Conservatively Successful

If I were still a conservative, here is what I might be thinking...

We walk around with our smart phones, music players, and computer pads when we're not attending meetings with our personal computers primed to share our electronic creations with others while we drone on about abstractions aimed at manipulating the lives of others to achieve the half-conceived goals of our masters. Work in this artificial world allows us to keep a lifestyle that depends on increasing the amount and power of our abstractions at the expense of the physical world outside, where creatures and increasing numbers of people are forced to eke out a much harder living, and die younger from the pollution and decreasing resources we leave them with.

Although we are far from being the masters of the universe, we imagine someday being the next best thing. Competition is the key. Beat out more people, just like we pass cars on the highway, and we might have a shot at the top, or at least being very comfortable until we die at a very old age. Increasingly, we find ourselves out of work for months at a time, and must hustle to ingratiate ourselves with the masters or their minions, competing even from home for a chance of getting back into the game. Our high-tech tools keep us prepared for our inevitable re-entry, with fresh skills and the all-important appearance of success.

Rumors and a growing stream of finely filtered news suggest that our world may be teetering on the brink of collapse, but the consistency of our immediate environment belies this option, along with the outrageous, almost science fiction quality of the information. The polished promises of a better life, buttressed by realistic stories and multimedia descriptions, are much more believable than the apocalyptic predictions using complex, scientific reasoning that numbs our minds while trying to scare us into radically changing the world that gives our lives meaning. Still, the weather, the spiking prices of everything from fuel to food, and the increasing dissonance with reality that we feel when we hear our leaders speak, all contribute to the sense that we better not totally dismiss those scary suggestions.

Maybe we'll come out near the top if everything else goes to hell. It may be our only hope of survival. We have an obligation to try, don't we? Isn't that what life is all about? The alternative is to be a loser, like those other people, and that's totally unacceptable. They lost because they didn't hang on, or took more responsibility than they should have – responsibility for others, or the impact they had on others -- not just for their own success, personal responsibility, which is what really matters. If you care about other people, except your friends, family, others like you, and of course the masters of the universe, then you're doing the world a great disservice. At least, that's what Fox, Rush, and the real economic experts tell us.

Some suggest that if people and species die because of our actions, that makes us murderers. If we accept that everyone and everything is connected, then we are potentially all murderers. That can't be true, can it? They must be wrong, if we are to maintain our innocence or at least our perception of it. If we accept that our unwillingness to accept more than personal responsibility, our drive to the top, is causing most of the problems we hear about, then the guilt may be too much to bear. No, clearly they are wrong.

God clearly favors the rich and powerful, no matter what their faults. Therefore, it follows that they can't be wrong about the important things. Aside from the occasional lottery winner, liberal movie star, and trust fund baby who didn't get the right genes, the masters of the universe got to be the masters because they proved themselves worthy.

Giving the most people what they think they want and convincing them that it's worth more than it took for you to make it – that's the true test of success. “God helps those who help themselves,” after all. If someone can't do it as well, or doesn't accept that it's worth doing at all, then they will get what they deserve: poverty. As for those other creatures: they were put here to serve us; if they won't, then they deserve what they get, even if it's extermination. Yes, that's the way of the world, and we have nothing to feel guilty about.

At least that's what we tell ourselves, the true faithful. Yet, for some reason, we're getting smaller in number.

Artificial Resistance

As I've mentioned elsewhere, most of us seem to have developed a relationship with our artificial world similar to what we might with a natural ecosystem. We pursue their self-interest as defined by their equivalent of a niche – characteristics and activities that efficiently use a subset of the resources available to the system. In the artificial world, we display the amazing adaptability of our species by differentiating ourselves as predators, prey, parasites, or grazers, depending on the situations we find ourselves in.

This observation may explain the resistance experienced by those of us who question the sustainability (and even validity) of the artificial world. People react as if we are questioning a natural law, which from their perspective we probably are. There is also a lot of investment to defend, and expectations that drive virtually every aspect of their behavior. Even many of us who have glimpsed the larger picture find it very easy to lapse into such thinking, especially where we remain embedded in the artificial world and depend on it for our survival and the survival of those we care the most about.

