The Deep Anti-Ecology of the Futurological "Geo-Engineers"

The White Guys of The Future over at the Very Serious futurologist IEET think-tank (not to mention stealth transhumanist-singularitarian-technoimmortalist Robot Cult outfit) have posted another piece of paint-by-the-numbers advocacy for the greenwashing policy-via-neoligism of "geo-engineering" this week. The author this time around is one R. Dennis Hansen who is, we are told "a planner for a federal resource management agency in Utah" and "member of the Mormon Transhumanist Association" (very confidence-inspiring, I must say).

Hansen frames his bit of futurological flim-flammery with a question that both opens and closes his essay: "Who says we can’t do anything about the weather or the climate?" And I for one suspect it might be quite revealing to think about the actual answer to that question.

There is, of course, a consensus among climate scientists and environmental activists that human industry is affecting the climate, that is to say, that we are palpably doing all sorts of things already about the weather or the climate. Presumably, then, those who say we can't would first of all refer to those who deny anthropogenic climate change altogether. Given that Hansen's "geo-engineering" proposals are addressed in the first place to those who do accept the consensus of climate science and who also share at least some of the concerns of environmentalists, it seems to me that this is not an essay addressed to anybody at all who doubts we can anything about the weather or the climate.

Now, to be sure, many climate scientists and environmentalists are increasingly frustrated at the apparent incapacity of our law-makers to craft effective environmental regulations, support conservation and reforestation programs and the like, legislate lower carbon emissions standards, scrub industrial soot, zone for more dense walkable urban neighborhoods, educate their citizens about relevant health and climate issues, create structural incentives like bike-lanes and petroleum taxes and rebates for energy efficient technologies to facilitate more sustainable collective behavior, invest in renewable energy systems like solar rooftops, windfarms, tidal farms, residential geo-thermal pumps, intercontinental and urban mass transit systems, support smaller-scaled organic agriculture, appropriate polyculture, and permaculture practices, and so on. But it is crucial to grasp that these frustrations imply first of all that those who are frustrated think there are in fact an enormous number of practical things that can indeed be done about weather or climate, namely the very sorts of things just listed among many others, but that they are not being done enough yet or by enough people to do the good work reasonably and righteously expected of them.

To grasp that environmental policy proposals are not now being implemented adequately is far from declaring that they will not ever be, nor even that they cannot be implemented in time, that climatic or cultural tipping-points cannot change a long intractable status quo for the better should environmental education, agitation, and organization keep the pressure up long enough. Certainly such frustrations are the farthest imaginable thing from endorsements that more conventional environmental proposals like these should be jettisoned for altogether different proposals, especially wild-eyed epic-scaled mega-engineering proposals involving, when they actually offer any real details at all, proliferating questionable scientific and engineering and political assumptions.

Hansen "defines" geo-engineering as "large-scale technological interventions in the earth’s climate system." Of course, it is hard to see why the regulative and facilitative interventions into mass-behavior advocated by conventional environmentalists (encouraging consumers to switch to solar heating, or electric cars, or white rooftops, or building intercontinental high-speed rail or reforestation projects, say) are not "large-scale" enough to be considered "geo-engineering," then, or, if they are, just why it is useful for futurologists to have introduced their pet neologism "geo-engineering" into the discussion in the first place.

One needs to grasp the essentially gizmo-fetishistic distortions of futurology to understand why white paint, heirloom tomato seeds, landscaping swales, wind-turbines, and comparable techniques and appropriate technologies wouldn't count for a futurologist as "technology."

Instead, Hansen fixes his attention on what I have described as the usual "ramifying suite of mega-engineering wet-dreams," including with robotic predictability "‘[f]ertilizing’ the ocean with iron to encourage the growth of carbon-capturing phytoplankton… Building ‘artificial trees’ to absorb carbon dioxide… Spraying ocean water into the atmosphere to produce sunlight-reflecting clouds… Launching trillions of reflective disks into the upper atmosphere." In other words, the same endlessly discredited handwaving as always.

Note that each of these proposals involve a verb, "fertilizing… building… spraying… launching…" and that the agencies corralling collective will and mobilizing the resources actually involved in these verbs would demand the introduction into these proposals of all the political dynamisms that bedevil environmentalism already.

The primary function of the "technological" in "bio-engineering" proposals -- especially given the hyperbolic scale and superlative cadences of the speculative technoscience preferred by futurologists waxing rhapsodic about "geo-engineering" technofixes -- is precisely to disavow the political agency indispensable to the worldly facilitation of sustainability, as well as to distract attention from the actual agents (the usual corporate-military elite-incumbent bad actors) who would most benefit from the implementation of "geo-engineering" proposals.

