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Chapter Fourteen
Problems II
In the preceding pages common sense has more than once been named and characterized, although admittedly never really adequately defined. Common sense has been regarded as something Nietzsche and Foucault undermine because it leads in directions that they do not wish to go (assuming they have the wishes I attribute to them). Together with Hannah Arendt and the late Wittgenstein, I have been defending common sense as the embodiment of the ethical authority society needs if it is to function at all. I take common sense to be also the soil in which the growth points we must nurture to improve society will grow, if they will grow at all. Not every cultural transformation is possible, but only the ones that are both thinkable transformations of some aspect of existing common sense and attractors of energy and resources that drive change.
While I have been resisting undermining common sense, I have also been criticizing it somewhat as Ellen Meiksins Wood (Wood 2004) and Marxists generally criticize it. In our modern world buying and selling are common activities; the rules that govern buying and selling are common sense. Common sense contains, it almost is, the constitutive rules of a logic of capital accumulation that is innocent enough on a small scale, but which in the aggregate is driving humanity “forward,” like lemmings rushing forward over a cliff, toward militarism and violence, toward the extinction of ethics and the biosphere. Ethics is at the very heart of common sense, and yet a particular central part of it, the very part emphasized by Kant, sets up a dynamic of capital accumulation that tends when unchecked to dissolve much of ethics and even threatens to dissolve those ethical principles, like basic honesty, that are among its own conditions of possibility.
My dialogue with common sense, like my dialogue with Michel Foucault, feeds a positive proposal. The proposal is an ethical, pragmatic and realistic approach to building social democracy on a world scale; not as a totalizing one-size-fits-all monolith as people like Foucault fear, but as a mosaic of diverse bio-regions and cultures, somewhat as John Maynard Keynes envisioned when he advocated limiting free trade in favor of local and national autonomy. (Keynes 1933) What would make each fragment of the mosaic a social democracy would be, in part, that it would not be driven by any regime of accumulation at all. Social democracy would not extinguish profit-making as a social practice, but it would succeed in subordinating it to one or another happy combination of ethics, rationality, and democracy. What Ellen Meiksins Wood calls “systemic imperatives” would cease to be imperatives, but they would in large part continue to exist not because they are imperative, but because ethics, reason, and democracy conclude that they work. They solve problems. When they do not work, for example, when free markets do not work, they are modified or replaced. Whatever modifies or replaces them would itself, in turn, be evaluated according to how well it works, and in due course, itself modified or replaced—unending experimentation and revision is another part (a characteristically Deweyan and Popperian part) of what it means to be a social democracy.
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At this point I return to the list of problems that began the first chapter. If people like Ellen Meiksins Wood, the critical realists, and I are right to attribute to social structures (i.e. to basic constitutive rules) a causal efficacy that to some considerable extent determines which way history is going, then making the rules visible, and making their functioning and their revision part of the analysis of any given problem must necessarily be a component of effective practices causing history to start going a different and better way. Therefore, in general the ideas proposed in the preceding chapters contribute to solving the pervasive problems of the modern world-system insofar as they tend to make the basic cultural structures of the modern world visible. The basic rules of the game become part of the analysis rather than a taken-for-granted unstated part of the background of the analysis.
However, since my interest is in solving problems, I do not think I have finished my work if I only indicate in general one dimension of the type of analysis that would in general contribute to solving problems. I think I need at least to suggest some applications to particular problems, or problem-areas, even if they are necessarily only sketches, and even if they should not be applied to practice without making a much more detailed study of the relevant empirical facts than a philosopher is able to make in his spare time. (Here “empirical facts” is meant to include social facts concerning how people frame and perceive problems as well as natural facts, always remembering Aristotle’s point in his Nichomachean Ethics that people act not on the basis of the facts but on the basis of what they believe to be the facts. (Aristotle ))
Although the following suggestions for solving problems are meant to illustrate some merits of ethical pragmatic critical realism as a philosophy, they also draw from time to time on miscellaneous ideas I happen to have which the reader may or may not find plausible. I hope that the merits of the general approach will shine through any fog generated by the reader’s possible disbelief in one or more of my miscellaneous ideas.
- The Destruction of the Biosphere.
The Indian physicist Vandana Shiva calculates that the Ganges Glacier is receding at the rate of 30 meters per year. (Shiva 2007) Perhaps she exaggerates. She calculates that by the year 2020 the glaciers of the Himalayas will have shrunk from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers. As a result, the fifth of humanity that depends on melting snows feeding the great rivers of South Asia when it is not the rainy season will suffer a water shortage, which will lead in turn to decreased production of food. Perhaps she miscalculates. If it should turn out to be the case in 2020 that the glaciers of the Himalayas still occupy 300,000 square kilometers, or if by then they have shrunk to zero, it will not be the first time that nature has not complied with the time tables projected by scientists.
