Blog Archives

Realclimatik

6/30/2023

I have been wrestling for some time with the question of why so many (otherwise intelligent and sophisticated) people reject the idea of man-made and potentially catastrophic climate change.

First, a small group seems to have some logical, quasi-scientific basis for their outlook, despite the piles of evidence and broad consensus among the scientific community; and certainly there is plenty of reason to recognize the arrogance, variance, and uncertainty in the scientific enterprise. But, while some skepticism is sensible, they have not mounted any plausible alternative and they have an air of desperation about them. This group may be actually a subset of the fourth group but they have a better grasp of the language of science and can position themselves on a more sophisticated plane.

Second, there are some who are more or less directly motivated by financial gain, having invested (time/money) in various carbon/methane/industrial/capitalism-intensive undertakings. It comes as no surprise that some oil-company studies from several decades ago noted the plausibility of climate change (and the implications for the oil biz) which were (not dissimilarly from Big Tobacco) dismissed, discarded, or deeply buried. But, again, this is another relatively small group.

A third group, shuts down any contemplation of the possibilities by assuming that anything endorsed by the “Libs” must be wrong, lest some disruptive weltanschauung overwhelm them. This seems to account for the Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis collection. Their alignment with Trumpian ideas more broadly is not a coincidence, so it’s hard to imagine having a substantive conversation with them on the topic.

Fourth, most rejecters arrive at their position, I suspect (more unconsciously than not) by either a cognitive dissonance with the implications of climate change; i.e., they can’t get their heads around a world in which the very planet is no longer a viable foundation for a common worldview. This stance is deeper and, in a sense, logically prior to, that of the MAGA-ites. This cognitive preclusion [disclaimer: I am not a psychologist (although my wife is studying to be one)] is based on both a disconnection with history and with the future. They can’t imagine a world in which the world/environment is radically different from our current “green and pleasant land.” Nor can they understand that the very nature of modern life has been built upon an economics and a psychology with huge discontinuities.

There is likely a large (fifth) group (perhaps the plurality of folks) who don’t get it either, but are willing to believe—at least directionally—that significant change is necessary, even if they don’t understand what it’s going to look like or how we’re going to get there. Some in this group don’t (at a certain level) care. They figure that they will be dead by more or less natural causes in the next thirty years before the serious shit hits the fan.

By way of digression, I would note that this emerging awareness is intellectually and emotionally challenging. It is of the same register as the “discoveries”/awakenings in the last few years that capitalism/inequality, gender differentials/discrimination, and racial/ethnic exploitation are all deeply “baked-in” to our society and that we are just starting the work of recognizing and moving towards remedying them.

One need not believe in the most dire scenarios and dystopias to recognize that there is a real and significant possibility (likelihood) of massive disruptions and destructions. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) wasn’t nearly enough; nor Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth (2006). Nor, apparently are any number of hurricanes, storms, droughts, satellite images, etc. The heat waves in Texas this month and the Canadian fires and resultant ashes spread across the upper Midwest and Northeast in the past few weeks are not enough, either. All the UN reports, scientific studies and tables and graphs operate at a rational level rather than connecting with how most people understand their world. For most of us, we don’t synthesize and analyze and logically project effects from causes. We live our lives as best we can within the context of our deeply-embedded cultures oriented towards conventionality, compliance, and getting by.

This approach to living is not new; even if modern capitalistic consumption accelerated by media and tech has increased the distance between our “normal” scope of awareness and what we are socially capable of understanding about our world. Inertia and incremental change (“human nature”?) is how almost everybody (about 100 billion of us over the past 70,000+ years) has functioned. The modern difference is the presence of science and analysis which gives us the chance to comprehend the state of the world in a deeper and more complex way than was available until the last 150 years or so.

The recent decision by State Farm and Allstate to stop writing new homeowner insurance policies in California provides a hint of a direction things are likely to take. It’s only when we get hit in the wallet that we pay attention. Indeed, the insurance mindset is one that offers both a route to awareness/action and a model for that action. Among the attitudes which startle me (especially among the ultra-capitalists (group two above) and those ordinary folks (group five)) is the refusal by these otherwise prudent folks not to buy a little insurance against the off chance that they’re wrong and have a lot at risk. At both a policy level and a personal level, this would seem to make sense (not to mention ounce of prevention = pound of cure).