Behind all the can-do enthusiasm, the shiny gizmos, the technobabble, the "geo-engineers" are indulging in a profoundly reactionary anti-environmental discourse directed less to the usual opportunistic greed-heads and climate-denialist know-nothings most anti-environmentalism caters to, but directed precisely to those who are already concerned about anthropogenic climate change and respectful, at least in a rough and tumble sort of way, of technoscience as a site for the practical address of shared environmental problems, those otherwise likely to number among the ones doing the most good.

Just as I have been pointing out the real-world implications of deceptive hyperbolic futurological discourse playing out in the present in skewed assumptions of today's policy-makers (futurological fantasies of genetic enhancement and techno-magical longevity therapies providing uncritical rationales for catastrophic immiserating proposals to raise the retirement age and dismantle indispensable Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security entitlements), so too it is crucial to grasp the anti-environmentalist impacts of the futurological faux-environmentalism of the "geo-engineers" are no less likely to play our in present-day distractions, displaced priorities, deranged policy proposals, and skewed budgets.

Reactionary Fruits of Futurology, "Geo-Engineering" Edition

The pernicious contribution of futurologists to environmentalist discourse is, in a word, just a word: "geo-engineering."

While the futurological enthusiasts of "geo-engineering" resent the accusation to no end, it remains as true as ever that their discussions of the "geo-engineering" topic tend to devote themselves much more to defeatist resignation about real-world environmental activism and policy and to very broad brushstrokes handwaving about mega-industrial behemoths of a kind that have no reality apart from the splashy covers of pulp-sf novels and CGI-animations, than they do to substantive discussions concerning, for example:

[one] How these proposals conceptually connect to one another to explain their subsumption under the term in question?

[two] How these proposals differ substantially from existing proposals to explain the necessity to introduce the cherished neologism in the first place?

[three] How the costs and risks that multiply upon the least contemplated contact of these proposals with actual eco-systemic and engineering realities still justify these proposals over others?

[four] How the political processes (funding, oversight, labor conditions, safety concerns, jurisdictional disputes) to which such proposals would need to be answerable to their stakeholders escape the political dysfunction that typically resigns their advocates to "geo-engineering" rather than standard environmentalism demanding regulation, education, structural incentives, and public investments to address climate change and resource descent in the first place?

[five] And why on earth we should choose of all people the very corporate-militarist bad actors who most benefited and still benefit from anthropogenic climate change to take charge of solving it as most of these mega-scale geo-engineering proposals just so happen to require?

I've written on this topic many times before, of course, and many of these posts are collected under the heading Futurology Against Ecology over on the sidebar (probably the best posts are also the most widely read ones, "Geo-Engineering" As Futurological Greenwashing and "Geo-Engineering" Is A Declaration of War That Doesn't Care About Democracy).

To the extent that futurology is really just an extreme edge of conventional corporate marketing and promotion discourse, it shouldn't be surprising that the coining of a phrase or the introduction of gimmick label would be imagined by futurologists to constitute a substantive contribution to environmental politics.

After all, re-packaging the given and treating the result as the "new and improved" the better to peddle the status quo as progress, and distraction as deliberation is the essence of advertizing. It is only the masquerade of futurologists as "experts" in an actual subject and their "think-tanks" as quasi-academic sites that makes the identification of their fraudulent and hyperbolic peddling of corporate-militarist incumbent-elites as straightforward promotional discourse more difficult than it would be otherwise.

Once again, it may be useful to think of "geo-engineering" proposals as a kind of macro-greenwashing correlated with the micro-greenwashing of consumer/lifestyle-green proposals, rather as macro-economics and micro-economics correlate in the literate post-Keynesian economic imaginary.

"The Future" Is Not Fairly Distributed

Futurologists have been masturbating about sooper-longevity gene therapies and anti-aging pills for years and years in their saucer eyed pop-tech Best Selling books and the fraudulent position papers of their Very Serious think-tanks.

The result of all that futurological hyperventilation is certainly not that the world is the least bit closer to tank-grown replacement parts or fine-tuned genetic enhancement therapies or designer robot bodies or any of the rest of that nonsense, but only that the very rich, very pampered, very insulated inside-the-beltway politicians and pundits who shape the healthcare policies with which we have to live our actual lives in the actual present always have widely-disseminated, perfectly-legible, false-but-familiar, phony-but-plausible media narratives and images to call upon when they are scouting for justifications to raise the retirement age or voucherize and eliminate healthcare benefits for the overabundant majority of the American citizens they claim to represent.

