Soul of the Future: Culture of Hope (part 2)

 "To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates."

                                 Shelley

 The often lovely, blooming months from June through August 2021 were in other major respects the summer from hell—that is, the summer from the future.

 An intense heat dome clamped down on a huge chunk of the normally cool Pacific Northwest, from Oregon to British Columbia and edging into Alaska.  Portland broke its all time heat record three times in a week, topping out at 116F—hotter than the hottest day ever measured in Houston or Atlanta. Roads collapsed, trolley rails melted. Other places in Oregon and Canada were hotter than the hottest known day in Las Vegas, in the Mohave Desert.  A British Columbia town had the hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada—as hot as Death Valley.  

 In Alaska, glaciers were breaking apart so fast and violently that they were creating ice quakes as powerful as small earthquakes.  Across the region, hundreds of people died from the heat.  The heat did not end on the shore: an untold quantity of sea life perished.

 Some estimated that it was a once in several centuries phenomenon: heat that hadn’t been seen since perhaps before Europeans knew the place existed.  Another estimate put it at about 5,000 years—half the history of human civilization.  Speaking of this event’s obvious relationship to the larger crisis, climate scientist Peter Kalmus observed, “I feel like the heat dome event in the Pacific Northwest moved up my sense of where we are by about a decade or even more.”

 Also this summer a heat wave in the Middle East included temperatures in five countries that were higher than those in the Pacific Northwest event. There was historic heat in Moscow and Australia.  A heat wave across the Mediterranean included the highest daily temperature ever recorded in Europe. It was reported in July that one day’s worth of melting Greenland ice could cover the state of Florida in two inches of water. On Greenland’s highest peak that only ever saw snow, it rained.

 Globally, on land and sea, July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded in 142 years of measurement, and significantly hotter than the 20^th century average.

 Ecologist Simon Lewis was among those to warn that literally unlivable temperatures that have at times already been measured in Pakistan, the Persian Gulf and even, momentarily, in Chicago, will occur over larger areas and in new locations, and last longer, in coming decades.  

 

The 2021 summer heat led to titanic fires in California and 11 other western states, as well as in Siberia, Greece and Italy. Many of these fires are so huge and hot that they create their own fiery tornadoes, their own thunder and lightning, as they burn through forests and fields, farms and towns, for months. Some are burning still, not so far away, as I write this in October.

 The summer heat also deepened ongoing droughts around the world.  In Colorado, the largest reservoir in the US declared the most severe water shortage in its 90 year existence.  In California, some rivers dried before they reached the sea, and major species of salmon face extinction.

 Historically heavy rains and floods shocked Germany and Belguim, China and India, as well as London and several cities in the U.S. in July.  At the end of August, on the anniversary of the devastating hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans, the even stronger hurricane Ida became only the third category 4 in history to make landfall in Louisiana: one in 1856, and one last year.  Even after weakening it carried heavy rains on an unusual inland path, causing flash flooding in places like Pittsburgh before flooding New York City subways and killing families in their basement apartments.  FEMA’s director noted that recent hurricanes have formed faster, become larger and more destructive.

 This hurricane—not likely to be the last of the season—further demonstrated the deadpan truth that began a report in the New York Times in July by Somini Sengupta: “The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it.”

 The summer brought additional news of forests being slaughtered in the Amazon and Indonesia at record or near-record rates, of a crash in the global population of insects (up to 75%) upon which bigger animals and fish depend, of growing dead zones in the oceans, and of scientists worried that the North Atlantic ocean current and the Gulf Stream have slowed down—the doomsday scenario of The Day After Tomorrow.

 In the midst of this, portions of the sixth assessment report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were leaked and then issued—perhaps the last such report, one scientist observed, that might make any difference, because if the world doesn’t act on this one, there may not be time to prevent the worst in the farther future. 

 For as this summer shows, the future is already happening.  Agence France-Presse summarized the report’s findings: “Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions...Species extinction, more widespread disease, unlivable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas—these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30.”

 “The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21 century unfolds. But dangerous thresholds are closer than once thought, and dire consequences stemming from decades of unbridled carbon pollution are unavoidable in the short term.”

 According to the IPCC report, “we need transformational change operating on processes and behaviors at all levels.” To put it another way, 14,000 scientists from 151 countries signed off on a study that predicted “untold suffering” for humanity if it does not successfully address the climate emergency.

 But at least in the United States, thanks to ego-driven partisan politics, and the heavy influence of gigantic fossil fuel corporations, prospects for any substantial immediate action seemed dim.  Meanwhile, the public response remains largely divided between benumbed desperation and angry, self-righteous denial.  The denial is not surprising, as the damage becomes obvious.  It’s very hard to admit that this society has contributed mightily to ongoing self-destruction that could make the atom bomb look like less than a firecracker.

 The future, almost by definition, is always uncertain. But the dominant context of human life in the next decades is becoming painfully obvious.  And what happens in those decades looks like it will determine whether human civilization has more of a future.

 So where are the grounds for hope?  From a philosophical or conceptual point of view, hope presupposes a situation that has something wrong with it.  Otherwise there would be no need to hope for a better future. 

 Hope becomes an issue, and tends to arise, when things are very bad.  Before he became President of his country, Vaclev Havel was a playwright and activist in  communist Czechoslovakia who was jailed for expressing his dissent.  He championed a particular view of hope.

  “...the kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison),” he wrote in Disturbing the Peace, “ I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.  Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.  Hope is not prognostication.  It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.” 

 There are those (such as the British author John Gray) who see this current self-destruction as inevitable, because of the imperatives of the “selfish gene” driving  evolution. But the orientation represented by Havel  may be at least partly based on a rejection of this rigid and mechanistic view.

 "To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic,” writes American historian and activist Howard Zinn, in the concluding paragraphs of his 1994 book, You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train.  “It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.”

  “What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives,” Zinn continues.  “If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.  If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”

 “ And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future.  The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

For Zinn and for others, to hope is to act.  Hope as an emotion is insufficient.  It may even be unnecessary.  What makes hope is action.  Hope is enacted.  Hope for the future is not  primarily how you feel or don’t feel: hope is what you do.

