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Why Liberals Should be Conservative: Climate Change, Excellence, and the Practice of Happiness, Part 2

February 4, 2019

Why Liberals Should be Conservative: Climate Change, Excellence, and the Practice of Happiness, Part 2

Ed. note: Part 1 of this series can be found on Resilience.org here.

The Resurgent Aristotelians: Hopkins, Fleming, Francis, and Holmgren

What then does a modern Aristotelianism look like?  How might we reconcile his ideal of a singular, philosophically deduced definition of a “good life” with modern pluralism and heterogeneity, and the Liberal insistence on individual expressive self-creation?  How do we define “good” or “excellence” without imposing an ideology or world-view on others who have their own?  Who judges and according to what standards?  If such a reconciliation is impossible, will we be required to make a difficult choice?  Or is there no real choice at all?

These are the questions that I will be considering, and to which in some cases I will hazard an answer, as we go forward.  To start that process, a quick recap may be in order.  I have outlined a philosophical and political standoff between Liberalism and a still-being-defined conservative Aristotelianism using common terminology, but in a particular way that may also need clarification.  I take Liberalism to represent the broad post-Enlightenment political and moral philosophy that has found its home in societies organized around a market economy, in which the primary location of agency, obligation, and desert or rights resides in the individual, who is freed from the “constraints” of “kinship, neighborhood, profession, and creed,” and given over to seemingly voluntary “freedom of contract” (Polanyi, 171).  Liberalism, as I use the capitalized version of the term, includes both political liberals or progressives of the sort that one might associate with Democrats, the Labor party, or Democratic Socialism, on the one hand, and “conservatives” (with scare-quotes) of the sort associated with Republicans, the British Conservative Party, and Christian Democrats, on the other. 

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Conservativism Now?  Market Economies and the Liberal Anti-Culture

June 19, 2018

Conservativism Now?  Market Economies and the Liberal Anti-Culture

The persistent purpose of my writing over the past decade has been to reflect in a hopefully complex manner on the sort of culture necessary to “solve” the climate and ecological crisis and create a truly sustainable way of life.

One of my main themes has been that neither liberalism (nor Liberalism[i] ) is suited to that task, in large part because it is fundamentally growthist, requiring for social stability the “simple requirement,” as Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it, of “the enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.”  As David Fleming wrote, “starting some three centuries ago, the market economy has, with growing confidence, been the source and framework for a loose and easy-going but effective civil society and social order” (85).  Expansion, growth, and the promise of limitless possibility are the foundation of the “effectiveness” mentioned by Fleming.  Growth is the social glue that has held liberal industrial societies together, which is one of several connected reasons why we won’t address our relationship to our natural ecology by becoming “more liberal” or “more progressive.” Sustainability, then, is neither liberal nor progressive.

But, one might ask, why so persistent a critique of our liberal friends?  After all, they (we) seem the most inclined to pay attention to the environment, and to show care and concern for our connection to nature.  One might imagine a story about a contradiction in progressive attitudes, torn between concern and empathy, on the one hand, and growth and prosperity on the other, happily resolved as the empathetic side prevails in the face of growing awareness of the collateral damage of growth and prosperity.  Perhaps.

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Post Peak Minsky—Debt, Unsustainability, and Inequality

April 16, 2018

Post Peak Minsky—Debt, Unsustainability, and Inequality

It has occurred to me that the fungibility of public debt is not sufficiently recognized—and perhaps of private debt as well.  In other words, when our government in the U.S. engages in deficit spending, the focus is generally on who, precisely, is the immediate beneficiary.  As Richard Heinberg notes in The End of Growth, deficit spending has often been coincidental with higher military spending, in which case government deficits and the growing debt is seen as function of American militarization.  Alternatively, or additionally, deficits like the one initiated by George W. Bush, alongside his tax cuts for the wealthy, may be seen merely as a largesse for the rich.  Others, particularly political conservatives, are critical of what they see as a bloated welfare state and will always see social programs as some ill-conceived fiscal vacuum sucking-up any tax revenues and budget agreements not held closely in check.  In any event, government deficits are often consider as being outside the economy, as if the borrowed money is being stuffed under the mattress in the Lincoln Bedroom.

I do think it is important to understand not only who directly benefits from deficit spending, and also the context and conditions under which Congress and the president decide to fund some amount of its total outlays with borrowed money.  At no point will I judge such considerations to be unworthy of our attention.  However, lost in this focus on the direct beneficiary of government spending (or failure to raise revenue) are some very important systemic considerations that, I will later suggest, help explain  the way a post-peak economy has extended itself while offering a hypothesis about the way growing inequality is a likely, if not inevitable, outgrowth of a capitalist economy as it nears the end of easy or possible growth.

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Film in the Anthropocene

March 20, 2018

Film in the Anthropocene

Film is of course the art form of Industrial Civilization and its mass culture, whether as a simple historical fact, a manifestation of technical possibility, or in the various ideologies it is adept at expressing.