I like to think of myself as someone who thinks that they do “get it” (at least directionally). At the same time, I also understand that it’s easy to condescend to those that I don’t think “get it.” Of that large group, I’m most concerned with those who could “get it,” but choose not to. But, as I have argued elsewhere, this is no time and place for “us and them;” we have no room for Hillary’s famous reference to “deplorables.” We’re all in the same boat and everybody needs to bail.

It is difficult and painful to try to wrap my head around the kind of changes needed. Most folks don’t have the luxuries of time and resources that I have to cogitate on such matters. Even still, it’s not likely that I see or will implement all the changes needed. I have no small inertia myself. Are solar panels, electric cars, and grey water enough? Probably not. It’s (past) time to think hard about what is to be done in the real world.

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Democracy in Bhutan

6/23/2023

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I’m no Tocqueville. Nonetheless, given my interests in both Bhutan and democracy, I thought I would talk about their intersection today.

From a historical perspective, there are two types of democracies today: the first comprises those countries which became democratic principally in the 18/19C: mostly in Europe but including the US and the British settler colonies, as well as parts of Latin America. At least in form, they have been at it for a while and have developed political cultures which—to varying degrees—buy into the ideals.

The second group comprises those countries which, during the course of the 20C, became independent from European (and US) empires and/or which adopted democratic structures usually without much preparation or a well-developed democratic culture. In most such countries, democracy has struggled greatly to go beyond the legal formalities. Bhutan belongs in this second group but with a twist. Most such countries fought for independence and had to establish a nation at the same time that they designed their political structure. Copying/adapting established models was relatively easy. Constructing a political culture of participation, respect for law, and looking out for the common good of the entire country has proved to be much more challenging.

Bhutan is different in that it already had some sense of national cohesion. Its relative isolation until late in the 20C meant that it did not have the other usual accoutrements of modernity, including a commercial epistemology, a robust and educated middle class, and a demarcated state. The bulk of the population, largely agricultural, isolated, and uneducated was, therefore, unpolitical as well.

Among the accomplishments of the fourth King (Jigme Singye Wangchuck (reigned 1974-2008), before he abdicated in favor of his son, the current King), was that he accelerated many aspects of modernizing Bhutan, including the shift from a traditional monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. The internal discussion process began in 2001 and a Constitution was promulgated in 2008, including many “normal” aspects of parliamentary democracy, with, however, a strong Buddhist influence and the retention of a fair amount of both formal and informal power in the throne (this is no European “performance art” monarchy). Elections to parliament began in 2008 and have occurred every five years (including upcoming in a few months).

There is an adage, which I learned some years ago in the context of managing corporate mergers: “The hard stuff is easy and the soft stuff is hard.” Formal rules, procedures and structures are easy; culture is hard. Western democracy has taken centuries to get to its current state (such as it is!). One of Bhutan’s central challenges is to foster citizens’ engagement with the political process (both parliamentary and local) and develop their sense of shared responsibility for their own actions with the elected officials as vehicles for society’s policy goals.

Fifteen years is not very long to accomplish this goal and cajole a traditional, deferential culture into greater involvement and activism. Having worked to educate students at my university here in SF in the nature and practice of democracy, I was glad to find a group in Bhutan that had taken on this challenge. Locke and Rousseau aside, as the late John Lewis said: “Democracy is an act.” It has to be inhabited and lived out by the full range of citizens. Participation is not instinctual; it has to be culturally nourished.

The Bhutan Center for Media and Democracy has multiple projects working in this direction. Project Mikhung (“Citizenship”) has developed teaching materials and public education programs in both the schools and for local communities to build the culture of engagement. We’ve taken it out, gotten feedback from students, teachers, and community leaders; revised the materials and are ready to take our pilot project across the country. Of course, as with any aspect of education, it’s not “one-and-done.” There are new students every year. Changing culture requires reiteration. So, Mikhung needs not just geographic expansion but also some degree of permanence so that democracy becomes ordinary (likely a generation or so).