 Those of us winding up our lives may continue to contribute to that future.  There’s a lot of bullshit out there characterizing and mostly maligning the Baby Boom generation, and these projections and over-generalizations verge on slander.  The activist element of the huge boomer generation was always a minority, but those that remain may still direct their resources to the future.  Activists Bill McKibben and Akaya Windwood recently published a piece in the Los Angeles Times calling upon progressive boomers to once again step up, perhaps through the organization they co-founded called Third Act.  “But older people too can be catalysts for deep change...If enough of the 70 million of us who passed the six-decade mark join it, then we’ve got a chance.  We’ve done it before.” 

But it is the young who have the greatest stake in the future because they will live it, as will their children. So it is crucial that they realize that hope is created by the choices they make.

 A recent article in the Guardian is headlined: “No point in anything else’: Gen Z members flock to climate careers.”  “ Survey after survey shows young people are not just incorporating new climate-conscious behaviors into their day-to-day lives—they’re in it for the long haul.  College administrators say surging numbers of students are pursuing environmental-related degrees and careers that were once considered irresponsible, romantic flights of fancy compared to more ‘stable’ paths like business, medicine, or law.”

 But environmental careers are just part of enacting hope.  There are choices within choices: within medicine, public health and treatments for climate-related ills; within law, environmental law is very important, as global impetus grows for giving legal standing to the environment and the future itself.

 Though business is more likely to be a self-deceptive choice, Kim Stanley Robinson has argued for the necessity of changing the global financial structure in order to address the immense scope and variety of the climate emergency.

 There are choices within the sciences, where research remains a source of hope. The arts need to free themselves from consumerism and apply themselves to reality on all levels. And effectively expressing what needs to be done really, really needs to be done.

 This commitment to hope in action begins basically with a rejection, stated or not, of predominant values: making and spending money as the object and activity and priority of life.  There is no financial stability in a world that is cooking itself. 

  Without becoming unrealistically one-sided, it may mean rejecting the very idea of career, replacing it with vocation—the commitment to use personal talents to be of use, to contribute. 

 As President Obama was leaving the presidency, he spoke to his last group of White House interns. He advised them to get beyond career goals, because ultimately the opportunities are often a matter of luck, of happenstance.  He told them instead to emphasize not what they wanted to be, but what they wanted to do.

  “Be kind, be useful, be fearless,” he told them. I think I would change “fearless” to “brave.”  But otherwise, I can’t think of a better formula for hope for the future. We can live with the future in mind, but we live only our own lifetime.  We can only decide how to live.

That's also why it's important to note that President Obama started out his advice with "Be kind."  Hope's reality in the world is what we do, but also what we are.  How we live is partly action--what do we choose, among the choices we have?  But it is also how we are, to ourselves and others.

A few years ago I was talking about the prospects for the future in the context of the climate emergency with some high-powered tech industry people in their 20s and 30s.  One of them saw it as a race--can the climate future be addressed effectively before it is too late to make enough of a difference?  It is a race--and the truth of the near future is that it will remain a race for decades while no one knows whether it is being won or lost.  There is too much of a time lag between cause and effect. So for the foreseeable future, the reality is the race, and the race is the reality.  

 For whatever the future holds, at least for the next several decades, people are going to live in it.  That future will be their present.  In some respects, maybe many respects, life may be harder.  But it could also be more exciting, more enlivening.   

That’s also where courage comes in: facing the apparent hopelessness, and facing down those who insist on giving up, on living without integrity and love for each other, for the future and the life of the planet.  “”Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present,” wrote Ursula Le Guin, “to live as responsible beings among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need to found our hopes upon.”

I've been promising to end this series, which I will do with the next post, plus an appendix/bibliography.

Soul of the Future: Culture of Hope (Part 1): Science as Salvation

“In the act of searching out the future, Home sapiens crosses the frontiers of the unknown and is transformed from the man of action, who responds in the moment, to the man of thought, who takes account of the consequences of his actions.”

 Fred Polak

The Image of the Future

  In stories about fatal threats to the future—especially movies, at least before the superhero epics—the future is most often saved not by military force or dithering politicians but by science. (Though prominent scientists often laugh at the lone scientist who predicts the danger or offers the solution.)

 So can science save the real future, particularly against the ruinous threats to civilization and planetary life as we know it, namely the climate emergency and mass extinction? 

Some recent books—including fictions—suggest that it might.  In at least three novels, Kim Stanley Robinson suggests various technologies that can be applied to specific elements of the climate crisis, most recently including a formerly feared favorite of “geo-engineering” technological fixes, the artificial cooling of the atmosphere by injecting particles to mimic the effects of the dust layer created by a giant volcano.  (It’s a technique that one of those earlier novels seemed to dismiss as causing devastating unintended consequences.)

 But KSR and others do not claim that technological fixes alone can possibly prevent global heating or its consequences far into the future. Such efforts could possibly help, temporarily, and may be necessary, but there must also be fundamental economic, political and cultural change, because otherwise the job won’t get done.  It’s just too big, and complicated.

 Many people automatically turn toward science and technology for last-minute solutions.  Many of the measures to address the climate emergency proposed so far involve technologies, especially clean energy systems, but also carbon capture and various other schemes.  Other proposals include or assume the participation of science, such as robust public health systems and medical treatment for heat-related conditions.

 But at least in the United States there does not appear to be a consensus, or even the extent of agreement that existed within western societies a generation or two ago, that science is the answer, or even that science has proved there is a question.

  Globally but especially in America, attitudes towards science are dangerously stratified.  One side rejects the scientific consensus that identifies the climate emergency, accusing the scientific establishment of systematic lying for institutional and personal gain, for a political agenda, and for even more sinister motives.  On climate as well as the Covid-19 global pandemic, alternative explanations and conspiracies are vociferously asserted.  But it all is clearly part of a larger, deeply adversarial group position that is most often expressed as political.