But it is also the art form of the Anthropocene.  I am overstating the case somewhat, but not entirely, when I note that the prevailing message of film is the power of belief and trust.  This is most visible in the nearly inevitable Hollywood Plot whereby evil, prejudice, self-doubt, or malevolent aliens are overcome, at the plot’s climax, by a leap of belief or trust that transcends the odds.  This is true whether we are talking about Westerns, “Star Wars,” “Rocky,” “Pocahontas,” “Toy Story”—or “A Wrinkle in Time,” which I saw earlier today (don’t ask).  Never mind the odds or probable limits.  Believe.  Trust.  Take my hand.  Look me in the eyes.  Close your eyes.  Jump.  What film doesn’t contain this moment?  The force is always with the film’s hero if only he or she will surrender fussy sensibility and give in to it.

It is easy enough to make a connection between the narrative of belief in yourself against the odds in the context of competitive capitalism, especially as it increasingly becomes a game of roulette in the financialized casino capitalism of today.  But the story of self-overcoming through belief in oneself is more broadly suited to the Liberal life-plan of self-creation.  You can be whoever you want—as long as you dream big: that’s the narrative line of almost every “age appropriate” (a phrase I use in both of its senses) movie or TV show produced for my children.  The meta-myth of Liberalism is that there are no limits, that ideas and ideals can create reality, that any obstacle can be overcome by human ingeniousness–if, that is, we don’t lose faith and fall victim to the sensible or moderate law of averages that are so often represented by the foil if not the antagonist.

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The Peace Fallacy

January 29, 2018

The Peace Fallacy

Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of the its population. . . . In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.  Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.  To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.  We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

. . . . This process cannot be a liberal or peaceful one. . . .–George Kennan in a 1948 memorandum[i]

Andrew Bacevich is a leading commentator on and critic of America’s senseless “habit for war,” as he puts it.  His foremost concern is our going-on-sixteen-year debacle in Afghanistan, though he is naturally troubled by our other misadventures in Iraq and North Africa, as well as our propensity for international violence in general.

Bacevich has recently asked when we might see “A Harvey Weinstein Moment for America’s Wars?”[ii]  When, in other words, will something like the “sudden shift in the cultural landscape” that was precipitated by the brave women who stood up against Weinstein be seen in response to “our penchant for waging war across much of the planet”?  Although he remains deeply disappointed by the distracted acceptance of these wars by the American public, he claims to find some reason for optimism in the recent “Weinstein moment”: “on some matters, at least, the American people retain an admirable capacity for outrage.”

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Surviving the Future in America

December 27, 2017

Surviving the Future in America

Nonetheless, the tide is flowing.  The direction is mapped, very simply, in those little hexagons of the Wheel of Life.  Localization stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but in has the decisive argument on its side that there will be no alternative. –David Fleming

To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New.–Thomas Hardy

I recently had the pleasure of reading Shaun Chamberlain’s selections from David Fleming’s Lean Logic, organized into an indispensable volume entitled Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy—a book, I should say, that sits on the top of my “must read” list for this year.  As I was reading, my mind kept wandering back to my multiple trips to Europe as a child growing up in a Europhile academic family (my father was a historian of ancient and medieval science).  What, I started asking myself, was the great lure of Europe for Americans, and why was I wondering about it right now?

My most memorable moments were of course filtered through my parents’ commentary and responses, and subsequent slide shows, but are personally vivid nonetheless.

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Remembrance of Things Yet to Come

April 19, 2016

Remembrance of Things Yet to Come

Remembrance of Things Yet to Come: A Response to Ted Trainer

I’m going to make divert slightly from my previously anticipated track to respond to Ted Trainer’s valuable critique of Leigh Phillip’s much-maligned celebration of ecomodernism, Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts (2015).   I agree with much of Trainer’s critique, and am particularly thankful for his delineation of the mathematical fantasy of continued economic growth, as well as his demystification of the dream of “decoupling,” so often used to animate this fantasy.  The limits to growth do indeed render the ecomodernists plan silly at best.  We have yet to see a case made for a continuation of modernity or the creation of a hyper-modernity not based on serious exclusions.

That being said, I find the alternative vision for the future that Trainer suggests improbable as well, though I should also add that it is only presented briefly in the article in question.  There, Trainer seems to imagine a future in which we might pick and choose from the bounty of modernism and the sustainable wisdom of pre-modern times so as to put together a rational society that is pleasingly moderate and modest, alike, yet adorned with high-tech festoons.  This view is common within “environmentalist” circles, where the well-situated liberal consumer entertain serious elements of sustainability, but with no real intention on cutting the umbilical cord to modernity and prosperity.  Here, nevertheless, is how Trainer describes it, criticizing Phillip’s view that anything but continued modernization and across-the-board growth and innovation will do.

Most importantly, apparently Phillips cannot grasp that we could opt for a combination of elements from different points on the path.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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