Cyclical vs. End-Time Thinking

I hope for a technological development that is so compelling that it undermines, to the point of absurdity, the neocolonialist [aka-neocon]/neoliberal ideology [and it’s acolytes] which/who are driving us off a cliff. I no longer believe a political solution, on it’s own, can stop the decline. Is such a thing possible? Dunno, but I can envision such an event occurring.

That said, with some trepidation, I did take note that Trump wishes to chip away at THE central pillar of neocolonialist ideology. The last President to attempt this took a bullet to the right temple from a grassy knoll. Good hunting Mr. Trump, keep your private security. And remember President-elect Trump, though it sickens me to report this, times have changed, this time “liberals” will be cheering for the CIA’s efforts. Under Obama, the term “liberal” has become a satirical antonym.

Donald Trump Plans Revamp of Top U.S. Spy Agency:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-officials-frown-on-donald-trumps-dismissal-of-u-s-intelligence-1483554450#livefyre-comment

Not many species live through a global mass extinction event. Those that do are certainly not large, top predators.
The probability that we, as such a species, will live through this must be low to zero.
We depend on species that will go extinct and that’s not a problem we can solve.

I agree the scale is massive beyond comprehension. The Laws of Thermodynamics assure us that, because the gas ratio is altered, the thermal gradient is also altered, thus, inexorably, so to is water content and distribution. Where I meant to draw attention to scale I’d be better off casting as acceleration I think.

i.e. how quickly systems destabilize will directly impact how quickly human societies react and with what level of violence.

I’ve long been attracted by cyclical thinking. I think I originally “found” Ian’s voice because I was following Sterling Newberry on U.S. political-economic cycles. And, yes, I do read the Archdruid — his idea that the psychological satisfactions of being Cassandra dominate clear and practical thinking is useful and echo the OP’s headline.

I also have a long investment stretching back to the 1970s in critiques of Econ 101 economics. I was trained in neoclassical economics and worked for a time as a non-academic professional economist, so my views have always been a bit of an ouroboros, a serpent swallowing its tail. Still, I take the point made in the OP: our economic ideology is blinding us, making it impossible to organize effectively to pull out of our Wile E Coyote run off over edge of the Seneca Cliff into thin air and oblivion.

Neoclassical economics — the theoretical core of Econ 101 and the foundation of neoliberal ideology — is a Big Lie, in the Goebbels sense. (“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.”) Of course, we live with so many lies, it may be hard to accept that one in particular deserves the honor of being designated for a place near the core; I don’t care to argue that — just to make a few observations.

The study of climate change is a remarkable example of Western Civilization’s great strength — the power of Enlightenment science. The understanding of the expert community is growing rapidly, I think, building an ever more sophisticated intuition about what is happening as we dump carbon into the carbon cycle and how this will play out over decades and centuries. The IPCC, which tries to bring this genuine expertise together, is pretty impressive really and it lags significantly behind the business end of the research. But, the economics in the IPCC reports is remarkable for its deliberate obscurity and vacuousness. The IPCC footnotes speak of hundreds of “studies” done conforming to empty-headed conventions of economic growth theory that are as stupid as spit and producing “results” that make no intuitive sense (countering climate change will “cost” economic growth in this self-defeating formula — go read the IPCC mitigation summary to see fully what I am pointing at: the economic analysis is appalling in that there are no referents to anything tangible one could think thru on one’s own).

People talk about the settled science of climate change coming to consensus on the main outlines of what is happening as if the science of climate change and atmospheric chemistry or oceanic chemistry or meteorology or ecology contain some clear set of policy imperatives. (Obviously, there’s a message in STOP!, but that’s not a policy path.) They contain a clear imperative that there should be a political imperative for a policy path, but not what that political imperative or policy path should be. Thinking thru the outlines of the politics would require an effort in political economy similar in scale and scope to the efforts to model the climate system, and that just isn’t happening. It is worth attending to why it isn’t happening, why people don’t see the blindingly obvious need to think it thru in concrete detail or the equally blindingly obvious point that we are not thinking it thru.

