Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

41

While global conditions and humanity’s prospects for the future are disastrous, my own life has become a lot more stable and emotionally tolerable over the course of this past year of employment. The PhD did immense psychological damage to me. After a lifetime in a competitive education system in which I had done exceptionally well, the PhD tended to reinforce the conclusion that everything I did was bad and wrong, and that I had no control over what would happen to my life. I had serious fears about ever finding stable employment after that long and demoralizing time away from the job market (though still always working, to limit the financial damage from those extra years in school). Being out and employed — and even seeing shadows of other possibilities in the future — gives me a sense materially, psychologically, and physiologically of being able to rebuild and endure.

As noted in my pre-US-election post, having a stable home and income makes the disasters around the world seem less like personal catastrophes, though the general population are behaving foolishly when they assume that the 2020–60 period will bear any resemblance to the ‘normality’ of, say, the 1980–2020 period. Of course, there has been no such thing as intergenerational stability or normality since the Industrial Revolution; after centuries where many lives remained broadly similar, the world is now transforming every generation or faster. In the 20th century, much of that change was about technological deployment. In the years ahead, ecological disruption will be a bigger part of the story — along with the technological, sociological, and political convulsions which will accompany the collapse of systems that have supported our civilization for eons.

My own answer to living through a time of catastrophe — in many ways, literally an apocalypse and the end of humanity, as we are all thrown into a post-human future where technology and biology fuse together — is to apply myself in doing my best in everything I undertake, whether that’s photographing a conference, making sandwiches for dinner, or advocating for climate stability and reduced nuclear weapon risks.

None of us can control the world. A huge dark comet could wipe us out tomorrow. A supervolcano or a coronal mass ejection from the sun could abruptly knock us into a nuclear-winter-like world or a world where all our technology gets broken simultaneously, stopping the farm-to-citizens conveyer belt that keeps us alive. There are frighteningly grounded descriptions of how a nuclear war could throw us all into the dark simultaneously, perhaps unable to resume long-distance contact with others for months or years.

It really could happen all of a sudden, with no opportunities for takesies-backsies or improving our resilience after the fact. We live in a world on a precipice, so all we can do is share our gratitude, appreciation, and esteem with those who have enriched our lives while it is possible to do so, while retaining our determination to keep fighting for a better world, despite our species’ manifest inabilities and pathologies.

Mars as a refuge for humanity?

Consider the 2015 Newsweek article: “Star Wars’ Class Wars: Is Mars the Escape Hatch for the 1 Percent?” which claims “the red planet will likely only be for the rich, leaving the poor to suffer as earth’s environment collapses and conflict breaks out.” The only way you could believe this would be if you had no idea how thoroughly, incredibly, impossibly horrible Mars is. The average surface temperature is about -60°C. There’s no breathable air, but there are planetwide dust storms and a layer of toxic dust on the ground. Leaving a 2°C warmer Earth for Mars would be like leaving a messy room so you can live in a toxic waste dump.

The truth is that settling other worlds, in the sense of creating self-sustaining societies somewhere away from Earth, is not only quite unlikely anytime soon, it won’t deliver on the benefits touted by advocates. No vast riches, no new independent nations, no second home for humanity, not even a safety bunker for ultra elites.

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Mars is nowhere near being a Plan B home for humanity anytime soon. Consider a worst-case climate scenario. The oceans have swollen ten meters higher, drowning New York City and Boston. Low-lying countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have been swallowed up whole. Heat waves make parts of the Southern Hemisphere uninhabitable as the planet is ravaged by floods, droughts, wildfires, and massive tropical cyclones. More than half of the world’s species die, coral reefs become bleached skeletons, freshwater sources from snowpack melt away or are fouled by rising seas, tropical diseases make their way into formerly temperate climates. Crops fail, people starve, and violence breaks out as over a billion climate refugees beat against the closed gates of the comparatively livable North.

That planet? Eden compared to Mars or the Moon. That Earth still has a breathable atmosphere, a magnetosphere to protect against radiation, and quite possibly still has McDonald’s breakfast. It’s not a world we would like to inhabit, but it is the one world in the solar system where you can run around naked for ten minutes and still be alive at the end.

