I found my following food-for-thought on January 29, 2024:
Several years ago, some colleagues and I conducted a taxonomy study to understand how AI is depicted in contemporary science fiction. We were hoping to learn whether the speculative side of our cultural imaginary on AI has better answers for what kinds of stories we should be telling, as policymakers try to understand and regulate these rapidly evolving tools. The answer? Nobody knows what AI is—even in fiction, where the author can make all the decisions about how the world works. The AI systems we studied in fiction were ambiguous in terms of their agency, their boundaries or extent of operations, the question of who owned or controlled them, etc. Little wonder that we collectively have such a poor grasp of what AI means in the real world, much less how to manage it.
To lay all my cards out, for me it’s no longer “global cIimate change” but the Climate Emergency (and one deserving capitalization). I’m not, however, here to convince you that terminology matters. What matters more is demonstrating how the urgencies entailed in the Climate Emergency are open to rethinking and recasting, with very different policy and management implications for those, like me, who agree urgent climate action is required.
My take-home message is this: If I understand recent discussions, we must deal substantively and structurally with issues of inequality, poverty, fossil fuel, and rising authoritarianism, to name four only. If I understand the Climate Emergency, we also don’t have time for anything except radical action to prevent global climate disaster. In other words, this means the former narratives must be able to recast the urgencies commonly attributed to the Climate Emergency in order for both sets of requirements to hold. Three examples of how this can be done follow. I conclude with an answer to the “So what?” question.
1. Recasting delay and deferral in the Climate Emergency
Narrative. To repeat, we don’t have time for more delays in dealing with the Climate Emergency. Vulnerable people, especially in but also all over the rest of the planet, are at risk and in hazard. Some are already dying because of this. We must act now to prevent the already bad from turning into the worst.
Implications for policy and action. If so, the narrative’s first implication is to acknowledge and understand why policy and action are shot through with delays, deferrals and their narratives. Policy and action are full of interruptions, with delays initially said to be temporary and deferrals indefinite, where not permanent. The mess is no less when the temporary turns out to be permanent, while some indefinites prove to be temporary after all
What can’t and mustn’t be ignored is that we have evolved a very rich literature to describe decisionmaking full of delays and deferrals: wicked policy problems, muddling through, incrementalism, groping along, bounded rationality, garbage can processes, second-best solutions, fatal remedies, rotten compromises, managing the unexpected, coping agencies, groupthink, adhocracy, and that deep wellspring of miserabilism, “the implementation gap,” to name just a few.
Nor do counter-exhortations of “Failure is not an option!” get us out of the messy decisonmaking that is part and parcel of responding to the Climate Emergency. Even if we were to end up with a techno-managerial elite able to control the Earth’s atmosphere to 1.5 degrees or something like it, we would still see learning and adaptation–aka, delays and deferrals–having to take place. Who doubts, for that matter, that the obviously necessary replacement of our energy intensive infrastructures with more sustainable ones won’t have their own learning curves–ditto delays and deferrals–even when (especially when) urgency is high?
What then is to be done? Am I saying nothing can be done? No. What I am saying is that we need to know more about those (implied) narratives of delays and deferrals under different scenarios of urgency.
“But we don’t have time for more research!” You’d then think that the costs to society of confronting these new disaster scenarios is set by the dangers of ignoring disasters, like hurricanes, floods and fires, that we are currently know more about. You’d also think that with the catastrophic disaster scenarios the planet is said to face, we’d see more investigations of how large critical infrastructures actually do avoid or avert massive climate induced flooding and fires.
In other words, what’s needs to be done is searching for more and different granularity that is actionable in varied Climate Emergency scenarios. Consider a timely example where urgency is already high and will be so for the rest of the Anthropocene: humanitarian aid.
A recent working paper, Understanding the role of narratives in humanitarian policy change and published by the London-based Overseas Development Institute (Saez & Bryant 2023), highlights the many and various factors leading to what they call delay narratives and discourses that infuse and transform contemporary humanitarian aid:
Not only does Figure 1 underscore that policy narratives can be better understood by focusing on delaying rather than supporting this or that policy and management. It also underscores the vast importance of context and contingencies in differentiating what factors are salient where, when and how.
That is, what the urgency of the Climate Emergency does is not erase or solve interruptions, but instead makes (1) the vastly different delay and deferral scenarios far clearer and (2) why no global techno-managerial elite could hope to address and monitor this high differentiation adequately, let alone “holistically.”
Or to put the point positively, some regional climate change modeling is of such a high resolution today that climate model results can be and are disaggregated in ways of use to key critical infrastructures. It is now possible to project estimates for rising sea-levels, storm surges, and inland flooding in, say, 20-year increments to better reflect already existing near- and longer-term cycles for infrastructure depreciation and forward investments, among others. More of this needs to be done, and importantly, we need to take the time do it.
2. What is to be done immediately in the Climate Emergency? Activate your EOCs!
Anyone who studies government emergency management in large disasters and catastrophes, at least in the US setting, knows longer-term recovery is the second part of emergency management. The first, very formidable phase is immediate emergency response. Which raises the issue: Yes, the climate crisis calls for a massive and rapid remaking of economy and society. Yes, surely that and more; but what do we also do immediately?
I
In the US setting, a disaster, like massive storms, wildfires or flooding, entails the activation of a city or county emergency operations center (EOC) and/or incident management teams (IMTs) to coordinate immediate response efforts. States also have their own EOCs or equivalent.
This activation is done all the time, when high winds, ice storms, wildfires, heat dome effects, flooding and their combinations take down essential services, particularly backbone infrastructures of water, electricity, roads and telecoms.
Now the thought experiment: Activate the EOCs and IMTs, or at least the ones which acknowledge and accept we are the Climate Emergency. And who, you ask, are the distressed peoples and sites?
Well, that’s not something you, the reader, can answer a priori. It’s up to those really-existing EOCs and IMTs, who recognize the Climate Emergency is making local spaces uninhabitable, taking away local employment. . .