Of course, we are a nation of non-millionaires represented by multi-millionaires whose access to the best available healthcare is utterly alienated from everyday reality, just as we are a nation of hard-working stressed-out laborers employed in jobs that could not be more different than the working lives of career politicians and lobbyists and members of the commentariat who think phone calls and quorum calls are stressful, who are lavished with attention and favors all their lives and not only see no need to retire at sixty-five from their labors such as they are but typically cling to their positions well into their seventies and beyond right up until the moment they literally collapse unconscious into stretchers and get carted off from them they enjoy them so damned much.

While the futurologists continue to spin scenarios that cash out in fanciful Hollywood action thrillers and Paul Ryan Ayn Rand wet-dream blood-baths of anti-government looting, it remains as true as ever that technodevelopmental gains in economic productivity over the last thirty years have larded the richest of the rich with greater profits and highest of the high end wealth concentration while the buying power of average salaries has flatlined or declines, it remains as true as ever that new medical techniques have created splashy high-end successes while the life expectancy past the relevant age of sixty-five for the average American have scarcely improved an iota.

Seinfeld and Stasis

Returning home late yesterday from teaching, with bag in hand from the local Taquería and already longing a little for my bed tho' it was not even fully dark out yet, I was struck by an episode of "Seinfeld" my remote strayed onto while I munched my cheese quesadilla.

The episode was nearly twenty years old and yet seemed absolutely contemporary -- the layout and gadgets in Jerry's apartment, the attitudes and conversational rhythms of the principals, the pop culture references, even the haircuts and outfits (including Jerry's bland bourgeois duds and Kramer's vintage oddball numbers), literally everything could be directly transplanted into the present day with the same intentions and nobody would blink an eye at any of it.

I do not mean to minimize the skill of the writers in saying this, but I think it indicates far more the utter deathly stasis of American culture over the last quarter century than some luminous prescience on the part of Larry David that "Seinfeld" feels so perfectly contemporary to this day. Even the finest smartest slickest most forward-thinking sit-coms from twenty-years before last night's "Seinfeld" episode first aired, would have felt dated and skewed to "Seinfeld's" audience were it re-run that same night, however much they might appreciate its artistry and chuckle at its jokes, arriving from the alien shore of an America long past.

"Seinfeld" could debut today little changed and achieve an identical popularity and identical accolades for its innovations. Nothing has happened but paralysis and decay in America since "Seinfeld" (and, face it, what "Seinfeld" was remains little more than that rarest of things, a network sit-com that simply doesn't completely suck, which is a good thing to be, but a far cry from an attribution of greatness).

Hearing the sampled, covered, cloned music pouring out of the radios of indistinguishable automobiles on our crumbling roads suggests the same stasis.

Seinfeld symptomizes our stasis, and warns us about the dead-end road we are traveling as a nation. It will take more than a laugh track to make paralysis feel like progress for long.

Stupid Societies Die When Their Luck Runs Out

With interest rates at historic lows and unemployment at historic highs it could not be more obvious that government spending right about now would stimulate the economy as nothing else could while at once addressing in an actually substantive way the looming catastrophes of climate change and resource descent that will define our generation or destroy our world.

Notice that I said, "right about now." Mine is not a declaration that government spending is always more stimulative than so-called "private sector" alternatives, but that it is when a national economy is caught in a liquidity trap such as our own is now, an extraordinary but occasional circumstance that Keynes and his heirs provided and refined the analytic tools to grasp and cope with for those with working brains. To deny this case -- until the models are proven wrong, and they simply have not been -- is to be a macroeconomic illiterate, plain and simple, while to pretend those making this case are treating it as a universal or a panacea is to be a liar.

This explains why Republicans so regularly make both these sorts of claims. All the austerity and tax-cut talk, to the extent that it is earnest and not just greedy opportunism, is the talk of people who are macroeconomic know-nothings, either embarrassingly ignorant of or outright denialist about. For a party which provides a home for climate-change denialists and anti-Darwin creation-"scientists" and abstinence-only follies it can scarcely be surprising that one finds laissez-faire dead-enders among Republicans in droves -- the GOP is, indeed, the largest and most powerful Flat Earth Society on Earth's curving surface.

As for the lies -- well, if the GOP didn't lie about what they are doing they would never be elected for anything, because they mean to enrich a small minority at the cost of majorities and no majority would let them get away with it if they were honest about it in even so notional a democracy as our own. Telling lies is second nature to Republicans, as lying to themselves is first nature.

