War Is Not Sustainable

As some human societies became more prosperous, others came to steal. Often, those who came to steal decided to stay and implement tributary systems - settled systems of extortion - which then became the targets of other raiders. As wealth accumulated, possessors sought to defend it, and to maintain their tributary structures. Eventually the possessors of wealth so offended, and offend, their tributaries - the people - with cruelty, that they were and are forced to delegate some of their powers to others, to lords, to institutions like parliaments and courts, and even to contractual understandings with the people - constitutions and laws. Hence the modern political system is a cascading web, from the international order down to the communities in which people live, of strategic alliances between more wealthy-and-powerful, and those less wealthy-and-powerful stakeholders who can get to the table, to maintain peace and the conditions of prosperity for a functional balance of them. Those most empoverished are typically excluded from the deal-making, whether taken as poor nations or as poor groups (children and women) or poor interests (where to place a toxic waste dump). The use of force to maintain social and economic order and alliances, and to compell others to negotiate or yield, therefore is as old as the human mind. When the framers of the United States of American declared they would form a nation "of the people, by the people, for the people" (Lincoln), they were instituting a strategy to reverse the natural flow of power, in a dynamic system that they hoped would be both stable and self-correcting. Although flawed and corrupt, it approaches sustainability, except that it still resorts to the use of power to maintain unsustainable relationships, and is therefore not yet sustainable.

In a democracy, where in principle power is exercized at the consent of those upon whom and for whom the power is exercized, governmental institutions incarnate the community. Whatever a human community is, however it is defined, whatever it is supposed to acheive, in a democracy we seat the right to use force, police power and military power, in those institutions which we form under the aegis of law that is written by people that are elected by individuals. Since individuals must reside in and depend upon their communities, which in turn depend upon the good will of their residents, communities must protect individuals and inspire their loyalty, and individuals must seek the well being of their communities. Hence, the success of a democracy can be measured by the degree to which all persons have a stake in the well being of their communities, and to the extent that their loyalty to the community prevents them from harming others or disrupting the normal pursuit of self-care which occupies everyone everyday. Therefore crime that must be suppressed by the use of force implies that the community has not adequately cared for its members, or inspired their loyalty. This community is not yet sustainable.

Conversely, those arenas in which military force is required or is permitted are not governed by notions of an incarnated community, that is, by the democratic ideal that the community must care for all and that all must care for the community. When military force is used to stop violence, it is a police action, and can be employed to limit damage to the broader community and the community in which it is, thus enhancing the sustainability of those communities, as they move toward less use of force. When military force is used offensively against an otherwise passive society, to protect resources, power or an ideal, or in revenge, at the expense of those upon whom the force is dealt, it is the old, anti-democratic, anti-community use of force. It disrupts and destroys peoples lives, it alienates people so they cannot trust each other in cooperative arrangements, and it destroys valuable resources. War, because it consumes resources and produces nothing, is not sustainable. War is antithetical to sustainable human communities and a sustainable world.

Alternatives to violence and war exist, in the real world. Whether these alternatives have been exhausted is answered by asking one question:

From what choice does the least harm result?

When "least harm" is measured by considering the impact of the choices on the total system of relationships, lives, habitats and resources, and which of these choices enhances the sustainability of democratic community.

The workshop series called "Sustainability Awakening" that I am developing aims to answer the question, speculatively, "What does a sustainable world look like?". Although war obviously has environmental impacts, and is largely about resources and wealth, it is a social function, that is, it is about relationships, and can only be ended by developing sustainable relationships. Now that we live in a world in which our failure to cooperate can kill us, otherwise martial actors can be motivated to negotiate more sustainable relationships.

What is needed is a coherent theory of War that shows how the value lost in achieving victory is far greater than the value gained in booty, because even if there is enough booty to pay for the victory, cooperation and good relations are far more valuable, and lost in waging war, in our interconnected world.

Robert Axelrod pioneered the study of cooperation as a relative choice in the game-theory setting of The Prisoner's Dilemma. His research has been extended into the realm of international relations, to what profit I do not know, but it is taken quite seriously. In this construct, the question is asked in very crass terms, "Do I cooperate, or do I act selfishly?" In human history the answer has often been "selfishly" because the rewards for cooperation were too low, and rewards for war too high. But in our time, the rewards for war are decreasing for parties that would wage war, and being calculated in global terms besides, where they are seen as negative, while the rewards for cooperation are positive and increasing.