 This position is identified as anti-science, and so the other side digs in to defend “science” against all criticism.  “Trust the science” has become an adversarial mantra and motto.

 But not all science—or the products of science-- can be trusted, as history shows. Yet those not wishing to find themselves allied with creationists and anti-vaxxers cannot criticize “the science” even when conclusions, procedures or even institutions warrant such criticism, or at least scrutiny.

 Does “science” even exist as much more than a polite fiction?  There is a scientific method, there are ideals of how science should be conducted, and there are scientists and institutions that sponsor, conduct and regulate the work of scientists.  But as shorthand, “science” can be deceptive and unproductive.

 Indeed there are images of “science” in the public mind, with a complex of emotions attached, from awe and admiration to suspicion and fear.  Often these two contrary reactions are held simultaneously in some proportion or other, as expressed in science fiction movies of the 1950s discussed earlier in this series.  Science unlocked the unearthly power of the atom, and science was often called upon to protect humanity from its monstrous consequences.  In this way, science takes on the ambiguous and mysterious power of gods.

 The nature of science is even obscured by the heroic stories that illustrate its ideals. We have this image of the scientific thinker dreaming up theories or following their curiosity in lab experiments, and coming up with an immense general discovery. Then after it is finally if tentatively accepted, others busy themselves applying this discovery to practical ends—to processes and products that have an important and usually lucrative function in the society of the day.

 Sometimes this is more or less true.  But the story obscures a larger point: much if not most science, even the most theoretical, is supported and undertaken with some practical end in mind.  Science is not about discovering how the universe works; it is about discovering how the universe works in order to achieve human ends.  Science is about learning things primarily in order to do things.

 These ends historically have mostly been military advantage or economic gain, though ultimately, it’s been both together.  The laws of physics were investigated on the payroll of rulers interested in the effectiveness of weapons: in how to make their archers more efficient, or where to place their guns or deploy their forces, or build better defenses. Other discoveries were paid for so that one seafaring nation could gain an advantage in global trade by navigating better, or building faster and bigger ships.  And so on.

 The industrial revolution saw an immense increase in the number of people employed in science and engineering, because industry needed them—to mine ores better, refine them better, to build better machines and manufacturing processes.  English industry encouraged the government to expand educational opportunities (including the new university that H.G. Wells attended) and extend them to the lower classes to find the scientific diamonds in the rough, and to provide a scientifically literate layer of technicians.  It wasn’t until then that the word “scientist” even existed, and it was coined to describe these technicians.  Since then, the connection between science and consumer products has not only been obvious--it's proudly shouted in their advertising.

 The point is that science was always oriented towards what it could enable people to do, and that was usually to expand economic activity through machinery and processes, while fixing people up (always the rich at first) when they broke.  This was the triumph of science, and one of its weaknesses, for knowledge that didn’t fit into the science of making things go just got ignored.

 Despite the imagery, science was practical. Chemistry was clearly practical. There was some patience for science that wasn’t obviously going to pay off right away, but might eventually pay off big.  Geology was a bit that way, though its relationship to mining was there from the beginning of it as a science.  Biology was more that way perhaps. The scientific knowledge that could improve weather forecasting had obvious benefits, especially to seafaring nations, for instance.  But there was leeway, because highly useful knowledge sometimes came from unlikely inquiries.

 So some scientists—not many, not particularly well funded, and not generally listened to-- managed to study the Earth’s atmosphere and how chemicals released into the air could affect it.  Eventually they would be among the first to give science a new practical function: to save civilization from destroying itself and the stability of the living Earth. 

 Unfortunately, this crossed purposes with most science: the expansion of human manipulation of the environment, and the unfettered exploitation of the Earth’s resources.  That's primarily what they were paid to do, and by extension, paid to think about.  It was the way they were institutionally biased to look at the world. 

 Not surprisingly, scientific findings that don’t support the interests of those who pay the scientists did often get suppressed, ignored or changed.  Some scientists skewed findings to support their employers’ interests.

 This does not negate all scientific findings. The main scientific findings on climate are so thoroughly proven in so many ways by so many scientists over so many years that they are as solid as science gets.  But it’s all more complicated than “believe the science.” 

 Knowledge or observations got ignored also because, in order to make things go, even in very complex machines and processes, the science had to be pretty simple.  Of course, starting from scratch, the progress was prodigious.  Still, for most of human history scientists learned how to do very basic stuff, including how to treat the ailments of the body that responded to gross mechanical interventions.  

 This kind of science is pretty straightforward on how to address the climate emergency.  Attack the causes of global warming by stopping greenhouse gases from polluting the atmosphere.  Build non-greenhouse gases polluting systems to meet energy requirements. Address the ongoing effects of global heating and the climate emergency. 

 There are known technologies and systems to do all of this, though new technologies can make these efforts more widespread and efficient.  Some of these technologies may employ biological and chemical as well as grossly mechanical means.  Some may be ingenuous and subtle.  They may be large projects on massive scales, or very many small projects.

 But there are now other components to science just beginning to become useful.  The 20^th century brought us relativity, quantum physics and chaos theory. Part of what makes them different is that they are all more or less incomprehensible, even to experts, but scientists have figured out some uses based on them, because the math works. Nobody really understands quantum physics, but quantum mechanics is usefully worked out, and today’s computers would be impossible without it.  There is the hope of new science as well as new technologies.

 Involved in practically all efforts to address the climate emergency is the relatively new and rapidly evolving science of ecology, and related insights into systems behavior and complexity.  While not itself a science, the concern for the future that is wedded with evolutionary and ecological insights is an essential underpinning, as well as ancient wisdom that was a mixture of insight and observation, such as the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee: “In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation to come.”

 Arguably, ecological insights have already changed science, from concentrating on doing things to include examining the possible consequences of doing those things.

  But it is society that must engage these efforts to address the climate emergency, which involve politics and economics, and ultimately culture.  So far, movement towards action has not been fast enough or large enough to prevent the first devastation of the climate emergency, which will likely grow and cascade for some decades to come. 

