Can You Feel It?

It's been building for quite a while, at least a decade, perhaps two. It's this gnawing feeling that we're losing civility. It's ever so gradually fading away.

We're moving from a society into tribes within a society. We cling to our differences both real and imagined and almost always exaggerated or inflamed.

The rift that divides us serves as a fertile breeding ground for xenophobia, racism, and bigotry of every description.

We have our tribes. Everything else is "the other," something to be viewed with hostility, suspicion, even paranoia. They are not "of us" even though we may actually agree on just about everything except a few hot button issues and even they may be exaggerated, inflamed.

I thought of this today after reading an item in The Guardian about the "Brexodus" underway in the UK.  It was about young people now choosing to leave Britain for a better life elsewhere. There were repeated comments about how Brexit has changed the British people, hardened them, made them less tolerant and more xenophobic; how Brexit has fractured British society and left old friends refusing to even speak to each other.

This, of course, is not unique to the UK. It seems to be happening everywhere across the West in varying degrees. We're certainly not immune, not really.

Imagine a Canadian senator on the lawn of the parliament buildings, half-laughingly exhorting protesting truckers to run over every Liberal in the country or the leader of one of two major political parties playing footsie with white nationalists.

Perhaps our tribe doesn't do that but don't we use that to justify embracing the divide, widening the rift? Where does that end? How do we stop it, reverse it? Do we even want some sort of reunification or do we prefer to hunker down within our camp, imagining how we'll trash the others in the next election? Do we have any sense of what's at stake as this deepens, what we might be losing?

We think of our constitutional institutions as a bulwark against extremism but are they really invulnerable? The Americans have got what they consider the most bulletproof constitutional settlement in the world, a divinely inspired gift from the Creator no less. Yet they elect a president who sees that constitutional fabric as a hurdle, not something to be respected and upheld. Worse yet, he has a Republican Congress that prostrates itself before him and stands by and lets him run roughshod over that vaunted constitution. We haven't yet seen how far his ideologically stacked Supreme Court will go in colluding with him but, let's face it, they haven't been chosen to administer justice equally.

This has happened before.  The history of authoritarianism is replete with examples of law makers transforming into law benders before turning into law breakers in service to the tyrant of the day.

Why am I so vexed at this? It's simple - we are embarking on an era far different to anything experienced in the history of human civilization. The world is becoming a place unknown to us or any of our ancestors. It will be more difficult, more challenging, more dangerous and to rise to those events will require a deeply cohesive society in which all - rich and poor, right and left, of all skin hues, religions and ethnicities - collectively shoulder the burden, mutually sacrifice for a greater good and look after each other.

Is there any other way to defend and preserve all the good things that we have? Can we hope to do that if we stand divided in camps glaring and hurling insults at each other?

I don't think the future will go well for us, especially for our youngest generations, if we don't overcome this tribalism. And, if we fail, is it not conceivable that these two camps we have today, left and right, will break down further into sub-groups that do define themselves by rich and poor, by religious faith, colour, ethnicity, geography, demography? How far does this go before tribes break down into gangs?

Optimism is hard to muster. We're not even preparing our nation and our people to meet the truly existential threat of climate change. This is not something that is thirty or fifty or seventy years off. I'm convinced we shall see the world transformed in the course of the 20s even if countries of the northern latitudes are least impacted.  Perhaps that will shake us, bring us to our senses, heal the rift. If not, then what?

As Good a Take as Any. The Roots of America's Malaise.

His book is, "Tailspin - The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall - and Those Fighting to Reverse It." He is Steven Brill, founder of American Lawyer magazine and, gulp, Court TV.

In a remarkable essay, Brill outlines the culture that put America into a nose dive, how the country went from meritocracy to aristocracy, and some recent efforts being made to pull America back before it ends as most tailspins end.

Lately, most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, have been asking themselves some version of the same question: How did we get here? How did the world’s greatest democracy and economy become a land of crumbling roads, galloping income inequality, bitter polarization and dysfunctional government? 

...About five decades ago, the core values that make America great began to bring America down. The First Amendment became a tool for the wealthy to put a thumb on the scales of democracy. America’s rightly celebrated dedication to due process was used as an instrument to block government from enforcing job-safety rules, holding corporate criminals accountable and otherwise protecting the unprotected. Election reforms meant to enhance democracy wound up undercutting democracy. Ingenious financial and legal engineering turned our economy from an engine of long-term growth and shared prosperity into a casino with only a few big winners.