When it is pollution of the global commons that threatens our planet and our lives, a sustainable world is necessarily a world of cooperators. We must cooperate to minimize the threat to life on Earth. Hence war, which is so supremely antithetical to cooperation, is also antithetical to the sustainability of human life on Earth. Whatever the costs in wild-form habitats, in resources wasted, in human habitats polluted, the costs of war to human relationships is too high to pay. Without good relationships, we cannot address our shared problems. War, waged in the offensive intention to take or impose, simply cannot be allowed, any more.

Christian Acquaints Atheist

Chris:

I'm afraid I forgot to ask a very important question. Perhaps I could guess, but what do you know as your message? What animates your sense of mission? Although I am something of a pushy proselytizer myself, I do not aspire to this role - I aspire to humility and empathy, any amount of which would make my life easier. Perhaps one can preach and be humble too? I believe that the authentic self cannot know anything for anyone else, hence must be humble, but it is then that I am most effective in communicating and most valued for what I might say. So I might speak-to and be authentic, but preaching and authenticity feel like alternative states for me. Hence, I aspire to unlearn preachy-ness, pedantry. How do you put these together?

I do not identify with many of the characteristics associated with atheists. I think there is usually a view of them as hyper-rationalistic without any humanity. Many atheists are simply anti-theists or just rebelling without really understanding just how optional the "God" hypothesis is, actually remaining in conversation with God the way a child continues to fight with estranged parents even after leaving home. Many atheists really did arrive at their atheism via rationality. My atheism is a truly mystical form - I did not arrive at it using logic, I got there by experiencing, in my whole being, a universe that does not need a creator or a director. I observed the universe, invested my faith in the beauty of the knowledge of science, and found a universe that made sense and invited me to create meaning. I did not find in it a purpose beyond manifestly being, and I did not find in the universe any universal moral truths. I found only the freedom to choose. So if I want to really stretch the definition of God, as many philosophers and theologians do, as being "the cosmos", it would be a God devoid of many of the elements that people who profess a belief in God need to have in their definition: Human emotions, human-like creative process, a human need for connection and reassurance, a human sense of morals, a human desire to control and cause. I am a true atheist. God, in any of the usual definitions, does not exist for me. There is nothing that any of the usual definitions of God offers that I want.

One dissonance for me, that causes me to be an atheist, is that having a belief system has an inherently corrupting effect, because once a person fails a belief system, they become divided and cannot manage their flaws of character. Only those people whose faith returns to something inside, is directed toward some sort of inner guidance system, can actually keep their beliefs in consonance with their behavior. But once a person accepts the literal do's and don'ts of prescriptive religion, the division of the self into good and bad is inevitable, and once divided, conscience is lost. I like about atheism that I cannot avoid responsibility for my choices, and my conscience is undivided from the choices I make.

So many "believers" condemn atheists for being amoral, without a guidance system. I have met one atheist I would characterize this way. But I do not find, if we observe the fundamentalist type of religionist, that having a morality is really sufficient. Sufficient is to have a conscience, which is not assigned by religiosity. I am an atheist with a conscience.

So yes, I would hope that there is something of value about my atheism.

When I needed to put my email account name on my landlady's internet account, she had to check with her minister to see if it was OK!

Stephen Alrich Marshall

Moving Target

With the dawning realization that global climate change is real and happening, and is attributable largely to the human activity of burning fossil fuels for energy, the immediate reaction of many folks is to ask "How can we reduce the amount of CO2 produced to meet our energy needs?" The goal, in shorthand, is "sustainable energy production and use.". The vision is a world not much different from the one we know, managed sustainably.

But this awakening to the need for energy sustainability coincides with several other, intimately connected changes of equal or greater consequence.

One of these, the end of cheap oil, is helping to persuade many to invest in sustainable energy technologies just for the financial benefits. But as the supply of cheap oil declines, the once abundant and convenient fuel that drove the massive suburbanization of America and life styles filled with stuff, will become too expensive to support this level of consumption. We will experience dramatic dislocation due the expiration of cheap oil.