Now, shifting from our oil, coal, and nuclear energy infrastructure to a renewable solar-wind-tidal-geothermal energy infrastructure, and also shifting from our car culture to a continental mass-transit infrastructure, and also shifting from our soil-eroding energy-input-intensive industrial agriculture system to a smaller more localized decentralized organic permaculture system, and also shifting our zoning priorities to enable dense walkable urban neighborhoods and preserve the ecosystem-services provided by wetlands and watersheds and green spaces would revitalize our economy.

The key tools to facilitate these shifts are regulations, public investments, tax policies -- certainly not micro-greenwashing boutique lifestyle consumption, nor macro-greenwashing "geo-engineering" marketing fantasies. We will not shop our way out of this crisis. We cannot expect the elite-incumbents who profited from the engineering of this catastrophe and thrive in it still to save us from the devastating results. There is no spontaneous order that will crystallize sustainability if only we deregulate out of its way.

The indispensable governmental regulations, subsidizations, investments, and shifts we can and must implement would facilitate the necessary return to a production rather than immaterial-neoliberal financial/promotional consumer-debt pseudo-economy. They would also provide social conditions for the revitalization of organized labor and hence renew the middle class (this time demographically diversified and more multiculture-competent) as a definitive democratizing force in public and civic life. And they would give the human race a chance to survive and possibly even flourish amidst the already-ongoing catastrophically-upcoming global warming and weirding of climate change (superstorms, pandemics, climate refugees in the millions) and resource descent (water wars, mass starvation, rare-mineral-dependent high-tech infrastructure failures).

Although we know what to do, we are not doing it. In fact, things have been getting worse, far worse, and getting worse ever more rapidly, the more we know more clearly what should be done and how do-able what must be done actually is.

Incredibly, our economic catastrophe has actually created excellent conditions for coping with our climate catastrophe: the best way to stimulate the economy is to invest in infrastructure and precisely such investments are indispensable to shifts into renewable energy and mass transportation systems, the greatest obstacle (apart from ignorance and Industrial-Ag lobbying) to a shift into smaller scale permaculture is its higher labor demand at a time when high unemployment happens to be our greatest, and to our everlasting shame our most neglected, economic priority.

My point isn't to propose that easy fixes are available, but just to say that it is hard to imagine a more congenial complementarity of crises, when what must be done is so well understood and the means for doing it solves so many problems at once. It is extraordinary to say the least that in the face of such urgent problems, such obvious solutions, such available means that the institutions of governance are so dysfunctional that we are doing nothing at all when there is so much to do that can so readily be done, especially when to do nothing is literally likely to do us all in.

Government is the indispensable institutional register capable of organizing the agency to address the catastrophes at hand -- and so, this is no time for anarchist day dreams, or narcissistic indulgences in lifestyle retreats. America's incredible resources as well as its unique historical and geographical situation make it the exceptional player in this drama, like it or not, actually capable in its dysfunction of destroying the world and also capable, were it to arrive even late to functionality, of saving the world -- and so, neither is this the time, especially for American citizens like me, to renounce our responsibilities and our power, such as it is, in despair, cynicism, or disgust.

We must educate, agitate, organize, contribute, and vote -- and I am sorry to say that this largely means engaging in a highly partisan effort for Democrats, imperfect, compromised, insufferable though they may be. You go into battle with the army you have, not the one you wish you had.

Third party bids are functional spoilers given the actually-existing system, and reforming the system to change this is harder and would take longer than pushing the Democrats left from the inside. That's just the way it is if (as I believe) the timetable for renewable infrastructure investment is shorter than the time it will take to get publicly funded elections and instant runoff voting. And all that means we have to push for renewable infrastructure investment at the most congenial actually available site: which is clearly the Democratic party.

The Republican party is -- in its present Movement Conservative phase and in this historical moment of interlocking financial and environmental crises -- the single most dangerous and destructive organized force in the world, since it is poised to do the most damage at the American site at which the most devastating and possibly irreversible planetary damage can be done.

I am far from believing that most Democrats are equal to the task at hand, just as I am far from denying that no Democrats are active forces of dysfunction and damage. But the Republicans are now defined by the project of plutocratic profit-taking at public expense and indulge in loud misinformation about sound economics and climate science in short-sighted short-term service to elite-incumbents to the ruin of the world. These Republicans must be defeated and marginalized utterly, then (perhaps the better to reorganize and re-emerge in a more sensibly conservative form), and more, and better, Democrats prevail if there is to be a chance for this world.

It is wholesome, even necessary, to pressure Democrats to reflect better the actual urgencies of the moment. One would have all Democrats embrace absolutely and consistently the politics of people who work for a living over the demands of the rentiers, the politics of public investment for all over private profit-taking for few, the politics of equity-in-diversity over parochialism and plutocracy, the politics of democratic expression and assembly over elite-incumbency, the politics of sustainability over extraction, the politics of consent over exploitation.