When the Roman Empire was falling apart — and I do not think the foundational causes were always obvious to the Romans themselves or something that they could be effective in countering — apocalyptic thinking and superstition took over as dominating ideology. (Christianity and chivalry formed the key ideologies of the Western High Middle Ages and were the legacy of more volatile periods of chaos which remain mostly “dark” despite heroic historical and archeological efforts, but some of what must have been the flavor comes thru even centuries later.) The most highly educated, literate elite “experts” debated fine points of theology and promoted elaborate lies about miracles, while popular preachers exhorted as hatefully as demagogues always do. From our perspective, it is reasonable to doubt that the Romans could develop the skills of epidemiologists to counter plagues or agronomists to counter soil erosion and famine; we know very little of their economic institutions beyond knowing that they apparently had some system of banking and insurance and legal arbitration. In the High Middle Ages, imaginative scholars re-constructed the Code of Justinian as a basis for a rationalistic system of law that we’ve been elaborating ever since, but we don’t know if that Code ever went into effect in its own time, and if it did, how it worked — the administrative area of the Eastern Empire, where it might have been used lost the Latin in which the initial core was written even before all the elements had been published; within a couple of generations, everyone spoke and wrote only Greek and even literacy in that language was in serious decline, while vulgar vernaculars were taking over the West. The Eastern Empire survived iconoclasm and upheaval, but there are a good two centuries at least that are very nearly as “dark” as the Dark Ages of the West — something as basic as literacy reached a very low ebb even in areas where administration survived and that very thin literacy was imprisoned by religion, for better and worse. And, there were many elements of Christianity, including the political organization known as the Catholic Church, which were sometimes for the better; the Church struggled thru centuries against the insanity of feudalism’s secular elite dedicating themselves to perpetual war and looting. Yes, the core economic device of Imperial Rome — looting by conquest — survived the fall, survived export as the Crusades, survived the truce by stalemate of the Quattrocento, survived until Henry Tudor foreclosed on bastard feudalism after the bloodbath of the War of the Roses and Henry VIII followed up by foreclosing on a no longer needed Catholic monasticism. And, still the spirit of feudal aristocracy went abroad as several waves of European imperialism and global conquest.

Neoclassical economics, the “theory” and rhetorical engine of neoliberalism, is our theology. Like historical Christianity, economics is a schizophrenic effort. Just as Christianity attempted to rationalize religion and to overcome pagan superstition, economics (and political science and sociology and anthropology — the Enlightenment social sciences, of which economics is the self-appointed Queen as theology was the Queen of medieval rhetoric, math and philosophy) attempts to rationalize our social and political arrangements and institutions. Christianity had some signal success, in overcoming customs of blood sacrifice for example and some limited success in making private resort to violence taboo. Economics had some success early on in loosening the bonds of authoritarianism and eroding the legitimacy of landed aristocracy. Rationalizing money, finance and central banking and economic regulation generally as technical activity — technocracy — has had mixed results, but that’s partly because economics has become deeply corrupt (as Christian theology succumbed to its own deep corruption in the late medieval period, apologizing for simony and secular power in the divine right of kings and so on). Just as Christianity kept alive an idealist ethic that defined but also nurtured its own corruption, economics has its own notions of its own corruption — ah, if only we could get those damn incentives aligned!

Political economic cycles are fundamentally about uncertainty — they are products of our not knowing a great deal more than we do know or can learn and overestimating what we do know then getting kicked in the ass for our ignorance by the consequences of our own hubris. We do learn, but we also forget and so it goes — a random walk in historical motion, the appearance of cycles forming as waves out of regular phenomena, like the passing of generations and the bunching up in crises at the inflection points. As Ian points out in the OP, the sheer scale of the hubristic Industrial Revolution promises a hell of a fall.