Not surprisingly, cheap oil has abetted a massive increase in human populations, along side of rising expectations, commensurate with that they see in our television shows. Remove cheap oil and …?

Meanwhile, the heat retaining effect of CO2 is not felt instantaneously. Even if all emissions were to end today, the Earth would continue to warm under the CO2 blanket we now have. With or without additional CO2, the oceans will rise just from their warming and expanding, dislocating the masses of humanity that live in or close to that one foot. But also, weather will be less predictable and climates will change, causing more dislocation of peoples due to hostile weather, and unreliable water supplies and food production. And a warmer Earth means that ice is melting, removing reservoirs of water that have sustained humans for tens of thousands of years, and further filling oceans. And most of that ice, far from human populations, is above sea level. Already scientists are reporting that water percolating down to the bottom of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is lubricating their motions, and portions of these sheets could slide into the ocean, further raising sea levels by meters, up to eight. New reports predict that new climates will be created in this new world, while old climates will simply vanish. Were these things to happen, a truly global flood would hit the reset button on human evolution.

In this context, what does "sustainable" mean? Fill in the blank in "Sustainable _____ use": Water, soils, fuel, forest, metals, food, air, space. Fill in the blank in "Sustainable ______" with any human activity or value: communities, economic development, families, political systems, social systems. Once we have admitted that our world is changing, that we face not gradually increasing pressures of population, food supply, fresh water, disease, competition for natural resources, with each other, and competition for habitat, with the natural world, but actually sudden and dramatic crises and conflicts, the question "What is sustainable?" has a new meaning. Energy production and use that does not produce CO2 emissions is only the first hurdle, and just preparation for the struggles to come. Still, we must adapt to conditions of a changing food supply, changing sea levels, insecure energy supplies, polluted water, epidemic disease in a time of massive population upheavals, governments willing to secure their borders with guns and blood, and the existential burden that each of us will need to bear, of a humanity bent on self-annihilation. To render the environment of the Earth hospitable to human life, or just to life, the task facing humanity is far larger than just limiting CO2 production. We must make humanity sustainable.

Many people will have no difficulty grasping this argument. The further argument may be less obvious.

"Sustainability" is a moving target. Sustainability, in so far as it can be achieved, won't manifest as a static structure. Given the hyper-kinetic energies of humanity, the ever pressing, pushing, inventing, building, destroying, rearranging, ambitions of human beings, even that system that might prove sustainable, if perpetuated, will be cast aside before being proved, before it has had a chance to work out its flaws, before it has repeated its productive cycles enough times to demonstrate that it might actually be sustainable. No, our search for sustainability will not be productive if we search for a particular formulation of, a closed ecology of, technology, political structures, or social arrangements.

Sustainability will not even manifest as a dynamic structure, and our search cannot be productive, if in our restlessness we search for a thing, for control of that system that is sustainable.

Our search for sustainability will be productive when what we seek is meaning. Sustainability dwells in the inventors themselves, in the commitment to taking less and giving more, to making life and relationships the source of meaning, not the possession of things. Sustainability dwells in the spirit of the design, in the integration of systems of supply, consumption and recycling. Sustainability dwells in the designers, the inventors, the livers, who ask, will this system self-strengthen, or self-destroy? Sustainability resides enduringly in the people, in their freedom and chaos, seeking for that something that feels right and durable and meaningful. Embedded in the human soul is the knowledge that what is sustainable, what self-reinforces, has meaning. Profound meaning.

That is how we know what is sustainable: It has meaning.

Puzzling Emotional Connection

Q: Why do you make such a big deal about why I like you? As you realize its not easy.

A: It's a puzzle and I like puzzles. I like to plumb the nature and properties of relationships, my own especially. I like to dance around the edges of givens, not to automatically challenge their existence, but to sharpen the questions about them. I enjoy the dance we do. Because I do not feel any danger to my own existence, and I pose no danger to yours, I can have and express any feelings I choose. Since you seem to me generally so unmoved by my remarks, minimally affected by them, I can explore what ever comes up. My responsibility, as I understand it, is to distinguish between objective facts about you and your actual assertions, and everything else I might feel or think.