Some of those who don’t believe humanity will meet this challenge—and there are many—suggest only a fundamental change in humanity itself will make the difference.  Such a possibility has been the theme of science fiction.  For example, a sudden evolutionary change, a genetic mutation either created by aliens or naturally, appears in the work of Arthur C. Clarke, Greg Bear and Doris Lessing, among others.

 Still other stories involve deliberate genetic manipulation, from major enhancements or changes to more subtle effects on thinking and behavior, as in everfree, the concluding novel of Nick Sagan’s apocalyptic/utopian trilogy. Most recently, such changes are the result of neurofeedback therapy in Richard Powers’ near-future novel Bewilderment.

 Among others who believe humanity is not yet capable of dealing with environmental crises and their cascading global effects, there are those who turn to science and technology for salvation according to their particular hopes and fears.  Some see humans transplanting to other planets as the only hope for the future.  Some see a humanity weakened by crisis becoming subsumed by the artificial intelligence beings it has created. And some hold both views.

 Science fiction stories and other forms of imagining alternative futures have presented intriguing possibilities and fostered many insights into the present and the past as well as the future, but care must be taken that they are not seized upon as literal predictions or even possibilities.  

There’s a rich tradition of stories about robots and artificial intelligence, as well as humans living on other planets.  But although they represent fruitful story premises, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson argues that neither is a real possibility for our future. In his view, science doesn’t support the likelihood of artificial intelligence beings surpassing humans in the foreseeable future, though science does suggest that humans cannot survive for long on other planets without at least periodic contact with the biology of the Earth.  “There is no Planet B.”

 The climate crisis has been shaping up for some time to be the ultimate challenge of humanity’s ability to take the next evolutionary step in consciousness by marshaling forces to ascertain and confront a crisis of an unprecedented kind not yet obviously occurring in front of our eyes.  The evidence now in front of our eyes is that it hasn’t met this challenge, and if our civilization hasn’t run out of time already, it probably will soon.

 We may yet turn more urgently to science for our salvation, and it may help, but it alone won’t save the future.  It is a tool, and still a fairly blunt one.  It allows us to do some things well.  But even when it works as well and as ethically as it ideally can, it is still too simple-minded to match reality.  We need other resources, even to know how to use science well.  We need to be better people, perhaps starting with greater humility. 

I had some correspondence with Nick Sagan after he’d published everfree.  I questioned whether genetic intervention was necessary for people to change.  He said he’d had the same discussion with his father, Carl Sagan.  Nick’s view of human nature was that humans  couldn’t (or wouldn't) change on their own, but his father argued they could. 

 Many social visionaries have called for or predicted a relatively sudden change of consciousness, or what Star Trek’s Captain Picard called an “evolved sensibility,” without sudden biological change or the intervention of genetic or other technologies.  It’s been called the Great Turn or the Great Turning and so on. 

 Is it possible?  Those of us who remember the omnipresent ashtrays of the 1950s know that deeply entrenched cultural phenomena can change relatively quickly.  The scale of necessary change is indeed daunting, but as Ursula K. Le Guin suggested, “ We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.”  

There is change in the world now—in awareness, political will, as well as in science and technologies—though it all does not seem to be enough. Chaos theory however suggests that small changes can eventually induce large ones, beyond our ability to predict.  The principle is simple enough, when we consider that seed money in the present can turn out to have vast consequences for the world of the future.  But we must return to one of our basic definitions of the future: it is what hasn’t happened yet.

 Yet there are aspects of the future we can be pretty sure of.  And while many possibilities exist, hope in the future doesn’t depend on any of them.  It does not even depend on believing in any of them. More on that  in the next—and last—post in this series.

What Else Can Happen Here

As we watch with half-averted eyes ("Bah, the latest news, the latest news is not the last") the bitter slog of the Unnamable, a moment to note what we are not seeing, that we are no longer seeing...

The news was everywhere in the 1970s and 1980s and well into the 90s of the daily violence and intractable conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.

It was rebellion, insurrection, guerrilla war, terrorism, ethnic violence, international intrigue and angry political controversy on several continents, all in one.

Known as "The Troubles" it resulted in bombings, shootings and other violence, especially once the UK installed troops in the most violent areas.  Some 3,500 people were killed according to official statistics.

The Catholic minority claimed economic and political oppression, and demanded that the North, which was majority Protestant and part of the United Kingdom, be joined to the Republic of Ireland to the south (majority Catholic) in a single independent state.

Those of us exposed to the news of those days saw these images on TV screens nearly every day.  The Troubles spawned countless movies and TV episodes that dramatized what was clearly intractable conflict on the order of the other great source of violence in those days, the deadly enmity between Arabs and Israelis.

 It was a war of two sides, each demanding absolute loyalty. For those involved it was us against them, with mutually exclusive demands: either/or.  Each took a position that ceded nothing to the other side; each side demanded complete victory.

There were many cease-fires that never seemed to hold.  It all seemed hopeless, especially as it reflected ethnic histories and loyalties.

And then, it vanished.

It vanished off the nightly news, the television and movie screens.  For after talks led to dramatic agreements (that few believed would hold), it entered a long period of undramatic negotiation. Today this intractable conflict is all gone, due to a series of far-reaching agreements that involve a very much changed Republic of Ireland.

Belfast City Hall today

The absolute first thing to notice about this is: a viciously violent conflict between two enemies with roots in history and economics that seemed to have no peaceful solution, has been peacefully solved by the two parties themselves.  And neither side lost, and both sides won.

The second is the how, which involves creativity, complexity and diversity, to solve the underlying problems.  It even involved accepting paradox.

  Britain maintained Northern Ireland is part of the UK, but allowed it to go its own way.  The Republic of Ireland gave up its territorial claims on the North, and entered into agreements with the North that made the two Irelands functionally interdependent.  In a fascinating essay in the New York Review of Books, Fintan O'Toole writes:

"This reciprocal withdrawal of territorial claims has recreated Northern Ireland as a new kind of political space—one that is claimed by nobody. It is not, in effect, a territory at all. Its sovereignty is a matter not of the land but of the mind: it will be whatever its people can agree to make it. And within this space, national identity is to be understood in a radically new way."

