21

Dec

The World Bank: Perhaps United States Should Stop Economic Growth, Redistribute Wealth?

Since I started this blog ten days ago, I’ve been harping on the idea that economic growth is directly linked to carbon emissions. Research shows that recessions cause significant drops in carbon emissions, while recoveries cause significant emission spikes.

Everybody likes growth. If you are a progressive Democrat, you favor economic stimulus to bolster economic growth and the middle class. If you are a Republican, you would like to cut taxes, “reform entitlements,” and peel back government regulations to unleash the “confidence” of our job creators and stimulate economic growth. Budget reporters unfailingly cast economic growth as “healthy,” and necessary—something that everyone obviously desires. The expert economists that are featured in the press say the same thing. Read any of the coverage of the ongoing “fiscal cliff” negotiations and this will become quickly evident. It’s called the “cliff” for a reason.

I want to draw your attention to a report on “Inclusive Green Growth,” by World Bank Sustainable Development Vice President Rachel Kyte. Here is the opening salvo:

“Inclusive green growth is the pathway to sustainable development. Over the past 20 years economic growth has lifted more than 660 million people out of poverty and has raised the income levels of millions more, but growth has too often come at the expense of the environment. A variety of market, policy, and institutional failures mean that the earth’s natural capital tends to be used in ways that are economically inefficient and wasteful, without sufficient reckoning of the true social costs of resource depletion and without adequate reinvestment in other forms of wealth. These failures threaten the long-term sustainability of growth and progress made on social welfare. Moreover, despite the gains from growth, 1.3 billion people still do not have access to electricity, 2.6 billion still have no access to sanitation, and 900 million lack safe, clean drinking water. Growth has not been inclusive enough.”

Inclusive green growth is the way to save the environment and lift the world’s poorest out of poverty, says Kyte. This is the main thrust of the report. Of interest to us is a short section on growth and the developed economies.

Kyte discusses the Kuznets Curve, an economic theory that I touched on last week. The Kuznets Curve holds that income inequality will rise in developing economies (China, Brazil, India), and fall as those developing economies become fully developed (Western Europe, the United States). The Environmental Kuznets Curve holds that economic growth will become more polluting in developing economies, and less polluting as these developing economies become developed. In other words, developed economies are, like, totally awesome.

The Kuznets Curve is completely wrong, says Kyte:

“The famous Kuznets curve argument, which posits that inequality first increases and then decreases with income, is not supported by the evidence. Inequality has increased substantially in recent decades in China, but also in the United States and most of Europe. And it has declined in much of Latin America (Milanovic 2010). Some countries reduce inequality as they grow; others let it increase. Policies matter. Thus, the links between the economic and social pillars of sustainable development are generally self-reinforcing. But the story is not so simple when it comes to the economic and environmental pillars. Economic growth causes environmental degradation—or has for much of the past 250 years—driven by market failures and inefficient policies. As with inequality, overall environmental performance does not first get worse and then improve with income—no Kuznets curve here either.”

Got that? Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, economic growth has caused environmental degradation. Developed countries don’t necessarily become more environmentally-friendly or economically equal just because they are post-industrial. They have to enforce policies that accomplish those lofty goals of economic equality and environmental protection.

Why should we continue to grow wealthy, developed economies, then? Some critics have asked this very question, Kyte tells us:

“Against this backdrop, some observers, mostly in high-income countries, have argued against the need for more growth, suggesting that what is needed instead is a redistribution of wealth (Marglin 2010; Victor 2008). They point to the happiness literature, which suggests that above a country average of $10,000 to $15,000 per capita, further growth does not translate into greater well-being (Easterlin 1995; Layard 2005). While this argument has value, it remains more relevant for high-income countries, where average annual incomes hover around $36,000. Developing countries—with average income of around $3,500 per capita—are still far from the point at which more wealth will bring decreasing returns to well-being.”