The direction of change is clear. How fast change happens is less important than the kind of change that is happening. It is clear what kind of change is happening. The ice of the Ganges Glacier is not the only ice that is melting. The melting of ice is not the only process that is destroying the physical conditions that make life possible in the orange-peel shaped space between the surface of the earth and the upper limit of its atmosphere. The kind of change happening is that human actions are destroying the biosphere.
Vandana Shiva identifies one of the principal features of destructive human activity: heightened emission of carbon dioxide and other fumes that destabilize the environment due to the increased burning of fossil fuels. “For me, globalization is really expanding the use of fossil fuel.” (Shiva 2007, p. 1) With the word “globalization” she identifies not just a cause of ice melting (burning fossil fuels) but also a cause of the cause. Globalization increases emissions by, among other things, “…making every one of us dependent on our everyday needs to come from China.” (ibid.) Now another problem is mentioned: that the vital processes of life are insecure because they rely on distant, complex, and unreliable sources for essential inputs. Shiva’s implicit point is that both problems, the problem of the destruction of the biosphere and the problem of the unreliability of the sources of the satisfiers of people’s everyday needs, stem from the same cause. She names the cause as “globalization.” She identifies it with one of its effects: “expanding the use of fossil fuel.” It could also be named as, “capital accumulation on a global scale.” (Amin, Mies) Ellen Meiksin Wood analyzes it in terms of “systemic imperatives.”
Ceasing to emit carbon dioxide in amounts greater than the earth’s plants can photosynthesize is an ecological imperative. It is just one example of an ecological imperative. There are also many other things humanity must do to make its behavior compatible with the long-term physical requirements of the earth’s fragile biosphere. But what humanity actually does is driven more by systemic imperatives than by ecological imperatives. Most people need money to live. For them it is a systemic imperative to get money. That usually means selling something, either some product or their services. Under the currently dominant paradigm production, and consequently employment, depend largely on investor confidence, which depends in turn on expectations of profitability. Compared to the massive fact that whatever must be done to assure expectations of profitability (in other words to establish a regime of accumulation) shall be done, the endless negotiations about emission standards, and about who is complying with them and who is not, are skirmishes on the deck of a sinking Titanic. The fine phrases of the Earth Charter are voices drowned in the wind. The Earth Charter says, for example, in its preamble on the global situation: “The dominant patterns of production and consumption are causing environmental devastation, the depletion of resources, and a massive extinction of species”. It should say: “The government of production by the imperatives of markets is causing environmental devastation, the depletion of resources, and a massive extinction of species.”
Vandana Shiva is among those who know that the systemic dynamics that drive its destruction must change if the biosphere is to last another thousand years and to continue to last indefinitely into the future. The title of her article to which I am referring asserts that to address humanity’s current crises it is necessary to “challenge corporate power and embrace true democracy.” I would beg leave to suggest some concepts that would put such phrases in a different (and hopefully useful) light.
A philosophical reorientation is called for. “Power” is an overused word. Whatever the institutional form may be, whether it is a corporation, a sole proprietorship, a trust, a limited liability company, or even a public sector corporation with all its stock owned by the government, or even a worker-owned corporation with all its stock owned by the employees, the driving dynamic is determined by the constitutive rules of what Charles Taylor calls a bargaining society, which I (following Gandhi) usually call modernity. Rules are causes. Social change is changing norms.
Before making a judgment at any given time and place concerning which democracy is then and there “true,” I recommend analyzing the language games then and there practiced as patterns of episodes in the natural history of the human species. A key question to ask is whether they are cultural resources. That is to say: whether they have potential capacity for organizing cooperating and sharing, thereby freeing people from the grip of systemic imperatives, thereby empowering people to obey ecological imperatives. I recommend thinking in terms of cultural action to transform the basic cultural structures of the modern world. I believe that if philosophers, social scientists, and educated activists think in such terms, planning and evaluating what we do in such terms, it will contribute to the reversal of the present trend toward the destruction of the biosphere.
I am here briefly recommending concepts for progressive organic intellectuals that in the preceding chapters and elsewhere I develop in detail. I do not expect this rather technical terminology to become a public working vocabulary employed by millions of people, although if it were to become one I would not complain. It is part of the very concept of cultural action that although some of its texts (for example Paulo Freire´s Pedagogy of the Oppressed) may be aimed at an educated audience, its practice always starts with culture as it exists at a given time and place, and always communicates with people in languages familiar to them that affirm what they know.
- Ethnic Violence.
These writings provide philosophical support for an ethical approach to problems often framed as ethnic violence. It can be summarized by saying that the solution to problems of ethnic violence is the construction of cultures of peace. It will have a familiar ring to many ears, now that the United Nations and several international nongovernmental organizations have devoted several decades to promoting the concept of culture of peace. It is a tautology. By definition, where there is a culture of peace there is no ethnic violence. Where there is ethnic violence there is no culture of peace. Its backers regard it as a useful tautology that gains empirical and theoretical content as its meaning is further specified.