One of the main goals of my recent trip was to see the impact of Project Mikhung and get the direct feedback from teachers and community leaders. Their stories were gratifying and inspirational.

As part of my engagement with this process, I got to talk with a group of grad students at the country’s major teacher’s college in Paro. I talked about the importance of engaging students in democratic ideas and practices. One asked how to respond to young students who are frustrated with the ineffectiveness of Bhutan’s young democracy. I responded that democracy isn’t pretty; that such ineffectiveness and frustration is “normal,” and that constructing a democracy is a long-term process. I reminded them (and me) that we teachers are in the business of long-term investment; which is nowhere more true than in the context of helping to change a culture (not just an individual student). It’s still far better than passivity and authoritarian structures. I told them that Bhutan has been extraordinarily lucky in the wisdom and good will of the Fourth King and the current King. That’s still no argument for monarchy, as the people of Thailand (and North Korea!) are currently experiencing. Indeed, generally, the idea that the great-great-grandson of some guy who won a battle is best fitted to lead a country didn’t make much sense in the 17/18C and even less so in the 21C.

Democracy is no panacea. Bhutan faces a host of issues—some unique to it and others shared with the rest of us in these parlous times. Even with its shift from capitalistic epistemology (embodied in the concept of “Gross National Happiness”), Bhutan has to find its way so that its people can express their vision of what that happiness entails. It’s a pretty open-ended exploration and, as so many nascent democracies have demonstrated over the past 250 years, there’s no telling the shape of the path ahead. Democracy’s greatest foe is fear of uncertainty and disorder. It will take Bhutan decades of working on the “soft stuff”: acculturation and practice, to get to the stage of democratic normalcy and stability; and, even then, as widely evidenced around the world today, such an achievement provides no guarantees.

Bhutan’s greatest strength is its people’s willingness to try to craft their own modernity. I’m glad to be a part of an effort to keep democracy in the mix.

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Of Interest

6/16/2023

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Even though the Fed has seemingly paused its extended campaign, the recent rise in interest rates as a conscious policy effort to tame the post-pandemic inflationary spurt has much of the financialati abuzz. There are significant and complex real-world effects, to be sure—on consumers, banks, countries, companies (the whole range of borrowers and lenders) but, as is often the case, such changes in price levels and the price of money turn my mind to a historical perspective on their impact and meaning.

Some will remember the inflationary era of the late 1970s (prices increased on average 8%/year from 1972 to 1982) and the Volcker-induced spike in interest rates that killed off inflationary expectations for a generation. I bought my first house in 1983 and had a mortgage at 12ish% (the high in late 1981 was over 18%!!). Since that time, rates have pretty consistently eased down to under 3% in late 2021. It was a remarkable run. One of its implications is that few people under 60 have much experience with the idea of increasing interest rates. The current mortgage rate level (6ish%) isn’t particularly high, but it seems so.

Part of History’s job is to remind people that the difficulties of their own immediate experience is not so out of the ordinary. Short-term adjustment is often challenging, but—just as we are frustrated with non-instantaneous access to whatever website we are looking for—a little perspective can make the ‘non-ideal’ of the moment a bit more tolerable. Interest-rate-wise, we’ve had it pretty darn good for several decades. Whatever else might be said about our national economic management over the past few decades, this part has worked pretty well. We’ve avoided Japanese-like deflation and the price effects of the Great Depression of the 1930s and kept prices raising only a modest amount each year—just enough to lubricate the broader changes in the economy and prevent historical price levels from getting stuck. Since we usually demand an unreasonable degree of perfection from our policy-makers, we should at least give some kudos for this. For example, we could be in Turkey, where the recently re-elected President Erdogan has the delusion that low interest rates are the best way to fight inflation, with the result that the Turkish Lira has lost 78% of its value against the dollar in the past five years! Inflation has run as high as 85%, so it’s a great victory that it’s now only about 40%.