The World Bank Vice President for Sustainable Development is open to the idea of halting growth in high-income countries, and then redistributing their wealth. I’m not sure whether she is talking about redistributing the wealth to poor countries, or to the poor within the high-income countries, or both. Either way, this is far more radical than anything anyone is talking about in the American media. It’s also far more rational, given the climate and resource crisis knocking on our door.

“Thus, growth is a necessary, legitimate, and appropriate pursuit for the developing world, but so is a clean and safe environment. Without ambitious policies, growth will continue to degrade the environment and deplete resources critical to the welfare of current and future generations.”

The developing countries need to grow in order to alleviate poverty and social chaos. We do not need to grow. We have lots of money, although it is distributed in a highly unequal way. Our historical record of economic growth is a major cause of the climate change fiasco. We should stop growing, and redistribute our wealth, in order to mitigate climate change and social chaos. Or so suggests wild-eyed radical, Rachel Kyte, the World Bank Vice President for Sustainable Development.

Why doesn’t anyone talk about this?

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20

Dec

Newtown and the Threshold Effect

The tragedy in Newtown and the ensuing debate on gun control is one of the most extraordinary events in recent memory. Whatever the outcome of this situation, I am coming to believe that it could be a breakthrough moment in American social and political life.

In “The Upside of Down,” Canadian Political Science Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon discusses the evolution of complex systems, such as our society. New research suggests that these complex systems can adapt to changing circumstances through “a four-stage cycle of growth, breakdown, reorganization, and renewal.”

Writing in 2006, Homer-Dixon seems confident that social breakdown is on its way:

“When social breakdown happens, as it will in coming years, we can be sure the worst will be full of passionate intensity. We must be equally sure that the best will have the conviction, the knowledge, and the resources to prevail.”

In an evolving complex system, it is important to watch out for small, unexpected changes that produce huge effects, he writes.

“Outwardly, everything seems to be normal: the system doesn’t generate any surprises. At some point, though, the behavior of the whole system suddenly shifts to a radically new mode. This kind of behavior is often called a threshold effect, because the shift occurs when a critical threshold—usually unseen and often unexpected—is crossed. (In our everyday conversation, when we say something was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back,’ we’re saying it caused a threshold effect.)”

Homer-Dixon cites the end of Apartheid, the collapse of the Grand Banks cod fishery, and devaluation of the Thai Bhat—which led to the 1997-1998 financial crisis—as examples of threshold effects. They can be either “good” or “bad,” he writes.

I do wonder whether this massacre could turn out to be one of these threshold effects. These mass shootings happen all the time. We have accepted high levels of indiscriminate gun violence in this country for a very long time. But, from what I can tell, there was something about this shooting — namely, the location, and the age of the victims — that has caused many Americans to take a look at our country and ask, “What the fuck happened?”

In “The True Believer,” Erik Hoffer anatomizes mass movements — their adherents, structure, evolution, et cetera. Often, Hoffer writes, the success of small pieces of reform can lead people to demand more and more of their leaders. Occasionally, these reform movements can turn into mass movements that shake the very foundations of society.

These calls for gun control appear to be emanating from a wide swath of the American public. Parents around the country are calling upon the government to act to protect their children. If the government — under intense public pressure — does push through substantive gun control, I think it could be enormously empowering to the people who are pushing for it. It could very well lead to a revival of participatory democracy.

If there is no action, I wonder whether our society will descend into a new threshold of depravity and cynicism. It must be said that we are already highly depraved and cynical. But it is surely possible to descend further and further into darkness. If, after all of this media hoopla and soul searching, we simply accept the status quo, we will have resigned ourselves to a new and devastating stage of social breakdown. And that is something that we all, most certainly, should try to avoid.

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17

Dec

Adam Lanza, Obama’s Address, and the Culture of Collateral Damage

My lord, the chutzpah of our President is something to behold! Obama’s Newtown speech is now being hailed as his “Gettysburg Address” by Washington Post Associate Editor David Maraniss. The accolades are gushing in at gale-force speeds. Our President-Philosophe is reaching the very zenith of his charismatic powers, and the ever-predictable stable of progressive pundits are no doubt beginning to sense the old, hoary thrill creeping further and further up their inner thighs.