II
The stakes thereby become clearer for both recovery and for immediate response when it comes to the Climate Emergency.
First, much of what outsiders recommend for now-now clearly belongs more under “long-term recovery” than immediate response, e.g., those net-zero emissions promises or those for more resilient or sustainable infrastructures. Nor is it news that this longer-term is invariably political with many stakeholders and does not have the same logic, clarity and urgency that immediate response has, e.g., disaster declarations that trigger immediate release of funds.
That said and second, those current appeals to “Stop oil!” and such immediately hit a major obstacle. In really-existing emergency response, fossil fuel is needed to evacuate people, transport goods and services to distressed areas, keep the generators running when electricity fails, and so on. Cutting down trees, distribution of water in plastic bottles, and wide use of readily available gas-guzzling vehicles, in case it needs saying, are also common because they are necessary..
III
As such, rather than focusing objections on the greater reliance in an emergency on petrol or like, we might instead want to think more productively about two empirically prior issues.
First, who are those EOCs and IMTs activated for the Climate Emergency? Their activation for wildfires, flooding and abrupt seasonal events have been increasing and increasingly responded to by all manner of city, county, state and agency EOCs and IMTs. That implies a learning curve, i.e., learning from past mistakes and delays.
Second, where EOCs and IMTs have been or will be activated, are they responding in ways that are climate-friendly? Or to put response challenge correctly: Where are the logic, clarity and urgency of the Climate Emergency requiring immediate eco-friendly response even before longer-term environmental recovery?
I ask the latter question, because I don’t think some of us who treat the Climate Emergency seriously have thought the answers through. It seems to me much more thought has been given by many more people to the use of eco-friendly stoves, toilet facilities, renewable-energy generators, and like alternatives. Years and years of R&D have gone into studying, prototyping and distributing more sustainable options.
Shouldn’t we then expect and want their increased use in immediate emergency response as well, especially when (not: “even if”) expediting them to the distressed sites and peoples means using petrol and cutting down trees in the way? Do the activated EOCs and IMT’S really need new benefit-cost analyses over such matters to take that decision—right now?
3. Not thinking radically enough about the Climate Emergency
I recently attended a conference on sea-level rise, storm surges and flooding in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, now and projected into the near decades. Most of the day was spent on projects and interventions for climate mitigation and adaptation that I knew nothing about, including: a Lake Mendocino water storage innovation, several dredging and sediment projects geared to beneficial uses, wetlands restoration projects, and a great many planning and feasibility efforts funded with respect to not just sea-level rise, increased storm surges and inland flooding, but also for rising groundwater levels and changing air temperatures affecting major infrastructures differently.
In addition to these specifics, I was told that:
The Bay Area would need some 477 million cubic yards of sediment–the vast majority of which can’t be sourced locally–to restore area wetlands and mudflats;
It would require an estimated US$110 billion dollars locally to adapt to higher sea levels by 2050, this being based on existing plans in place or used as placeholders for entities that have yet to plan; and
To expect much more sea level rise locally because of the newly accelerated melting of the ice cap melting in Antarctica and Greenland.
Millions of cubic yards equivalent to over 420 Salesforce Tower high-rises? Some $110 billion which has no possibility whatsoever of being funded, locally let alone regionally? And those massive new requirements posed by the melting ice caps? How are these unprecedented high requirements to be met, let alone the really urgent ones?
It’s not surprising that the individual interventions presented that day and all the hard work they already required paled into insignificance against the funding and work challenges posed by the bulleted challenges.
What to do then? How to respond now?
I
These massively large sums (and like figures) are meant to stir us to urgent action. Such numbers do that for some people, but others respond by becoming even more uncertain than they already are in the Anthropocene. Some of that increased uncertainty is translated into dread over how to proceed (like we saw with respect to nuclear weapons in the Cold War), and dread can also be instrumental in generating immediate action.
More often though, I’ve found that the increased uncertainty generated by category-five sums and figures ends up reinforcing the focus on and approach to projects and interventions already underway. At least here we can see what hard work achieves.
And in that hard work is one answer to why such large numbers, even when they measure true requirements, fall short of the needed analysis.
II
The problem lies in the estimates of losses (economic, physical, lives, and more) incurred if we don’t take action now, right now. It’s been my experience that none of these estimated losses take into account the other losses already prevented from occurring by infrastructure operators and emergency managers who avoid systemwide and regional system failures from happening that would have happened had they not intervened beforehand, sometimes at the last moment.
Why are these uncalculated billions and billions of saved dollars important when it comes to responding to sea level rise, increased storm surges, more inland flooding, rising groundwater levels and other sequelae?
Because it from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society will be drawing for operationally redesigning the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations for climate restoration and recovery.
We already have a pool of such professionals who make this radical recalculating possible. They are not being consulted nor is their professionalism adequately recognized for the Anthropocene challenges ahead. Those in infrastructures who are already making billion-dollar saves by preventing worse fires and flooding are going to be needed even if the impossible sums were funded, and most assuredly because they won’t be.
So what?
Return by way of concluding, to our starting narrative about the Climate Emergency, expressed in such statements as.: “Based on climate science, there is not enough time to first overhaul a critical mass of economies simultaneously according to socialist democratic planning and then to realise emission reductions” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2024.2434469 ).
It should not be a surprise, however, that context-dependent factors relating to differences in inequality, poverty and the such interrupt the preceding conclusion, as when making the following statement.: “We emphasize the importance of taking political time and maintain that collective social responses to major climate impacts must center actually existing material and symbolic inequalities and place procedural and distributive justice at the heart of transformative action. This is so even where climate change will have devastating physical and social consequences” (https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10242756; my italics).
All of which means that without first differentiating the impacts of the Climate Emergency by location and time, it is next to impossible to identify, let alone differentiate, the consequences with respect to the disparate and different practices of acting democratically here versus there–or otherwise heedlessly instead.
