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142 comments on Cassandra's curse: how "The Limits to Growth" was demonized
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There are two other groups that are doing good work within a limits to growth model. The folks over at
www.footprintnetwork.org
and
www.rprogress.org
have done quite good work assessing the condition of fresh water, fisheries, forests, soil, etc. and have concluded that humanity crossed into overshoot sometime in the 80's. Overshoot can last only so long. It seems that we are going to bump into the limits rather soon, perhaps led by biofuels and increased food prices.
As for why the populace "spontaneously" denigrated Limits to Growth, I think a good place to look is the various discourses (long-lived, society-wide conversations) that are operating at any given moment in the network of human conversations. In fact, I assert that the response the LTG researchers got was in no way spontaneous.
Foucault distinguished various epistemes for humanity, which could loosely be thought of as "proscribed ways of thinking" and these, he said, were governed by discourses. To Foucault, we are currently living in the "things always progress" episteme, which started, I believe, at the beginning of the 19th century. A discourse will express itself in various sub-conversations. Obama's "audacity of hope" message is a variant of "things always progress." The expectation that our standard of living "should" always increase is another variant. Given that episteme/discourse (I shall use discourse herein), it's no wonder LTG was fought against.
Discourses have the effect of acting like a paradigm or context inside of which we think. Almost everything thought by most humans will have reference to or live inside of the current prevailing discourses. Some discourses live in just one society, others seem to be shared by most humans (the discourse for war seems to be global, the discourse for women's equality is specific to just a few countries). The few people who recognize the prevailing discourses and step outside of them will trigger the immune system of the prevailing discourse.
The people who express the discourse defending itself don't say to themselves, "Such and such a person is breaking the discourse." They often reason and gather evidence and make cogent arguments (or not so cogent as it happens) — all inside the discourse — all while they have no idea of the constraints that are operating on them. They don't know that the discourse is, in a very real way, using them to express itself. This doesn't negate the concept of "free will," it just means that an individual must "be woken up" by someone who teaches them that that discourses are running the show most of the time. The Eastern concept of enlightenment is merely the individual distinguishing them-self from the discourses. Just by reading this, some people will have something click that never did before and thus become "enlightened." (Others will resist what I'm saying but perhaps the seed will be planted.)
In my experience, especially when significant emotion is present, it's almost always a discourse doing the speaking; the individual and any "free will" recedes to the background.
My wife and I have fun asking ourselves: which conversation is running me right now? When I'm "plugged in" during an argument with her, it's the "I'm right, you're wrong" conversation and it takes effort to interrupt that. When we discuss money, a whole host of conversations want to take over, but the predominant one for me is "conserve in case the future brings something unknown" and I have to watch that or I won't take calculated risks.
A discourse that is arising in the world right now is the one to do with peak oil. A discourse that took a while to graduate from being just a conversation to a full-fledged discourse is "global warming."
If people respond to this comment, the perceptive reader will try to distinguish which discourses are operating. Blogs are wonderful places to study discourses.
-André
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episteme
A brilliant jewel of a post.
Connecting dots, there's also the ArchDruid:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/08/twelfth-hour.html
and Transactional Analysis
http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/ta.htm
and Apperception and Narrative
http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/LitEvol.shtml
.. which like all evolving systems, are challenged to adapt - when the bases and assumptions on which they are founded and grow - and if the change is too great they will fail to thrive.
Which underlies my realistic-assumption/pessimism about PO and GW; we seem no more able to avoid catastrophe than and ant's nest in a forest fire...
Discourse: 'me too' / 'im ok, youre ok' ;)
j
Hi, jmullee. Thanks for the kind words.
The ArchDruid post is fabulous...the author definitely was noticing discourses operating in their blog.
The Transaction Analysis post is good because it shows that conversations can be assigned an age to them. For instance, when I am emotional, my conversations tend to become quite young ("I did too leave my keys right there, you must have taken them!" — an embarrassing actual conversation).
"It's not fair" is another very young conversation that we learn very early and most of us never really let go. In fact, the concept of fairness is employed everywhere and is the basis of much legislation and generally how we interact with each other. People become quite indignant when the "it's not fair" conversation is operating them. Something being fair or not is simply a product of a prevailing discourse. The universe at its core is just doing its universe thing and it takes us humans to assign the concept of "fair" or "unfair." Without humans (more specifically, without the presence of representational language), "fair" could not exist.