The ethical approach thus tautologically summarized can be outlined as follows:
One. Critical realism licenses us to take relevant discoveries of the natural sciences into account in the social sciences. We know that a capacity for rage is built into human physiology (Konner ). We know the blood of young males tends to carry high quantities of testosterone, which produces a predisposition toward aggressive behavior. In general, for physical reasons humans, especially males, have proclivities to practice and to enjoy violence.
Two . Being the cultural animal is the ecological niche of the human species. ((One) above is misleading if it is taken to mean that there is a pre-cultural human body, to which culture is later added. The body itself evolved as that of a cultural animal. (Tanner )
Three. Culture consists centrally of rules, also known as customs, conventions, ethics, norms, or standards of behavior. (Max Weber’s instrumental and value rationality can be seen as particular kinds of norms; thus, his four causes of human action reduce to two, norm and impulse.) Rules constitute institutions.
(Four. The repertory of an individual or group usually includes more than one set of more or less clearly defined sets of rules, applicable in different contexts; for example those of the underlife and those of the overlife in Goffman’s studies of asylums. (Goffman ))
Five. The rules of cultures and subcultures prescribe violence and peace in varying degrees. (For an example of a subculture prescribing violence see Harre ) Most limit violence, and some prohibit it altogether.
Six. Cultures whose norms favor peace have a tendency to flourish and to survive because (even if for no other reason) limiting violence increases productivity. (Weingast )
Seven. Sometimes social norms are followed and sometimes not.
Eight. Notable among the occasions when a culture’s rules are broken are those when for some reason or another social control of impulse is absent. For examples: when people are drunk, sleepless, psychotic, under the influence of drugs, carried away by the excitement of a mob; when police and other authorities are absent; when men lack family and community ties; when the rule of law has lost credibility.
Nine. Notable among the occasions when the peaceful rules are broken and the violent elements of a culture’s norms are activated are those when leading individuals and groups find it in their interest to incite ethnic conflict.
Ten. Notable for generating both (8) and (9) and also for themselves generating the breaking of peaceful rules are basic cultural structures that generate humiliation and exclusion (for example unemployment). Unmitigated capitalism is an example of such basic cultural structures. History has known other examples, some of which have produced deep-seated resentments that simmer for many years before finding expression in violence. (See e.g. Wasserstrom 1980, Petersen 2002)
Eleven. A culture of peace is one whose norms prescribe peaceful behavior and are generally followed. (A more detailed and more official definition is given in United Nations Resolution A/RES/52/13 and partly reproduced in a footnote below.)
The epistemology behind this eleven point outline differs from that which until recently guided most research on ethnic violence. Namely: research of the kind critical realists as well as philosophers like Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre criticize as “Humean.” (Harre , Patomaki, Bhaskar ) “Humean” research identifies independent and dependent “variables” or “factors” (for example an independent variable might be a measure of “relative deprivation” and a dependent variable some measure of ethnic or political violence (Gurr )) gathers data, measures, codes, and then does some sort of statistical analysis, perhaps something as simple as composing a table which shows which variables were and which were not associated with high degrees of ethnic violence. It also differs from rational actor and game-theoretic approaches, even while complimenting them for having shed much light on (Nine) above. I cannot however, simply ignore empirical findings when I consider the research design sub-optimal. Any approach has to be consistent with empirical findings (however produced) in the following Popperian sense: if a theory entails a prediction, and the prediction turns out to be false, there must be something wrong with the theory. (When p implies q, then not q implies not p.) (Nevertheless, a theory that does not lend itself to Popperian testing may still be a good and useful theory. (See Lakatos ))
Although I am obligated not to believe anything flatly contradicted by any findings, I elaborate my ideas on how to build a culture of peace drawing mainly on ethnographically oriented studies by sociologists and anthropologists. Dunn and Elias summarize a series of such studies by attributing to cultures of violence the following characteristics: poverty, domination of females by males, low levels of formal education, unsteady employment, glorification of violence, intolerance manifested in a strong sense of separation between “them” and “us,” physical separation of men from women and of adults from children, leaving children to grow up on their own with little adult supervision, little geographic mobility. (Dunn and Elias 1987) If one reverses such a list of typical features of cultures of violence, and thinks of a culture of peace as one characterized by prosperity, gender equality, lifelong learning, steady employment, non-violence, tolerance of diversity, multigenerational activities with both women and men present, travel, and intense interest of adults in the education of the children, then it is hard to avoid the empirical hypothesis that a culture of peace is a middle class culture. Formally, I define a culture of peace as one with peaceful norms that are followed. Empirically, I believe such cultures to be frequently characterized by middle-class values.