What prompted these thoughts was that I find myself demurring at Ian’s identification of money and profit as at the core of ideological fault. I actually agree with Ian, that the failure of profit to account properly for social cost is a problem, but I think that his rhetorical formulation — in the technical language of neoclassical economics, “externality” — leaves us in the neoliberal quicksand. And, worse, it lends itself too easily to the mindless moral posturing of denouncing “greed is good” pseudo-philosophies like Randism that neoclassical economics seems to throw off as a by-product of its mainline disabling of critical thinking.

Denouncing “greed is good” doesn’t really get us where we need to be, it seems to me. We need to be able to disagree, to have varying points of view, even the usual human modicum of self-interest and mixed motives and still manage to cooperate sensibly, to constrain ourselves collectively and individually know why.

The main gig in neoclassical economics is to get the unsuspecting student to invest in a great chain of little lies that then form that great chain of being, the one Big Lie. The student of economics can generate an endless rhetorical stream of analysis of the (free) market economy, feeling very smart and even powerful, flooding every discussion of policy with ready formulations. “externality”! Like Adam naming the plants and animals, as if a label confers power.

The “market economy” of neoclassical economics is a system in equilibrium (or stabilized by its powerful attraction to the near possibility of an equilibrium). The system is self-regulating. Do you see the problem? The contrast with the OP’s headline?

The alternative modes of thought are end-times (classical Marxism, arguably) and some unbranded cyclical thinking that might admit uncertainty and risk and the impossibility of utopianism. (Maybe, we could talk “resilience” or something like that as a guide.)

The neoclassical equilibrium can manage risk (knowing-what-we-don’t-know and being able to manage), but not uncertainty, not not-knowing-what-we-don’t-know.

In a world of uncertainty, we can learn if we are prepared to do so, and we can hedge our bets to make use of what we do know, but the system is not self-regulating or automatic in any meaningful sense and cannot be. We can not rely on the market god to choose the best course for us. The market god is the deity of neoclassical economics and neoliberalism as a theology and serves to argue for disabling democratic politics and intention.

What distinguished FDR and the New Deal from the neoliberalism of Reagan and Clinton is that the New Dealers, without any overarching theoretical conviction, acted in the knowledge that the political economy as a (then rather obviously failed) system needed deliberate detailed management in the common public interest. They didn’t imagine, or even pretend, that they could deregulate and the magic of the market would make it all work out for the best. FDR took the U.S. and the world off the gold standard, a supposedly automatic mechanism worshipped by many despite the manifest dysfunction it imposed in the 1920s and in the great deflationary spiral 1929-33 that created the Great Depression. The New Deal created a carefully structured and repressed financial system. The New Deal created a carefully managed agricultural sector, where farm incomes and investment were protected. The Tennessee Valley Authority did not wait on private initiative. (On the other hand, a common tale is that FDR followed his conservative instincts and relaxed deficit spending and direct employment too soon in 1936 and soon found out the market god would not deliver, though not everyone at the time took the lesson as a failure of the market god; many insisted it showed the failings of the New Deal to institute sustainable change — people do not always “learn” what we think they should from manifest failure; in fact people may disagree!)

That’s where we are now: we have to accept our responsibility to manage the global political economy, the global climate, the global ecology. There are those who would object (rightly in my view) to an authoritarian monolith, just as post-WWII neoliberalism took up the cause of arguing against the alleged monolith of statist socialist planning. It was bullshit, of course, and tailored to suit the self-interest of immensely powerful interests seeking to contravene public authority and hijack the common wealth for private purposes. The pretense in neoliberalism of being anti-authoritarian was not entirely wrong, just not really interested in being right either.

The success of the New Deal and the mixed-economy social democracies of post-WWII western Europe created systems that a later generation could profit by dismantling. Out of such dim and contingent understanding are cycles created.

I am pretty sure the neoliberal market god is in the way. I do not know if there is any real prospect of overthrowing the ideology of neoclassical economics. The criticism has reached a remarkable crescendo in my lifetime without, so far, budging the academic establishment or the cliches of the market economy. Identity politics isn’t going to do much more than sell more Prius’s. If Uber and the bizarre vision of self-driving cars can subvert the creation of sensible infrastructure (rail, canals), and I think it can, we are going down a path of building a global economy for a privileged 500 million, and I hate to imagine what’s in store for the rest.