Weinersmith, Kelly and Zach. A City on Mars: Can we Settle Space, Should we Settle Space, and have we Really Thought this Through? Penguin Random House, 2023. p. 2, 137-8

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Struggles in the post-secondary sector

Even before the appalling Trump re-election, there have been deep problems in the post-secondary and university space. COVID was obviously a disruption to everyone, but there are also deeper and longer-term forces changing how universities operate and how students interact with them.

Sadly, the near-to-medium future seems certain to be characterized by further resource conflicts, tough decisions by schools, and continued political contention about higher education. It is particularly worrisome to see cost-saving measures eroding things which likely can never be replaced: when you get rid of the specialist ancient language training that makes history possible, you effectively close down those historical fields by ending the pipeline of new experts. More broadly, universities are full of important fields of work which nonetheless have trouble defending their value to legislators and an angry public.

Ironies abound in a world where knowledge is more important than ever yet education is suffering – where technical knowledge is more indispensable than ever for being politically informed, yet dominant political movements sideline and disparage expertise. Collectively, we have a lot to survive and overcome in the decades ahead and in order to have a fighting chance we need trained and informed minds.

Waiting for America’s decision

These past eleven months of working and slowly recovering from the PhD have altered my stress responses a great deal.

Literally for years, I was in a constant state of such anxiety that it interfered every day with both productivity and sleep. During the worst parts, all I could do was alternate between trying to focus on other things and jumping back to the news to see if there had been an act of mass violence.

Today’s US election is as stressful a thing as has ever happened in my life, perhaps more so because literally all of the predictions I have heard (from political experts to my brother Mica who is much better at handicapping elections than me) have been for a Trump win.

It’s staggering, distressing, and disturbing to me that this election could even be close, given Trump’s obvious incompetence and the danger he poses. The January 6th insurrection left me with a terrific fear that the forces tearing America apart are stronger than those holding it together. If America makes another sociopathic and self-destructive choice today, that breakdown will accelerate.

I fear that the dynamic which now dominates the democratic world is this: as our fossil fuel addiction keeps damaging the climate, more and more societal systems which were previously able to cope will begin to fail instead. As people notice this breakdown, they give up on conventional political candidates willing to do the slow incremental work of changing policy in favour of ideological blowhards who promise drastic changes for the benefit of the masses but who are really controlled by self-interested cadres of extremists and the ultra-wealthy. While all this is happening, there is too much drama and emotional turmoil to properly diagnose what is putting society under such strain, along with no willingness to act on abolishing fossil fuels. Our broken politics are breaking the world.

None of these worries are new, and I suppose what is striking me most right now is how subjectively OK I feel despite my extreme anxiety and terror. I think perhaps it’s the difference between confronting a potential tragedy after being awake 24 hours on a forced march versus on a day after decent sleep. The fear is just as intense, but with at least the stability of housing and employment it seems less like a constant personal catastrophe than it did during the PhD.

Good luck to us all tonight.

Global fertility and the climate crisis

Foreign Affairs has an interesting article on “The Age of Depopulation: Surviving a World Gone Gray“.

It describes several hypotheses for explaining the reduced fertility rates and falling populations almost all over the world, but emphasizes that women simply voluntarily don’t want to have as many children:

Pritchett determined that there is an almost one-to-one correspondence around the world between national fertility levels and the number of babies women say they want to have. This finding underscored the central role of volition—of human agency—in fertility patterns.

Personally, I wonder if the ecological crisis is a major background psychological cause. To everyone who is paying attention, the unambiguous message from scientists and policy experts is that we are destroying our own civilization and the capacity of the Earth to support us through our selfish and short-sighted determination to turn burning hydrocarbons into dollars. Even when it comes to my own life, I am profoundly afraid that prosperous, open, and advanced societies will cease to exist as the ecological basis for our entire civilization collapses. I think there is a decent chance – if I live until 2060 or so – that the young people in that time will look at photos of the produce sections in our supermarkets and be unwilling to accept that they were ever real: that we had so much bounty, such tremendous gifts from nature, and we squandered it all because we allowed psychopaths to rule us. It’s even worse than that in democratic societies: we demanded that psychopaths rule us, because we are unwilling to accept the truth of our situation.

