world. There is no reason to assume that the non-human world will wait while we slowly come to terms with all this; the ecosphere isn’t going to conform to our timetable.

 

Where this leaves us

Though I made no claims to special predictive powers, two things seem likely to me: (1) All human activity will become dramatically more local in the coming decades, and (2) Without coordinated global action to change course, there is little hope for the survival of human society as we know it. When I offer such as assessment, I am routinely accused of being hysterical and apocalyptic. But I don’t feel caught up in an emotional frenzy, and I am not preaching a dramatic ending of the human presence on Earth. Instead, I’m taking seriously the available evidence and doing my best to make sense of that evidence to guide my political choices. I believe we all have a moral obligation to do that.

As a result, I have recommitted to local organizing that aims mainly to strengthen institutions and networks on the ground where I live, rooted in a belief that those local connections will be more important than ever in coming decades. At the same time, I try to maintain and extend connections to like-minded people around the world, hoping that those connections can contribute to the possibility of coordinated global action. In short, I am trying to become more tribal and more universal at the same time, recognizing there is no guarantee that of a smooth transition or success in the long run.

In these efforts, I engage in a considerable amount of computer-mediated communication. Whenever it’s feasible, I favor direct human communication in face-to-face settings, on the assumption that local networks will be strengthened by such communication in ways that CMC cannot foster. I also use CMC to reach out beyond the local, both to learn about global initiatives and to contribute to such initiatives. I try to take advantage of the opportunities offered by CMC without being seduced by illusions of easy organizing through the send button.

So, a summary that likely isn’t controversial: These days almost all left/radical organizers will communicate online, but the social justice and ecological sustainability at the heart of left/radical politics isn’t going to be achieved online.

It’s tempting to leave the discussion at that level, but the questions about scale/scope/time aren’t addressed by that easy summary. With a larger focus, the trouble with CMC — with all the time and effort it takes to learn new programs, keep up with the constant changes on the internet, think about the role of the virtual world in real-world politics — is that it keeps us stuck in the past.

That may seem paradoxical; we’re used to talking about the people who don’t embrace computers as being the ones stuck in the past. After all, isn’t the internet the key to the future? Not if the future is going to be defined by less energy and less advanced technology. If the changes outlined above are an unavoidable part of our future, then we would be well advised to start weaning ourselves from the high-energy/high-technology world, not only in our personal lives but in our organizing as well. That doesn’t mean immediately abandoning all the gadgets we use, but rather always realizing that our efforts to make the most effective use of the gadgets in the short term shouldn’t crowd out the long-term planning for a dramatically different world.

That different world may well impose changes on us before we have been able to face them ourselves. Novelist/poet/critic Wendell Berry captures this when he writes, “We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to ‘need.’ I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won’t live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines.”

The task is daunting, but it is our task nonetheless. Berry is not optimistic about the future, but he concludes with our charge:

 

“Nevertheless, on every day left to me I will search my mind and circumstances for the means of escape. And I am not without hope. I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.”

 

When we lack answers to difficult questions — or even a way to imagine finding answers — it’s easy to put the questions aside. Better, I think, to let the questions continually disturb us.

Every time I touch the keyboard of my laptop to write an essay that will be posted on a web site, which I will send to editors via email, my thoughts are troubled.

 

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of The Texas Observer. The author is solely responsible for its content.

It didn’t take long for the Tucson shooting to become just another point of contention in the endless shout-fest between liberals and conservatives. Lost amid the partisan bickering was a lesson that states like Texas should heed: Lack of mental health care leads to tragedy.

On Jan. 8, a 22-year-old former community college student named Jared Loughner snuck up behind Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords while she was greeting constituents in a supermarket parking lot and shot her in the head. He then fired indiscriminately into the crowd, killing six people, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, and wounding 13 others.

Within hours of the attack, some left-leaning commentators were linking the shooting with the violent rhetoric emanating from some right wing and Tea Party activists. The problem with this theory is that it lacks a basis in fact. As of this writing, it appears Loughner had no affiliation with any conservative political group. In fact, it’s not clear he had any coherent political ideology. His online diatribes are the jumbled ramblings of someone with severe mental illness.

His classmates at Pima Community College reported that Loughner frequently made “irrelevant and nonsensical comments in classes,” according to TIME. The Washington Post reported that Loughner had written on a recent exam, “Eat + Sleep + Brush Teeth = Math.”

The more you learn about Loughner, the more it seems the shooting wasn’t politically motivated. We’ve found the violent tenor of recent political rhetoric truly dispiriting. But the Tucson rampage seemingly has little connection to anything Sarah Palin has been saying.

If anything could have prevented the shooting, it was probably better mental health care. Arizona, like Texas, has received low rankings from mental health advocates in recent years. The state slashed mental-health funding by 37 percent in 2010 to fill a state budget gap.

Texas should learn from this. The state already ranks 49th in per capita spending on mental health. With a $27 billion budget shortfall, Texas will likely reduce our meager mental health services even further. Severely mentally ill people who don’t receive treatment can become violent, and Texas has seen its share of horrific examples. That includes Otty Sanchez—the schizophrenic San Antonio mother who decapitated her infant in 2009.

We may soon see more tragedies like the Sanchez case. They won’t be as high-profile as the Loughner shooting. But reductions in mental health care will surely lead to loss of life.