You know, I was planning on writing something today about the very real sympathy that I feel for Obama. The man has been dumped into nearly impossible circumstances: an epochal depression, the looming ecological collapse of our civilization, a utopian, revolutionary, Right-wing movement hell-bent on destroying the middle class and the earth, a pathetic and confused Left, a corrupt intelligentsia, a bought-and-paid for congress, a fascist Supreme Court, bloody revolutions abroad, resource depletion, et cetera, et cetera.

But I will save my Obama apologia for tomorrow. This Newtown speech is one absurdity too far. In order to illustrate why the President’s latest address and the surrounding media hoopla is a surreal and bizarre affair, I want to draw your attention to the fate of two Pakistani children. I know this will be difficult, but bear with me.

Investigative reporter Pratap Chatterjee described the boys in the pages of the Guardian on November 7, 2011:

“Last Friday, I met a boy, just before he was assassinated by the CIA. Tariq Aziz was 16, a quiet young man from North Waziristan, who, like most teenagers, enjoyed soccer. Seventy-two hours later, a Hellfire missile is believed to have killed him as he was travelling in a car to meet his aunt in Miran Shah, to take her home after her wedding. Killed with him was his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan.”

Chatterjee works for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an organization that is relied on by numerous media organizations across the world. Chatterjee claims that there is no known evidence that the boys were “terrorists.”

“The final order to kill is signed allegedly by Stephen Preston, the general counsel at the CIA headquarters. What evidence, I would like to know, does Mr. Preston have against Tariq and Waheed? What right does he have to act as judge, jury and executioner of two teenage boys neither he nor his staff have ever met, let alone cross-examined, or given the opportunity to present witnesses?

It is not too late to call for a prosecution and trial of whoever pushed the button and the US government officials who gave the order: that is, Mr Preston and his boss, President Barack Obama.”

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports the following statistics on CIA drone strikes in Pakistan since the program began in 2004:

Total US strikes: 354
Obama strikes: 302
Total reported killed: 2,597-3,398
Civilians reported killed: 473-889
Children reported killed: 176
Total reported injured: 1,256-1,414

Now, I checked the Bureau’s methodology, and it is not clear to me whether they accept the Obama administration’s definition of militants when they calculate the civilian death total. Before this definition was reported by the New York Times in April, most media organizations uncritically passed along statistics about dead “militants” from the CIA. According to the Times’ story on Obama’s “Kill List,” the administration counts all “military-age males” that are killed in strike zones—meaning age 16 and above—as “militants.” If you don’t think that anyone above 16 who happens to be killed by a CIA drone strike in North Waziristan is a terrorist, then you may understand there to be a higher civilian death toll.

There have been 302 “Obama strikes,” as the Bureau puts it. We can assume, then, that Obama is directly responsible for the deaths of over 100 children during his first term, though that would be far too conservative. The number is undoubtedly higher, if you include drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia, as well as the unavoidable “collateral damage” incurred by the surge in Afghanistan.

If we trust what is considered to be a reliable source by the world’s media, then, Obama is responsible for the deaths of dozens and dozens of children, far more than were killed by Adam Lanza. While he has almost certainly never killed a child with his own hands, he has signed papers and given orders that have resulted in the death of dozens of children, at the very least.

Perhaps these were all terrible accidents. Unfortunate collateral damage of the war on terror, you may say. Still, even if this were true, we must acknowledge that Obama has an internet connection. Unless he is the most incurious person in the history of the world, he knows that the drone strikes he has ordered have killed children. It is a fact that even the CIA has acknowledged. And yet Obama continues the program.

The drone strikes have “stepped up enormously” under Obama, the Bureau tells us. And the CIA continues to bomb funerals and humanitarian rescue-workers as part of the drone program.

“The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.

The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a ‘targeted, focused effort’ that ‘has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.’