I am in the midst of learning to engage emotionally with other people in ways that are personally meaningful and safe for all involved, and I have endeavored - you may be the judge of my success - to own my stuff, to project gently and without offense, what I perceive may be true. This is an art in all cases, for me at least, but in the case of our relationship, certain key tensions, that are built in, raise the challenge level.

How much me and how much you? Perhaps neither, but the chemistry of how we interact. I am not easy to like, as you say, but since the episode following the work on the deck and siding, I have not cared. For me, liking you is not easy, but it is interesting. You can decide you do not like me, and I would lose a foil for exploring feelings and ideas, for calibrating my language in terms of effective communication, a foil which demands that I expand beyond my normal conception of things. All of which I like and would miss, but is not necessary for my survival.

Sometimes I feel you are responding to me as if I am a crazy, and not to be taken completely seriously. Although not a preferred response from you, I enjoy the challenge of probing you to see what would reach you and engage you emotionally. This curiosity probably explains why I wonder why you like me.

There is no reason to deny a certain "father factor", in that you do remind me of my father in many ways. There is a huge key difference - you are not intentionally cruel, you actually wish me well - which I appreciate enormously. But some of what remains feels like a degree of emotional disinterest in the things I regard as important, and therefore of key importance for my personal validation in relation to a father figure, and therefore of great interest to me. Herein lay the rub, because further probing would reveal contradictions and confusion, because at any deeper layer of feelings I am no longer talking about my relationship with you, but with my father, and the feelings of abandonment that I have in relation to him. With you, at the not-so-deep level, I can remain disinterested too. But it is a cunning disinterest. It is an interested disinterest. It is the disinterest that is interested in the dance at the boundaries of who each of us is.

When I consider your career and your origins, I do not actually expect you to be equipt understand me, or how I think or feel, and how I express myself. I expect you to be baffled by much of what I say. This is part of the puzzle for me - how can I communicate who I am to someone who, it feels to me, doesn’t get me? Who may feel like he gets me but with whom I do not feel that reciprocal sympathy that marks connection? (Someone who, we may say, is unique in my personal constellation of friends in his similarity to my father.) What reaching out beyond the limits of my own mind do I need, to make that connection? Is the hope, the need, even meaningful? Would I be better served by discovering that I feel respected by you at the deep level that I feel the need of, or
by the internal adjustments I make to the feelings of loss I have in relation to my actual father? In the universe of your origins and career, these feelings and thoughts may seem completely a waste of energy, or just a mystery. But I am willing, because I need to, to explore feelings, ideas, perceptions, syntheses, with you, as long as you remain open to reading about them, and responding with the candor I have thus far found.

Tis a fully loaded cart? Yes! Are you having any fun? I hope so. I could stop.

I play, quite seriously, at the boundaries of social consensus, where perhaps I am alone, where I do not always feel substantive, reciprocal sympathy, from which I need to seek the channels of communication between the subjective person I actually find myself to be, and other people who presumably have a subjective existence, because they exist in the objective world around me, but do not respond in a way that is comprehensible to me. Is that me or them, or is it just the chemistry of who we are together? I do wonder.

Answer To A Friend

Q: Do you still live in Springfield and work with that "green peace" outfit?

A: I am fascinated by the memory lapses people have, especially smart people. I am not sure which of my activities got put in the "green peace" category, but if you do not mean the organization Green Peace, which I do not belong to and have never mentioned, then perhaps you would consider my activities as pulling for something that can be called "green peace". Am I correct to sense a certain derogation? Truthfully, I cannot fathom any animosity toward a movement that seeks to preserve the capacity of the earth to support life, since humanity is a form of life and needs "green peace" to survive. The arguments, as I hear them, merely pit short term personal or national survival and wealth against long term universal survival, and I fail to grasp how smart people can be so shortsighted.