That said, such considerations are beside the point for those who insist the Climate Emergency calls for global climate security. But you see security is what militaries do—and a well-funded military is one of the few government organizations that routinely does long-term planning and often takes that planning seriously.
It’s one thing to call for radical resistance against the major polluting nations. It’s another thing to lay out how the next wave of environmental activism includes cadres of digital hackers ready to take on, say, Xi Jinping and the CCP. China is responsible for an estimated one-quarter of annual global GHG emissions, largely due to its massive fleet of coal-fired power stations. Where is the hacktivism ready and able to disable these plants? Or disable the real-time operations of, say, the “Big 3” credit rating agencies (S&P Global, Moody’s and Fitch) for their insanely positive ratings of the economies fueling the Climate Emergency?
In what world is an unprecedented global techno-managerial elite managing climate for nearly 8 billion people easier than, say, mobilizing the Chinese proletariat of some 220 million or disrupting the operations of the Big 3 CRAs, both for the planet’s survival?
So, again: What’s to be done?
As I hope my above examples illustrate and underscore, the Climate Emergency exhibits already a large array of local coping and managing responses. We know from this evidence that the Emergency is complex, precisely because local activities and responses are so heterogenous and diverse. We also know the large array of local cases form a distribution across which practices could emerge for local transformations, if not for scaling up.
What I am saying is that the agenda for better addressing the Climate Emergency would establish as its benchmark the really-existing diversity of climate responses and related practices already underway (including militant practices and those, say, reducing inequalities and poverty). Now, that would be radical! Yes, more is needed by way of other-level policy and management, but the “more” would be evaluated against this benchmark and not some other far more imperfect one of stop this! and stop that!
We are so used to hearing “failure is not an option!” when it comes to major events that we miss the reality: It is somewhat the other way around, isn’t it? We are already managing complex critical systems as reliably as we do so as to prevent their systemwide failure now. Focusing on what could happen by way of possible management to save the planet is not the same as focusing on what will happened if real-time management isn’t as effective in saving critical infrastructures, at least until the next failure ahead.
It’s more than passing odd then that those exhorting “failure is not an option” seem to believe we all are not trying hard enough.
II
Consequently, it’s no surprise that those who accused of not “giving whatever it takes to save the planet” find themselves admitting the adverse effects of the climate emergency while focusing on what they know can be managed or have better chances. Consider one such example:
We emphasize the importance of taking political time and maintain that collective social responses to major climate impacts must center actually existing material and symbolic inequalities and place procedural and distributive justice at the heart of transformative action. This is so even where climate change will have devastating physical and social consequences.
Note the last sentence: At least it has the merit of recognizing an entailed devastation by stiving to be more democratic. Not for them a “doing whatever it takes” on the backs and in the flesh of already poor people and minorities globally, who have no say in their ongoing punishment (see https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4416499).
III
So what?
In your plans for reform, you forget the difference between our two roles: you work only on paper which consents to anything: it is smooth and flexible and offers no obstacles either to your imagination or to your pen, whereas I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more prickly and sensitive.
So wrote Catherine the Great to Denis Diderot, the French Enlightener.
How has it come to pass that so many today think they are Enlighteners but act as our Empress, as if we corporeal bodies had no alternative?
Following the shadow, one comes to the body . . . Hugh of St. Victor
Follow the shadow and you come to the body–or in one religious sense, follow the Old Testament and you come to the Gospels. A modern version of this mysterium is the concept of “policy silhouettes”: These are policies and projects that look full-bodied, but in reality they are shadows cast by really-existing implementers, managers, operators and staff who are, well, out of sight until you find them.
Examples?
–Considering the importance of carbon emissions, CEO total salary should be calculated by deducting a percentage of carbon tax amount linked to total carbon emissions of the company currently. (comment from the online Financial Times)
–My chief difficulty with most remedies to the Ukraine crisis is that they start by boarding a time-machine to correct long-ago events. This gives their solutions a theological air, which address the world as it should have been, not as it is. (https://www.ft.com/content/12cfb5ca-a5d9-4137-a8d4-cf2454d95e8c)
–“We therefore call upon governments and the United Nations to take immediate and effective political control over the development of solar geoengineering technologies.” But taking immediate and effective control is the last thing governments can do under conditions of the Anthropocene. (https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.754)
–It’s important to remember that even many of the historic left wing forces in the US basically accepted the settler program and many of the early American anarchist and socialist utopian projects, for instance, were quite literally white settler projects that often directly displaced indigenous people — and I don’t mean in the general sense that we all occupy indigenous land or whatever it is people say at the beginning of board meetings nowadays, but in the literal sense of anarchist communes being built on important seasonal sites that were still in use up until that point. (https://illwill.com/new-battlefields)
–The rise of the state, along with the securities it provided, represented progress. So too did the emergence of representative institutions, constitutional government, trial by jury, marriage by choice, the free professions, the choice of a trade, the system of taxation, the institutions of public service, schemes of welfare, freedom of conscience, the right to publish, and the presumption of innocence – all of which Hegel celebrated in the Philosophy of Right. It would be odd to toss these achievements aside as mere indices of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ or ‘the dialectic of enlightenment’ or ‘power’ or ‘governmentality’ or ‘logocentrism’ – all of which have been variously condemned by the hermeneutics of suspicion. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2022.2095754)
In October 2022, the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) published its flagship report, Crises of Inequality: Shifting Power for a New Eco-Social Contract. Worth reading just for its case material and data, the some 330-paged report concludes with this last paragraph (quoted in full without edits):
Despite a challenging context, solutions exist, many of which have proven their effectiveness in real-world contexts, as demonstrated in this report. Power asymmetries and inequalities are daunting, but there are also countless examples of ways those at the bottom have successfully pushed back and shifted power away from the top. However, policies and strategies that have worked in one country might not be applicable or transferable to different contexts, or they may need to be adapted to national conditions. Importantly, instead of applying blueprints, we have to find and test alternative solutions by tapping into the creativity, imagination and skills of experts, entrepreneurs, political leaders, citizens and holders of traditional knowledge and wisdom. These new policies and institutional reforms need to reflect the values and goals agreed upon in new eco- social contracts, supported by an expanding community of ideas and actors that transcends silos and is collectively committed to a vision for the future grounded in the universal principles of justice, equality and sustainability. (p. 317)
The word, “creativity,” appears in two other places in the report and that with reference to the same group. The word, “imagination,” appears also in two different places, one in a citation and the other pejoratively in: “to manipulate our minds and imaginations”. For its part, “skills” is mentioned more frequently, though here largely within contexts about the need to develop, build and improve skills that aren’t there or poorly distributed.