In previous discussions, I've focused on the raw consumption aspect of sustainability, and in a crude way, what that consumption supports: increasing “happiness” along with its proxy, life expectancy. Those discussions have mostly ignored the real experience of life in our society, the complexity of interactions and environments that both create our artificial world and are created by it. The abstractions have real and ultra-significant counterparts in what is the essence of many people's lives, of my life. It is therefore no surprise that they are viewed warily, at best as thought experiments, at worst as sedition (for example, a conservative friend once told me that the reason I could continue writing such things was because I was too powerless to be considered a threat).

In my cynical moments, which are becoming more frequent, I'm inclined to view recent economic and political events is as a preemptive power grab by those with the most to lose if the artificial world is significantly modified. I have no doubt that many of them are smart enough to see the inevitability of such modifications if anything resembling civilization is to survive this century (or even, as I've argued, the next couple of decades).

By watching what they're attacking, it's obvious that they understand at least the outline of the modifications that need to be made. The Achilles heel of our system is arguably its promotion of hoarding and waste, which enables a decreasing number of people to have an increasing amount of personal power at the expense of everyone and everything else. By contrast, in a sustainable system (such as a healthy, natural ecosystem) very little is wasted, and everything else is effectively borrowed. To defeat any transition to sustainability, those who choose to hold on to power (or want some day to attain it) would try to maintain people's dependence on non-renewable resources for as long as possible, destroy or manage to own the elements of natural systems that might be enlisted to provide free resources and services, and undermine cooperation among people that can't be controlled economically or otherwise (thus enabling people to find more natural niches than the ones provided by the existing system). All these things are being done, with already devastating consequences.

When I'm feeling extremely cynical, I imagine (and write) that the people who worship power are simply following the logic of competition to its ultimate conclusion, where only a few people (“the winners”) survive, and everyone else dies. Whatever their motivation, the end result may actually be worse: with no one to take care of them, and the natural world in decline, they'll just be the last ones to die. To avoid total depression, I spend some quality time in denial, then resurface with hope that somehow enough people can be educated about the fatal flaws in their worldview that we can work together to create a future for all of us and maybe a few more generations.

Goals in Education

I recently started applying for a part-time job helping high school kids prepare for standardized tests used for entering college. As I worked through the application, I remembered the lessons of the years I spent as an educational consultant, which directly contradict the entire idea of such competition as a valid method in education.

Competition, by itself, is not a bad thing: it's a tool for reaching an objective. Like our economy, the objective is for people to gain more personal power than others. There are a limited number of colleges (“institutions of higher education”), so only a few students that apply can get into them; tests are a way for colleges to ensure that the students they get are capable of getting the most out of their limited resources. From a student's perspective, it is self-evident that “knowledge is power,” and college provides an opportunity to gain more knowledge. Employers value employees with more knowledge (and the demonstrated ability to gain it), and reward college graduates with better chances of a job, and higher paychecks, which improves the graduates' ability to acquire more of what they need and want.

My main problem is with the goal.

Focusing personal power is a strategy that enables populations to have access to resources that aren't locally available by providing incentives for a small group of risk-takers to search for them elsewhere. But as more people become risk-takers, the overall risk to the entire population increases, not least because the “incentive,” giving people more than they need, multiplies so that resources become depleted faster. In an environment with fixed resources, or a limit to how fast people can access new ones, the most successful risk-takers are able to thrive – for a while – while the rest of the population becomes less able to thrive, and then survive. Our entire planet is now in this condition, with populations of other species already declining rapidly (in large part because we consider them “resources”), and ours soon to follow if we don't change our behavior.

If the overarching goal of a population is to survive as long as possible, which is the most rational goal I can think of, then its members need to learn how to get the most utility out of what the environment can produce on a regular and reliable basis. That last part is what I would recommend as the most basic goal of education.