But it is crucial that these efforts to push Democrats from the left to the left always do so in ways that also directly empower Democrats as a governing party against the efforts of Republicans, or at any rate never -- even in the short term, since the short-term defines the span in which the address of so many of our urgent problems takes place -- actively disempower Democrats relative to Republicans.

It is better to elect a comparatively compromised Democrat in a district whose politics are backward and so increase the governing majority of Democrats -- among whom are much more progressive voices who can do something useful, even if less often than one might like, with such a governing majority -- than to allow a Republican reactionary to win and hand Republicans the majority that renders progressive voices altogether mute. Likewise, it is better to challenge an incumbent Democrat in a reliably Democratic district when their politics are less progressive than their constituency is, the better to push the party as a whole from the left to the left. So, too, it is always good to make progressive cases to one's representatives and to the community of her constituency to amplify the progressive case in the representative's hearing, and to encourage and actively support representatives whenever they act in ways that reflect progressive priorities. Again, this helps push Democrats from the left to the left.

This is slow-moving, painstaking, exhausting, compromised, frustrating work, and I realize that I am asking you to hold a whole lot of different things in your head at once that cannot be communicated easily in a tweet. But if you would imagine yourself ethically righteous or politically engaged -- and you should -- then it is your responsibility to make this effort.

Politics is not performance art nor is it a philosophical symposium.

To expect stakeholder politics seamlessly or even comfortably to align with one's own ideals would be perfectly ridiculous even in a system considerably less corrupt and plutocratic and ill-informed as our own. To expect it here and now and upon discovering it does not, to pout and stamp and retreat into purist abstraction or punitive inaction when the stakes are so high and our responsibilities so clear is almost unfathomably infantile and irrational.

Stupid societies die when their luck runs out. America is unbelievably, indeed, almost unbearably stupid right now, and I'm not sure we should be counting on luck at a time like this. It is time for good people of good sense and good will to do our best and do our duty for the good of us all.

Those Faddish Futurologists

It's funny -- and not just funny ha ha, though of course it is also that -- to observe just how thin the line can be between Very Serious futurological flim-flam artistry and the earnest pitching of fad diets, New Age narcissistic psychobabble, and manic exercise scams. On they go, the futurological circus barkers, peddling their wares: immortality via robot bodies! freezing your head! nanobots in the bloodstream! "uploading" into virtual paradise! sooper genetic tweaks! and always just twenty years away! But the tune can change on the turn of a dime, they pause in the chorus of techno-sublime and suddenly instead they're peddling paleo! Atkins! alkaline water! positive visualization! Vegas pill-popper fairs! muscle confusion!

I suppose the most conspicuous illustration of the phenomenon is also the most influential of the superlative futurologists, Raymond Kurzweil himself, who cheerfully indulges his theo-futurological id in handwaving techno-whizbang volumes like The Singularity Is Near when he isn't being the Raymond Kurzweil who indulges in punchy little food fad numbers like The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life: How to Reduce Fat in Your Diet and Eliminate Virtually All Risk of Heart Disease and Cancer (you just gotta love that "virtually").

Although the straightforward credulity continuum connecting junk science, food fads, and self-promotional psychobabble is not exactly hard to fathom, I would also point to the ways in which these forms of kidding yourself for cash can also complement and enable one another in futurological sub(cult)ures like transhumanism, singularitarianism, and techno-immortalism.

As witness George Dvorsky, one of the Very Serious White Guys of the Future over at the futurological "think-tank" IEET: Seized by the momentary realization that all the usual Robot Cult preoccupations are no more available after twenty years of boosterism on their behalf than they were when they were being hyperventilated on the pages of OMNI, Mondo 2000, Great Mambo Chicken, and Extropy way back when (but in twenty more years, man, watch out, it'll be FAI, VR, SENS, Drextech, the whole nine!) the futurologist always has more proximate flim-flammery ready-to-hand, there are always thigh-masters to scrunch and livid green spirulina bone marrow shakes to gulp in those moments when one despairs at the absence of a buckyball-spiderthread space elevator on the horizon but still aches like crazy (and I do mean crazy) to accentuate the hyper-positive. Quoth Dvorsky:

Look, it’s 2011 and it’s glaringly obvious that we’re still quite a ways off from achieving the much heralded posthuman condition. The sad truth is that all interventions or augmentations currently available are fairly low impact by any measure…. So what’s a transhumanist to do? … An increasing number of transhumanists are taking matters into their own hands by working with what they got. And by doing so, they’re pushing the limits of their genetic potential.