Speaking publicly for the first time on the controversial CIA drone strikes, Obama claimed last week they are used strictly to target terrorists, rejecting what he called ‘this perception we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly’.

‘Drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties’, he told a questioner at an on-line forum. ‘This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists trying to go in and harm Americans’.”

It is a documented fact that Obama is directly responsible for a program that bombs funerals and kills children. This should not be disputed.

Let us then move on to Obama’s Gettysburg Address. I’ve typed up a few of the more poignant quotes:

“In the face of indescribable violence, in the face of unconscionable evil, you’ve looked out for each other, and you’ve cared for one another, and you’ve loved one another. This is how Newtown will be remembered, and with time and God’s grace. That love will see you through.”

Obama describes the murder of 27 innocents — mostly tiny, defenseless children — as an act of “unconscionable evil.” I really do wonder what goes through his head when he reads such words on national television. Does he think about the funerals bombed on his orders? The 12-year-old Pakistani boy killed en-route to a wedding? How does he wrap his conscience around that one? Continue reading →

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15

Dec

The Elephant in the Room: Carbon Emissions and Economic Growth

Yesterday, I took the “Huffington-Post-Left” to task for urging a contradictory policy program upon President Obama and the Democrats. These worldly liberals propose that we revive robust economic growth and take action to prevent climate change. From what I can tell, these are mutually exclusive goals.

Today, I will try to justify these assertions by examining a December 2009 report by University of Michigan assistant research scientist Jose A. Tapia Granados, “Dispelling the Smoke: CO2 Emissions and Economic Growth from a Global Perspective.”

Granados examined the data on carbon emissions world-wide over the past century. His aim is to test the validity of something called the Environmental Kuznets Curve.

The Kuznets Curve is a theory about pollution and industrial development. It holds that economic growth in developed, service sector-based, post-industrial economies (such as Western Europe and the United States) is less polluting than it is in developing countries (China, Brazil, India). When the U.S. was developing during the Gilded Age, it polluted a whole lot. Now it is developed, and therefore, America’s economic growth must pollute less than it did during earlier stages of development.

The Kuznets Curve looks like a simple hill. Pollution per unit of economic production goes up until the middle, and then declines permanently.

In 1992, a famous conservative economist named Douglas Holtz-Eakin sought to demonstrate that carbon dioxide emissions—the primary cause of global warming—follow the law of the Kuznets Curve. Six years later, other economists wrote that United States’ carbon emissions per primary unit of energy consumed had peaked in 1973, and would continue to decline through 2050. If the carbon emissions application of the Kuznets theory is correct, it potentially means that the U.S. could keep growing forever (assuming there were enough resources to do so), without contributing unduly to global warming.

Granados argues that this theory is definitively false. The data shows that the historical pattern of carbon emissions for developed countries resembles an “N”-shape. Up, down, then, way back up. Not up, up, up, and then down forever, as the Kuznets Curve would have it. This would imply that developed countries are contributing just as much per unit of energy consumed to global warming as developing countries, and therefore, cannot keep growing indefinitely.

Why? Because carbon emissions are strongly correlated with economic growth throughout the 20th century. Every time there is a worldwide recession, or a recession in an individual country, the data shows that carbon emissions drop. When there is strong economic growth, carbon emissions rise exponentially.

Take the United States, which is generally a good indicator of world economic activity:

Considering the special case of the US economy, its annual rate of growth and the rate of growth of US emissions of CO2 follow each other very closely. Emissions dropped strongly in the recession of the early 1920s, but they dropped much more lastingly and deeply during the Great Depression in the early 1930s, and again in 1938, in the so-called Roosevelt recession, and again in the recessions of 1949, the mid 1970s, and the early 1980s.

There were three periods in 20th century America in which there was a negative or weak correlation between carbon emissions and economic growth: The 1910s, 1940s, and 1990s. The first two had to do-with World-War-time fuel rationing leading to decreased car sales, Granados postulates. There was a weak correlation in the 1990s because there were both high carbon emissions during the 1990 recession and low carbon emissions during the high-growth year of 1997, due to an oil price spike. This weakened the overall correlation. But carbon emissions grew at an annual rate of 1.8% in the 90’s, as opposed to .9% in the 80’s, and .6% in the 70’s.