My co-author and I have taken this line of reasoning some steps farther by making middle-class values part of what it means to be middle class. In the tradition of Whiggery, we have moved Emile Durkheim´s finding that normlessness is more frequent in the upper class and in the lower class up from the status of empirical finding to the status of part of the meaning of the concept “middle class.” (Richards and Swanger 2007) Weaving ethics into the warp and woof of social science, we regard being a respectable citizen as part of what it means to be middle class, while acknowledging that having a moderate degree of wealth and income is also part of what it means, and acknowledging that middle class people typically have the high levels of formal education that Pierre Bourdieu associates with being an owner of cultural capital. A classless society could be achieved by the euthanasia of the rentier class (Keynes 1936) and by incorporating the lower class into the middle class by means of education and improved access to resources; or, what amounts to nearly the same thing, a classless society could be achieved by implementing the principles of John Rawls´ theory of justice. (Rawls 1975). I suggest that moving toward a classless society in this sense is also moving toward a culture of peace.
I do not claim that there are no instances of poor people with middle class values, nor that every study of upper class values confirms Durkheim´s findings. I do want to claim that an ethical approach which sees culture change as norm change provides a starting point for a systematic methodology for building cultures of peace as characterized above and in the United Nations culture of peace literature. (Richards and Swanger forthcoming). To the best of my knowledge studies of ethnic and other violence have produced no empirical findings that contradict this claim or make it implausible. Some empirical findings strikingly confirm it.
From a comparison of the ethnic violence in Northern Ireland and in the Basque Region with the comparative absence of ethnic violence in otherwise similar situations in Catalonia and Quebec, Peter Waldmann finds the descent into violence in the former two places to be due to the loss of middle-class control over their nationalist movements. (Waldmann 1989) Valery Tishkov finds that in the Kyrgyz-Uzbek violence in the former Soviet Union in 1990, and in general, according to his review of the literature, ethnic violence is violence of social marginals against ethnic or racial marginals. (Tishkov 1995 p. 135) Waldmann and others have found that although the leaders (or manipulators) in ethnic violence are often well educated and upper or middle class, the rank and file generally is not. The studies attributing ethnic violence in part to the social construction of negative ethnic identities can be read as implying that cultures of peace can also be socially constructed. (Fearon and Latin 2000) Empirically-based critiques showing the inability of rational actor approaches to explain the apparently irrational character of much ethnic violence can be taken as showing that solutions must be found at a deeper level, at a level less tied to historically contingent liberal institutions, at a level more tied to physiology and to culture. (Varshney 2003)
- Poverty
Because the constitutive rules of the basic cultural structures of the modern world are what they are, most people need to sell something to live. They can be poor for two reasons, or for a combination of both:
One: Because they have no goods or services to sell that anyone buys, or
Two: Because the price of what they sell is so low that their income is insufficient to meet their needs.
Looking at the problem from this viewpoint (a viewpoint which temporarily puts on hold the question how to produce goods so that there will be enough things to buy when and if the poor get money), there are three possible ways to solve it:
One: For the poor to acquire skills or to begin to produce products for which there is a market;
Two: To raise the prices of what the poor sell to levels high enough to provide them with incomes sufficient to meet their needs; or
Three: For the poor to acquire assets (money, goods and services, and/or income producing assets) in some other way, i.e. a way other than selling something.
Anti-poverty programs can be classified according to these three possibilities.
Type One programs augment the capacities of poor people to offer something for sale in the market. They include active labor market policies that send workers to where the jobs are and train them. They include microcredit programs that support small-scale entrepreneurship. They include Don Bosco´s salesian schools that provide underprivileged young people with job skills. They include seminars aimed to acquaint poor people and people who might offer jobs to poor people with emerging market opportunities. In more general terms, the neoliberal economists who designed the Washington Consensus reasoned that the main asset of poor people is themselves, themselves as assets to offer for sale in the labor market. Accordingly, that Consensus advises governments to aid the poor with education and with health services, i.e. with self-improvement leading to enhanced self-marketability.
Type Two programs for the most part raise the price of what the poor have to sell by constraining the buyers. The buyers are not allowed to pay the lowest price the unmitigated market will bear. They must pay minimum wage. They must pay union wages set by collective bargaining. In Western Europe, consumers must pay prices for milk and other farm products that are set by schemes designed to make it possible for farmers to earn a living. In the province of Misiones in Argentina poor small farmers who grow yerba mate have banded together to make consumers pay more for their product by restricting the supply, and also to channel more of what they pay to themselves by eliminating middlemen.
Another way to raise the price of what the poor have to sell is for the government to enter the market as a competing buyer. For example, at one time the government of Sweden guaranteed work to anybody who did not find work elsewhere. No employer could buy the labor from employees at a price lower than the wage the government was paying. Yet another way is to appeal to the conscience of consumers, as in the Fair Trade Movement, which asks consumers to follow Gandhi´s principle to consider when buying a product not only its price but also the living and labor conditions of its producers.