A real economics has to think about things that actually matter. Like the limits to the assimilative capacity of the earth’s environment and the implications for energy use cum entropy (waste, pollution) — any energy use. Or, how economic systems are organized by hierarchy. We do not live in a market economy in any real sense; the actual economy is organized primarily around administrative hierarchies; we need an economics that can talk realistically about that. And, I think we actually do need a large-scale modeling effort for the economics of climate change, one that takes into account tightening resource limits and assimilative capacity, the importance of scale to technology and alternative means to realize technical scale. And, the very real probability that we will shortly lose all possibility of controlling the dynamic momentum of the climate and ecology by means of our own faltering self-restraint alone.

Our economics thinking is very deeply impoverished by adherence to the cliches of neoclassical orthodoxy and neoliberal ideology and the slogans of “sustainability” and the like are not well thought thru. Engineering the climate is a crazy idea that will shortly be forced upon us by our abject failure to constrain profligate use of fossil fuels. And, even the progressives still fall back on conservative instincts and the market god of carbon taxes / permits who never seems to arrive.

The Archdruid seems to think the rise and fall of civilizations is built into the hubris of intelligent species and the possibilities they inevitably discover on their isolated planetary islands in advance of their own possibilities for intelligent self-governance. It seems likely to me. The fall of civilization beginning now (or circa 1973) seems plausible enough. If so, it will take a good 300 years or so to play out, even if Seneca’s cliff proves a very steep incline indeed.

OK that was a way long rant, but I like it and will hit submit; please forgive me those few who read this far.

My bottom line on economics, is that we need an economics that can explain why we need to collectively constrain ourselves — collectively constrain all energetic economic activity that produces waste and uses the assimilative capacity of the environment, for example — and individually understand why. Because an economy is a system of distributed decision-making, in which we all pursue our private lives and interests.

I don’t know that that is where we are headed. It seems to me we are thinking collectively (in a Jungian sense almost) about discarding a large part of the human population. That’s just so horrifying to me I cannot enjoy the ephemeral memes of self-driving cars and hot policy ideas like a basic income guarantee. I see those ideas as shadows of this mesmerizing notion that human population is mostly surplus. I think I know where declaring billions of people as surplus will end up.

“The question is “is this time different?’

The argument is scale.”

Scale is important, but you also need to consider technology.

Previous civilizations didn’t have nuclear weapons or even nuclear reactors to leave untended. They also weren’t capable of creating biological weapons the way we now can. etc.

Technology might also throw up something that might lead to an ever-increasing AI singularity or some control technology that would allow the leadership to in some sense freeze things the way they are now, or things beyond the current imagination, although it seems like the time window on these possibilities is starting to close bit by bit.

Whatever happens, humans are everywhere, and we’re pretty crafty, it would take a lot to wipe us out entirely. But, to ‘Shh’s point above, our current civilization is extremely complex and interconnected compared to those that came before and therefore seems quite vulnerable to systemic collapse at some point.

I remember reading ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood, and it was clear that, like Brave New World or 1984, it was a dystopic novel meant to describe a possible future in the hopes of helping avoid it. But reading ‘Oryx and Crake’ (again by Atwood but written many years later), I was struck by the fact that, whereas in ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ she focussed on the ‘after’ state, in ‘Oryx and Crake’ she focussed more on the ‘before’ state. It seemed that where Atwood once saw a decent civilization followed by dystopia she now foresaw a dsytopia (the ‘before’ state in Oryx and Crake) followed by the near extinction of humans, and she seemed to be on the fence about whether that extinction would be good or bad. At least that is how I read it.

“A civilization ends when it can’t handle problems that are totally obvious, because its ideology won’t allow it to deal with them.”