Not surprisingly then, no one reading this report up to the last paragraph could conclude, I submit, that “countless examples” have been demonstrated to exist for pushing back power through creativity, imagination and skills.
Instead, this report is unremittingly negative and dispiriting, with one challenging statistic after another piled high, and then higher, until leaving a shadowing insurmountability in their wake.
The report’s authors will counter that my characterization is unfair. I’ve not addressed the material referenced in the first sentence: “Despite a challenging context, solutions exist, many of which have proven their effectiveness in real-world contexts, as demonstrated in this report.” I counter by saying these cases demonstrate just how far we are from actually achieving the report’s recommendations.
But my counter won’t do. I have been unfair, in the sense of not recasting what the authors are doing in a way that makes better sense of what the report is doing.
Recasting the problem
A different way to see the report is to shift the genre which serves as its context. The authors’ clearly think of the statistics, cases and policy recommendations as part of the policy report genre. Since the report is in the public domain, however, it’s open to being reinterpreted in many other more useful ways.
For example, my preceding criticisms are moot, if the report is treated first and foremost as a manifesto, also an entirely honorable policy genre:
A manifesto is a public declaration of intent, a laying out of the writer’s views (shared, it’s implied, by at least some vanguard “we”) on how things are and how they should be altered. Once the province of institutional authority, decrees from church or state, the manifesto later flowered as a mode of presumption and dissent. You assume the writer stands outside the halls of power (or else, occasionally, chooses to pose and speak from there)
We may quibble about the report being an overly long manifesto or why a UN entity considers itself outside the corridors of power.
But I want to be very clear that by using the report as a manifesto I am not damning with faint praise or slighting it. For the record, manifestos not only have a major role in public life, their importance increases in direct proportion to the digital spam churned out by lobbyists for regulators and policymakers.
Final point
If UNRISD’s Crises of Inequality: Shifting Power for a New Eco-Social Contract is read as a manifesto, then no one looks to a manifesto for the details of implementation. So too here. The report is a loud and clear call for change and is opposed to anything like bearing witness or responding with a ready quietism of despair. Manifestos are always ending where the transformations they call for are to begin.
Here are ten examples from my practice as a policy analyst.
1. Climate emergency parsed through a poem by Jorie Graham
–I liken one of our complexity challenges to that of reading Hardy’s “Convergence of the Twain” as if it were still part of the news (it had been written less than two weeks after the sinking of the Titanic).
So too the challenge of reading the first sequence of poems in Jorie Graham’s Fast (2017, Ecco HarperCollinsPublishers). The 17 pages are extraordinary, not just because of pulse driving her lines, but also for what she evokes. In her unfamiliar words, “we are in systemcide”.
–To read the sequence—“Ashes,” “Honeycomb,” “Deep Water Trawling,” and five others—is to experience all manner of starts—“I spent a lifetime entering”—and conjoined ends (“I say too early too late”) with nary a middle in between (“Quick. You must make up your/answer as you made up your//question.”)
Because hers is no single story, she sees no need to explain or explicate. By not narrativizing the systemicide into the architecture of beginning, middle and end, she prefers, I think, evoking the experience of now-time as end-time:
action unfolded in no temporality--->anticipation floods us but we/never were able--->not for one instant--->to inhabit time…
She achieves the elision with long dashes or —>; also series of nouns without commas between; and questions-as-assertions no longer needing question marks (“I know you can/see the purchases, but who is it is purchasing me—>can you please track that…”). Enjambment and lines sliced off by wide spaces also remind us things are not running.
–Her lines push and pull across the small bridges of those dashes and arrows. To read this way is to feel, for me, what French poet and essayist, Paul Valery, described in a 1939 lecture:
Each word, each one of the words that allow us to cross the space of a thought so quickly, and follow the impetus of an idea which rates its own expression, seems like one of those light boards thrown across a ditch or over a mountain crevasse to support the passage of a man in quick motion. But may he pass lightly, without stopping—and especially may he not loiter to dance on the thin board to try its resistance! The frail bridge at once breaks or falls, and all goes down into the depths.
The swiftness with which I cross her bridges is my experience of the rush of crisis. I even feel pulled forward to phrases and lines that I haven’t read yet. Since this is my experience of systems going wrong, it doesn’t matter to me whether Graham is a catastrophizer or not. She takes the certainties and makes something still new.
–I disagree about the crisis—for me, it has middles with more mess than beginnings and ends—but that in no way diminishes or circumscribes my sense she’s right when it comes to systemcide: “You have to make it not become/waiting…”
2. Finding value through different genres
–Capitalism, imperialism, militarism, racism, nationalism, atavism: with that line-up and more, who’s got a chance? Isn’t it better to start at the other end and answer: “What really-existing political conditions and cultural practices allow for the expression of fallibility?”
No wonder, then, rapid change isn’t ignored and utopians want something more. No wonder poems matter, since poems favor words many people don’t know and new words can be new worlds–including worlds uncolonized by our very own historically-contingent “ism’s.”
3. Global Climate Sprawl
You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet. . .It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.
I suggest that Global Climate Change isn’t just a bad mess; it’s a spectacularly, can’t-keep-our-eyes-off-it, awful mess of getting it wrong, again and again. To my mind, GCC is a hot mess–both senses of the term–now sprawled all over place and time. It is inextricably, remorselessly part and parcel of “living way too expansively, generously.”