Type Three programs can be divided into two kinds.
The first kind can be called Transfer Benefits. In these cases although the poor do not sell anything (except sometimes perhaps in an extended sense of “sell” as in “selling votes to buy welfare”) somebody sells something. Part or all of the revenue is transferred to the poor. For example, many otherwise poor Native Americans receive monthly checks from the sale of mineral resources found on reservation lands. For example, philanthropists make money selling something, or owning businesses that sell something, and support the Salvation Army. For example, profits are taxed and used to fund welfare benefits. For example, surplus value from private and public sources is used to pay people to go to school. For example, the government of Venezuela uses oil revenues to support poor musicians and indirectly their families (orquestas sinfónicas juveniles). Chile uses copper revenues to pay otherwise poor people to play soccer and to teach other people to play soccer. (Chiledeporte). In the Middle Ages monks and nuns, many of whom would themselves otherwise have been even more poor than their vows required were subsidized by rents from church lands to pray, to participate in ceremonies, to do manual labor in monasteries and convents, and to attend to a variety of kinds of afflicted people in hospitals. (ora et labora) Church-related foundations used rents from landed endowments to provide for the poor. Recently Guy Standing of the International Labour Office (and other institutional affiliations) has argued that the elimination of poverty requires supplementing wages with non-wage income, and has proposed a taxonomy of types of non-wage income. (Standing 2005)
A second type of Type Three program is one that encourages what can be called “Alternative Paradigm Benefits.” By an alternative paradigm, I mean any paradigm that does not rely on sales. For example, if grandma baby-sits while son and daughter-in-law go out for the evening, the standard of living of the latter is enhanced, but they do not buy anything from grandma. If father, son, and son-in-law add a new bedroom to the house, the labor cost does not enter the market. Pre-capitalist societies generally organized mutual aid through bonds of mutual obligation, sometimes called reciprocity and/or a gift economy. Many such practices continue today. Barter systems and time banks can be regarded as following alternative paradigms insofar as they are deliberately designed to include people who are excluded by normal market exchange. (Cahn 2000)
The foregoing should be sufficient to show that the rococo neo-end-of- the-Roman-Empire-decadence we witness today—in which growing numbers of the excluded live on a combination of handouts and crime while entertaining themselves with sex, drugs, violence, and hypnotic music—is absolutely unnecessary. (Assuming that measures of the kinds illustrated above are accompanied by good answers to the question temporarily put on hold at the beginning of this section.)
4. Water Shortages
The hydrologic cycle provides the earth with about 110,000 cubic kilometers of rainfall every year, not counting the rain that falls on the oceans. (Jackson et al 2001) Of this amount approximately 40,000 cubic kilometers comes from evaporation of ocean water, the rest returns to the land water evaporated from the land. Approximately half of the global renewable supply runs rapidly toward the sea in floods. About a fifth of it is inconveniently located for human purposes. Some 27% is potentially available for human use as renewable groundwater or capturable surface runoff. This figure can be increased to perhaps 31% using dams and reservoirs to capture floodwater. Of the fresh water put to use by human beings, over 70% is used for agriculture (the figure is 81% for the United States) About 40% of the world’s food supply depends on irrigation. Irrigation and irrigation skillfully combined with new and highly productive varieties of grains are among the reasons why in 2007 planet earth is able to support a human population several times larger than the Reverend Thomas Malthus thought possible in 1817, but there are stern signs that we have reached a point where our luck is running out. The combination of the depletion of non-renewable aquifers (the Ogallala aquifer under the American high plains may be gone in a century), declining water availability in key food producing areas (most importantly but by no means exclusively North India and North China), the use of agriculture not for food but for biofuel, increased pollution, and rising population implies trouble ahead. (Postel 1999, Pringle and Barber 2000, Global Envision 2007)
From my non-Nietzschean, democratic, morality of the herd point of view, the problem is one of family planning: how to stabilize the population, and how to use available water supplies efficiently to meet everybody’s basic needs. A love ethic is implicit in a philosophy that advocates modifying the rules that guide and govern human behavior so that institutions will work for everyone’s benefit. The way I see it may overlap with the way the problem is seen by those who think in terms of military preparedness to cope with resource wars and with revolts among people who in the desperation produced in the wake of the coming severe water shortages fall under the sway of radical ideologies. But it is not the same. As I see the problem (and as I recommend that others see it) ways should be found to achieve food security for all under new and adverse conditions. One way or another (by purchase in the market or by some other means) food should be shipped from regions still capable of producing it to regions that no longer can; or refugee populations should move in the opposite direction; or both.