He goes on from there to extol the virtues of the usual Cross Training regimens, Paleo Diets, and even the rather dubious Four Hour Body by guru of the moment Timothy Ferris.

While I am far from discounting the virtues of fitness and nutrition in a flourishing life, so long as one remains modest and moderate about the business, I can't help but comment on the body-loathing and hysterical death-denialism that seems so often to connect those who strive with punishing exertions after the Body Beautiful and who daydream about immaterial "selves" digi-immortalized and released into cyberspatial paradise... the strange sort of permanent adolescence that seems so often to connect the serial enthusiasms for hype-marketed crap-gadgets forever on the "bleeding edge" and an endless ego-churn of diet, exercise, lifestyle fads... the conspicuous lack of critical standards that seems to drive desperate futurologists away from consensus science time after time into hyperbole and junk (cryonics, old school AI, Drexlerian nanotechnology, geo-engineering, offworld migration, designer genetics, and so on) as well as into so many self-help self-hate self-improvement scams.

Just what is it with these foolish, facile, faddish, futurological fanboys anyway?

Iron Law of Celebrity

While it may be possible to become a celebrity without being a sociopath, it is next to impossible to remain one for long without being a sociopath. Now that our politicians are also celebrities, it pays to remember this law from time to time.

This post is very grumpily dedicated to Anthony Weiner, with thanks for the reminder.

From "The Great Stagnation" to a Great Awakening

Tyler Cowen made quite a splash for a few months with his "Great Stagnation" thesis, proposing in a book (but here's a succinct op-ed precis) that technical innovation and improvement of quality of life are now slowing down, contra the cheerleaders of silicon capitalism about accelerating progress forever right around the corner.

Part of Cowen's argument is that the dizzying transformations we have come to associate with "modernization" represent what he calls "low-hanging fruit," and that technical breakthroughs of comparable transformative scope may simply be harder to come by from here on out. I question that phrase a little since it is hard to square with the fact that it took millennia for humanity to stumble onto these apparently low-hanging fruits, for one thing. But also I disapprove of the metaphor because I think there are differences that make a real difference among these "low-hanging fruits."

Hitting upon a petrochemical reorganization of production (a reorganization that definitely transformed more than you might initially think of, not only our energy and transportation infrastructure but also our disastrous petro-fertilized industrially-irrigated globally-dispersed agricultural system and our plasticized material environment, for example) represented a kind of hyper-bubble, an organizational cul-de-sac, toxic to the touch and catastrophic to the atmosphere, in finite and dwindling supply, neither desirable or even possible to emulate as a developmental pathway in nations that have not already taken it up, leaving those that did stranded in a poisonous junk-heap.

Strictly speaking, I am not sure it is right to describe the recognition that we have been misdiagnosing as "progress" an actually unsustainable and poisonous petrochemical bubble and that we must now change course as "stagnation" rather than as a hard lesson that will either destroy us or provide the knowledge and wisdom from which real and sustainable progress may arise.

Certainly, I would want to distinguish the siren-song of the dead-end short-cut of petrochemical modernization as "low-hanging fruit" from that of the elementary hygienic and therapeutic discoveries that provided a leap forward in life-expectancy over the last century and a half (especially to the extent that this results from the address of infant mortality, malnutrition, and cardiovascular disease), elementary techniques that could and should be available sustainably and equitably to all. While futurologists may get starry eyed about imaginary nanobots scouting out and zapping cancer cells, Mike Davis (in Planet of Slums) brings us back to earth when he declares the ultimate "miracle drug" to be, quite simply, the availability to all of clean water.

When Cowen goes on to deride those who pin their hopes for continued or even accelerating progress on innovations in the computer sector, saying they represent a "different kind of innovation," I certainly agree with his conclusion, but possibly would differ from him in my analysis of it. Digitization and networked organization has simplified certain tasks and lowered certain costs, but while the stories we have been telling ourselves about these changes have tended to make recourse to metaphors and narratives of "de-materialization" and the "abolition of distance" and the widening of "participation," the lived realities of digital networked mediation and organization have been acutely material and geopolitical, involving the facilitation of financial fraud, the displacement of exploited labor onto invisible distances, and the implementation of more intensive and intrusive modes of marketing and surveillance.