Many people are going to see peak oil as "unfair" and stay at that age. For people who speak publicly about peak oil or any other serious matter that occurs as threatening to people, the job is always to lead the audience into an adult conversation before the speech is complete.
The age of conversations on blogs often becomes quite young, somewhere around the 3 to 6 year-old range. I like The Oil Drum because the age of the conversations is overwhelmingly adult (although every once in a while it does get quite young). The people conversing here, I think, are very good at keeping the conversation age high and I see them often resisting to lower the age when someone else has started down that road.
I didn't read the whole of the last link but it appears to distinguish the set of conversations that humans use as part of their identity (their concept of self), particularly as it shows up in novels and stories.
You assigned your response "me too" / "i'm ok, you're ok" (thanks for playing with me!) and it seems valid to me. Because of your comments re: our inability to avoid catastrophe, the larger discourse your comments might fit within might be "it's hopeless" or as some people have chosen to label it, "we're doomed."
That, of course, is just another discourse. :-)
-Andre'
Howdy;
From all accounts, and from a fairly wide and varied bunch of friends here in little old Ireland, our societies are basically captive to these discourses that focus on economic performance to the exclusion of practically all else.
Within my lifetime i've seen televisions supplant and eradicate a sustained culture which has probably survived on the irish western seaboard for something like 8000 years.
Archaelogical finds suggest that after the ice age, our forebears lived day to day with essentially the same equipment used by my grandparents, minus a bit of metal and finer textiles.
If 'the powers that be' - and these same powers have had the foresight to avoid investing in public transport, education and health for decades (/sarcsm) - continue to ignore anything not of immediate concern to a tiny group of undereducated postcolonial investors (who are all assured positions on the board of directors from birth), then indeed it is prudent to cost-benefit some preparations for the worst-case scenario.
These people have homes without bookshelves ! - they remind me of the migratory groups that Jared Diamond described in 'guns germs and steel' who, in adapting to the very easy life on a paradisiacal island, even lost the ability to make fire.
Editorial control of the narrative, of the consensual hallucination, has historically here in ireland been the privilege of the Fili, or druids and poets.
These days the same power lies in the hands of the 'free' press, entirely beholden to advertisers eager to appeal to the most-easily-stimulatable desires of thier selected demographic segments.
So this situation has very carefully stripped out any consideration of, or responsiveness to, anything but the bottom dollar and the quarterly result.
I even heard that G.W.Bush's administration excludes from consideration anything further away than 3 months.
The extreme feminist views of kristeva and cisoux etc, demolishing the entire patrifocal linear narrative seemed to me to be a recipie for mass psychosis (might explain the huge number of pharmacies in urban france !).
Narratives seem essential to psychological coherence, though perhaps I lack the imagination to see beyond the camp-fire-light.
I can't forsee the emergence of any force or factor sufficiently strong and coherent to cause real change in the discourse, except for the olduvai cliff itself.
TVs are still filled wall-to-wall with car and holiday adverts (last time I looked at one).
The only examples I can think of, of societies whose discourses were demolished, are those vanquished by colonising forces; think of proud, fierce and wild amazonas hunters ending up shining shoes in a slum in Rio.
Perhaps that is what is really in store for us all - an end to captivity and return to the feral state, ironically just at the point when we have captured the last remaining wild humans in the snares of consumerism.
At end also I should confess that in selecting the doomer banner to march behind, I find purpose and invigoration .. which I lacked whilst contemplating a future history comprised only of ever-more-'efficient' mass consumerism!
So, in conclusion, am I betting my kids lives that somehow Bruce Willis will turn up and compel us all to power-down to 19th century tech?
Nope.
I wouldn't miss this for all the chi in china :)
j
Andre, I wanted to thank you and note an appreciation for your posts in general and this one in particular. Well done.
"fairness" may be one of the most intransigent and harmful "monkey concepts" we have to come to grips with (and probably won't). Even among intelligent folks, "making the situation fair" is often a tacit overlay for any consideration or action. It drastically limits the rational options for action.
kudos.
You're welcome, greenish. Thanks for reading them :-).
-André
Andre - what a thoughtful post!