...Income inequality has soared: inflation-adjusted middle-class wages have been nearly frozen for the last four decades, while earnings of the top 1% have nearly tripled. The recovery from the crash of 2008 – which saw banks and bankers bailed out while millions lost their homes, savings and jobs – was reserved almost exclusively for the wealthiest. Their incomes in the three years following the crash went up by nearly a third, while the bottom 99% saw an uptick of less than half of 1%. Only a democracy and an economy that has discarded its basic mission of holding the community together, or failed at it, would produce those results.

...Although the U.S. remains the world’s richest country, it has the third-highest poverty rate among the 35 nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), behind only Turkey and Israel. Nearly 1 in 5 American children lives in a household that the government classifies as “food insecure,” meaning they are without “access to enough food for active, healthy living.” 

Beyond that, too few basic services seem to work as they should. America’s airports are an embarrassment, and a modern air-traffic control system is more than 25 years behind its original schedule. The power grid, roads and rails are crumbling, pushing the U.S. far down international rankings for infrastructure quality. Despite spending more on health care and K-12 education per capita than most other developed countries, health care outcomes and student achievement also rank in the middle or worse globally. Among the 35 OECD countries, American children rank 30th in math proficiency and 19th in science.

...there is a theme that threads through and ties together all the strands: many of the most talented, driven Americans used what makes America great–the First Amendment, due process, financial and legal ingenuity, free markets and free trade, meritocracy, even democracy itself–to chase the American Dream. And they won it, for themselves. Then, in a way unprecedented in history, they were able to consolidate their winnings, outsmart and co-opt the forces that might have reined them in, and pull up the ladder so more could not share in their success or challenge their primacy. 

By continuing to get better at what they do, by knocking away the guardrails limiting their winnings, aggressively engineering changes in the political landscape, and by dint of the often unanticipated consequences of their innovations, they created a nation of moats that protected them from accountability and from the damage their triumphs caused in the larger community. Most of the time, our elected and appointed representatives were no match for these overachievers. As a result of their savvy, their drive and their resources (and a certain degree of privilege, as these strivers may have come from humble circumstances but are mostly white men), America all but abandoned its most ambitious and proudest ideal: the never perfect, always debated and perpetually sought after balance between the energizing inequality of achievement in a competitive economy and the community-binding equality promised by democracy. In a battle that began a half-century ago, the achievers won.

It's a fine essay if not too much of a giveaway. Read it and you might decide you don't need the book.

It's Just a Sense, a Feeling.

If there's one thing we need to get much better at it's learning to deal with the unexpected.

It's a huge understatement to note that, on so many fronts, we're already passing through uncharted waters. Human lifespans being as brief as they are, life experiences can be very limited in depth and breadth. And so when change sets in, seismic change, and the ground begins shifting beneath your feet it's natural to become confused, disoriented.

A lot of what's happening today, the early onset stuff, was not foreseen by us just a decade or two ago. It can be incredibly depressing to think back to the 80s and 90s and the relative stability and security we enjoyed in those days and then look at what is upon us now.

Many science types tell us we're on the verge of a mass extinction event, the sixth in Earth's history. Extinction. Try to wrap your head around that. Delving into that idea reminds us that we, and most of the species trying to share this planet with us, are merely the latest iteration of life on Earth. We are the dominant species today but we weren't in earlier times. The human species didn't exist in these previous eras. Other life forms did going back about 3.8 billion years. Some other life form was the dominant species in each of those eras.  And those former species, plant and animal, died and were buried and became the coal, oil and gas that we've used to trigger the extinction of life in our era. Ah, the irony.

Our base of knowledge today is greater than at any time in the history of mankind. We amass data faster than we can hope to process it. There is no much information at your fingertips and yet you can only access it in slivers and even that in a most haphazard fashion.

We once imagined a future extending into something akin to infinity, at least in a practical context. Hitler proclaimed a thousand year Reich. Now, as our knowledge base expands at explosive rates, we struggle to foresee where we might be twenty, thirty or forty years down the road. We just don't know.  It wasn't that long ago that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that, if we didn't slash greenhouse gas emissions and pronto, dire change such as the loss of Arctic sea ice might be upon us by the end of the century, 2100. They were attempting to peer 90 years into the future and yet they were out by 70 years. It can feel like you're driving down a highway at full speed in a dense fog.

Our demonstrated inability to gauge the pace of the onset of climate change, arguably the greatest threat to mankind and life on Earth generally, is unsettling. What else have we overlooked? What else have we gotten wrong?