"In its most startling paragraph the Belfast Agreement recognizes “the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose.” It accepts, in other words, that national identity (and the citizenship that flows from it) is a matter of choice. Even more profoundly, it accepts that this choice is not binary. If you’re born in Northern Ireland, you have an unqualified right to hold an Irish passport, a British passport, or each of the two. Those lovely little words “or both” stand as a rebuke to all absolutist ideas of nationalism. Identities are fluid, contingent, and multiple."

Ireland's new Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, son of an
immigrant from India, and openly gay

These agreements were ratified by large majorities in both countries. It helps as well that both countries--particularly the Irish Republic--are much more ethnically diverse than they were.

Today Ireland is in the news for a very different reason (apart from being the absurd target of a hurricane.)  The "Irish problem" in 2017 is prompted by Brexit.  The UK as a whole--though it was mostly Great Britain--voted to leave the European Union.  But Ireland, North and South, doesn't want to leave.  O'Toole:

"Ireland has evolved a complex and fluid sense of what it means to have a national identity while England has reverted to a simplistic and static one. This fault line opens a crack into which the whole Brexit project may stumble."

The nub of the Brexit problem is this:

"When these ideas were framed and overwhelmingly endorsed in referendums on both sides of the Irish border, there was an assumption that there would always be a third identity that was neither Irish nor British but that could be equally shared: membership of the European Union. In the preamble to the agreement, the British and Irish governments evoked “the close co-operation between their countries as friendly neighbours and as partners in the European Union.” The two countries joined the EU together in 1973 and their experience of working within it as equals was crucial in overcoming centuries of animosity."

I'm not going into the Brexit weeds on this--O'Toole is the better guide--but instead I point out a certain resonance, if not model.  I hear it said that the United States is still the most diverse country in the West, and demographically that diversity is growing. Yet we are in the political grip of the either/or, of two sides divided by ideology, world view, economics, education, geography and especially history and its relationship with ethnic and other identities.

 One flashpoint is immigration. There are lurches left and right all over the world prompted by immigration, as either causing real problems or as a hot button distracting from what's really causing the problems, or very likely both.

Sooner or later, a lot of "boths" ("Those lovely little words 'or both'") are going to define themselves beyond the either/ors.  The US may not get to that particular later, but it's possible. It might even come sooner.

We know it's possible because others have arrived there.  Which is why we're not seeing gunfire on the streets of Belfast anymore.

Big Ideas

In one last late night look at a few news sites for a sense of what Friday morning's stories might be, I happened on a live TV feed from Stockholm, announcing the Nobel Peace Prize.  It went to an organization, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, known as ICAN.

By the time I checked my usual list of news sites on late Friday afternoon, there was no trace of the story on most of their front pages, including the NY Times and Washington Post, nor on the Google aggregator.  The Guardian, which had followed the announcement with a live blog for its UK and European readers, had its story buried deep in the front page weeds.  Even the BBC, which had room for butterflies and pandas, didn't front page it.

The only US site I saw that had a story was the New Yorker, with Robin Wright's report entitled The Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Anti-Bomb Idealists. Though the piece itself is informative, the tone of the headline and the opening sentence ("The dreamers won") seem dismissive.  It is after all an organization that works with nearly 500 other non-governmental groups in 101 countries, and scored a success with a UN treaty banning nuclear weapons, currently being ratified by the more than 120 nations that voted for it.  "Anti-Bomb Activists" might seem more appropriate and less condescending. But then again, ICAN's budget is a meager one million dollars a year.

If the sneer that seems implied is discounted, the active representation of this ideal is precisely why the group deserves the award.  They are advocating for an idea, a Big Idea, and it is with such big ideas that nearly every step forward in civilization has begun.

The ideas come first, and then stated in some major way, and a society embraces them.  In American history, it was the bold idea that we are all created equal, appearing in the Declaration of Independence as the primary rationale for a new and self-governing nation.

Once these ideas are so embraced, they become accepted standards that seem to have always existed.  They also make hypocrisy possible when people and nations don't live up to them and businesses find creative ways of circumventing them, which leads to outrage, condescension and cynicism, as well as activism and change.

That we are all equal under the law was not a given, not even an idea or an ideal, for much of western history alone.  Now we have arguments about whether lots of money makes you more equal than others even in court, but we wouldn't have that or any other argument unless the principle existed, and was enshrined in our highest laws.

Slavery was a legal and accepted business practice for much of American history. At one time, the idea that it is wrong was a new idea that was met with fierce opposition as well as condescension.  It was outlawed in England, and in the midst of a war in which it was the primary issue, the Emancipation Proclamation began the process of ending it in America.

A great deal has followed from that idea, based on human equality, and it has echoed through our age, from civil rights to the end of legal discrimination based on sexual orientation.  The idea has not been fully applied, obvious retrenchment is being attempted today, just as new forms of slavery have arisen and spread all over the world.  But slavery and racism and other forms of discrimination are no longer accepted as legitimate.  They are societially shameful.

In the 20th century a new idea painfully emerged: the world.  International treaties began to codify rights and relationships among nations not based on empire or any coercion.  An international organization formed and for the first time, lasted and grew to a global organization: the United Nations.  It promoted some awfully big ideas.

One was universal human rights, beyond the borders of any one nation. Together with others in England,  H.G. Wells, who made the case for world government throughout his long career, devoted the last years of his life to the cause of codifying such rights--which had never been done before--and insisting that the international body that would be formed at the end of World War II formally adopt them.

Others (among them, Eleanor Roosevelt) negotiated such a document, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was considered by the UN in 1946, its first year of existence, and formally adopted in 1948.  It is the basis for further codifications and declarations, and of UN policies and actions, such as those that the UN and member states took to end apartheid in South Africa, and in so doing, end that idea as a normal right of the state.