Even without today’s water shortages, and even without the worse water shortages looming on the horizon, humanity was already failing to meet everybody’s basic needs. Back in the days when on a global scale fresh unpolluted water was plentiful, people nevertheless went hungry. The reasons were more legal than agricultural. The hungry did not own food. They could not buy it and therefore they could not eat it, even though in every known case of widespread hunger food could be purchased on the market by people with enough money to buy it. (Sen 1981) In addition to failing to provide food security, the prevailing institutions also left approximately one billion people without safe drinking water, and nearly half the world’s population without adequate sanitation facilities. (Jackson et al. 2001) Present and coming water shortages complicate finishing the unfinished business of coordinating resources, technologies, incentives, and needs.
Sandra Postel, the great guru of water management policy, advocates a “blue revolution” to make more efficient use of the available supplies (Postel 1999). Readers of the preceding chapters will not be surprised that I agree with her that unless there is a culture shift, the usual policy recommendations calling for economic incentives for the more efficient use of water are neither likely to be implemented nor likely to do the job if they are implemented. Taking a long historical view, she cries out against the prevailing ethos of wastefulness and calls for a water ethic. She cites examples of water discourse and practice from traditional cultures of South Asia and Africa from which we moderns have much to learn.
I am trying to follow Postel’s advice as best I can myself, in addition to advocating that governments and large-scale farmers follow it. I am changing the irrigation of my fruit trees from flooding to spray and then to drip. I have planted fig trees, which produce comparatively high nourishment with comparatively little water. I use mulch to retard evaporation, and irrigate in the evening or at night for the same reason. I am trying out a circular raised bed system that is supposed to produce more vegetables with less water. (see www.changetheworld.org) I am planning to irrigate with grey water but I have not done it yet.
Since most of what I grow I share with the neighbors, and since most of my neighbors are poor, my little personal project is both water-saving and food security enhancing. Against what I am doing it can be objected: (1) What one person does with fifty trees is irrelevant to global water management; (2) It is unsustainable because I cannot continue indefinitely investing money in food production without getting any revenue from selling the products; (3) It is a replicable model only to a minimal extent because only perhaps 1% of people who own land have the required level of generosity, while 99% will save water and/or share food only when it is in their immediate economic interest to do so, or when they are forced to do so; (4) Personal efforts to “be the change you want to see” can only divert attention from the systematic large-scale programs that have a realistic chance of actually solving the problem. I believe that the philosophy developed in the preceding chapters implies replies to these objections:
One. Since society is made of rules, the way to change it is to follow different rules. Whether society will succeed in providing food, safe drinking water, and sanitation for each of its members working within the limitations imposed by present and future resource constraints depends on whether better social rules are adopted. The measure of the utility of an innovative practice does not lie primarily in the number of gallons of water saved, or the number of pounds of food delivered. It lies in its capacity to generate more ethical norms.
Two. Once a business enterprise distributes profits to its owners, the role of profit in orienting financial accounting (and thus indirectly providing criteria for distinguishing efficient from inefficient production) is over. What the shareholders do with their dividends has no effect on the efficiency or sustainability of the business. Let me illustrate this rather abstract point and its relevance with an example: I know a family living in and near Santa Barbara, California, whose members have inherited the stock owned by an ancestor who founded American Metals Corporation (formerly known as Climax Molybdenum). They receive periodic income drawn from corporate profits. For several generations now they have raised show horses. If they can go on indefinitely raising show horses with dividends from American Metals, why cannot I go on indefinitely sharing food with my neighbors with dividends from mutual funds? Speaking generally: As long as the economy is generating profits, rents, and interest, why can they not be recycled to serve useful social purposes?
Three. A critic might say that the feasibility of the culture shift I advocate depends on there being more generosity in human nature than there is. I would reply that the critic’s way of looking at the question is ethnocentric. It is a common fallacy to deduce from an alleged scarcity of generosity the conclusion that the institutions that exist here and now are the only possible institutions. Actually, anthropological and historical research shows that there is nothing new or unusual in what I am doing. In many cultures, it would not be framed as “generosity” (thus implying that it is optional and unusual behavior) but rather as expected and normal. (See www.gift-economy.com; Gouldner 1985) There is an ontological issue here: If one takes cultural norms to be the stuff (the being, the ousia, the hyle) that economic systems, laws, and governments are made of, then one will see that the latter can be changed by cultural action.
Four. The fourth objection is actually a rhetorical device to allow me to reply by filling in a little context. Every neighborhood in Chile has by law a Neighbors’ Council (junta de vecinos), although in some neighborhoods the junta is inactive. Sharing homegrown fruits and vegetables is one of several parts, and not the largest part, of a successful food security scheme run by our junta de vecinos. In our neighborhood, nobody need go hungry, and nobody is put in the position of just accepting handouts without being treated as a responsible and contributing member of the community. The food security scheme is large scale in the sense in which Mother Teresa’s simple path was large scale: any neighborhood can do it. Some very poor neighborhoods might have to partner with a richer neighborhood and/or get outside support from a public or private agency in order to generate sufficient resources.
