Amanda Gelder has a great interview with Jeremy Rifkin at Culturelab. What I find most intriguing are the connections Rifken draws among psychology, politics, and economics. We find ourselves in a pickle of historic proportions at the moment at least in part because of errors in thinking about these things.

I’ll try to pull together a couple of threads to focus on economic thinking and its relationship to the global crisis we face:

The Enlightenment view is that human beings are rational, detached agents that pursue our own self-interests and our nation states reflect that view. . .

A lot of interesting new discoveries in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, child development, anthropology and more suggest that human nature might not be what Enlightenment philosophers suggested. For instance, the discovery of mirror neurons suggests that we are not wired for autonomy or utility but for empathic distress; we are a social species.

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Geopolitics is an extension of the Enlightenment view of human nature, the idea that we pursue our utilitarian pleasures and individual self-interests. In geopolitics, the nation-state becomes a macro view of that. Nations deal with nations by being rational, detached and calculating, pursuing self-interests, excercising power and acquiring more capital and wealth. That’s why Copenhagen failed. The world leaders weren’t thinking biosphere, they were thinking geopolitics. Everyone was looking out for their nation’s self-interest.

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A lot of business people would say that you can’t be empathic in the market. But the market is a secondary institution–it’s an extension of culture. The real invisible hand of the market is trust, which is the result of empathic engagement. The only way you can have a market is if you have a shared narrative. The market is not a utilitarian frame of reference, it only exists by the social trust that allows people to engage in anonymous settings and believe that their engagements will be honored. When that trust fails, markets collapse and that’s what is happening now.

Rifken thinks the new world of distributed knowledge and distributed energy means we’ve moving from Homo sapien to Homo empathicus. His vision is attractive. I wish I could share his optimism. Still, we too often forget that philosophy does not live just in acedemia – it has real world implications. The “market” we have come to deify today is really nothing more than a myth, a powerful one that has turned destructive and threatens to consume civilization itself.

Rifkin has just published a new 600-page book, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, in which he expands on the ideas explored in the interview. I recall in my college days (note we were flower children of the 60s) reading books about evolving human consciousness.  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s  The Phenomenon of Man. Lancelot Law Whyte’s The Next Development in Man. Remember Charles Reich’s The Greening of America? Answer: not without some embarrassment.

So count me skeptical. My remaining aspirations are much less ambitious than forging a new human consciousness, rather just to eat well and live warmly in an increasingly uncertain world.

Solastalgia: the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault; a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home’; symptoms include anxiety, despair, numbness, a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless, grief.

Solastalgia is a neologism coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003. It describes a form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as mining or climate change. Solastalgia is a global condition, felt to a greater or lesser degree by different people in different locations but felt increasingly, given the ongoing degradation of the environment.

Wikipedia explains:

As opposed to nostalgia – the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home – “solastalgia” is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment. A paper published by Albrecht and collaborators focused on two contexts where collaborative research teams found solastalgia to be evident: the experiences of persistent drought in rural New South Wales (NSW) and the impact of large-scale open-cut coal mining on individuals in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW. In both cases, people exposed to environmental change experienced negative affect that is exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the unfolding change process.

An article in the New York Times quotes Albrecht:

There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease.’ People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.

Albrecht has found that this “place pathology” isn’t limited to natives or to the displaced. People can be despairing and depressed without being forced from their homeland. The land changing around them can bring about the same sense of mournful disorientation.

The researchers could have found evidence of solastagia by looking at me in Sacramento, California in the ’70s, as the paradise I was born and grew up in was devastated by rampant and uncontrolled “development.” It got so bad I fled in a desperate attempt to maintain some semblance of sanity. The Seattle area in Washington proved little better.

When at last I found a real home again here in Oregon, that traumatic experience provided the impetus to do everything in my power to prevent a repeat of the California and Washington experience.

In California, things have gone from bad to worse; it is now what Sasha Abramsky in an article in The Nation calls the “west coast wasteland.” California’s population has exploded from a little over 10 million in 1950 to about 37 million today. But as many have warned (including Eben Fodor in his landmark 1998 study “The Cost of Growth in Oregon“), growth costs a lot and doesn’t pay for itself. After 60 years of growth, the bills have come due.