Rather than a different kind of innovation, computers have actually amounted to conventional innovation, ambivalent and contingent in its impacts, but experienced culturally through the distortive lens of relentless, nearly ubiquitous, hyperbolic promotion and futurological framing. Futurological day dreams of nanotechnological cornucopias, renewable energy too cheap to meter, declarations of "geo-engineering" war on climate change, immersive virtual reality cyber-heavens, post-human or even post-mortal genetic enhancement, and so on (some of which Cowen genuflects in the direction of himself more than he should) should be grasped by way of that example of computer innovation: just as Moore's law is not a magic carpet ride into a rapturous singularitarian end-of-history even if computers and digital networks do indeed make many tasks incomparably easier and cheaper, so too nanoscale biochemistry and genetic science will continue to provide useful innovations in medicine and materials without ending scarcity or mortality, so too a renewable energy infrastructure and agroforestry/permaculture techniques might make our energy and food systems sustainable as they are not now, but only if these techniques are embedded in sociocultural changes in our pathologically wasteful, inequitable, frivolous consumer lifeways.

It is well known that the security, quality of life, and buying power of the middle class has been declining for generations even as costs of production have decreased and profits increased, that the so-called epoch of "accelerating change" and "the Long Boom" and "innovation unto infinity" about which futurologists have been handwaving so ecstatically for years has actually been an epoch of unprecedented disparity between a fraction of the richest of the rich and the intensifying precarization of ever wider majorities.

Setting aside the obvious distortions introduced into this discussion by the pervasive deceptions and hyperbole of marketing discourse, and the metaphors and narratives of the futurological imaginary at its extremity, it seems to me crucial to recognize that what Cowen characterizes as contemporary "stagnation" is better regarded as a crisis of and for politics, rather than something demanding "technical" or "scientific" address in some facile de-politicized understanding of the technoscientific.

This anti-democratizing anti-civilizing concentration of wealth, that is to say this profoundly inequitable distribution of the costs and benefits of innovation and production, has not happened because of generically diminishing technodevelopment (the very idea of which should, but doesn't, strike one as incoherent on its face) but through the particular forms of technodevelopmental social struggle that have articulated innovation and production.

The market-ideological deregulation of enterprise has lead inevitably to abuses, the market-ideological dismantlement and prevention of general welfare programs has lead inevitably to insecurity, the market-ideological attack on organized labor has lead inevitably to the immiseration of the middle-class, the market-ideological cutting and regressivity of tax-revenues has lead inevitably to inequity and injustice, the market-ideological organization of corporate lobbying and campaign spending has lead inevitably to the corruption and paralysis of the political system, the market-ideological proposal that money is speech and that corporations have human rights has lead inevitably to plutocracy and serfdom. (You can be sure, Cowen himself would disagree emphatically with much of the substance and emphasis of what I am saying here.)

To raise the general standard of living, champion human equity-in-diversity, render civilization sustainable, and incubate innovation and expression requires better informed and democratically passionate technodevelopmental social struggle, progressive political campaigns, good old fashioned education, agitation, organization pushing from the left wing of the possible. Treating scientists as a priesthood or corporate CEOs as gurus or Commentariat hacks for incumbent-elites as "thought leaders" is an utterly misguided misapprehension of what our present "stagnation" materially consists and of what brought us to this imbecilic and perfectly avoidable pass.

In my view, the provision of a universal non-means-tested basic guaranteed income (or the approach to such an income via vastly expanded general welfare programs), paid for through steeply progressive income (including capital gains) and property taxes, would be the best way to subsidize real democratic participation, including -- as Erik Olin Wright has pointed out -- the subsidization of democratic labor organizing by providing a permanent strike fund, and frustrate the current regime of unpaid domestic labor, outsourcing of domestic production onto overexploited regions of the world, and the crowdsourcing of the culture industry via digital networks, and would subsidize research and innovation through grants to freely available knowledge and frustrate the current regime of circumscription and capture and piracy via regressive intellectual property rights.

Bill McKibben has written about social research suggesting that the lives of people in extreme poverty are reported almost universally to be materially improved by an increase in income right up to a certain point. Adjusted for inflation and cost-of-living disparities the amount is roughly ten thousand dollars a year. But, contrary to our probable expectations, beyond that point reports of satisfaction and well-being are no longer universal at all but become profoundly ambivalent and confused, beyond a certain point people are often stressed and oppressed by increasing incomes quite as much as they are satisfied by what those increasing incomes afford them. Even if McKibben is oversimplifying his case or overstating the force of his point, it is obvious that this insight provides yet another set of possible reasons to approve the radically democratizing politics of a basic guaranteed income. But it also provides another angle of view on Cowen's "Great Stagnation" thesis.