Using carbon emissions data from 1950 onward, Granados examined the 48 nations with 20 million-plus populations in 2000, and found the exact same trend. Rising emissions during periods of growth; falling emissions during recession. In 2009, world emissions fell 1.4%. The following year, as economic growth returned, emissions grew by 5.9%.

In summary, historical evidence strongly suggests that drops in emissions have occurred in periods in which economic activities shrank, as occurred in the West in the 1930s and the 1980s and in the East in the 1990s. It shows that in periods of accelerated global economic growth like the 1950s and the 1960s, both total and per capita CO2 emissions strongly increased.

World Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Economic Growth. Courtesy of the University of Michigan.

World Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Economic Growth. Courtesy of the University of Michigan.

Granados also finds a strong correlation between carbon emissions and profits. Citing Joseph Schumpeter, Karl, Marx and Wesley C. Mitchell, he argues that profits drive our economic system. Given that the only thing propelling forward our jobless recovery is corporate profits (comprising 93% of the “recovery”), it’s hard to disagree. So not only would action on global warming decimate the profits of big, bad oil companies, it would destroy our entire way of life (not necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion).

For firms involved in extraction of fossil fuels and petroleum, any cut in emissions implies a cut in sales and, therefore, a cut in profits. This is a major reason for these firms to constitute “special interests” opposed to policies to reduce CO2 emissions. However, the coal and petroleum business interests are not the only ones seriously concerned by policies to cut emissions. The automobile industry, the transportation sector, and corporations in many other sectors of the economy would have their profits cut by any effective policy to reduce emissions.

Though with different levels of intensity, CO2 emissions are implied by almost any economic activity and almost any business, which means that, in general, policies to reduce emissions will very likely reduce business profits. Policies to cut emissions and prevent global warming will therefore very likely be opposed by business interests. Indeed, “think tanks” and “research institutes” funded by corporations and the business community have been for many years the most conspicuous skeptics of the contribution of CO2 emissions to global warming.

Indeed, our horrifyingly ugly, alienating and wasteful suburban living style is protected by powerful business interests who make lots of money off of our strip malls, highways, automobiles, cell phones, etc. Continue reading →

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14

Dec

“The Obsolescence of Left and Right”

The premise of The True and Only Heaven, Chistopher Lasch writes, is to demonstrate that the old political ideologies of left and right “have exhausted their capacity either to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action.” Given the presumed defeat of laissez-faire, the left assumed that it would be the party of the future. Welfare states would continue to grow indefinitely; capitalism would evolve into socialism.

By 1991, it was clear that the left’s zealous confidence in progress was foolishly misplaced.

Who would have predicted, twenty-five years ago, that as the twentieth century approached its end, it would be the left that was everywhere in retreat?

As a one-time man of the left, Lasch always seems to reserve the most venomous barbs for his former comrades. But he also takes the new right to task. Despite hollow promises to resurrect family values—a project dear to Lasch’s heart—the right had failed to arrest the disintegration of American culture. The right’s slavish commitment to free-market capitalism, in fact, was responsible for the ever-deteriorating conditions of American family life.

Whereas conservatives had once fought against the ideology of progress, the so-called Reagan revolutionaries, bearing the conservative mantle, had come to embrace it. Indeed, supply-side economics—the great economic “innovation” of the Reagan years—was little more than a bastardization of the progressive Keynesian economics that led to the 1964 Kennedy-Johnson tax cut.

Ritual deference to ‘traditional values’ cannot hide the right’s commitment to progress, unlimited growth, and acquisitive individualism. According to Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming, “skepticism about progress,” once the hallmark of “intellectuals identified as conservative,” has all but disappeared. “Political differences between right and left have by now been largely reduced to disagreements over policies designed to achieve comparable moral goals.” The ideological distinctions between liberalism and conservatism no longer stand for anything or define the lines of political debate.

