March 4/9. The Archdruid writes about technology and the externalization of costs. Greer does a great job of explaining how technology, as it has developed over the last few thousand years, has given obvious benefits to its users and owners, while causing harm that is not obvious to its users and owners. An example would be a factory that makes a product cheaper by exploiting workers or dumping toxic waste. Capitalism rewards whoever does the best job of externalizing costs, which leads to increasing costs that are now poisoning whole systems like the economy and the biosphere, and leading to collapse.
So far, so good. But western intellectuals can't rest at pointing out what's actually happening; they have to turn it into some kind of universal logical statement. This is the same disagreement I have with Derrick Jensen: he observes the behavior of large complex society over its first few thousand years, uses that behavior to make a universal logical definition of "civilization", and projects that definition onto all possible large complex societies. To me that's like defining the human potential by watching a baby, and Greer does the same thing by defining "technological progress" so that it logically requires increasing externalization of costs. If you want to see Greer's argument as local not universal, you can go through his entire post saying "as we know it" after every instance of the word "technology" or "technological".
His conclusion: "a society that chose to stop progressing technologically could maintain itself indefinitely, so long as its technologies weren't dependent on nonrenewable resources or the like." My conclusion would be: "a society that made it a top priority to not externalize costs could keep improving technologically without destabilizing itself." Or, if we have a culture that is acutely aware of whole systems, then any new technology, in order to outcompete existing technologies, has to externalize fewer costs. You can already see the first glimmers of this in ecological food labeling.
So the externalization of costs is not a feature of technology, but a feature of human lack of awareness, which leads to one particular bad path in the vast landscape of toolmaking. We've been on this path at least since the invention of stone weapons that caused prehistoric extinctions, and I think we can get off the path without going all the way back there. Technological changes that benefit whole systems do not have to be reversals, but can lead us outside the tiny realm of stuff we have already tried.
Now, from the perspective of the doomer vs techno-utopian debate, it may seem that I'm making a stealth argument for unlimited fusion power or a Star Trek future. I'm against those things. My intention is to argue for the vastness of the Unknown Unknown. It's the same argument Terence McKenna made when he said, in the context of extraterrestrial life, that looking for radio transmissions from other planets is like looking for Italian food on other planets.
This argument has practical implications. If you think civilization as we know it is collapsing, and you also think that the range of human action is limited to stuff we've already tried, then you might expect to get a head start on the future by learning pre-industrial skills like blacksmithing or small-scale farming. If that's what you love to do, cool, you can probably carve out a niche. But if you think it's what you have to do, you're gambling your quality of life on the belief that your own imagination sets the limits of the collective response of billions of people to a historically unique crisis.
March 11. Sarah Perry has a new post on Ribbonfarm, Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, and Beauty. It's so dense with ideas that it's taken me a week just to wrap my head around it. These are the main points:
1) Good systems are made of many subsystems with boundaries. This enables more diversity and it's much easier to solve problems. Examples would be bodies made of many cells, islands with different ecologies, technological systems built out of modules, and human societies made of many tribes or neighborhoods.
2) The march of civilization has destroyed boundaries and subsystems in order to build one giant system, and this is a bad thing. This is why "the system" is so clunky, so unsatisfying, and why we have no power. The metaphor here is mountain climbers roped together. If one falls, they all fall; but we're like billions of mountain climbers who, because of that danger, are not permitted to move at all, but remain stuck in mediocrity.
3) Ancestral cultures are more elegant and beautiful than modern culture because they are small enough that individual humans influence them, and also because they are constrained by rules. An example would be children who learn to play music together on instruments that force them to all play in the same key.
Related: Steven Strogatz on the dangers of Too Much Coupling:
"Coupling" refers to the ability of one part of a complex system to influence another... In all sorts of complex systems, this is the general trend: increasing the coupling between the parts seems harmless enough at first. But then, abruptly, when the coupling crosses a critical value, everything changes... With our cell phones and GPS trackers and social media, with globalization, with the coming Internet of things, we're becoming more tightly connected than ever... But the math suggests that increasing coupling is a siren's song. Too much makes a complex system brittle.
I think he's wrong, but only because the core of the system is completely insulated from the choices of ordinary people. The tragedy is that a large system with no boundaries has to be designed that way. If somehow we all had real power, it would collapse overnight. But it's possible to build a big system out of many "cells". Within your cell, you have power and your life has meaning. And your cell is linked to other cells and has power within a larger system, and that system has power within a still larger system. In the whole system, political power could be almost completely bottom-up, we could smoothly adapt to change, and the connections would not reach the density to make it unstable.
April 13. Can civilisation reboot without fossil fuels? This is an important question, and I'd like to see more than just this one guy trying to answer it. His answer is that the most realistic source of energy would be charcoal and wood gas, but that wood power would be heavily constrained by competition with agriculture.
I think the most likely scenario is that solar power (not necessarily photovoltaic) is able to adapt and survive through the coming resource bottleneck, and eventually it will grow to surpass the energy we're now getting from fossil fuels. Then, if the most powerful nations have stable zero growth economies, we've got utopia, but I don't expect humanity to learn that fast. Probably there will be solar empires, still addicted to growth and all fighting each other, and we'll eventually hit peak solar, in which it takes more and more effort to harvest the last few photons. Then we'll either finally figure out how to live without growth, or we'll get another crash.
April 20. Over the weekend I had a visitor, Nick. We talked about all kinds of things, and I learned lots of stuff about the possible future of energy. For example, you can have a parabolic reflector focusing sunlight on a point through which you pass a fluid that can hold lots of heat, and then this fluid can transfer heat to water, driving a steam engine, so you've got solar power without a high-tech infrastructure making photovoltaics. Nick's utopian vision is a kind of home-scale mini-biosphere or super-greenhouse that would make such good use of sunlight and water that people living in it would be almost completely self-sufficient. This kind of thing will have to be developed if we ever want Mars colonies, but then it would turn out to be more useful to help us live better on Earth.
May 4-6. In the last post I was writing about three different things -- sweet foods, video games, and marijuana -- that make you feel good, but if you do them too much, you feel bad. Why does reality work this way?
Why isn't there anything that feels good, and continues to feel good the more you do it? And why doesn't it work the other way around? If I slap myself in the face it feels bad, but if I were to do it all the time, it would keep feeling bad, rather than turning around and starting to feel good. Why is feeling good so challenging and feeling bad so easy?
You might try to answer this in terms of evolution, or biology, or even the laws of physics. But that raises the question: why is the physical world this way and not some other way? You could call this the Hedonic Anthropic Principle. If this is a mindless universe of particles and waves in which consciousness appeared by accident, how unlucky are we that pleasant consciousness is so elusive?
I want to believe that life is intrinsically meaningless, because then it should be possible to game the system, to find an easy trick to feel enduring bliss. But we've tried this for all of history and completely failed, which suggests that life does have a meaning: that our minds and our stories are serving some invisible deeper mind that does not simply want us to feel good, but uses good and bad feelings, like scientists using treats and electroshocks on rats, to lead us toward some unimaginable goal.
In this subreddit post, The Hedonic Anthropic Principle, polyparadigm argues that consciousness can only arise where happiness is challenging -- because otherwise the decisions are so easy that consciousness is not necessary. I happen to think consciousness is universal, but I still accept this idea under a special definition of consciousness: the power to choose whether or not to be in the moment.