Having children when you expect the future to be chaos demands an even greater act of faith from prospective parents. I would say that if we do want more children (which is questionable) we need to stop acting as though the future is something which we can and should destroy for the sake of our near-term ease and convenience.

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US security assurances and nuclear weapon proliferation

Although France has historically been the only case of an insurance hedger opting for an independent deterrent, there is no guarantee it will be the last. Under President Trump’s leadership, significant doubts about America’s commitment to both Europe and East Asia led to growing concerns that the United States may not indefinitely remain a reliable and credible provider of extended deterrence—concerns that may remain long after the Trump administration as allies fear abandonment temptations could one day return to the White House. Burden-sharing disputes with NATO, Japan, and South Korea, and efforts to reduce America’s conventional footprint—a key indicator of its commitment to its allies—have led to questions in Germany about whether it requires a substitute to American extended deterrence, and similar discussions at least privately in Japan and South Korea among some domestic constituencies. Doubts about the reliability of America’s commitment to extended deterrence came to a boil under President Trump, who was at times perceived by allies such as South Korea as being willing to throw partners under the bus in pursuit of hisown policy objectives, such as a deal with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. The experience has the potential to revive debates about independent deterrents in America’s long-time allies—and not just for instrumental reasons to elicit stronger reassurance from Washington to hedge against future incarnations of Trumpism that seeks to retrench America’s commitments back home.

Narang, Vipin. Seeking the Bomb: Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation. Princeton University Press, 2022. p. 298

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Conformity versus competence

[I]n most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence.

Ordinary incompetence, as we have seen, is no cause for dismissal: it is simply a bar to promotion. Super-competence often leads to dismissal, because it disrupts the hierarchy, and thereby violates the first commandment of hierarchal life: the hierarchy must be preserved.

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Employees in the two extreme classes—the super-competent and the super-incompetent—are alike subject to dismissal. They are usually fired soon after being hired, for the same reason: that they tend to disrupt the hierarchy.

Peter, Laurence J. and Hull, Raymond. The Peter Principle. Buccaneer Books, 1969. p. 45-6

Related: Whose agenda are you devoted to?

Monbiot on alienation and politics

When politics, bereft of relevant stories, cannot connect with the lives of those it claims to represent, it contributes to the dominant condition of our age: alienation.

Alienation means many things. Among them are people’s loss of control over the work they do; their loss of connection with community and society; their loss of trust in political institutions and in the future; their loss of a sense of meaning and power over their own lives; and a convergence of these fissures into psychic rupture. In the political sphere, alienation leads to disengagement, and disengagement opens the way for demagogues.

Monbiot, George. Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. Verso, 2017. p. 54

AI image generation and the credibility of photos

When AI-assisted photo manipulation is easy to do and hard to detect, the credibility of photos as evidence is diminished:

No one on Earth today has ever lived in a world where photographs were not the linchpin of social consensus — for as long as any of us has been here, photographs proved something happened. Consider all the ways in which the assumed veracity of a photograph has, previously, validated the truth of your experiences. The preexisting ding in the fender of your rental car. The leak in your ceiling. The arrival of a package. An actual, non-AI-generated cockroach in your takeout. When wildfires encroach upon your residential neighborhood, how do you communicate to friends and acquaintances the thickness of the smoke outside?

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For the most part, the average image created by these AI tools will, in and of itself, be pretty harmless — an extra tree in a backdrop, an alligator in a pizzeria, a silly costume interposed over a cat. In aggregate, the deluge upends how we treat the concept of the photo entirely, and that in itself has tremendous repercussions. Consider, for instance, that the last decade has seen extraordinary social upheaval in the United States sparked by grainy videos of police brutality. Where the authorities obscured or concealed reality, these videos told the truth.

Perhaps we will see a backlash against the trend where every camera is also a computer that tweaks the image to ‘improve’ it. For example, there could be cameras that generate a hash from the unedited image and retains it, allowing any subsequent manipulation to be identified.

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