As Abramsky observes, what was a gorgeous state with a terrific infrastructure built up over the past century now has no money or political will to keep the place running properly. Paradise is broken and in a perennial state of fiscal crisis as California threatens to become a failed state. And California is not alone.

My heart still aches for what once was and is now irretrievably lost. I still can’t bear to cross the border. Unfortunately, as the symptom of climate change shows, the disease of growth doesn’t respect borders. Growth now threatens to devastate the entirety of the globe.

Earth is the only home we have, there’s nowhere left to flee. As it succumbs to the ravishes of growth, are we not destined to see solastalgia spread and become a global contagion?

Population density, not a sudden increase in human brain power, led to the emergence of modern human behavior. That’s the thrust of a new study by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal Science.

High population density leads to greater exchange of ideas and skills and prevents the loss of new innovations. Complex skills learned across generations can only be maintained when there is a critical level of interaction between people. It is this skill maintenance, combined with a greater probability of useful innovations, that led to modern human behavior appearing at different times in different parts of the world.

So it’s memes, not genes, that’s primarily responsible for civilization.

The battle against dangerous climate change has been lost, and the world needs to prepare for things to get very, very bad.

That’s the gloomy message climate scientist Kevin Anderson conveyed at a high-level academic conference on global warming at Exeter University. Despite the political rhetoric, the scientific warnings, the media headlines and the corporate promises, carbon emissions have soared way out of control. So much extra pollution is being pumped out that most of the climate targets debated by politicians and campaigners are fanciful at best, and “dangerously misguided” at worst. It is now “improbable” that atmospheric CO2 levels can be restricted to less than 650 parts per million (ppm). At 650ppm, the world would face a catastrophic 4C average rise. And even that bleak future could only be achieved if draconian emission reductions are adopted “within a decade.”

Atmospheric CO2 levels are currently about 387 ppm, up from 280ppm at the time of the industrial revolution, and levels are rising by more than 2ppm each year. The generally accepted view is that the world should aim to cap CO2 levels at 450ppm, to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 2C. The latest science suggests that reducing atmospheric CO2 to 350 ppm or below will be necessary to avoid catastrophic “tipping points.”

Global warming is proving worse than even the bleakest scenarios considered by the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  Economist and IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri says he is stunned at the trillions of dollar thrown at the banking crisis while funding to arrest global warming is beggared.

Sharon Astyk observes we are nearing a point at which we will no longer be able to go on as we have been, and the projects we engage in will have to change fundamentally.

We may have to admit that the hope of growing the economy again or rescuing the banks is futile – and turn our efforts, hopefully, towards mitigating suffering. We may have to concede that the planet will pass the 2 degree tipping point (and I say this with great pain), and that the best we can hope for is to not add more damage. We may have to concede that our children will be dealing with a national infrastructure designed for cheap energy – and without much of the energy, and turn ourselves to the national and world project of adaptation.

Astyk invokes the memory of Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Giesel, whose work gently teaches that not all endings are happy endings:

This is a hard lesson for children, but one that it is good to embed early – to clarify the distinction between fiction and reality. It is one that is clearly hard for many adults to grasp – thus, the fact that we desperately *want* the economy to be restored makes us see signs of restoration where none are. The fact that we want to address climate change without personal hardship makes us convinced that this is possible, that we want there to be fossil fuels without constraining our consumption means we choose to believe it. But navigating the fact that happy endings of the “Happy 100 percent” sort are mostly fictive is perhaps the life project for both children and adults.

It’s time to grow up.

Richard Heinberg has posted a really interesting piece at Post Carbon Institute on the relationship between energy and societal complexity. He ponders the consequences of the fact that reduced energy will inevitably result in simplification – a reduction in societal complexity or, more ominously stated, collapse.

Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies is the touchstone work. As Heinberg summarizes:

Tainter saw societal complexity as a strategy for solving problems (too many people, not enough food, warlike neighbors, changing climate, and so on). But investments in complexity yield diminishing returns, so eventually the strategy always fails and the society must simplify again. This simplification typically manifests as political and economic crisis, abandonment of urban centers, declining population, or war.

One of the reasons that returns on complexity begin to decline is that growth in exploitation of energy sources cannot be sustained: soils erode, forests disappear, fossil fuels deplete, the climate changes around us.

Heinberg poses the questions that we will be forced to confront: How will that simplification occur? How simple will society become?

Heinberg says adaptation strategies are likely to be more successful if we can organize the simplification process. But as we are seeing in the reactions to the multiple crises we’re facing, our automatic response is ever more complexity:

[W]e labor instead under the belief that our current problems can be solved with ever more complexity in the forms of technology (genetically modified crops and hybrid cars) and government bailouts for failing companies.

Will we as a society continue doing what we have been doing until it simply doesn’t work any longer and we’re compelled to do something else? Time will tell.

Heinberg helpfully lists others who have been exploring in their works the phenomenon of collapse and what it means for us: Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; Thomas Homer-Dixon,  The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization; John Michael Greer, The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age; and Dmitri Orlov, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects.

Robert Jensen at Countercurrents accuses the media of failing in their duty to question technological fundamentalism – the notion that the increasing use of increasingly more sophisticated high-energy advanced technology is always a good thing.

“If the central role of journalism is to raise the difficult questions that citizens should confront in a democratic society, journalists are not doing their jobs.”

It’s hardly surprising that journalists fail to question technology or the dogma of progress and growth. After all, journalists are as much a part of our culture and are as blind to its underlying ideology as any other occupational group. It’s rare that anyone questions the core assumptions of their society, at any time.  Why would we expect today’s journalists to be any different?

Jensen cites the example of automobiles and the burning of petroleum in internal-combustion engines. While our car-based transportation system has given us the ability to travel considerable distances, this technology also has given us traffic jams and road rage, strip malls and the interstate highway system, horrific carnage and death as a routine and unremarked fact of life. Our high-energy lifestyle has contributed to unprecedented global warming which threatens to destabilize Earth’s climate and unravel Earth’s ecosystems, of which human economies are but a fragile and dependent part.

Jensen argues that the “common response” to the social and ecological pathology of the car culture has not been to rethink the reasons and ways we transport ourselves, but rather to figure out how to replace petroleum so we can continue to drive, leading to the manic quest for “alternative fuels.” But we don’t see the car culture as pathological. In fact, we don’t see the car culture as a “culture” at all. It’s like the air we breath. We are so immersed in it that we take it for granted. It’s simply the world in which we live. We can’t imagine it any other way.

Peak oil threatens to unravel the very fabric of our reality. And it’s our response to peak oil that’s pathological. Rather than change our ways, we try to keep the car culture going at any and all cost.

Our faith in technology is just one element of our broader devotion to economic growth.  We have defined the good life as synonymous with consumption and the ability to acquire more and more of increasingly sophisticated technology. So we continue to pursue progress and economic growth. We cannot see, we refuse to see, that this path leads to death and destruction.

Jensen points out that those who challenge this dogma are routinely ignored or dismissed as naïve. But, Jensen asks, who is really being naïve?

“Naïve, perhaps, but not as naïve as the belief that unsustainable systems can be sustained indefinitely, which is at the heart of the technological fundamentalists’ delusional belief system.”

Glenn Parton writes at Speaking Truth to Power that our global environmental crisis has its roots in human psychological disturbance. We have lost touch with what it means to be human – with our sanity.

The environmental crisis consists of the deterioration and outright destruction of micro and macro ecosystems worldwide, entailing the elimination of countless numbers of wild creatures from the air, land, and sea, with many species being pushed to the brink of extinction, and into extinction. People who passively allow this to happen, not to mention those who actively promote it for economic or other reasons, are already a good distance down the road to insanity.

Solving the global environmental crisis requires that we regain our psychological balance, our humanity.

