Restoring values to the economic culture
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Dr. Alan Greenspan
These are scary times, or maybe ‘unnerving’ is the better word. I was watching the House hearings today with Alan Greenspan and was stunned by his admission that the ‘best minds’ in the financial world were not smart enough to see what was coming.
Not smart enough. Among other things…
But there is something about this financial meltdown, which is taking the economy with it, that has all the hallmarks of one of those once-in-history events. Startling to me is this sense that, not only did they not see what was coming, they did not understand the dynamics of the very financial monsters they had created — securitization, bundling debts, carving them up into pieces, selling the pieces as paper for investors, then more carving and more selling higher up, then all of this insured with those infamous credit default swaps, and all of this fueled at lightning speed by computers, faster and faster, instant decisions with billions of dollars involved in each second’s worth of transactions.
Now our dubious financial leaders run faster and faster trying to get out ahead of the storm, but no one can run as fast as this squall line casting its dark shadow over the near, and possibly long term future of this society. Sadly, the future of the global community as well.
There is something here, yes, about human hubris, about how we think our intelligence will always save us, keep things ordered and rational — as if chaos is not also part of the creation story. As people of the Age of Enlightenment, we tended to worship the human mind, rational thought, and many great advances of civilization came from that. But the rational mind fooled us into thinking we were superior to the forces of Nature, rather than understanding that the mind is also part of Nature and subject to its laws and systems. And, oh, by now, we ought to be keenly aware of what Nature can do at a moment’s notice.
My brother here in town who teaches mechanical engineering (and from whom I have learned a lot about how energy systems work and the laws of thermodynamics not only in physics but in civilizations) brought to my attention this startling conversation on PBS’s Jim Lehrer News Hour Tuesday evening among reporter Paul Solman and the economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who predicted the current crash some years ago, and his mentor Benoit Mandelbrot, mathemetician and one of the pioneers of chaos theory. Feel their fear as they talk about the crisis. It is infectious. I found myself breathing deeply by the end.
PAUL SOLMAN: We sat down with Taleb and the man he calls his mentor, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, pioneer of fractal geometry and chaos theory. And even more than feeling vindicated, they’re both scared.
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: I don’t know if we’re entering the most difficult period since — not since the Great Depression, since the American Revolution.
PAUL SOLMAN: The most serious situation we’ve been in since the American Revolution?
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: Yes.
PAUL SOLMAN: Professor Mandelbrot, can that possibly be true?
BENOIT MANDELBROT, Mathematician: It’s very serious.
PAUL SOLMAN: More serious than the Great Depression, possibly?
BENOIT MANDELBROT: Possibly. I hope not.
Part of chaos theory is what is known as “the butterfly effect,” that a small flutter one place can have huge unpredictable consequences as the effect spreads out from the source. Mandelbrot notes how small the world has become, that one small event one place can have huge consequences elsewhere, as we are now seeing. The potential for catastrophe at growing scales becomes greater as we make bigger and bigger institutions for this smaller world. In other words, if, as Treasury Sec. Paulson and others are leaning, we use this moment, and our tax dollars, to consolidate banking into fewer and huger financial institutions, the next breakdown will be worse than this one.
We are creating a world subject to globe-wide catastrophes, and, as Greenspan acknowledges, we do not have the intellectual capacity to even understand the monsters we are creating.
Now think of this when it comes to our even bigger challenges — ecological overshoot, global climate change, population growth, mass emigration, increasing violent conflict — and you can see why some of us lose sleep at night.
We need to put the brakes on and fast. We need to catch up with what we are doing, what is racing away from us. We don’t know what we’re doing anymore. And chasing one crisis after another thinking maybe we can get out ahead of them is mostly leading to more poor choices.
The meaning of life
So here is a collective opportunity to get off this treadmill. Things are falling apart in any case. Let’s let the falling apart happen with more ease, more calmly, while we rethink what in the world is the meaning of life and what our role is as a species on this planet.
Now, for a couple of reflections from yesterday’s NY Times:
Verlyn Klinkenborg, whose writings I like a lot, writes of Gov. Palin’s approach to the question of when a species becomes extinct, something like, at the point when they disappear we know they are in danger. Up until then, “boom.” It reflects a certain orientation towards Nature that is pervasive in a large part of the culture. His reflection, ‘Premature.’
Then this lovely op-ed from author Margaret Atwood, A Matter of Life and Debt. One of the things we must do now is restore the relationship between lender and debtor, back to a truly honest exchange, restoring the human factor in what is now a deeply broken relationship. Atwood goes back to the religious underpinnings of the relationship, and calls for exactly what I suggest above:
“Perhaps we will have some breathing room — a chance to reevaluate our goals and to take stock of our relationship to the living planet from which we derive all our nourishment, and without which debt finally won’t matter.”
We can fret all we want about the financial crisis and deep economic recession settling in on us. But if we try to save ourselves by reverting to the course, the way of life, that brought us to this crisis, the next catastrophe will not only be bigger and more horrible, but we may find ourselves on a planet hot, wasted, toxic, and very hostile towards the continuation of the human species.