Even those who resist doing anything to mitigate against climate change, i.e. abandoning fossil fuels, are more open to adaptation strategies. In Florida, for example, they might refuse to accept the link between global warming and sea level rise and yet they're quite open to planning to adapt to sea level rise. However how do you adapt unless you have a pretty good idea of what is coming and by when? The later you leave it the fewer good options you may have remaining when you do decide to act. On the other hand should you act too soon, perhaps on flawed assumptions, you may squander irreplaceable assets pointlessly. Decisions, decisions.

You might not be able to save the first little piggy's house or the second little piggy's house but there may be things you can do to ensure that all three piggies are getting along when it comes time to take refuge in the third little piggy's sturdy brick house. When you think about it, the first little piggy and the second little piggy become dependent for their very survival on the generosity of the third little piggy. It's the third little piggy who has to share his abode and presumably his pantry to keep all three alive. That's what you call "social cohesion."

Imagine how well that wolf would have dined had the piggy community been as profoundly divided as our societies are today. Imagine if those piggies were as divided economically, politically, racially and socially as we are today, hostile and distrusting of each other.

What if there had been a political pig caste who groomed the little piggies with lies and fear and anger and suspicion, manipulating them for the political caste's own benefit? Isn't that what's happening to us today? Our trust in government and in each other is being eroded, diluted.

I have a cousin in the States. While he's not uneducated it's plain that his worldview and his social senses are shaped by FOX News, Limbaugh, Alex Jones (or this sphincter) and that crowd. The world he sees and the world we see are radically and irreconcilably different. He believes. He takes what he selectively hears on faith. And the only way to maintain that belief is to dismiss fact and evidence-based information as the stuff of conspiracies. The real world is one giant plot, a hoax, intended to lure him into some diabolical trap. Once you're in his place, Pizzagate and chem-trails become all too believable.

And so we sail into the uncharted waters of the unknown and perhaps unknowable with a crew ready to mutiny against itself and no one at the helm. I've got a sense, a feeling, that this is not shaping up well.

It's Getting Hot In Here

No, not the temperature, although that too is getting hot. I'm referring to the tenor of our social and political discourse. We're turning venomous, turning on each other. Society is degrading into camps, tribes.

We write off others, denounce them, vilify them and call them stupid childish names. We write them off at the very time when we most need to reach out and find common ground to restore and rebuild the framework of social cohesion.

When I began blogging about 10 years ago there was a marked difference between our side and the Tory camp. They were much quicker to pick up on the degeneracy of hyper-partisanship as it took hold in the United States. If you weren't in their camp you were a libtard or a lieberal or some equally puerile epithet. On their side it was constantly positing us, all of us, as their enemy. We might criticize their leaders but they had no hesitation in demeaning all of us. It was a shameful thing, a petty nastiness that they appeared to share with their American cousins.

Flash forward ten years and that same contagion of darkness has a foothold in our camp. The same hyper-partisanship, the same derogatory names, the same rage and hostility.  And so we have fallen lower. The thing is, this demeans us. The other side, they don't care. It merely validates their own view of irreconcilable and warring camps. We confirm what they want, even need, to believe about us to justify their own ugliness.

This is not a harmless indulgence by an intemperate few. It seeks to divide us, pull us ever further apart. Some quest to destroy a political party that predates Confederation and that still commands the support of more than 30 per cent of our fellow countrymen.

To those who boast about wanting to destroy the Conservative Party, what then? What do they want, a one-party state? Do they want their party in perpetual control of our country and our society? Do they really imagine their party is infallible or magically immune to corruption? It's not. Two years in and we've seen that this government has plenty of foibles and a good many failures. It has reneged on the critical promises that got it elected. It's a pretty face on some pretty shopworn politics.

The Trudeau Liberals, on the strength of some major promises they did not fulfill, got 39.5 per cent of the vote. 60.5 percent of the voting public supported other parties. By a 3 to 2 margin, the Canadian public was defeated in that election. Trump got a much better share of the popular vote in his country than Trudeau did in ours.

It is not disloyal, it is not aiding the enemy, to roundly criticize the Trudeau government for its grievous failings. It is not disloyal to expect far more and far better from the Liberals than we had to accept from the Harper Tories. Moreover it is not loyal to sit mute when our side strays and falters as the other side did.

I want to hear no more of this rabid nonsense about destroying the Conservative Party. This is stacking up to be a hellish century. We need social cohesion more than at any time in humanity's past. This is a time when we need to be reaching out, finding common ground, restoring consensus wherever that can be achieved. We will need to win them over, not alienate them and not create rifts among ourselves.