But as Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, noted in awarding the Peace Prize to ICAN on Friday morning, one of the UN's very first resolutions in 1946 was to establish a commission to deal with the problems of atomic energy, including nuclear weapons.  The historic treaty in the 1960s banning atmospheric nuclear tests led to a complete cessation of such tests.  And as Reiss-Andersen also noted the non-proliferation treaties of the 1970s committed nuclear nations to eventual nuclear disarmament.

The 2017 UN resolution legally binds the signatories to prohibit nuclear weapons completely, with 123 nations voting in favor of it.  None of the nuclear nations or their close allies were among them, but the idea has been stated and supported by a majority of world governments.  It means something a bit more than a dream.  It sets a standard that every nation must deal with.  Nuclear weapons, like chemical weapons, are outside the norms of current civilization.

Such ideas, even when officially stated at the highest levels, and even when enshrined in law, can be violated, and often are.  But we don't call laws against murder no more than addled idealism by naive dreamers just because people continue to kill each other.  Not even when they get away with it.

Another big example of a big idea is war itself.  Louis Menand wrote a New Yorker piece called What Happens When War is Outlawed.  It begins with a little known international treaty, eventually signed by every significant nation in the world, that outlawed war between nations as an instrument of policy.  It was the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War.

It has been completely lost to history, Menand notes, principally because the last nations signed it in 1934, just a few years before the largest war in human history began.  So once again, at best, an embarrassingly naive expression of misplaced idealism (like the celebrated 1939 New York Worlds Fair), if not cynical to begin with.  A hard-headed realist Cold War foreign policy expert called it "Childish, just childish." Certainly ineffective.

But was it really?  Menand points out:

"And yet since 1945 nations have gone to war against other nations very few times. When they have, most of the rest of the world has regarded the war as illegitimate and, frequently, has organized to sanction or otherwise punish the aggressor. In only a handful of mostly minor cases since 1945—the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014 being a flagrant exception—has a nation been able to hold on to territory it acquired by conquest."

The rest of the piece goes into various contributing reasons why this has been so, the most recent of which is globalization, when international trade is too essential to disrupt with warfare.  But my conclusion would include the very fact of the spread of the big idea represented by that treaty outlawing war, which is that war is no longer considered to be a normal, legitimate instrument of policy.  Whereas for centuries before, it was.

The latest Big Idea to emerge in a big way was expressed in the Paris climate agreement.  For the first time in human history, official representatives of nearly every human on the planet agreed to take responsibility for fixing what humanity had done to destroy that planet.

 Like every other such statement, the actual accord may be flawed and not immediately effective, and backsliding will occur.  But the response to its rejection by the current White House incumbent by other nations as well as states, cities, businesses and citizens of the US shows it is still a powerful Big Idea, inspiring passion and determination.

The idea is now Big, and humanity has agreed on it.  It may well happen that the damage to the planet will doom civilization and the Earth as we know it before humanity can fully live up to this idea.  But even in the event of that ultimate tragedy, there is at least this expression of the best in humanity and human civilization.

We have enough evidence of human weakness and evil to tempt all of us to consider these as the essence of human nature.  We have to remind ourselves that, just as individual humans do exhibit such contrary traits as goodness, intelligence, courage, kindness, fairness and self-sacrifice, human civilization has had some awfully good Big Ideas and they have changed things for the better.  The Nobel Peace Prize shines a light on one of the most important of those Big Ideas today.

Snowflakes

That I am way behind a lot of popular culture is not news.  Neither is the fact that I don't much care.  But sometimes, something interesting, or even halfway significant, catches up with me.  Like this new meaning of "snowflake."

I saw it used twice in contexts I didn't understand in one Internet sift, so I looked it up.  Merriam-Webster characterizes it as "a disparaging term for a person who is seen as overly sensitive and fragile."

Its origin (according to M-W) is another tipoff as to why I wasn't familiar with it."In the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. elections it was lobbed especially fiercely by those on the right side of the political spectrum at those on the left."

These days it tends to be used (and not just by the far right) in context of the easily offended on college campuses, and the culture of trigger words, micro-aggressions and speech that makes people "feel uncomfortable."  Sensitive snowflake is the usual combination.

Thus the Wiktionary definition (#4):"Someone who believes they are as unique and special as a snowflake; someone hypersensitive to insult or offense, especially a young person with politically correct sensibilities."

It is now used however against the right and its own sensitivity to criticism, as by Jonathan Chiat who referred to the current regime in Washington as the Snowflake Administration.  The Urban Dictionary definition turns it around completely and aims it at the alt.right "whose immense white fragility causes a meltdown when confronted with the most minute deviation from orthodox White Supremacy." This connects it to a 19th use, when "snowflake" meant whites who opposed the abolition of slavery.

And of course, somebody (at the Atlantic in this case) applied it to both sides and dubbed the entire country A Nation of Snowflakes.

Today's use is also age-based. M-W again: "There were glimmers of this use in the decade and a half that preceded that election, but the meaning at first was a bit softer, referring mostly to millennials who were allegedly too convinced of their own status as special and unique people to be able (or bothered) to handle the normal trials and travails of regular adult life."

M-W traces this use back to the cult movie (and book) Fight Club in the late 90s.  It also reminds me of the 2003 musical Avenue Q which ran for six years on Broadway and several more elsewhere in New York, as well as being produced elsewhere in subsequent years (in Eureka, for instance.)  It was in large part a satire on Sesame Street, bemoaning the contrast between the happy positive messages Sesame Street gave Millennials as children, and the hard world they faced out of college.  It turns out, they sang, that they aren't unique and special as a snowflake.

Obviously a lot of people liked this hit show (though I pretty much hated it) and that sentiment has fed into the negative portrayal of the Millennial generation.  I don't want to get into a war of generations, or generational stereotypes.  My purpose is bringing the subject up is to take it back to individuals. Individuals who are unique snowflakes.

Now I recognize that there are ways in which all assholes are the same, or else we wouldn't recognize them as such.  And I recognize that culture, especially popular culture tends to enforce sameness, very powerfully for the generations who've grown up with social media and smart phones.  (There's even the assertion that smartphones have already destroyed a generation.)