You are of interest to me too, as in my mind, and please correct me and forgive me if I am wrong, you are a representative of those interests, of those who esteem the security of wealth more highly than the security of life, who construe security in terms of defenses against hostile parties, and disdain any notion of security that might result from a better distribution of power and wealth. If this is so, if your stands on these issues can be characterized this way, why would you have any interest in me? Our politics are contra-polar. Do you like me despite my politics, and cope with the dissonance by ignoring my arguments or condescending to them? Or perhaps you might like to help me get more interested in that productive work which would advance my personal prosperity - hence distracting me from my politics - , or see me as a son-like figure who - and this is true - could use a father figure to push him in positive directions. I am spinning the fibers of likelihood borne to me by subjective evidence, by inference, not by facts or admission. I wonder if perhaps you actually enjoy the dissonance enough to tolerate the politics, or enjoy my intelligence enough to tolerate the dissonance. I wonder if you would be happier if I suddenly had an awakening, to be reborn into the fold of free-marketeers. I am puzzling over these things and I am happy that you have taken enough interest in me to wend your way across the mine field of my personality. You even dared to ask me about "green peace"! I admire you for that.

Well, being not a possessor of wealth, I have only the more primal vested interest, to create and preserve that environment in which any person can find something to do to self-maintain. In fact, I am so low on the totem pole that I cannot even aspire to personal wealth - my well being depends on the well being of those around me. So not having wealth, the stability of the economy and political environment is important to me for a different set of reasons - and possesses a different look. I am not looking for good locks and a working class that carries the yoke of its labors with docility. I am not seeking a social culture which esteems the ossification of those systems that control wealth while liberating the possessors of wealth to pursue more. Nor am I interested in piping wealth from those who have it to those who do not. My aspiration is for a flexible dynamic system that is sustainable over imaginable time, whose science can say "within our powers of prediction, Earth can support life for indefinite time." (This is not currently true. Within our powers of prediction, Earth's life support systems could fail, and humanity would be the cause of those failures.) My aspiration is for a human social-cultural system that dynamically readjusts to changing conditions and opportunities, and values the health and opportunity for self-maintenance of all systems of life. My aspiration is to make human activity consonant with the sustainability of Earth's life support systems through self-aware, self-adjusting social-cultural processes. I wish for humanity to accept the task of maintaining Earth's life support systems, such as planetary homeostatic mechanisms that keep ozone in the upper layers of the atmosphere, and ecosystems and habitats that maintain particular species of plants and animals, through integration of these values by social-cultural systems, with a minimum of applied police power. Stated as succinctly as I possibly can, I believe that only a full blown ecology of economic activity, in which personal freedom operates responsibly, is sustainable over indefinite time, and to be sustainable over indefinite time, that economic ecology must integrate the values of maintaining Earth's life support systems. This is the bare minimum for me. Anything short of this trends humanity and life toward self-annihilation. My personal well being is of course important to me, but I do not place it outside of the well-being of others, or the well-being of the Earth's own systems. That other people do is unfathomable to me.

Well, none of this has anything necessary to do with you. I have simply used you as a catalyst for plumbing my own feelings about the world and my place in it. So to answer your question, I don't know which "green peace" advocates you mean, but I can assure you that I continue to work for "green peace". I am currently occupied by a responsibility to coordinate production of a series of workshops for Solarfest, an organization that promotes sustainability awareness.