Last year I was having a conversation with my sister about what I call "the unsustainable growth economy" (GDP growth of 2 to 3% anually). She is an economist so she more than anyone should realize that economic growth always reaches a peak and then deminishing returns. She argued against my assertions and finally at the end of the conversation she made a plea, "I need that growth to continue because otherwise my IRA will fail to mature and I won't ever be able to retire!"
LTG is an emotional issue for people and the challenge of defusing that psycology is difficult to impossible. Simply winning an argument is a waste of time if the loser of the argument is still attached to their original beliefs.
I was one of 3 speakers at an evening set of presentations around earth day once and one of the speakers mentioned this "need for retirement accounts to grow" as one of the last arguments put forth by academics who find themselves failing to respond in any other way.
Reminds me of Andre's child talk!
Well, that's what it is. People believe in things because those things make the world make sense to them.
About three years ago I was talking to a friend with a heavy mortgage. He said it was alright because "house prices will always go up", so if the payments were too hard for him they could just sell.
"They can't go up forever," I said.
"Why not?"
"At some point the price of housing will be greater than the average family can afford."
"Oh then people will demand higher wages, wages will go up so it'll be okay."
"When incomes and prices go up together, that's called inflation, mate. If I earn $10 an hour and bread is $1, if tomorrow bread goes to $2 then my income going to $20 an hour leaves me exactly where I was, paying 10% of my income on bread."
"But... prices have to keep going up."
"Why? They might even go down. Houses are like anything else, demand is high up goes the price, demand is low down goes the price."
"House prices can't drop!"
"Why not?"
"Because then we'd be fucked. What would we do?"
Lots of people confuse the way they want things to be with the way they are :) Thus the difficulty in understanding the concept of limits to growth.
Hey André
Great comment! Foucault discources seem very similar to meme theory that I was first exposed to in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.
Jason Brenno and I at the Hubbert Tribute are uncovering startling new information about how the "things always progress" discourse has manifested itself in United States energy policy over the past six decades.
If we continue on the current trajectory of misinformation about the tightening of the oil market in major media (i.e., anything but peak), the new dominant post-peak discourse will be that the permanent energy crisis we are experiencing was a result of our not understanding energy or perhaps ignoring some obscure experts. We will likely be told that our energy policy of the past really was not an energy policy but that no one really knew what was happening at the time - that it was all just misguided, unorganized optimism and that we could not have done anything differently given the circumstances of the time. This is far from the truth.
In reality, all the information was on the table in the decade of the 1950s. Recoverable resource estimates in 1950s - which have proven to be highly accurate - indicated that we needed to be very careful with how we planned our future. Various experts including Hubbert, Pogue and Hill of Chase Manhattan Bank, and Andrew Crichton predicted that U.S. oil, natural gas, and coal resources could not possibly support a high growth economy for any reasonable length of time. A rational review of the recoverable resource estimates of the time suggests that we needed to begin a long term plan to create a sustainable society based on proven renewable energy sources.
As an example, take a look at the peak diagram that Chase Manhattan Bank's Petroleum Group put out in 1956. Hubbert was not alone in the wilderness. At least not at first.
In the stupor technological optimism, we have overestimated the value of technology and underestimated that of energy as explained by Stuart Udall's 1976 essay "Super Technology: The God that Failed" and now as you point out by Robert Hirsch.
Over the next year, The Hubbert Tribute will show that the discourse of "things always progress" has led us over the past six decades to bet our economy and future on speculative technological advances that never come to fruition. In the late 1950s, key individuals in government, think tanks, and corporations opted to use their influence and decision making capacity to forward a perpetual high-growth economy dependent on high-grade finite fossil fuels in the hopes that technology would make low-grade resources economic over time.
They believed that speculative technological advances including coal to liquids, oil shale, breeder reactors, fusion, and enhanced oil recovery would become economic in the long run, thereby justifying the continuing growth of a consumerist suburban, car-oriented way of life and fueling the development of a highly industrial globalized system for the rest of the world.
This discourse still governs a highly ineffective mainstream energy policy discussion peppered with oft-unchallenged assumptions that many of the speculative "solutions" of the past and a few newer concepts (e.g., hydrogen, cellulosic ethanol) will be able to seamlessly replace oil, capture any carbon that is emitted in the process and eventually substitute any finite fossil fuel resource when its exhaustion is imminent.
Stay tuned...