GCC’s the demonstration of a stunningly profligate human nature. You see the sheer sprawl of it all in the epigraph, Philip Roth’s rant from American Pastoral. So too the elder statesman in T.S. Eliot’s eponymous play admits,
The many many mistakes I have made
My whole life through, mistake upon mistake,
The mistaken attempts to correct mistakes
By methods which proved to be equally mistaken.
That missing comma between “many many” demonstrates the excess: After a point, we no longer can pause, with words and thoughts rushing ahead. (That the wildly different Philip Roth and T.S. Eliot are together on this point indicates the very real mess it is.)
That earlier word, sprawl, takes us to a more magnanimous view of what is going on, as in Les Murray’s “The Quality of Sprawl”:
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
Sprawl is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home…
This extravagance and profligacy–the waste–are not ornery contrarianism. For poet, Robert Frost, “waste is another name for generosity of not always being intent on our own advantage”. If I had my druthers, rename it, “GCS:” Global Climate Sprawl.
4. War
–I finish reading the Collected Critical Writings of Geoffrey Hill, which discussed a poet I don’t remember reading before, Ivor Gurney. Which in turn sends me to his poems, which leads me to his “War Books” from World War I and the following lines:
What did they expect of our toil and extreme Hunger - the perfect drawing of a heart's dream? Did they look for a book of wrought art's perfection, Who promised no reading, nor praise, nor publication? Out of the heart's sickness the spirit wrote For delight, or to escape hunger, or of war's worst anger, When the guns died to silence and men would gather sense Somehow together, and find this was life indeed….
The lines, “What did they expect of our toil and extreme/Hunger—the perfect drawing of a heart’s dream?”, reminded me of an anecdote from John Ashbery, the poet, in one of his essays:
Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. ‘I need another five years,’ said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.
It’s as if Chuang-tzu’s decade—his form of hunger—did indeed produce the perfect drawing. Gurney’s next two lines, “Did they look for a book of wrought art’s perfection,/Who promised no reading, no praise, nor publication?” reminds me, however, of very different story, seemingly making the opposite point (I quote from Peter Jones’ Reading Virgil: Aeneid I and II):
Cicero said that, if anyone asked him what god is or what he is like, he would take the Greek poet Simonides as his authority. Simonides was asked by Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, the same question, and requested a day to think about it. Next day Hiero demanded the answer, and Simonides begged two more days. Still no answer. Continuing to double up the days, Simonides was eventually asked by Hiero what the matter was. He replied, ‘The longer I think about the question, the more obscure than answer seems to be.’
I think Hiero’s question was perfect in its own right by virtue of being unquestionably unanswerable. In the case of Chuang-tzu, what can be more perfect than the image that emerges, infallibly and unstoppably, from a single stroke? In the case of Simonides, what can be more insurmountable than the perfect question without answer?
–Yet here is Gurney providing the same answer to each question. War ensures the unstoppable and insurmountable are never perfect opposites—war, rather, patches them together as living: Somehow together, and find this too was life indeed.
Ashbery records poet, David Schubert, saying of the great Robert Frost: “Frost once said to me that – a poet – his arms can go out – like this – or in to himself; in either case he will cover a good deal of the world.”
5. Intertext as the Anthropocene’s long run
I’m first asking you to look and listen to one of my favorites, a short video clip of Anna Caterina Antonacci and Andreas Scholl singing the duet, “I embrace you,” from a Handel opera (the English translation can be found at the end of the clip’s Comments):
Antonacci’s performance will resonate for some with the final scene in Sunset Boulevard, where Gloria Swanson, as the actress Norma Desmond, walks down the staircase toward the camera. But intertextuality–that two-way semi-permeability between genres–is also at work. Antonacci brings the opera diva into Swanson’s actress as much as the reverse, and to hell with anachronism and over-the-top.
–Let’s now bring semi-permeable intertextuality closer to public policy and management. Zakia Salime (2022) provides a rich case study of refusal and resistance by Moroccan villagers to nearby silver mining–in her case, parsed through the lens of what she calls a counter-archive:
My purpose is to show how this embodied refusal. . .was productive of a lived counter-archive that documented, recorded and narrated the story of silver mining through the lens of lived experience. . . .Oral poetry (timnadin), short films, petitions, letters and photographs of detainees disrupted the official story of mining ‘as development’ in state officials’ accounts, with a collection of rebellious activities that exposed the devastation of chemical waste, the diversion of underground water, and the resulting dry collective landholdings. Audio-visual material and documents are still available on the movement’s Moroccan Facebook page, on YouTube and circulating on social media platforms. The [village] water protectors performed refusal and produced it as a living record that assembled bodies, poetic testimonials, objects and documents
What, though, when the status quo is itself a counter-archive? Think of all the negative tweets, billions and billions and billions of them. Think of all negative comments on politics, dollars and jerks in the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post. That is, think of these status quo repositories as a counter-archive of “status-quo critique and dissent.”
–So what?
A genre notion of the status quo as counter-archive means that today’s counter-archive is also to be thought of as semi-permeable and in two-way traffic with other genres. Intertextually, today’s status quo not only looks pretty good, it is pretty good compared to the past times of Genghis Khan (think: history as a benchmark genre) and in comparison to post-apocalypse (think: sci-fi as a benchmark genre).
This raises an interesting possibility: a new kind of long-run that is temporally long because it is presently intertextual, indefinitely forwards and back and across different genres.
For example, if the climate emergency is violence and the Big Polluters are culprits, then violent resistance against them is a form of violence reduction if the resistance succeeds. This means the “violence” and the “resistance” are difficult to evaluate, let alone predict, because the long-run over which they are to unfold is itself a current but changing intertext.
As in: “the varieties of revolution do not know the secrets of the futures, but proceed as the varieties of capitalism do, exploiting every opening that presents itself”–to paraphrase political philosopher, Georges Sorel.