Introduction

___Leaving behind all of the painful mistakes I have made before, I am getting ready to make a few more, right here in full view of anyone who wants to see! I am probably inured to ridicule, having spent my entire life deflecting it, so I am even ready to invite some! Well, only in humor.
___But not every thing here will be humorous. For example, the small text size that is the default in Firefox is not humorous at all. I can barely read what I am typing, and I am quite unhappy with all those young software engineers, and an older one I know, who seem to think that litte tiny letters improve their web sites. Well, just don't program text in pixels, and make the contrast adjustable, and we'll all survive. Please rely on relative scaling whenever possible. All typos and misspellings are hereby attriibuted to poor vision.
___Since this is to be my personal blog, I am making no promises to anyone that I will follow a paricular theme or show any respect to anyone. That is, I am not making promises. Don't be expecting any severe ridicule, either, unless the subject is selfish people. However, if you look at my profile, you will notice that I am mostly interested in relationships, and, not so obviously, consider development of sustainable culture to be my life's work.
___On the subject of relationships, I have been diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrome, an Autism spectrum disorder, and with ADD or ADHD, the combination of which, combined with dysfunctional parenting, left me incompetent in relationships, hence without the ability to support myself, either. So beginning at the beginning, I read (red) ethnographies to learn about people, and studied human evolution to predict the internal structure of the human being. This strategy was very helpful. Then all I needed was to get 10 years of medications and even more years of therapy to deal with the persistent mental health issues I had. Moreover, I needed to care.
___Asperger's is a condition in which social behavior is not instinctive, but not in which connection with others is unwanted. Untying all of the nots in the last sentence, Aspergers sufferers lack instinctive social skills, but have normal desires for connection, and may possess normal or even exceptions skills of reading emotions of others. But without the instincts to support social connection, they experience exagerated loneliness, and need to make very focused efforts to learn social skills, so they can come out of their loneliness. This is why I am so interested in relationships. As important as they are to everyone, You might need to ask an Aspie to find out just how important they are.
___The meaning of life is experienced through relationships. My sister says that the meaning of life IS relationships, but I believe that the meaning of life is really plural, in fact so multitudinous that counting them would take a lifetime. Good enough we take a lifetime to have them. Anyway, Even fun that seems totally narcissistic, like the elation of coming down a ski slope, depends hugely on the emotional ballast provided by the background experience of human connections. (You get to the bottom of the slope and do what? Put on a poker face because you don't want anyone to know what fun you had??) As someone who has felt absolutely isolated, without any bonds to any other person, I can report that fun isn't much fun without love somewhere. Is the human being that is isolated from all other people able to find meaning? Probably there are examples, but are the rare individuals who are able to live alone actually feeling meaning? Meaning, I believe, is tied to social reality because meaning is created socially. Meaningful is how we describe the links we have to other people, the elemental emotional bonds that keep us in community. Even a child raised by wild animals would navigate the world in terms of the relationships s/he had within that community of animals. What about "The Man Who Planted Trees"? He lived alone and created profound meaning. But not without caring about other people, and not without connecting. What about someone who is completely narcissistic? I ask you, what are the meanings of that life? If the tree falls in the forest, and there is no one there to hear it fall, does it make any noise?
___I may be challenged on this point, as others will seek exceptions to the rule just because, by generalizing, I have included them in the rule. But for me it is true that relationships provide the substrate and medium of meaning, the reasons and motivations that drive me through life. I have many meanings, and they accumulate, as I build my relationships, as I multiply them and improve their quality. My life did not start to make sense, I did not have any sense of direction, until I decided I would abandon any project that did not bring me closer ot other people. By declaring that my activity has as its first purpose to connect me with others, that the productivity I seek must somehow enhance my relationships, I have eliminated the noise of my life. Now there is mostly music. Sense. A way to judge the value of any proposed activity, project or plan. The point of any thing I do is not the thing, but its impact on my relationships, taken at every level of detail, from the immediate and personal to the grandly attentuated, to the impact that my life has on LIFE, on the Earth, on the ability of Earth to support life. Hence my interest in Sustainable Culture.
___From the beginning, in a family system riven by cruelty, I wanted to have a different relationship with my children (I have only one son, he does not live with me). I wanted to have a relationship that would be sustainable over generations. I wanted to have a relationship formula in which rebellion was not necessary. My belief was that, if I could communicate love and support, if my children did not need to fight with me to feel secure and prepared for the life ahead of them, if they could self define without alienating me, I could have them in a sustainable family system, a system that would promote well-being. I was naive, of course, the reality is not so simple, but at an early age I was already wishing for something "sustainable". The desire has not evaporated. My "family" is still quite cruel, although I experience little of that cruelty myself, and still very narrow minded and shortsighted. Much of my family lives in abject poverty, in the ruins of war, lawlessness, depravity, ignorance, and corruption. And what I worry about most is that my family looks set to burn down its house. Global climate chaos multiplied by a human population in excess of Earth's carrying capacity multiplied by human evolution (necessarily) lagging behind the needs for positive, creative, caring adaptation, equals a profound disaster in the making. At the extreme, Possibly the end of all life above the level of paramecium.
___The next posting was written yesterday, before I opened this blog. Writing it for a different blog, where it is not germaine, motivated me to open this blog.