5. Air Pollution
The problem of air pollution lends itself to illustrating how I am using the word “problem.” High levels of particulate matter, carbon monoxide, black smoke, ozone, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere impede the functioning of the human cardiovascular system (Hoek et al 2001) and respiratory system (Schwartz 1996).
I have been using the word “problem” in a Deweyan way to refer to the impediment of the natural processes of life. This is not to say that I have laid down a definition of the term as Euclid laid down that a circle is the locus of all points equidistant from a given point. Rather than make my own definition of “problem” for the specific purposes of this book, I have joined in the ongoing social activity of producing English sentences in which the word “problem” occurs. Elaborating my meaning by calling a problem an impediment to life is a way of participating in this ongoing historical process. It is an adherence to Dewey´s naturalism. It is also a comment on the ordinary use of the term and a statement of my intention to emphasize a certain feature of that ordinary use. Calling air pollution a problem precisely because it interferes with the physical functioning of the human species, because it impedes the natural processes of life, is a philosophical choice that is connected with ordinary and scientific usage.
In associating “problem” with “life,” the former being an obstruction and a threat to the latter, I am influenced by the observations on the history and meaning of the word “life” made by Michel Foucault in Les Mots et les Choses. Foucault studies the constitution of the modern science of biology (a term derived from from bio meaning life, and logos meaning knowledge, hence meaning the knowledge of life or the science of life). Foucault shows that a modern concept of life is inseparable from the concept of functions of systems. The constitution of biology as a science in its modern form was inseparable from the reclassification of plants and animals with classificatory schemes based on the functions of systems. (Foucault 1966) For example, the respiratory system performs functions. One of its functions is to provide oxygen to the blood so that the muscles can both move and produce motion. Air pollution impedes the functioning of the respiratory system and is therefore a problem.
Air pollution also provides an opportunity for illustrating how I use the word “culture.” At some times and at some locations on the earth, including London (Brimblecome 1987) and Switzerland ( ) measurable improvements in air quality have been deliberately achieved. This has been done by setting standards (i.e. rules, norms) and then promoting compliance with the standards. Physical indicators interface with social norms. The latter are used to evaluate the former. Physical indicators are used in evaluating whether the right standards have been set and also in evaluating compliance. Nature judges culture. I have been saying generally that culture should be judged by nature, and that culture should be regarded as made of rules whose purpose is (in Aristotle’s phrase) the good life.
Sophisticated schemes have been devised to provide economic incentives for polluting less. I have been using the concept of culture (and emphasizing the guiding of behavior with norms as central to that concept) to perform a Wittgensteinian dissolution, a Foucauldian putting into historical context with an archaeology or genealogy, and a Derridean deconstruction of the very idea of “economic incentive.” Homo economicus is not a physical reality. Oxygen is. Blood is. Measurements of oxygen and of blood should be used not only in evaluating the results of establishing particular economic incentives but also in evaluating the results of speaking and seeing within the framework of the metaphysics of modernity. Statements like “creating a market in which credits earned by reducing emissions can be bought and sold, entitling the buyer to violate otherwise applicable standards, has proven to be a successful way to improve air quality” should be read in two dimensions. In their social dimension, such statements presuppose the basic cultural structures of the modern global economy, inherited in the main from Roman Law. In their physical dimension, such statements refer to conditions set by nature. Given existing mentalities and institutions, emissions credit markets sometimes produce (cause) the physical result that there is less particulate matter, carbon monoxide, black smoke, ozone, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere.
Both the particular result, given existing mentalities and institutions, and the general context constituted by the mentalities and institutions should be evaluated, revised, modified, and improved. Distinguishing nature from culture is a philosophical move possessing the merit of being a reminder to keep both the physical and the social causes in mind; while distinguishing among cultural structures some that are basic and constitutive (the ones that govern meeting basic needs) serves as a reminder to keep in mind with respect to social causes both
Similarly, bearing in mind that we humans do not deal directly with nature, but rather deal with nature through the mediation of culture, and bearing in mind that the prevailing modern cultural forms are those of a bargaining society, facilitate understanding and coping with common phenomena such as: tighter air quality standards in the first world leading to the migration of dirty industries to the third world; the consequent loss of jobs and lowering of wages in the first world; the consequent concentrations of pollution at third world sites; residential air quality being a function of social class, with richer people tending to live in less polluted areas; and other every-day phenomena.
6. Exhaustion of fossil fuels.
Amory Lovins once said that markets quickly discount the future value of fossil fuels to zero. (Lovins 1990) His point illustrates the general principle that markets often yield bad decisions.