6. “Ridicule is the only honourable weapon we have left.” Muriel Spark, novelist
I can’t quote them because Heidegger was a Nazi, Pound a Fascist, Sartre a Maoist, Eliot an anti-Semite. I don’t read Foucault because he didn’t care if he infected guys and I don’t read that mystery writer because she was a convicted killer. I don’t go to baseball games because of the players’ strike way back when and I refuse to watch that man’s films because he’s said to have messed with his own kid.
I don’t buy Nike because of the sweatshops, listen to Wagner because he was a Jew-hater, or have a TV because it makes children violent. I can’t eat tofu because of genetically modified soybeans or cheese because of genetically modified bacteria. I don’t listen to Sinatra because he was a nasty little man or Swarzkopf because she was a collaborator. The U.S. government’s been screwed since Johnson and the Great Society (no, since FDR and the welfare state (no, since Lincoln and the Civil War (no, since Jackson and the Trail of Tears (no, since Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase (no, since Washington and his plantation slaves…)))).
I don’t trust Freud because he didn’t understand women, Klein because she couldn’t get along with her daughter, Bettelheim because he’s suppose to have hit kids, or Laing because he too wasn’t nice. I think we were never further away from nuclear war than during the Cuban Missile Crisis (only afterwards did Brezhnev insist on nuclear parity). Plus it’s a good thing Japan has lost decades of economic growth or they’d’ve been re-armed by now.
From time to time I’ve wondered if Socrates could go to heaven. Speaking of which, why is Adam painted with a belly button, where in the Bible is the turkey that keeps showing up in those tapestries of Eden and Noah’s Ark, and for that matter why do shadows first show up in early Western art only? Do you really think historical Jesus worried about who licks what where?
Dying means my total annihilation. Too bad for eternity, I say: It doesn’t know what it’s missing. It’s when I’m dead that I become “will always have been.” Still, little gives me quite the exquisite pleasure as knowing my secrets die with me.
Which makes me wonder: Other than the streets, where do squirrels go to die? And whatever happened to pineapple upside-down cake and Saturday drives? I have to wonder, did Wittgenstein read Rabelais: “Utterances are meaningful not by their nature, but by choice”? Can there be anything more mind-numbing than beginning, “In hunting-and-gathering societies. . .”? And just who did say, Freedom is the recognition of necessity (Hegel, Engels, Lenin, who)? E Pluribus Unum: Isn’t that Latin for “Follow the dollar”?
Whatever, every morning I wake up and thank heaven I wasn’t born a minority in this country. If I had a magic wand, I’d solve America’s race problem by giving everybody a master’s degree. I’d make sure they’d all be white, married, professionally employed, and own homes. (BTW, every adult in China should have a car; with all that ingenuity they’d have to come up with a solution to vehicle pollution.)
But then again, I’m quite willing to say that the entire point of human evolution is there hasn’t been any worth speaking of. As for the rest, I suppurate with unease. It’s probably—possibly, plausibly?—wise not to think too much about these things.
7. Consequences and thought experiments
More times than we’d like, formal plans emerge as a by-product of a struggle between contingency and “consequences.” In these cases, people confront not so much discrete events with causal consequences but rather contingencies associated with aftermaths, about neither of which there is much causal understanding.
I
Yet, the ability to identify consequences is core to many professions, including my own, policy analysis. Here in the States it is the spawn of pragmatism (i.e., consequences matter) and rationalism (i.e., the steps in an analysis extend from define the problem through identify the options to predict the consequences of each and chose among the best in terms of predicted outcomes). The difficulty, of course, is predicting consequences.
Thought experiments, so common in philosophy and in contrast, can challenge a problem definition in ways that offer new insights, options and/or problem definitions. A thought experiment searches out other kinds of “consequences,” perhaps more tractable to the cognitive and affective limits of analysis.
This possibility of tractability is why I hate “formal experiments,” i.e., they succeed when they fail (as in “fail to reject the null hypothesis”). For: What if some failed hypotheses were good-enough futures anyway?
II
In my view then, the attempt to identify consequences can be analogous to trying to find the right word.
Many people assume that writing is all about finding the right word. On the other hand, when asked how he seemed always able to choose the right phrase, the poet responded: “Dear Mr. Stein, I do not choose the right word. I get rid of the wrong one. Period. Sincerely yours, A.E. Houseman.” T.S. Eliot makes the same point: “It is supposed that the poet, if anybody, is one engaged in perpetual pursuit of the right word. My own experience would be more accurately described as the attempt to avoid the wrong word. For as to the right word, I am not convinced it is anything but a mirage.”
A thought experiment, in other words, is to search out wrong words, the mirage.
Examples fly to mind. Consider some descriptions for the self-correcting, self-regulating, self-healing efficacy of complex adaptive systems. If fireflies can do it, why can’t humans? If fireflies can self-organize and flash in unison, why can’t humans better coordinate and synchronize their behavior? Presumably so too: If earthworms can do it, why can’t humans? If earthworms can move tons of soil, why can’t humans do the same?
8. “Keep it simple!,” when not sabotaging complexity, cannabilizes it
Not to worry, we’ll scale up later, soothes the techno-managerial elite. Later on, presses the happy-talk, we’ll relax assumptions and add realism. Anyway, we know how to reduce inequality (just give them money!), overpopulation (just don’t have babies!) and save the environment (just don’t cut down the trees!). So many of these just-do-this suffocate in their fat of “Well, this time is different,” “This time we really don’t have any other choice,” and “This time, you have to believe us, failure is not an option here and now.”
The chief problem with “start simple here and now” is that each scale/level is complex in its own right. The shoreline only looks smooth on the map. “Keep it simple” and “Break it down to essentials” only work, if they work at all, when context complexity is first admitted as helpful. “Which do you find to be simpler,” asks novelist and essayist, William Gass: “The radio that goes on when you turn a single knob, or the one that won’t work because the parts are all lined up on the floor?”
When I hear someone telling us “Keep it simple!” I immediately suspect they’ve lost the plot, like the actor playing Hamlet, who finished the bedroom scene with Gertrude but forgot to kill Polonius.