I have already suggested that it might not make much sense in the final analysis to describe by the word "stagnation" what amounts to our learning (or not) the hard lesson that the wasteful, toxic cul-de-sac of petrochemical production constitutes an epochal civilizational bubble phenomenon rather than a narrative of triumphal progressive modernity. So, too, it may be that beyond a certain point the productivist/consumerist standards on the basis of which we have sought to measure human well-being and satisfaction have been profoundly misleading, such that it might not make much sense in the final analysis to describe as "stagnation," either, our discovery that we are no longer be able to interminably fulfill let alone amplify their actually pathological terms.

I do not mean by all this to deny the conspicuous and demoralizing failure of our long cherished and celebrated public institutions and system to continue to provide solutions to shared problems, or to provide security and satisfaction in most of our lives, or even manage not to destroy the very planet on which we depend for our survival and flourishing. Nor do I mean to deny that increasing knowledge and technique has an indispensable role, as always, in solving those shared problems, in facilitating that security, in providing that satisfaction, in finding our way to a sustainable and equitable civilization.

But I do think that it is wrong to describe as a general "stagnation in technoscientific innovation" what is in fact a complex of crises most of which arise from political failures and will demand political struggles (including technodevelopmental struggles that should not be mischaracterized as apolitical technical problems) and many of which amount to belated recognitions that we have mistaken panic for progress, hysteria for happiness, waste for worth, recognitions that are the furthest things from "stagnation" but look instead like the possible beginnings of wisdom.

To Affirm Belief In God Is Not Yet to Affirm Much of Substance

According to a Gallup poll that has attracted some interest today, 92% of Americans declare that they believe in god, significantly, presumably, just a smidge fewer than did in 1940.

Of course, people hear many different questions in the question whether they believe in god, and people mean many different sorts of things when they declare they believe in god. Among these questions and answers people hear or try to answer when asked "do you believe in god?" are the questions, Do you think you are a good person or try to be a good person? Are you part of a community of like-minded people who help and comfort and support one another? Are you the kind of person who rocks the boat? Do you think there is more to life than making money? Do you still value things your parents or teachers or others you respect told you or seemed to think were important to them?

Further, many people who affirm a belief in god go on to conduct themselves in ways so utterly indifferent to this belief, or in ways that so contradict the more particular articles of their faiths it is hard to treat any 92% affirmation of belief as more impressive than, say, the 92% of selfish short-sighted people who decry selfishness and short-sightedness.

And then, just as strikingly, among those who really do take seriously their belief in god it is quite apparent that so many people are willing to die or to kill over the endlessly many different ways they embed this broadly affirmed belief in radically different spiritual practices and institutional commitments, specific creeds and communities, it is hard to pretend even the well-nigh universal affirmation of belief in god -- even setting aside the hypocrites and liars and rationalizers making this declaration -- expresses any kind of coherence or unanimity, or even anything much more than a near vacuity.

I have been a cheerful confirmed atheist since I was a teenager myself, over a quarter century by now, but I am enough of a pluralist in matters of warranted belief to sympathize with and find some measure of inspiration in ethical or in aesthetic terms in many human lifeways that have been shaped conspicuously by forms the belief in god takes in some people, even as I am horrified by others in which that belief provokes or justifies authoritarian or moralizing rages for order, promotes cruelty or parochialism, closes off self-criticism or critical inquiry.

To be told that someone "believes in god" does not yet tell me much of anything about what form that belief takes in the life of that person or what sort of person they are in consequence. To be told that 92% of Americans "believe in god" does not yet tell me anything of substance, and to treat it as a substantial claim seems to me to lose sight of almost all the differences that make a difference in the very matter at issue.

Certainly it seems rather obvious to me that the differences among believers are often incomparably more decisive (both to them and to me) than their differences with an unbeliever like me. And I must admit I find it a bit frustrating when polls and studies and discussion like that of the Gallup poll pretend "belief in god" actually means something monolithic to those who affirm the belief, when clearly nothing could be farther from the case, and on that basis go on to treat my own non-belief more marginal than forms of belief more marginal than mine.

Is there really anybody who believes that it matters more that nearly as many people will assert in 2011 the near-vacuity of an uncharacterized belief in god as would do so half a century ago than it matters how much more (or less) secular our public institutions have become now since then, how much more (or less) diverse the landscape of organized religiosity has become now since then, how many more (or fewer) people participate actively in regular church attendance or engage in religious/spiritual practices like prayer or meditation or proselytizing now since then?

Worse than the fact that the poll result that "92% of Americans believe in god" really tells us next to nothing important is that it pretends to tell us something very important indeed while keeping us from understanding almost everything important about the substantial life of beliefs in the world.