The left and right both believe in progress, in “the desirability and inevitability of technical and economic development.” Neither has much to say about environmental limits. Both sides vehemently “repudiate the charge of ‘pessimism.’”

Neither side addresses the overriding issue of limits, so threatening to those who wish to appear optimistic at all times. The fact remains: the earth’s finite resources will not support an indefinite expansion of industrial civilization. The right proposes, in effect, to maintain our riotous standard of living, as it has been maintained in the past, at the expense of the rest of the world (increasingly, at the expense of our own minorities as well). This program is self-defeating, not only because it will produce environmental effects from which even the rich cannot escape but because it will widen the gap between rich and poor nations, generate more and more violent movements of insurrection and terrorism against the West, and bring about a deterioration of the world’s political climate as threatening as the deterioration of its physical climate.

Yikes! Lasch fashioned himself a modern-day Calvinist prophet, and I’ve got to say, that’s some prophetic doom-saying right there. How much of this has come to pass? Environmental effects from which even the rich cannot escape? Hurricane Sandy, check. Depletion of non-renewable resources? Look no further than unsustainably high commodity prices as well as the crude oil production plateau. Widening of the gap between rich and poor nations? Check. Ever more violent movements of terrorism against the West? Check. A deterioration of international politics mirroring the ever-growing climate chaos? We’ll have to wait and see on that one.

The left’s program is “equally self-defeating,” writes Lasch. Extending Western standards of living to the rest of the world will lead “even more quickly to the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources, the irreversible pollution of the earth’s atmosphere, and the destruction of the ecological system, in short, on which human life depends.” Continue reading →

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13

Dec

A Progressive Defines the Idea of Progress

After I waded through a few chapters of Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (see yesterday’s post), I began to wonder how the self-conscious defenders of progress articulate their doctrine. Fortunately, I came across a copy of Charles A. Beard’s A Century of Progress (1932). Beard was regarded as one of the leading progressive historians of the early 20th century. An ardent New Dealer and World War I cheerleader, Beard turned isolationist in the late ‘30s and became a great critic of FDR. A Century of Progress — a collection of essays championing labor rights and feminism, along with a piece celebrating machine “Industry” by Henry Ford, and an essay on “The Process of Social Transformation” by Jane Addams — was released the year before Beard was anointed as president of the American Historical Association. The collection begins with an essay, “The Idea of Progress,” which I will focus on today.

Beard begins by acknowledging the controversial nature of Progress, its status as a philosophical theory of history and political action, as well as its predictive pretenses. He then provides a succinct definition:

Briefly defined, [Progress] implies that mankind, by making use of science and invention, can progressively emancipate itself from plagues, famines, and social disasters, and subjugate the materials and forces of the earth to the purposes of the good life—here and now. In essence the idea of progress belongs to our own times, for it was unknown to the ancients and to the thinkers of the Middle Ages. It is associated, therefore, with every phase of the vast intellectual, economic, and rational movement which has transformed the classical and medieval heritage into what is called, for the sake of convenience, Western civilization.

Indeed, Progress, along with its associated forces of democracy, science, and technology, has a laudable list of accomplishments, says Beard: The eradication of diseases and starvation, the amelioration of pain, as well as the gift of modern comforts, long lives, and the vast dissemination of knowledge. It also fills us with a sense of hope that things will only get better.

Where the pessimist sees the worst, it proposes a search for the best and advances toward perfection by increments. The suffering, ignorance and folly which drive the timid to the Nirvana of doubt and oblivion are, under the light of progress, calls to action, to research, to planning, and to conquest.

Progress is a universal force. It has revolutionized nearly every society across the planet. Perhaps the planet, too, will be revolutionized—or “subdued,” whichever you like—by the forces of Progress.

Everywhere it makes its way, dissolving the feudal institutions of Europe, disturbing the slumbers of the Orient, arousing lethargic Russia, and finding a naked avowel in the United States of America: the earth may be subdued to the security, welfare, and delight of them that dwell therein.