9. Quoting our way to answering, “What happens next?”: I/2
What to do when there isn’t even a homeopathic whiff of “next steps ahead” in the policy-relevant document you are reading? Yes, it’s a radical critique that tells truth to power, yes it is a manfesto for change now; yes, it’s certain, straightforward and unwavering.
But, like all policy narratives with beginnings, middles and ends, the big question remains: What happens next? Without provisional answers, endings are premature. “The thing is that you can always go on, even when you have the most terrific ending,” in the words of Nobel poet, Joseph Brodsky.
II
“It is an interesting fact about the world we actually live in that no anthropologist, to my knowledge, has come back from a field trip with the following report: their concepts are so alien that it is impossible to describe their land tenure, their kinship system, their ritual… As far as I know there is no record of such a total admission of failure… It is success in explaining culture A in the language of culture B which is… really puzzling.” Ernest Gellner, social anthropologist
Thomas Carlyle’s mock philosopher, Dr. Teufelsdröckh asks in Sartor Resartus: “Am I a botched mass of tailors’ and cobblers’ shreds, then; or a tightly-articulated, homogeneous little Figure, automatic, nay alive?” That is: patched together when it comes for purposes of understanding.
III
There is talk of revolution, whispers of reform, and everything seems possible except departure from the norm. Sean O’Brien (“If I May”)
But then again: Consider the same norm–e.g., even cobblers should be happy–but change the point of departure. For example, Japanese adult pornstar, Jin Narumiya, has announced he’s retiring as a porn actor:
Dear Always Supportive People
I am celebrating my 28th birthday today. I have been able to do my best in my activities because of the support of all of you. Thank you so much. As some of you may already know, I have retired from pornoactor. There are three reasons. The first is that as I continued my activities, I lost sight of my own meaning life. I was chased by mysterious pressure, and before I knew it, my mind was empty. I was able to do my best even though I was on the edge of my mentality because I had people who supported me and were looking forward to my work, but I reached my limit and made time to face myself for a while. During this time, I focused on getting in touch with nature, meditating, and recovering my empty mind. Who am I? What is happiness? I faced these questions seriously, and the answer I came up with was retirement. And to take on a new challenge.The second is at work. I saw the reality of working in pornoactor and not being able to expand my work. And all you can do is get naked and have sex. I’ve had people say that to me. This made me feel very frustrated. It also made me very sad. So I wanted to challenge myself in a new field and achieve results, and look back at those who made me feel frustrated. Third, I wanted to live my life in a way that I could love myself more. I want to do what I want to do and make those who are involved with me happy. And I want to create the best life possible.I have been supported by many people in my life. I am helpless on my own. I cannot do anything. So we need your support going forward. I will soon start a new journey. I would like to make this journey exciting together with all of you. Thank you for reading this far. Lastly, I would like to thank my parents for giving birth to me, everyone who has always supported me, and all my friends who support me behind the scenes.
“If it were possible, I would have such priest as should imitate Christ, charitable lawyers should love their neighbours as themselves, . . .noblemen live honestly, tradesmen leave lying and cozening, magistrates corruption, &c., but this is impossible, I must get such as I may.” Robert Burton from his The Anatomy of Melancholy.
IV
quin etiam refert nostris versibus ipsis cum quibus et quali sint ordine quaeque locata; . . .verum positura discrepitant res. (Indeed in my own verses it is a matter of some moment what is placed next to what, and in what order;…truly the place in which each will be positioned determines the meaning.) Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
In other words, one answer to “What happens next?” is to juxtapose disparate quotes in order to extend the endings we have. There must be a sense in which such extensions are forced and since forced, any resonance (no guarantees) is compelling. This is a high-stakes wager that answers to “What happens next?” are alternative versions of what I would have thought instead.
10. Quoting our way to answering, “What happens next?”: 2/2
"Who we are is what we can't be talked out of" Adam Phillips
Large proportions of the Chinese collection are perhaps copies in the eyes of those collectors and dealers, who believe that authentic African art has become largely extinct due to diminishing numbers of active traditional carvers and ritual practices. However, the ideological structure and colonial history of authenticity loses its effects and meanings in China, where anything produced and brought back from Africa is deemed to be “authentically African” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925089
But when. . .researching shanzhai art made in Dafen village, located in Shenzhen, Southern China, and home to hundreds of painter-workers who make reproductions in every thinkable style and period, I was struck by the diversity of the artworks and their makers. The cheerfulness with which artworks were altered was liberating, for example, the ‘real’ van Gogh was considered too gloomy by customers, so the painters made a brighter version (see Image 1).
In another instance, I witnessed the face of Mona Lisa being replaced by one’s daughter to make it fit the household. When I brought an artwork home, the gallery called me later to ask if it matched my interior. Otherwise, I could change it. Such practices do turn conventional notions about art topsy-turvy. And shanzhai does not only concern art, it extends to phones, houses, cities, etc. As Lena Scheen (2019: 216) observes,
‘What makes shanzhai truly “unique” is precisely that it is not unique; that it refuses to pretend its uniqueness, its authenticity, its newness. A shanzhai resists the newness dogma dominating Euro-American cultures. Instead, it screams in our faces: “yes, I’m a copy, but I’m better and I’m proud of it”.’ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13675494251371663
So what?
Any realistic attempt of ecological restoration with cloned bucardo [the Pyrenees ibex] would have to rely on hybridisation with other subspecies at some point; the genetic material from one individual could not be used to recreate a population on its own. Juan hypothesised: “we would have had to try to cross-breed in captivity, but you never know what could be possible, with new tools like CRISPR developing… and those [genome editing] technologies that come in the future, well, we don’t know, but maybe we could introduce some genetic diversity. This highlights a fundamental flaw in cloning as a means of preserving ‘pure’ bucardo—not only are ‘bucardo’ clones born with the mitochondrial DNA of domestic goats, but the hypothetical clone would also be subjected to further hybridisation. This begs the question, could such an animal ever be considered an authentic bucardo?” https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tran.12478
Return to an old resource management typology, the two dimensions of which are: (1) fixed resources/mobile resources and (2) fixed management/mobile management.