Of course, the idea that government (the “State”) should be responsible for the management of the economy as a whole is a relatively new one. The development of “political economy” in the 19C was an effort to bring intent and “scientific” thinking to what had been under-theorized and haphazard policies of taxation and spending up until then. One aspect of 19C liberalism was the idea that the government should invest to improve the conditions of the people as a whole (think education and infrastructure, in particular). Still, it took the Great Depression and the instigation of John Maynard Keynes to push governments to take a more active role across the economy as a whole. In combination with the rise of the “welfare state” in Europe, public expectations changed.

In the normal manner of things, people now hold their governments responsible for the overall state of their economy and such policies have become a central part of the political discussion. We all like someone to blame when things go wrong and government often fills this role. In a sense it’s too bad, because there is some evidence that 1) we don’t understand how our policies actually affect macro-economic performance in general and 2) there is a considerable portion of the economy that the government can’t do much about anyway. That’s the joy of a “private enterprise” system. In addition, it usually takes a long time for economic effects to flow for policy decisions, so any current situation is, often as not, the result of decisions made years ago.

Such subtleties are usually elided in political debates, however, where votes are more often driven by the gestalt of “are you better off now that you were four years ago?” The Biden Administration certainly hopes things calm down further over the next 16 months and that the stunning increases, for example, in supermarket prices over the past year or so will fade from the popular imagination. It’s a reflection of democratic politics that in the likely upcoming “Round 2” of geriatric Presidential debates (the uninspiring communicator with a pretty good story to tell vs. the vacuous, but effective, inspirer of millions), the memory of the price of milk will count for more than the incessant noise that passes for political campaigning these days.

From a policy perspective, too, interest rates are distinctive in this way: the popular expectation of price level changes itself contributes to those changes. It’s not just the impact of higher mortgage rates on housing prices/supply, but the fear/optimism of both past and future. Thus, managing rates requires creating not only real-world effects, but also perceptual effects in both “Wall Street” and “Main Street” (metaphorically, btw, we need a new “street,” to represent ecommerce and social media (perhaps “Net Street” or “Click Street”); it’s a tricky business, especially for underpaid civil servants.

Between overreliance on government, overconfidence in economic “science,” democratic politics in which anecdotes outweigh analysis (and both are “trumped” by polemic) and the semi-mystical mixing of policy management with popular psychology, it’s a wonder that there’s anything of coherence in all this. James Carville, managing Bill Clinton’s campaign back in 1992, famously defined their focus as “the economy, stupid.” It worked, but he should have been clearer: “It’s the public’s perception of the short-term economy, stupid.”; which is as succinct a summation of modernity as you’re likely to find.

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Backwards

6/9/2023

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In a novel I was recently reading,1 the narrator notes: “We must not imagine we understand all there is to know about the world.” It’s one of the charms of this book that the author inserts trenchant observations and a touch of philosophy directly (reminiscent of Tolstoy, but not as intense!) directly alongside the telling of the tale and the comments of the characters.

The comment highlighted for me the way the we humans insist on pretending that the complexities and dynamics of life have to be evaluated by our linguistic and intellectual constructs. This tendency creates the implication that any discrepancies and problems that arise are due to how people are or how the world is—rather than any shortcomings or inadequacies in the way we think or talk. Indeed, we have it all backwards.

As an academic, I see this practice all the time: the way the university (and its affiliates: publishing/media/intellectuals) categorizes ideas and perspectives. Thus-and-such is “history,” and “political science” is something else. When I was at UC Davis, I took a class in economic history. It was taught by an economic historian, located in the “economics” department (i.e. economist who analyzed past events). He wasn’t part of the “history” department, and, even though the two groups’ offices were about 100 yards apart, they hardly ever talked with each other.

As a historian, I can look back on what we now label myth or religion. Dozens of varieties of cosmologies/epistemologies which—even when inconsistent with how the world actually was—would continue on indefinitely (and whose ultimate failure was due far more often to external conquest than incoherence). Modernity, with its handmaidens: science and bureaucracy, is the current prevalent version; but is no better. Insistence on comprehensiveness and coherence belies the rough nature of reality and the human limits in dealing with it (see “Centric,” 30 September 2022).