I like that a lot. World population was 2.5 billion in 1950. By 2020, it will be 7.5 billion, three times that, and sometime around 2037, it will be 9 billion. I guess two of my core admonitions are “Do the math,” and “Never bet against the math.” The subject of overpopulation is taboo. Think how often climate change comes up and how rarely overpopulation does. Yet it is this explosion in population that is driving and accelerating changes to the climate and destroying species and ecosystems around the globe.

Almost everyone knows something is WRONG. But it is virtually impossible to get them to realize that they are being had and get them to point the finger at those doing it to them. Instead they reject one kleptocrat, Clinton, and vote for another, Trump, when it is kleptocracy and the class war that maintains it that is killing them. This is a crisis they face, or rather refuse to face, in the here and now. So think how much harder it is to get them to focus, and act, on the existential crises of overpopulation and climate.

Spengler from “Hour of Decision”, published in 1936:

We live in momentous times. The stupendous dynamism of the historical epoch that has now dawned makes it the grandest, not only in the Faustian civilization of Western Europe, but – for that very reason – in all world-history, greater and by far more terrible than the ages of Caesar and Napoleon. Yet how blind are the human beings over whom this mighty destiny is surging, whirling them in confusion, exalting them, destroying them! Who among them sees and
comprehends what is being done to them and around them? Some wise old Chinaman or Indian, perhaps, who gazes around him in silence with the stored-up thought of a thousand years in his soul. But how superficial, how narrow, how small-minded are the judgments and measures of Western Europe and America! What do the inhabitants of the Middle West of the United States know of what goes on beyond New York and San Francisco? What conception has a middle class Englishman, not to speak of a French provincial, of the trend of affairs on the Continent? What, indeed, does any one of them know of the direction in which his very own destiny is facing? All we have is a number of absurd catchwords such as “overcoming the economic crisis, “understanding of peoples,” “national security and self-sufficingness,” with which to “overcome”
catastrophes within the space of a generation or two by means of “prosperity” and disarmament.

One of Spengler’s themes is that the great cultures are mutually impenetrable to each other. This implies that the Chinese, while they may have adopted some of our outward forms, are inwardly still themselves. While the Classical culture was wiped off the face of history, the Indian and Chinese (both older than the Classical by far — the Chinese were already in their Age of Rationalism 1500 years before Charlemagne) have endured, century after century of plagues, wars, revolutions, invasions, world wars, to the the present day. If the Western culture flames out (I’m not totally sure it hasn’t already — who is the true master of the USA today?), then these ancient cultures will inherit world-supremacy.

@ Tiago January 5, 2017

We’re not ignoring it. We’re just letting the Marxists babble amongst each other in their safe spaces which is far less effort and better ethics than eliminating them.

The melting of the polar ice caps will do more than just raise the water levels along the coast: it will also massively change the weight distribution on the planet, and because the continents are simple solid rock floating on liquid magma, they will be re-adjusting.

Therefore, we can expect many more earthquakes and accompanying tsunamis that will make Fuchishima look like a wave in the bathtub. Tsunamis as tall as skyscrapers were not unusual in pre-historic earth.

Then, the meltdowns of the nuclear reactors that we have scattered around the planet are the poison pills that ensure our extinction.

Sleep well.

I have enjoyed this blog for quite some time but this is my first comment. I just want to say how much I agree with Mr. Welsh’s view. What I like is that he does not put a time frame on the situation because to do so is foolish. We are clearly in decline. Indeed, the Greco-Roman world that has had a long run (in human terms) is in the endgame. How long it will take to ‘fall’ is the question. I read other blogs–Berman, Kunstler, McPherson. I do not disagree with their views. However, they all are too damn quick to put a time frame on things. To read Kunstler every Monday one would think the world is about to end on Thursday.

Like the Archdruid and Mr. Welsh I believe we are in for a slow motion fall that could take decades or longer. How much of humanity will survive? I don’t know. I have no doubt there will be a huge die off. On the other end there may be warlords and struggle or finally common sense and willingness by all to live within the borders of nature. Who can say for sure.