The frequent example of the mobile resources/mobile management cell has been pastoralist (nomadic/transhumant) herders. Fortunately, the truth of the matter has always been more usefully complicated.
From the standpoint of sustaining biodiversity across wide rangelands, some pastoralist systems are examples of mobile management (e.g., of grazers or browsers) with respect to fixed resources (different patches at different points and times along routes or itineraries). Indeed, fixed on-site biodiversity management may be just too costly to undertake.
II
Now ratchet up the complexity: What had been mobile management must now be fixed; and what had been a fixed resource or asset now must be mobile.
Example: During the COVID lockdown, some pastoralists created informal bush markets at or near their kraals as alternatives to the now-closed formal marketplaces. So too do formal associations of pastoralists participating in distant conference negotiations or near-by problem-solving meetings exemplify a now differently fixed resource exercising now differently-mobile management.
III
So what?
Terms, like “adaptable” and “flexible,” are not granular enough to catch the place-specific improvisational property of “adaptable” and “flexible” in undertaking shifts from fixed to mobile or mobile to fixed.
More formally, being skilled at real-time improvisation is what we also must expect of pastoralists whose chief system control variable is their real-time adjustments in grazing/browsing intensities (which can of course include adjusting livestock numbers and water point usage).
Epimetheus, the twin brother of Prometheus, was assigned the responsibility of distributing among animals, including humans, their respective key traits. Because he lacked foresight (hint, Epimetheus means hindsight and his brother’s name, foresight), by the time he got to humans he had no more traits to distribute. One response to his mistaken distribution was Prometheus stealing fire and giving it to humans by way of compensation.
But even with fire, humans were unable to protect themselves from other animal predators, including themselves. Once Zeus heard about the consequent human suffering, he called upon Hermes to bestow upon humans two special qualities: ‘dikē’ and ‘aidōs’, or roughly, righteousness on one hand and shame, modesty and respect on the other. According to Plato,
Hermes asked Zeus in what manner then was he to give men right and respect: ‘Am I to deal them out as the arts have been dealt? That dealing was done in such wise that one man possessing medical art is able to treat many ordinary men, and so with the other craftsmen. Am I to place among men right and respect in this way also, or deal them out to all?’ ‘To all,’ replied Zeus; ‘let all have their share: for cities cannot be formed if only a few have a share of these as of other arts’.
So here is the wager. Yes, income, wealth and genetic traits are widely and unequally distributed across individuals. But feeling righteous about and/or shamed by these traits–be they yours or theirs–is far more evenly shared when individuals have to live and work in the same place. It is the latter more equal distribution that makes the former more unequal distribution always relevant for public policy and management.
Most scholars attending to the material dimensions of politics either tend to focus on the local, looking at particular infrastructures such as a road, a dam, or a power grid, or at the global, often assessing the capitalist reordering of the world, but overseeing or ignoring the international (Salter 2015, xiii). This oversight, we argue, is not accidental, as infrastructures bring to the fore conceptual problems of space, scale, and agency that constitute the international as a distinct lens for academic inquiry, delineating it from the global, national, or local. . . Infrastructures, we argue, have a generative role in constituting the international as a distinct realm of inquiry that is different from the local and the global. However, we also show how the contemporary infrastructural boom blurs the very same distinctions that infrastructures once helped in setting up. . . .
In other words, infrastructures are at the heart of contention between dynamics of crafting the unevenness between societies that constitute the international on the one hand, and contributing to boundary erosions, driven by an expansionist capitalist logic, on the other hand. https://academic.oup.com/isr/article/26/4/viae046/7831266
An example?
The astonishing thing about the Chinese Communist Party is that it really doesn’t want to rule the world, nor even to be a second hegemonic pole countering the first one. What they want is to rule China – plus the places they feel they’ve lost, like Hong Kong, Taiwan – and to trade freely with other countries. They would genuinely like a multipolar world, in which they would share power with their trading partners, but the problem is that they have only one way of achieving that, which is to use their tech sector, in concert with big finance, to create something like the Bretton Woods system within the BRICs. This would involve fixed exchange rates, essentially a common currency backed by the yuan. It would be a major project, equivalent to the New Dealers planning the world order in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference. The rest of BRICs are not ready for it, as we can see from the huge tensions between India and China. Much of the global south is not ready for this kind of multipolarity either. . .But if they don’t start pushing in that direction, then they will be stuck with a bipolar US–Chinese world, with all the risks that this entails. https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/quantity-to-quality?pc=1643
Or in recasted terms: such is the international dilemma of big tech and global finance.
Assume you come across the following typology, a 2 X 2 table identifying four types of confidence you have over empirical findings for policy analysis and policymaking:
It’s a fairly easy to question the above. Do we really believe that well-established evidence, even as defined, and high certainty are as tightly coupled? In fact, each dimension can be problematize in ways relevant to policy analysis and policymaking.
But the methodological issue is to compare like to like.
That is, interrogate the cells of the above typology using the cells of another typology whose overlapping dimensions also problematize those of the above. Consider, for example, the famous Thompson-Tuden typology, where the key decisionmaking process is a function of agreement (or lack thereof) over policy-relevant means and ends:
This latter world has a few surprises for the former one. Contrary to the notion that inconclusive evidence is “solved” by more and better evidence, the persistence of “inconclusive” (because, say, of increasing urgency and interruptions) implies lapsing eventually into decisionmaking-by-inspiration. So too the persistence of “unresolved” or “established but incomplete” shuttles, again and again, between majority-rule and compromises. More, what is tightly coupled in the latter isn’t “evidence and certainty” as in the former, but rather the beliefs over evidence with respect to causation and the preferences for agreed-upon ends and goals.
In case it needs saying, methodological like-to-like comparisons of typologies need not stop at a comparison of two only. Social and organizational complexity means the more the better by way of finding something usefully tractable.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 