Neoliberalism Has Made Us What We Are Today - And That Isn't Pretty

Neoliberalism is a social, political and economic model best suited to those with psychopathic personality traits.

That, in any case, is the conclusion of Paul Verhaeghe, who dissects neoliberalism and what it has done to us in The Guardian.

"Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative."

"..the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation.

"Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it’s known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other."

The bullying reference struck me because it is precisely what I hear mid-level public servants complain has spread through their work place.  Performance anxiety, job insecurity, the sense of fellow workers being threatening.  That seems to have taken hold since the arrival of the Harper regime.

"...Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough, all the while reinforcing privilege and putting increasing pressure on its overstretched and exhausted citizens. An increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated, guilty and ashamed. We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are deemed to be losers or scroungers, taking advantage of our social security system."

A good measure of Social Darwinism has been inculcated in us.  Even those most vulnerable to it seem to embrace it.  It's powerfully corrosive of social cohesion, an attribute that we, as a people, will need to find our way through the travails that await us this century.  "Every man for himself" becomes a mantra for social ruin.

"A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom we perceive ourselves as having in the west is the greatest untruth of this day and age.

"The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman neatly summarised the paradox of our era as: “Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless.” We are indeed freer than before, in the sense that we can criticise religion, take advantage of the new laissez-faire attitude to sex and support any political movement we like. We can do all these things because they no longer have any significance – freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet, on the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a bureaucracy that would make Kafka weak at the knees. There are regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban poultry-keeping."

Yes, indifference, disengagement, disaffection are the usual by-products of today's neoliberalism.  There are those, such as our prime minister, who have learned to exploit this.  The fewer citizens who turn out at the polls the better for Stephen Harper.  He needs merely appeal to the fears, resentments and bigotry of a small segment of the voting public, barely 20% of eligible voters, to achieve a majority provided enough other eligible voters can be kept away from the ballot box. 

"...There are constant laments about the so-called loss of norms and values in our culture. Yet our norms and values make up an integral and essential part of our identity. So they cannot be lost, only changed. And that is precisely what has happened: a changed economy reflects changed ethics and brings about changed identity. The current economic system is bringing out the worst in us."

This very economic system that brings out the worst in us is still accommodated by our political classes - all of them.  There's a reason there is not one federal leader today - Conservative, Liberal or New Democrat - speaking out against the scourge of neoliberalism, much less offering the public a "New Deal."  Mulcair, trying to stay ahead of the shadow of Horwath, is claiming to have turned Left but it's an unconvincing performance. 

So what are we to do?  A vote for Harper or Trudeau or Mulcair is still a vote for the continuation of neoliberalism at the expense of social democracy.  It is a vote for social and economic feudalism, the relentless advance of increasingly illiberal democracy. 

There's a study coming out of Princeton this fall that addresses the death of democracy in the United States and the ascent of plutocracy and the corporate state.  We need to pay close attention to those findings because the same process is already well underway here in Canada.  If we don't defend democracy it is at risk of remaining in name only.

When You Run Out of Stuff

One of the most recurring themes on this blog over the past six years has been the prospect of running out of stuff.  As the first truly global civilization, mankind is running out of stuff.   Not everything, mind you.  We're running out of stuff that we need but we're building up dangerously big surpluses of stuff that we don't need, that could just kill us.

For example, around the world nations are running out of fresh water.  We have a huge and rapidly worsening fresh water crisis on our hands.  Maude Barlow gave an updated overview of the problem just last week.  With the exception of just a handful of countries, the world is running out of biomass, the renewable natural resources that not only underpin our economies but provide us with the clean, safe environment we need in order to live.  Anthropogenic global warming, man-made climate change is multiplying the magnitude of these crises and sapping our strength to implement solutions.

In many posts over the years it has been argued that we have to jettison our neo-classical growth-based economic model because it no longer works for us but rather works against us and traps us in a vicious circle of inequality and decline.  I know that Justin Trudeau and Tom Mulcair, like Stephen Harper, are constantly praising growth but they are  just blowing smoke up your ass.

Which brings us to Chris Hedges and Avner Offer, an economic historian and Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History.

Neoclassical economics, [Offer] says, is a “just-world theory,” one that posits that not only do good people get what they deserve but those who suffer deserve to suffer. He says this model is “a warrant for inflicting pain.” If we continue down a path of mounting scarcities, along with economic stagnation or decline, this neoclassical model is ominous. It could be used to justify repression in an effort to sustain a vision that does not correspond to the real world.