As with religion or patriotism, Progress may be exploited by “pious frauds” or “munitions-makers.

In the hands of the demagogue or noisy promoter it may be manipulated to avoid questions and obscure doubts. And yet the idea survives its friends as well as its enemies.

Beard continues on to fully articulate why the Idea of Progress was unknown to medieval thinkers. Civilizations were thought to go through life cycles in those days past. Progress holds that with the right knowledge and technology, civilizations can just keep ascending higher and higher…

At the outset, the explorer confronts four fundamental questions which have perplexed thinkers since civilization began on this planet: Do nations, like human beings, pass through youth, middle life, and old age to death? Or do they revolve endlessly, as some ancient writers thought, in a cycle—despotism, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and mob-rule—or some such succession of forms. Or is it possible for a nation to stand still through countless ages, preserving what it believes to be an ideal arrangement of things? Or is there discernible, under the surface ebb and flow through the centuries, some stream of tendency, some organizing principle indicating the course of nations, and giving to their peoples some guiding rule by which to shape their activities and mold their lives and their institutions? Continue reading →

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12

Dec

The True and Only Heaven

Yesterday, I explained a bit about my fondness for the historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch, as well as my newfound interest in the idea of progress. Here are some questions I will try to deal with over the next few days: What is progress? Who believes in it? And why is it so important?

Lasch’s preface to The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (1991) is a good starting point. He begins with a simple question:

How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?

There are many ways of understanding the ideology of progress, but Lasch gives a basic rundown in the preface. In short, humans must infinitely increase the size of our economic systems in order to satisfy our exponentially increasing desires. Whereas medieval Christians and virtuous republicans saw civilization as a process that imitated the cycles of life—birth, middle age, death—progressives see civilization as a process of incremental material improvement that is destined to continue indefinitely into the future.

Lasch traces the idea back to the founders of 18th-century liberalism (liberalism, in the European sense), meaning Adam Smith, the philosopher-apologist of the capitalist revolution. But the ideology of progress is not simply tied to capitalism. It is the logic of industrialism. It means that humans, using the tools of scientific rationalism, can permanently subdue the forces of nature, and ultimately create ever-expanding material abundance for all.

During the Enlightenment, Lasch writes, there were utopian progressives. The forces of logic, rationalism, and technological innovation were held to be ushering in a new heaven on earth. In the postwar era, even after two world wars and a sustained flirtation with nuclear holocaust, the idea of progress lived on, albeit shorn of its most obviously utopian suggestions.

The more comforts people enjoyed, the more they would expect. The elasticity of demand appeared to give the Anglo-American idea of progress a solid foundation that could not be shaken by subsequent events, not even by the global wars that broke out in the twentieth century. Those wars, indeed, gave added energy to economic development.

Indeed, the great economic stimulus of World War II pulled America out of the Depression and into an unprecedented era of abundance. Although humanity’s great technological “advances” seemed to be pulling civilization into an ever-more precarious and dangerous position, they had also bequeathed a new era of unheard-of material wealth. Whereas utopian progressives held that the Enlightenment heralded the arrival of the True and Only Heaven, contemporary progressives (which would include both laissez-faire conservatives and Keynesian revivalists) hold that civilization will continue to climb the never-ending ladder of progress once a robust economic recovery returns.

To Lasch, the ecological crisis throws the entire project of Industrial Progress into question.  “Now that we have begun to understand the environmental limits to economic growth, we need to subject the idea of progress to searching criticism,” he writes. It should be noted that Lasch takes the limits-to-growth argument for granted; the idea is hotly disputed today, amidst soaring commodity prices, the plateau of crude oil production, disastrous climate change, worldwide economic stagnation, ever-widening income gaps, and other associated problems. If Progress is stripped of its Utopian vision, all that remains is the promise of steadily-increasing economic development. But if endless economic development now invites civilization-ending global warming, and widespread resource depletion threatens the viability of economic growth itself, what realistic hope does the ideology of progress provide beyond endless incantations about the miracles of markets and technology? Continue reading →