Well unless sufficiently advanced aliens are able to keep us in a thermodynamic society by force as in the Gor Novels, we basically have to find a way to beat into the heads of people that killing the goose that lays the golden egg is fucking stupid.

But more worrisome is who comes through the die off?

As things stand feminist botched the whole birth control debate by missing the entire point of children and thus smart assertive women are being bred out of the human race since they aren’t having children. In their place smart dominant men are marrying submissive women and producing dominant sons who vote and submissive daughters who either don’t vote or vote their husband’s interests.

I trust it doesn’t take a genius to realize the long term problem of that.

Hi Mandos,

No. I have worked with more than one generation of Chinese people from China. Each generation is more “American” than the last in demeanour, attitude, and philosophy, and there’s no turning back.

Adopting demeanor, attitudes, and philosophies of the West was a conscious survival strategy, was it not? I can’t say much because my knowledge of China is pitiful. Let me just say at least, I won’t be convinced that Chinese have become Americans while their immigration levels are lower than even Japan.

Uh, who is, given that you’re not sure whether “Western culture” has “flamed out”? (Leaving aside the rather pregnant concept of a culture “flaming out”, as though it were a sort of rocket.)

The rocket metaphor isn’t bad, although “seasons” are more apt, and the West is in its winter now. The current “transhumanist” dream of genetic engineering is a sad parody of the old Faustian dream of colonizing the stars. But yes, who or what guides the USA’s foreign policy (which is the only policy that matters in world history)? Bush’s foreign policy was run by Zionists. Obama is an anti-colonialist and crypto-Muslim. Maybe Trump will be a reprieve, but as far as I can tell the USA has been run by Asiatics for the past 16 years.

Some hegemonic paradigm other than our current one may come to be, through a continuous transition, and it may be driven by factors primarily based in non-Western countries, but it won’t be “an ancient culture”, as though those were distinct organisms with continuity other than notional and in the emotions of those invested in notions of organic, continuous culture.

Good statement of your philosophical materialism. Whatever impelled a Confucius to think and act as he did, if that is still alive or can be rekindled in the Chinese people, then the China of ancient memory is still kicking.

@Hugh

Discussion of overpopulation is no more taboo than discussion of climate change.

What’s taboo is the massive genocide implicit in any “solution” (final or otherwise) proposed for overpopulation.

Just so, if most of the burdens of addressing climate change must fall on “those people” — whoever the designated burden-bearers must be — climate change will not be addressed in any comprehensive way.

Come up with ways to address overpopulation without genocide, and ways to address climate change without overburdening those least able to carry more weight, and the supposed taboos evaporate.

But we’re still very far from that point, aren’t we?

In continuing my previous comment –

The previous fundamental worldview is debated to be rooted in the industrial age still. The mechanistic view. The world is gears turning. That there is a solid form to the world, black and white morals. My theory is that human’s world view and basis is an internalized structure of what they see around them. Not too controversial that the recent generations view themselves and the world around them as types of machines interacting in an archetypal kind of way. The next generations will internalize the archetype of the internet. There is not a good word like ‘mechanistic’ analogy to the internet era, except for the word ‘viral’. The future will view the relations of the world as more viral. I can guess where this will lead humanities ideologies.

– There will be less structure to the worldviews. No solid right or wrongs. Maybe not even solid truths. More like viral culture ideas competing with each other for dominance.
– Interaction and attention will be much more valued. Getting attention, keeping attention. Things will be useless unless people interact with it.
– The worldview will be more reflecting of networks. Connections, group forming.

These are just some ideas I have no idea. Mechanistic ideologies should still be there but probably be subsumed by viral network ideologies.

Get to work kids!

Ché Pasa, in a country like the US, overpopulation can be managed through sharply reducing immigration, both legal and illegal, and in stressing smaller families. Replacement levels in advanced countries like the US is around 2.1 children per woman. It should not be that hard or onerous to get fertility levels below this.

Thing is if we can’t even talk about it here, then consider how much harder it is in the developing world where populations are growing much faster and cultural and political taboos are much stronger.

Oh no. There’s definitely an end to this madness.