Offer, who has studied the rationing systems set up in countries that took part in World War I, suggests we examine how past societies coped successfully with scarcity. In an age of scarcity it would be imperative to set up new, more egalitarian models of distribution, he says. Clinging to the old neoclassical model could, he argues, erode and perhaps destroy social cohesion and require the state to engage in greater forms of coercion.

“The basic conventions of public discourse are those of the  Enlightenment, in which the use of reason [enabled] us to achieve human objectives,” Offer said as we sat amid piles of books in his cluttered office. “Reason should be tempered by reality, by the facts. So underlining this is a notion of science that confronts reality and is revised by reference to reality. This is the model for how we talk. It is the model for the things we assume. But the reality that has emerged around us has not come out of this process. So our basic conventions only serve to justify existing relationships, structures and hierarchies. Plausible arguments are made for principles that are incompatible with each other.”

The corruption of neo-classical economics.

Offer argued that “a silent revolution” took place in economics in the 1970s. “Economists,” he said of the 1970s, “discovered opportunism — a polite term for cheating. Before that, economics had been a just-world defense of the status quo. But when the status quo became the welfare state, suddenly economics became all about cheating. Game theory was about cheating. Public-choice theory was about cheating. Asymmetric information was about cheating. The invisible-hand doctrine tells us there is only one outcome, and that outcome is the best. But once you enter a world of cheating there is no longer one outcome. It is what economists call multiple equilibria, which means there is not a deterministic outcome. The outcome depends on how successful the cheating is. And one of the consequences of this is that economists are not in a strong position to tell society what to do.”

The problem, he said, is that the old norms of economics continue to inform our policy norms, as if the cheating norm had never been introduced.

 “Let’s take the doctrine of optimal taxation,” he said. “If you assume a world of perfect competition, where every person gets their marginal products, then you can deduce a tax distribution where high progressive taxation is inefficient. This doctrine has been one of the drivers to reduce progressive taxation. But looking at the historical record this has not been accompanied by any great surge in productivity; rather, it has produced a great surge in inequality. So once again, there is a gap between what the model tells us should happen and what actually happens. In this case the model works, but only in the model, only if all the assumptions are satisfied. Reality is more complicated.”

On the Need for Social Cohesion in a Post-Growth Society

Our current economic model, he said, will be of little use to us in an age of ecological deterioration and growing scarcities. Energy shortages, global warming, population increases and increasing scarcity of water and food create an urgent need for new models of distribution. Our two options, he said, will be “hanging together or falling apart.” Offer argues that we cannot be certain that growth will continue. If standards of living stagnate or decline, he said, we must consider other models for the economy. Given the wealth and resources of industrialized nations, he said, a drop in living standards to what they were one or two generations ago would still permit a good quality of life.

Offer has studied closely the economies of World War I. Amid this catastrophe, he notes, civilian economies adapted. He holds up these war economies, with their heavy rationing, as a possible model for collective action in a contracting economy.

“What you had was a very sudden transition to a serious scarcity economy that was underpinned by the necessity for sharing,” he said. “Ordinary people were required to sacrifice their lives. They needed some guarantee for those they left at home. These war economies were relatively egalitarian. These economics were based on the safety net principle. If continued growth in the medium run is not feasible, and that is a contingency we need to think about, then these rationing societies provide quite a successful model. On the Allied side, people did not starve, society held together.”

However, if we cling to our current economic model — which Offer labels “every man for himself” — then, he said, “it will require serious repression.”

“There is not a free market solution to a peaceful decline,” he said.

“The state of current political economy in the West is similar to the state of communism in the Soviet Union around 1970,” he went on. “It is studied widely in the university. Everyone knows the formula. Everyone mouths it in discourse. But no one believes it.” The gap between the model and reality is now vast. Those in power seek “to bring reality into alignment with the model, and that usually involves coercion.”

We have a choice.  Either we continue with our neoclassical economic model that now serves mainly to vest wealth and political power in increasingly fewer hands and consign our grandkids to a future of coercion and repression or we create a movement to lead our country out of this trap.  That can begin by using government to undo the creature of its own making - inequality - and making our government's priority the restoration of the most robust, broad-based middle class possible.  It is only through the rehabilitation and expansion of that now shrunken middle class that we can hope to achieve the degree of social cohesion and collective will to transition Canada to an economic model we need and future generations will need for the 21st century as we progress into a post-growth era.  We either control our fate or our fate will be decided by others for us.