October 24th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Please appreciate that Margaret Swedish is an honorable person. She neither hides, nor hides from, naturally persuasive empirical evidence. At least to me, her behavior is exemplary. We need to see her example displayed in the actions of many others who presently seem to be unwilling to communicate what their science tells them is real and true.
So far as I can tell, shedoes not formulate policy or engage in action planning. She does the work people are supposed to be doing: helping one another see the world we inhabit as it is.
Of course, her reporting is off-putting precisely because her message is apparently unforeseen, distinctly discomforting and most unwelcome.
Despite all the efforts of denialists and naysayers, people need to do their duty, as Margaret is doing, by urging the family of humanity to open our eyes and see what looms ominously before us on the far horizon. By avoiding science, we are losing the exquisite value found in one of God’s gifts to humanity.
Ignoring science cannot be allowed to prevail, even though her reasonable and sensible evidence comes into conflict with what culture prescribes as real and true. Is it possible that the standard for determining what is real and true in our culture is often this: whatsoever is widely shared, consensually validated and judged to be economically expedient, politically convenient, socially agreeable is true and real? In that case, Margaret’s perspective does present our culture with evidence of inconvenient truths.
Each culture presents its membership with much that is real and also much less that is illusory. From the standpoint of a psychologist, because humans are shaped early and pervasively by cultural transmissions in our perception of reality, it looks like an evolutionary challenge for humankind to see the world as it is.
It appears that cultural transmissions or memes generated within a culture may at times mesmerize human beings in that widely shared and closely held memes occasionally “produce” illusions of the world as it is. Some of what Margaret is reporting seems to be disturbing in some basic way because her work comes into conflict with certain culturally derived notions held by leaders of our culture about what it means to be human and about the “placement” of humankind within the natural order of living things. Unexpected scientific evidence of this particular kind is uniformly difficult for people to see immediately, I suppose, because such evidence undercuts the ‘pedestal’ from which human beings prefer to arrogantly look upon other creatures and nature. We humans may introject culturally biased and scientifically unsupported transmissions (i.e., memes) that confuse human reasoning and promote a certain cortical conceitedness which is not helpful when trying to see what is real or to recognize certain requirements of practical reality. For a very long time cultural transmissions or memes appear to have been passed from generation to generation, distorting human perceptions and making it difficult for us to see scientific evidence for what is real about it.
When a psychological practitioner like myself thinks a patient is suffering from a mental illness, that determination is a matter of evidence-based clinical judgment. However, general standards of what is normal are not clinical judgments (and sometimes do not objectively correlate with reality), but are often unverified, specious ‘evidence’ of cultural norms and social conventions that contain occasional misperceptions of what is real. Because some misperceptions are valued by those who share them, these memes get passed along as if they represented reality.
In cases of deeply disturbed mental patients, they are inclined to distort reality so drastically that their distortions are not widely shared and closely held by other people. Instead, these mistaken impressions are labeled as examples of craziness and disregarded. By contrast, human aggregations in governments, social organizations and cultures appear not to misperceive and misrepresent reality so sharply, yet distortions of what is somehow real are still taken to be true and shared as if factual by aggregates of people.
A term of art in psychology is useful here, folie a deux. The term means that two people share an identical distortion of reality. This understanding leads to other terms, folie a deux cent million for a social order or folie a deux billion for a culture. These terms refer to misperceived aspects of reality commonly shared and held by many people in aggregates. One way to define the highest standard of what is normal for the individual and for people in aggregations is in terms of being able to see what is reasonably and sensibly free of illusion, what appears to be real based on scientific evidence. Hence, in taking note of the process of humankind becoming evermore aware in the passage of space-time of whatsoever is somehow real by means of acquiring good scientific evidence, we can track the evolution of science.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
October 25th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Whew! That was a mouthful, Steven! Thanks. It made me feel a bit more jeremiad in my work, but I guess someone has to do it!
But, to your important point. I believe we are under a profound cultural illusion deeply embedded in our approach to the world, how we perceive it, and how we perceive ourselves within it. Among the many things that are broken is our actual experience of our biology as part of the greater biology of the planet. We think the Earth outside ourselves, and we on top of it. It is there for our use, for our benefit, to be manipulated and controlled as we see fit.
This is the culture that is falling apart all around us. We are seeing the results of this approach to the human within the story of evolution.
Both rationalism and much of our Western Judeo-Christian tradition has exacerbated this false sense of separateness. I believe wholeheartedly that an essential aspect of our path towards living less destructive, even healing lives, lives that would allow the Earth to eventually regenerate from the harm we have done, lies in restoring our sense of rootedness in Sacred Earth, rediscovering our integral place within ecosystems and the biosphere, to allow new cultural ‘norms’ and new paradigms to emerge from the rediscovery.
We have mythologized the supremacy of the human in our religions by placing supremacy in a god outside the universe, and then imaging god in human terms. The most dynamic spiritualities emerging right now are those that see and experience ‘god’ as deeply embedded within the story of creation, the dynamism at work within all. People come to this insight from various traditions, enriching them and bringing a vast diversity to that insight. It can only enrich us.
Hopefully, it can also help us break through the self-delusions.
Margaret
October 26th, 2008 at 6:01 am
Many thanks, Margaret, for all you are doing. Keep going.