I read a some articles and listened to a couple of podcasts over the last week or so, all of which, taken together, were quite sobering especially in the context of the great changes we increasingly see these days. That led me to the following thoughts on the difficulties so many have in accepting the harsh facts of finance, ecology, and energy today.
Note on the image: In looking for an image to accompany this post, I thought of the ‘three wise monkeys’ who “see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil,” the icons of propriety and cultural conformity whose origins are in seventeenth century Japanese Buddhism. Since the 17th Century, the phrase and symbol have referred to people who deal with wrongdoing and dishonesty by turning a blind eye to what they pretend they have not heard and thus cannot speak of. On searching for an image to accompany my post, conceptually that seemed a good fit. Then I came across an article in the US edition of The Sun in the UK reporting that York University had pulled the image from their website and poster announcing some art conference, out of fear of being accused of not being ‘woke.’ Someone, ignorant of the history of the symbol, assumed it might be taken as some racist stereotype. Well, symbols as well as words mean only what we mean by them. I hope my meaning is clear.
Financially Deaf
We have all heard the various critiques of capitalism and the furtive debates, such as they are, over how to ‘save’ capitalism versus how to replace it. As with so many things, if we keep talking in all the same old categories little if anything will be achieved. Forget debating the ‘…isms’ and look at the facts. I think that is far more useful. One of the facts that has been noted numerous times but not considered for its serious implications for the way we all live, is the financialization of the economy.
Over the last few decades, the U.S. economy especially and other ‘advanced’ economies as well, have all become increasingly ‘financialized.’ Now, that entails a whole range of monetary and economic changes that are far too complex to even summarize here. More important, let’s look at the overall trend and its consequences for people, not just “the economy” as cable talk shows would have it. What does it mean for an economy to become financialized?
The biggest clue is the fact that the financial sector—banking, various kinds of investment institutions, and the stock and bond markets—has gradually become a greater and greater part of the overall economy. That is, a greater proportion of the dollar value of economic transactions are financial rather than material, than ever before. Most importantly, the financial elite has become the most dominant force in society, heavily influencing political and social as well as economic policy formation. What does that mean?
Simply put, it means that finance—the ownership and exchange of monetized ‘assets’ in the form of financial instruments, by the smallest economic class of super-rich persons and corporations—has come to be far more powerful a determinant of economic decisions than the human requirements for an equitable real economy.
The actual economy of humans exchanging goods and services has become more and more subordinate to the abstract activities of the most powerful in the investor class. As the super-rich busily manage larger and larger ‘financial assets,’ they cannot hear the messages of supply and demand emanating from the people in the real economy.
Ecologically Dumb
Industrial modernity is culturally and in important ways physically separated from the living ecosystems that constitute our habitat within the larger Earth System. We moderns live in the world but in many ways are not of the world. We extract from the Earth materials and organic matter from inside the air-conditioned cockpits of giant earth-moving and harvesting machines.
And we collect our consumer products and manufactured food-like chemical compositions from big-box purveyors of ecological waste, oblivious to the complex supply chain that produces so many ecologically costly “externalities.” Most remain ignorant of where it all comes from and the ecological destruction caused by extraction, processing, transportation, production, packaging, and marketing.
I used to ask my urban university students, who lived in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Region–a desert–where their water came from. Most could not describe the source(s) much beyond the faucet, or ‘the water company.’ The complex system of artificial water supply from many sources to water those suburban lawns in the urban desert was beyond their grasp. But Water Always Wins, as Erica Gies puts it in her insightful book by that name.
That is a long-standing problem for industrial civilization, although it was not apparent to most when expansion was not yet constrained by the finite character of planetary ‘resources.’ In the U.S., the “taming of the West” destroyed indigenous peoples and ecosystems alike to feed the growth of the industrial system and its members increasingly insatiable consumerism. Colonialism and imperialism did likewise worldwide, ignorant or indifferent to the ecological and human destruction wrought by the dominator culture.
For hundreds of years it did not affect the progress of industrial development in the Global North because the ability of the political-economic Technosphere that feeds industrial consumerism to dominate both Nature and the peoples of the Global South. Because of our mental separation from Nature, most people are ecologically dumb. We perceive Nature unrelated to our everyday lives except as a series of pretty landscapes to look at and as the source of materials for our economic production. Ecologically dumb, we allow our lives to be driven by the ideology of endless economic growth—on a finite planet. How dumb is that?
Energy Blind
Energy is everywhere, of course. But what is important to humans is the ability to harness and put to use the energy in our environment to do the work that we used to do. Early in the era of a growing awareness of the climate crisis in 2011, John Urry, a British sociologist published a book called Climate Change and Society, in which he pointed out the extreme increase in energy captured and deployed by humans during and since the industrial revolution.
Unfortunately, some reviewers found the book ‘too academic’ and ‘too hard to read.’ It was densely packed with information about the growth of the global carbon economy. A key point Urry made was that the deployment of fossil-fuel energy with new technologies allowed a rapid expansion of human activities of all kinds. However, people are often blind to the larger implications of their personal or group mobility, resources, and behavior.
What struck me most about Urry’s analysis of the relations of humans and carbon-based energy was the extreme expansion of mobility of both things and people engendered by the harnessing and deployment of fossil-fuel energy in the building and operation of industrial civilization. But we live on a finite planet and we now experience The Limits to Growth that Donella Meadows and her colleagues at MIT had predicted so accurately in 1972 that we would face in the early years of the twenty-first century.
In the 30-year update, some twenty years ago, Meadows, et al, concluded that industrial civilization’s ecological overshoot cannot be sustained without resulting in societal collapse. The original book was widely ridiculed by economists, and the 30-year update was widely ignored. Yet, after fifty years, its predictions are all on target. We remain blind to their real-world consequences at our peril.
Today based on the most current data, which is consistent with Meadows early projections, energy expert Art Bergen, argues that industrial civilization is headed for collapse and soon. Amid global energy wars, waffling efforts at replacing fossil-fueled energy production with ‘renewable’ sources are far from a viable alternative to massive energy conservation. We remain, as he says, energy blind.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 