But I found in my years of interviewing people that there was something unique about all of them.  This especially became obvious when I talked to them about their work.  Some people, however, are obviously remarkable and unique, and they ought to be celebrated.

Some of them are young.  I know of two young women who grew up in this community who have done immense good for people in some of the harshest conditions on the planet.  (One of them was on the cover of Time as a Person of the Year.)

I know of others who approach their lives and careers with intelligence, very good questions and an open heart.  And there are those who come to my attention through the media who impress me.  One of these is Raianna Brown, who was briefly famous in that Internet evanescent sort of way when a photo of her in cheerleader uniform taking a knee in protest at a Georgia Tech football game went viral.  (Photo at the top.)

What's especially impressive is that while the reposted photo turned heads last week during the NFL protests and contortions, it was originally posted to no acclaim at all last year, which is when she felt moved to protest.  I also learned from this story how thoughtful and articulate she is, and how impressive.

Although many protests involve others--with some involving many others--it is an individual decision to participate.  Protests in America, particularly racial protests, always are met with rabid opposition and are rarely popular, as Ta-Nehisi Coates proves in a new essay.  This includes the original March on Washington in 1963, now universally celebrated and treated with reverence, though those of us who took part in it knew that 60% of the country viewed it unfavorably at the time, according to one poll, although at times it felt more like 75%.

In this case Raianna Brown protested completely alone, though because of who she is, she had explained what she was going to do and why, and had her coach's support.  She knew she would get criticism, but in addition to making a stand, she wanted to start a discussion.

Young people like Raianna Brown give me hope, not just for what she did but for the character and quality of her thought that comes through her words.  She is special.  She is unique, and should inspire others to explore and cultivate their unique opportunities for being in the world and contributing to a better future.

Only when young people believe in their integrity as individuals can they have the confidence to participate to the best of their unique abilities.  Sesame Street was not wrong, about a lot of things, and certainly about this.

Courage

The media headline from President Obama's speech accepting this year's Profiles of Courage award from the JFK Library inevitably was his defense of Obamacare, and his call for members of Congress to display courage in supporting its substance. The quotes were largely accurate and obviously President Obama knew what the headline was going to be, but these were only a few lines in the speech, and missing the context.

He didn't bring up the topic of the Affordable Care Act out of the blue.  First of all, its passage was, according to CNN, one of the reasons he was given the award: The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation said Obama received the award for "expanding health security for millions of Americans, restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba and leading a landmark international accord to combat climate change."

It is an award honoring President John F. Kennedy, whose birthday this month is 100.  As a senator, JFK authored the book Profiles in Courage, about eight US Senators throughout history who exhibited principled courage in difficult political situations.  As President, JFK proposed the healthcare program that became Medicare.  His younger brother Senator Ted Kennedy, championed an expansion to all US citizens to make healthcare a right.

 In his speech, President Obama told a story about how Ted Kennedy walked the halls of the hospital where his young son was fighting for his life and talked to people there worried that they couldn't afford the next cancer treatment for their children.  He made healthcare his cause, and shortly before his death, urged President Obama to make it his first legislative priority.

Welcoming President Obama to Boston on Sunday

So in talking about courage in Congress, it was completely in context for President Obama to remember those who voted for the ACA, knowing they might lose their next election because of it--and many in fact did.  After talking generally about John and Bobby Kennedy as inspiring him to enter politics, he said:

"Our politics remains filled with division and discord, and everywhere we see the risk of falling into the refuge of tribe and clan, and anger at those who don't look like us or have the same surnames or pray the way we do.

And at such moments, courage is necessary. At such moments, we need courage to stand up to hate not just in others but in ourselves. At such moments, we need the courage to stand up to dogma not just in others but in ourselves. At such moments, we need courage to believe that together we can tackle big challenges like inequality and climate change. At such moments, it's necessary for us to show courage in challenging the status quo and in fighting the good fight but also show the courage to listen to one another and seek common ground and embrace principled compromise."

He spoke about the beginning of his presidency and the courage it took to vote for the Recovery Act, to support the auto industry and regulate Wall Street, and especially, the complex and previously impossible task of what came to be called (by his opponents) Obamacare:

"And there was a reason why healthcare reform had not been accomplished before. It was hard. It involved a sixth of the economy and all manner of stakeholders and interests. It was easily subject to misinformation and fearmongering.

And so by the time the vote came up to pass the Affordable Care Act, these freshmen congressmen and women knew that they had to make a choice. That they had a chance to insure millions and prevent untold worry and suffering and bankruptcy, and even death, but that this same vote would likely cost them their new seats, perhaps end their political careers.

And these men and women did the right thing. They did the hard thing. Theirs was a profile in courage. Because of that vote, 20 million people got health insurance who didn't have it before."

Many lost their seats in the 2010 elections, his said. And this was the context for his comments on the future:

"It was a personal sacrifice. But I know, because I've spoken to many of them, that they thought and still think it was worth it.

As everyone here now knows, this great debate is not settled but continues. And it is my fervent hope and the hope of millions that regardless of party, such courage is still possible, that today's members of Congress, regardless of party, are willing to look at the facts and speak the truth even when it contradicts party positions.

I hope that current members of Congress recall that it actually doesn't take a lot of courage to aid those who are already powerful, already comfortable, already influential. But it does require some courage to champion the vulnerable and the sick and the infirm, those who often have no access to the corridors of power.

I hope they understand that courage means not simply doing what is politically expedient but doing what they believe deep in their hearts is right."

But then President Obama expanded his examples of profiles in courage to include ordinary people who sacrificed for their families, who did the right thing even when it was difficult.

He included political activists who worked nonviolently for change. And he powerfully restated his credo for involvement in creating political change, ending with a ringing call to keep the faith and keep working for the future:

"I know that the values and the progress that we cherish are not inevitable, that they are fragile, in need of constant renewal.