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11

Dec

How I Became Interested in the Ideology of Progress

Lasch 2

I have been reading Christopher Lasch for a long time. Lasch was one of the most famous American cultural critics of the late 20th century, and I first came across him when I found his most well-known book, The Cultural of Narcissism, in a cardboard box in my parents’ attic when I was a senior in high school. I devoured the book, a potent and vitriolic takedown of American capitalism and its freakish New Left “critics,” although I undoubtedly did not understand it very well. I had read Neil Postman’s jeremiad against television, Entertaining Ourselves to Death, for my junior year English class, and feverishly taken it to heart (I stopped watching TV soon after). The Culture of Narcissism seemed to impose Postman’s compelling critique of television upon the entirety of American society. I enjoyed this immensely.

The Culture of Narcissism became a bestseller when it was published in 1979. It also won the National Book Award. A few of Jimmy Carter’s advisers became enamored with the book, and Carter gave a speech that was intended to be a dumbing-down of Lasch’s argument, which is too difficult for me to quickly summarize here (the main thing you should know is that he uses “narcissism” in the clinical sense; he is not simply critiquing selfishness or self-absorption, per se). Carter implored Americans to stop living just for “things,” and to wean themselves off of oil. In the wake of years of oil shocks and persistent stagflation, the speech polled quite well. But, a few days later, Carter proceeded to fire his entire cabinet for some reason, inviting the derision of the press. This episode is now known as Carter’s “malaise” speech, and is firmly associated with Carter’s 1980 defeat in the national memory. Nobody remembers that the speech was received well, except the guy who wrote a book about the whole incident (Title: What the Heck Are You Up To Mr. President? Jimmy Carter, America’s ‘Malaise,’ and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country). These days, pundits endlessly cite the speech as evidence that the American public doesn’t want to hear the cold, hard truth about our way of life (they conflate the speech with the mass cabinet-firing). All we want is Reaganesque “optimism,” they say.

Lasch was profiled in Time magazine, and became a celebrity intellectual. As Lasch was a major critic of celebrity-culture and hero-worship, this was somewhat ironic and uncomfortable for him. Worse, he also felt that Carter had missed the point of The Culture of Narcissism, and so he wrote The Minimal Self in 1984 in order to clarify a few things. I won’t go into that complicated and fascinating book now.

So, when I was looking through the course catalog for my freshman year of college, I found a class with The Culture of Narcissism on the reading list. It was called “Psychohistory of the Modern World,” it was amazing, and the professor, Philip Pomper, became my advisor for the remainder of college.

Beyond the fact that I think he’s great, why should we care about Christopher Lasch? Nobody really remembers him anymore (he died in 1994), except the famous cultural critics of today who borrow his arguments. Like Chris Hedges and Chris Hayes. Continue reading →

11 years ago Short URL Comments

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10

Dec

Lasch, Against Progress

“The belated discovery that the earth’s ecology will no longer sustain an indefinite expansion of productive forces deals the final blow to the belief in progress. A more equitable distribution of wealth, it is now clear, requires at the same time, a drastic reduction in the standard of living enjoyed by the rich nations and the privileged classes. Western nations can no longer hold up their standard of living and the enlightened, critical, and progressive culture that is entangled with it as an example for the rest of the world. Nor can the privileged classes within the West—and these include the professional class as well as the very rich—expect to solve the problem of poverty by taking everyone into their own ranks. Even if this were a morally desirable solution, it is no longer feasible, since the resources required to sustain a new-class style of life, hitherto imagined to be inexhaustible, are already approaching their outer limit. Under these conditions, the universalistic pretensions of the new class cannot be taken seriously. Indeed they are deeply offensive, not only because they embody a very narrow ideal of the good life but because the material prerequisites for this particular form of the good life cannot be made universally available.”

–Christopher Lasch, “Progress and Its Critics,” 1991.

11 years ago Short URL 1 Comment

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