As to the methodology of education, let me use a helpful analogy. Two people each have a destination they want to reach. One has a map, and the other one doesn't. All things being equal, the person with the map has a better chance of reaching his destination without something unexpected either detouring him or stopping him altogether.

The map is the equivalent of “knowledge,” and the “destination” is the set of conditions that will provide one's needs and wants for a long time. For the map to be useful, it must accurately and readably represent landmarks and other information that correspond to identifiable parts of the real world that are meaningful to whoever is using it. If any of these conditions aren't true, then its user loses his advantage over the person without the map.

Suppose the person without the map knows how to make maps. She translates everything she encounters into a form that she or someone else can refer to later. She has learned on her own how to recognize places where she can meet some of her needs and wants, so she can live off the land if necessary while she searches for a location that provides all of them. If she never finds the ideal place, her maps may be never find their way into the hands of the people who feel the need to use maps. She may even discover that, for her, the “ideal place” is different from other people's, perhaps it is the totality of all the places she's visited, or just the experience of exploration itself.

If everyone is making “maps,” and testing the ones that others have created by using them and making corrections as necessary, then the chances of finding what they all need and want will be maximized. One reason is that more people cover more ground. Another reason is that there is a critical social component to life that is every bit as important as the “environment” we inhabit, if not more so: it is the glue that enables us to work together, and provides the impetus for playing together, which may be the most productive activity we can be part of.

Years ago, when I tutored for a living, one of the most common questions I heard from students was “Why do I need to learn this?” Fortunately, I had some experience I could use to plausibly answer it, but I knew that ultimately the students wouldn't be totally convinced until they had experience of their own. This was one of the reasons why my father conceived our education business: to develop and nurture the ability to synthesize knowledge and understanding from direct experience, to “make maps” and learn the communications skills required to share them with others so we can all benefit.

When my father died, the business effectively died with him, but the lessons live on. With our global crisis requiring us to collectively live within our means (another lesson I learned while running a small business), we need to change our goals from unrestricted growth (profit) to innovative use of what Nature can provide in the long term. This requires that we respect the many species that are part of the web of life we are part of, and must depend on. To do so we must get to know them, from experience; to learn how to “live off the land” -- and find happiness where we can, without stealing it from others now and yet to be born.

The Dark Side of Solar Power

[Note: A version of this essay first appeared in the “How do we approach Sustainability?” discussion in the Ecological Society of America group on LinkedIn.com.]

I recently learned of a plea by an ecologist to oppose plans for large scale development of solar power in the deserts of the U.S. which could do great harm to the species that occupy those areas, including many that are already threatened or endangered.

There are two primary drivers for this development: the need to maintain an energy supply, and the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions to combat climate change. Focusing only on this small set of variables may enable fast action, but it short-circuits consideration of potential feedback loops that can negate the contributions of the action to what appears to be the ultimate goal: stopping biodiversity loss (including loss of our own species). We also don't get to ask the question that is at the heart of the issue: How much energy is enough, and why? Our discussions, at least from an economic point of view, are instead all about how we can meet demand (what we want, which is almost always more than we need) by changing the amount and nature of the supply.

Instead of re-learning how to view ourselves as part of a healthy ecosystem, we're constantly trying to create one of our own, which we can dominate to the exclusion of anything (or anyone) else. This quest has resulted in a shadow ecosystem (“economy”) that by design will tend to treat other species as “resources” rather than entities with their own rights.

So perhaps we are looking at the immediate issue all wrong. The goal of preventing (or reducing) climate change through cutting carbon emissions isn't really about stopping biodiversity loss, but rather maintaining a biological resource base and reducing the more direct risks to our own survival. This serves the even larger goal of perpetually increasing the scope (size and complexity) of our economy, which can accommodate a perpetually increasing number of people.

If you value all life, instead of just ours, then the ENTIRE enterprise must look pretty repulsive. To those who don't, pleas for the fate of animals and others impacted by it, unless they are perceived as valuable resources, will fall on deaf ears.