We can also see this in the way the media describe certain works of art or ideas as “genre-bending” or “-melding.” This year’s Oscar winner, “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once,” is a great example, pulling from various classifications. It is “boundary-defying” (as if these “boundaries” are anything more than convenient indicators of a general description). You could undoubtedly recall books, movies, and other art works which both were “boundary-defying” and which were branded in this way. Such characterizations seems to carry a connotation of either transgression or courage; which is more a signal of our general adherence/compliance with cultural and intellectual norms than a comment about the insight which the work provides.

In my current course on genocide, this has come up in several ways. Turks and Armenians argue over whether the events of 1915 constitute a “genocide,” as if the label would rather than deal with the horrors and fears and suffering that actually happened to people. Even using the classifications “Turk” and “Armenian” are, similarly, substitutes for thinking and living. The Nazis spent no small effort to define—precisely—who was a Jew so that they could classify and treat each person correctly (i.e., not murder more than they should). Lately, Israelis have been having similar debates.

As I’ve noted elsewhere (“How is Now?, 26 August 2022), the classification and order schemes of knowledge are part of the great project of modernity, principally developed in the 18-20C, to enable people to comprehend the sprawl of knowledge fostered by the scientific revolution, enlightenment, and widespread education. Our poor human minds have been overwhelmed by all this stuff and we struggle to deal with the information we need to live and operate in a bewildering, changing society. Categorization/classification is our tool of choice to give ourselves some epistemological breathing room; a way to acknowledge that there are great fields of information and ideas out there and we can’t deal with them all (or even list them) so we slap some labels on big bins and say “Oh, I’ll figure out the details later (if I really need to).”

The less attention/capability we each apply to understanding other people or aspects of the world around us—the “simpler” we make it—the further we are from seeing clearly and the more trapped we are in the conventions of language and society. When pushed to an extreme, this ends up as “us” versus “them,” or “good” versus “bad.”

The price we pay for a better chance at sanity in this sea of information is that we tend to think that these categories/classifications are real. Nationality/ethnicity/race, religion, and gender are the most common examples (no wonder that’s the main list of constitutionally-suspect classifications); political beliefs/characterizations are pretty regularly abused too. There is nothing “real” about any of these; they’re all socially created/defined.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with classifying and ordering. But, as with many aspects of modernity, the issues are: how far do I take it? What do I give up by stopping my thinking once I have applied a label and put someone/thing in its appropriate box?

If the goal of classifying/categorizing is merely the production of a label, then it risks being a distraction from actually understanding what the underlying phenomenon is. We risk thinking that reality is only important insofar as we can put it in the appropriate box. Much of contemporary identity politics seems to fall into this trap; indeed, much of our current domestic political clusterF&%# is a manifestation of this fixation on labels and an inability (refusal?) to see what’s really going on.

1 Children of Earth and Sky, Guy Gavriel Kay (2016). I have read a bunch of Kay’s books lately. He is a lovely writer of historical fantasies, with rich language, charming characters, and engaging stories.

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Bemji Calling

6/2/2023

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Bemji Calling

A couple of years ago (040921), I wrote about my interest in and relationship with the country and people of Bhutan. I closed that piece expressing the hope of returning. This week, having just returned, I want to talk about Bemji, a village near Trongsa in central Bhutan, where we visited the family and home village of our long-time friend, Karma Nima.

Most of the time in my four trips here, has been spent either in towns or the city (the capital, Thimphu, is the only place with more than 25,000 people) or trekking in the countryside. So, to spend a day and night here in a small village (100+ people) gives another perspective. Nowadays, everything is pretty much connected or connectable—via phone, internet, or satellite—so, there is no more illusion of rustic isolation. Even ten years ago, I had to ask our trekking guide to get off his cell phone so we could try to imagine that we had escaped from modernity amid the country’s natural beauty. Still, Bemji is a 45 minute drive from the main road (even if mostly “paved”), so going to or from is not a daily event.