A market is a place where there are sales. Sales are contracts. Contractual relationships are not the only human relationships. They are often not the best type of relationship. Lovins also notes that contractual relationships among human beings normally do not even try to establish a sustainable relationship between humans and the environment.
Another way –besides offering ways to talk about the folly of relying excessively on markets to guide the transition from fossil energy sources to other energy sources—in which these philosophical reflections apply to this practical problem, stems from the concept of Marx-avoidance. This book can be regarded as a polemic against avoiding the ethical issues raised by Karl Marx’s critique of political economy. It can also be regarded as offering an explanation of the pervasiveness of Marx-avoidance (see Chapters Two and Three) and a charting of its course in the particular case of Michel Foucault.
Marx-avoidance is a threat to good solutions to energy problems in general, but especially and in particular when the solutions require nuclear power. Unless renewable sources such as solar, wind, tides, and biomass can supply humanity’s needs –an outcome I regard as desirable but unlikely—nuclear power with all its dangers and defects is here to stay. The question of property –the question Marx-avoiders most avoid—becomes crucial. Who owns nuclear power? If the state owns it, who owns the state? The stage is set for nuclear despotisms analogous to the hydraulic despotisms documented by Karl Wittfogel in ancient Egypt, where tiny elites that controlled irrigation water dominated everyone else.
The solution lies in soft energy paths guided by ethical criteria. i.e. by rules perennially revised to serve life better, insofar as soft energy paths are possible; and in the democratization of ownership of resources and technologies; especially of those highly complex and expensive ones required by hard energy paths.
7. Terrorism.
I suggest a viewpoint that declines to draw a sharp distinction between terrorism and other forms of fighting. As Nietzsche reminds us, humans have been fighting since time immemorial and have often regarded it as a healthy and good activity. Two great founders of modern philosophies of peace and war, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes, differ in many ways but agree that the natural state of human beings is a state of war. Peace must be established.
Even those of us who consider “natural state of human beings” to be a concept without a referent must agree that there is no reason to be surprised when people fight. Nor should we be surprised to find that people fight with the weapons they have, and with the tactics that are feasible for them in their circumstances. I do not think there is any good reason to draw a sharp line around certain fighters and call them terrorists, as if there were a specific difference separating them from other species of the genus.
Those of us who favor a herd morality and a love ethic; who want a nonviolent world under the rule of law, where people cooperate and share through participating in functional institutions; who want the social functions performed by fighting in the past to be performed by other practices in the future; face similar problems in peacemaking, peacebuilding, and constructing cultures of peace whether we deal with nuclear-armed states replete with cluster bombs and intelligence services that routinely torture to get information; or suicide bombers using car bombs. In either case the word “terrorists” does not help us, because for a certain class of people it rules out almost everything we might do to make peace. It places them beyond the pale as fighters less legitimate than other fighters, as humans who have forfeited their human rights, as bad people with whom good people do not negotiate.
I suggest that the word “terrorism” has entered the lingua franca of the mass media and worldwide common sense not because it accurately describes a distinguishable set of fighting tactics, but rather because it is one pole of a binary polarity whose other pole is the currently dominant liberal utopian paradigm. (See Chapter Eleven) (Readers of the works of Richard Rorty will notice that while I agree with most of his substantive points, although not with his ironism, I use the term “liberal” in ways not exactly the same.) Let me give two examples.
As I was lunching in a small café in Oxnard, California, three men at another table were watching live coverage of the Iraq War on television. When a fiery glow lit up the sky over Baghdad, one asked the other two, “Was that a U.S. bomb or a terrorist bomb?” He did not ask in error. He made a valid move in a language game currently played. The binary polarity he employed in fact exists in contemporary mass culture.
A second example. As I was hailing a taxi with a friend in Rosario, Argentina, a middle-aged male shopkeeper emerged from his shop and engaged us in conversation. Pointing to some children who were playing on the sidewalk, he said, “They are with the terrorists.” He did not misspeak. He expressed a worldview that is widely shared, in which Latin American street children who steal merchandise from shops are broadly identified with all the forces of evil in the world, among whom the terrorists are emblematic and quintessential.
One pole of the binary polarity I detect is the liberal utopian paradigm, the world of shopkeepers writ large, the world of private property, markets, honest juridical subjects --in Marx’s words the world of freedom, equality, property, and Bentham. This is the world that Lionel Robbins and many others advocate as economically rational. It is the world that the United States military, according to its mission statements, sets out to defend.
Hardt and Negri identify the hegemony of the liberal utopian paradigm as the Empire whose opposite pole is the desire-full, nomadic, life-affirming, creative Multitude. For an audience far wider than the readers of Hardt and Negri, the liberal utopian paradigm is framed as the way the world should be, and its opposite pole is framed as terrorism.
Terrorism is two problems with two solutions. It is fighting, for which the solution is peace. It is a systematically misleading concept, for which the solution is philosophy.
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