I've said before that I believe what
 Dr. King said, that "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice," but I've also said it does not bend on its own. It bends because we bend it, because we put our hand on that arch, and we move it in the direction of justice and freedom and equality and kindness and generosity. It doesn't happen on its own."

"And so we are constantly having to make a choice because progress is fragile. And it's precisely that fragility, that impermanence, that is a precondition of the quality of character that we celebrate tonight.

If the vitality of our democracy, if the gains of our long journey to freedom were assured, none of us would ever have to be courageous. None of us would have to risk anything to protect them. But it's in its very precariousness that courage becomes possible and absolutely necessary.

John F. Kennedy knew that our best hope and our most powerful answer to our doubts and to our fears lies inside each of us, in our willingness to joyfully embrace our responsibility as citizens, to stay true to our allegiance, to our highest and best ideals, to maintain our regard and concern for the poor and the aging and the marginalized, to put our personal or party interest aside when duty to our country calls or when conscience demands.

That's the spirit that has brought America so far and that's the spirit that will always carry us to better days."

Another video and full transcript of the speech is at TIME.

100 Days to Save the World

Imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's a hard time to be hopeful.  ISIS wantonly destroys the sacred elegances of the past, while beheading and raping innocents of the present.  Terrorists and psychotics use easily obtained and operated lethal firearms to massacre innocents in any ordinary place, while political cynics make sure they remain well-armed. Fearful fanatics seem to dominate all politics; racism and other reactionary passions are seemingly ascendant, making trump cards out of what would ordinarily be jokers.  There are alarming examples of destructive fanaticism on what our impoverished dialogue insistently calls the Left as well as the Right. There is a smell of chaos, caught and eagerly exploited by proudly evil and cowardly trolls in cyberspace and beyond.  It seems that where evil, insanity and cynical greed do not reign, debilitating distraction does.

In short, civilization seems to be falling apart at the moment when it is most needed, when it is most urgent to face up to crisis conditions in the larger contexts of all life on Earth.

But there are contending forces also rising to confront these challenges, to try to save the world and its civilizations, although in better form.  There are visions, organizations, heroic individuals, movements, projects; there are designs in the practical, physical world that offer the hope of new energy systems, new economics and so on.   Many of the books I've mentioned here and elsewhere before (like Down to the Wire, Eaarth, The Great Disruption, America The Possible, and a later entry I haven't mentioned, Klein's This Changes Everything)  that delineate near and far future challenges of the climate crisis, also suggest that meeting these challenges could make the world a better place in other ways--healthier, more just and sustainable, in which humanity flourishes in a world made safe for life.

All of that remains the work of generations.  For this moment, the upcoming and urgent task is to get some international agreement that gives the planet a chance by limiting and phasing out greenhouse gases, in the quantities and in in the timeframe that today's best science suggests will give us a fighting chance to save the future.

An excellent article by John Sutter at CNN entitled "100 Days to Save the World" outlines the reasons, the tasks and especially the reasons to hope that this time when nations meet in Paris in November and December, they will meet this challenge.

Much is moving towards this moment.  The encyclical by Pope Francis, endorsed by leaders of other Christian sects,  preceded the recent Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change   which asserts that for Muslims, addressing the climate crisis is a religious duty.  It calls for a future of 100% renewable energy, and specifically for a climate treaty this year.

“To chase after unlimited economic growth in a planet that is finite and already overloaded is not viable," the declaration said.

To underline the factual claim behind this moral imperative, also last week:

We’re not even nine months into 2015, but by Wednesday humans had consumed an entire year’s worth of natural resources since Jan. 1, according to the Global Footprint Network.

Global Overshoot Day is perhaps a too-cute marketing moniker for what is the most ominous fact of all, for this is the kind of deficit spending that really can't go on.  It is of course not the first such day--though it comes almost a week earlier this year than last.  According to GFN: "Earth Overshoot Day is meant as an approximation rather than an exact date. Still, the data shows that humanity’s demand on nature is at an unsustainable level — one year is no longer enough to regenerate humanity’s annual demand on the planet.”

Not only are humans living beyond the means of the planet to sustain that kind of life, even more evidence arrived last week that humanity has become the most destructive predator on the planet, wiping out predator animals also at an unsustainable rate, with consequences all along the food chain--up as well as down.

The climate crisis makes all of this worse, and even in the near term (another study finds) will likely lead to the most political volatile condition: "food shocks," meaning food shortages and price spikes.

So there is plenty of motivation available for leaders from all nations to meaningfully address the climate crisis, which is the bare minimum but could be the change that opens opportunities for much more, as other factors (especially the advancing technologies and falling costs of renewable energy) move in a positive direction.

Within the US, where support for addressing the climate crisis is substantial but below many other rich nations, there are fascinating findings outlined in an earlier CNN post by John D. Sutter.   In the form of a quiz, he reviews these findings: though 97% of the world's working climate scientists affirm the reality of the climate crisis and its greenhouse gases emissions cause,  only 10% of the American public knows that they do, the fact of this stunning unanimity.  Yet 70% say that they trust climate scientists above all to give them the correct information.

The US doesn't score high on the percentage of people that "believe in" the climate crisis, but on the other hand, only 9% are "sure" it doesn't exist.  And 70% support strict emissions regs on power plants.

There is an opportunity for everyone in these stats, Sutter points out: 67% of Americans surveyed say they strongly or somewhat trust family and friends on this issue.  Currently, 74% say they rarely or never talk about climate change.  This is the denialists' second greatest victory (after buying the Republican party and its obstructionists), for clearly people aren't anxious to get into what they fear will be violent arguments.  In 2008 that number was lower, at 60%.

What will reverse that? President Obama will do his part, as Pope Francis and the UN Secretary General visit in September, and the climate crisis is sure to be talked about.

But it will likely take friends and family as well, although it might start with more controversy than calm. Nobody wanted to talk about the Vietnam war or the draft in the 1960s, until their children demanded it by making a lot of noise.  Climate organizations are making their demonstration plans, so there will more noise made in this next 100 days.  To save the world.