“The solution to the global environmental crisis we face today depends far less on the dissemination of new information than it does on the re-emergence into consciousness of old ideas. Primitive ideas or tribal ideas, kinship, solidarity, community, direct democracy, diversity, harmony with nature provide the framework or foundation of any rational or sane society. Today, these primal ideas, gifts of our ancestral heritage, are blocked from entering consciousness. The vast majority of modern people cannot see the basic truths that our ancient ancestors knew and that we must know again, about living within the balance of nature.”

Psychological research on the happiness of societies predicts that money has the biggest positive effect on happiness among the poor. When you’re already relatively well-off, more money makes less difference.

A new study to be published in the Journal of Happiness Studies highlights a striking paradox. As the Chinese are becoming richer, they’re becoming more unhappy.

Between 1990 and 2000 millions of Chinese were pulled up out of poverty. In ten years the average rural wage in China more than tripled, while in urban areas it quadrupled.

Yet happiness hasn’t increased as expected. In 1990 28% of Chinese people described themselves as very happy, but by 2000 this figure had dropped to 12%. When asked about their satisfaction with life, the story was the same: in 1990 the average was 7.3 (out of 10), but by 2000 it had dropped to 6.5. This drop was seen across rural and urban China and in almost every income bracket.

What explains the Chinese experience of decreasing happiness and life satisfaction alongside so many being released from poverty? The answer could be the increasing disparity between rich and poor. In China, like many other societies around the world, the rich have accelerated away from the mean income level rapidly, leaving the rest of society looking on jealously. It’s just that in China it has happened very quickly and so the results are particularly pronounced. 

While many Chinese are getting richer in absolute terms, they are not getting richer in relative terms; on the contrary, relatively they feel poorer. As average income levels are pulled higher by the small minority of rich and super-rich, more and more people feel poorer in comparison. As a result they feel less satisfied with life and less happy.

An article by Andy Revkin in Sunday’s New York Times notes that recent data show “an unexpected rise in global emissions and a decline in energy efficiency.” Revkin adds that “a growing chorus of economists, scientists and students of energy policy are saying that whatever benefits the cap approach yields, it will be too little and come too late.”

He quotes economist Jeffrey Sachs:

“Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people.”

In sum, cap-and trade hasn’t worked, as we pointed out in this blog posting. But god forbid we should question our addiction to “growth.” In fact growth is our god, and economists the priesthood.

So what is Revkin – or as he carefully puts it in his article, what do “others” – suggest? A Manhatten Project-like commitment to and investment in “new technologies.”

Joseph Romm says that we don’t have time to wait for some unknown techno-fix and disagrees that we can’t stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at acceptable levels (below 450 ppm) using existing technologies.

Existing technologies – including, for example, solar thermal can provide sufficient energy to support people around the globe at decent and equitable levels of existence. We know from long historical practice – before the auto age – how to construct aesthetically pleasing and equitable communities that don’t rely on ravaging the Earth and poisoning the atmosphere. And we can probably avert catastrophic climate change if we just stop burning coal.

Global warming is a symptom of a too-large ecological footprint.  But it’s not the only symptom. Peak oil, to be followed by peak natural gas and peak coal, are other symptoms. Other resources – soil, water, rare earth metals, forests, fisheries – are reeling from the relentless assault of “growth” as well.

Global warming and other consequences of stress on Earth’s sources and sinks require much more than a technological fix.  They require that we topple the false idol of growth, along with its priesthood.

The solution to global warming isn’t technical – it’s spiritual.

A new survey titled Public Attitudes on the Environment (pdf) reveals that people prefer to act locally on environmental issues – which may be why calls to tackle “global” warming don’t seem to be having much appeal as the potentially catastrophic consequences warrant.

The survey’s core result is that people care about their communities and express the desire to see government action taken toward local and national issues. People are hesitant to support efforts concerning global issues even though they believe that environmental quality is poorer at the global level than at the local and national level.

Americans are clearly most concerned about pollution issues that might affect their personal health, or the health of their families.

The survey also revealed stark differences in people’s environmental attitudes, depending on their political leanings. Democrats and political liberals clearly express more desire for governmental action to address environmental problems, while Republicans and ideological conservatives disdain government intervention.