Small towns/villages/hamlets still run to a local rhythm, even if they are well connected. They are a microcosm of what Bhutan itself is trying to do on a larger scale: maintain the hand-made tapestry of life amid the digital onslaught. Our friend Karma arranged for us to stay in the village temple in a room just off the main shrine. About 20 locals gathered to meet us for dinner there (including a formal presentation of locally-made arak to drink, followed by dancing (Facebook video link available for a small fee!). The next morning we had private prayer ceremony and, due to an auspicious coincidence, the neighboring monastery was hosting a special ceremony of unwrapping a model of Zangtopelri (Guru Rinpoche’s heavenly palace). We got to meet Karma’s 93 yar old uncle and innumerable cousins (by both blood and affection).Then, Karma arranged a demonstration of an ancient Bon (pre-Buddhist) warrior dance which was great fun.

The vibe of the village reminded me of a trip we had taken twenty years ago this week to a small town in the Marché region of Italy, where our friend Ezio gave us a tour of his small home town. The walk took several hours, because Ezio couldn’t get more than half a block without running into someone he knew who insisted on catching up. Karma is less effusive than Ezio, but the sense of human connectedness was the same. It’s a sense I rarely find in the US, between metropolitan frames of life (83% of us live in metro areas) and the ease with which most of my friends/acquaintances have relocated, often multiple times, around the country. But, since a real sense of “people in place” seems to take at least two generations, it’s not so clear how modern American cities can replicate this aspect of “community.”

This is my fourth trip to Bhutan over 25 years. Beyond the usual eye-openers of travel and the chance to establish more extensive relationships with some individuals, my time here has given me a chance to see change over time in a way not possible at home, where compounding daily/weekly/monthly events of change become a blur and are hard to see at a distance. I’ve been going to London for fifty years, and have seen great changes there, too. But they seem incremental as well. The process of modernity, which, in the West has taken us about five centuries, is compressed here to less than fifty years. Of course, that is the great challenge which Bhutanese culture is wrestling with.

While I enjoy and marvel at the chance to observe this, I am also acutely aware of the risk of falling in with modernity’s arrogant stance towards those less “advanced.” Given the widespread evidence that Western modernity has gone off the rails, no small amount of cultural humility is in order.

One of the principal reasons for my trip has been to check in on two projects on which I’ve been working for a few years: democracy education and tree planting. The latter is going great guns, we are on target to plant 190,000 trees this year as part of a five-year, million tree project. Bhutan is the only carbon-negative country in the world and I hope that our project will keep pushing the frontiers of what is possible to fight what I see as our civilization’s greatest threat. I’ll be talking about democracy in Bhutan in an upcoming posting.

Our first day in Bhutan, a bit bleary from travel, we were given a tour of the new JSW Law School, a remarkable campus high in the hills above Paro. The Dean explained how he had led the design and construction of the school and, perhaps more importantly, a new curriculum to train a new generation of Bhutanese leaders: a combination of law and humanities (this is a college-level, not (yet) graduate-level program); a combination of Buddhist tradition, current Bhutanese law and modern international law/relations. It was an inspiring example of a rooted modernity; exactly the kind of innovation that moves a traditional culture forward. It’s also the other end of Bhutan in terms of engaging with modernity.

The village of Bemji is fading. It had well over 300 people scattered across its valley when Karma was growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s. As has happened in countless other countries over the past few hundred years, the lure of cities and the opportunities of the world are eroding the local culture and weakening the roots of tradition. Karma told us that it’s been a challenge to find someone to learn to lead the Bon warrior ceremony, now that the currently leader’s dancing is not so sprightly anymore. Bemji is calling, but now its calling via Facetime.

We left Bemji on Saturday and got back to SF on Tuesday; a testament to the wonders of global travel. We had a raft of great experiences, both personal and cultural (both religious and modern). We’re already planning a return in a few years. Stay tuned.

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Condemned to Repeat It --
Musings on history, society, and the world.

I don't actually agree with Santayana's famous quote, but this is my contribution to my version of it: "Anyone who hears Santayana's quote is condemned to repeat it."

Realclimatik

Democracy in Bhutan

Of Interest

Backwards

Bemji Calling

Condemned to Repeat It --Musings on history, society, and the world.

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Condemned to Repeat It --
Musings on history, society, and the world.