Many of the debates surrounding health care seem to dwell in the realm of ideology and polemics, and fail to address the way in which this issue meaningfully intersects with people's lives. I have had numerous exchanges with a good friend of mine on this issue, and we find ourselves in disagreement over it. However, this is an issue that did directly affect me over the past year, and I think it's important to discuss that in order to change the tone of debate.
About 15 months ago, I was dismissed from my position as a teacher in a public high school. I'm not going to go into details regarding that dismissal, other than to say that it was likely due to personality conflicts more than my performance as an aggregate over the entire year, from start to finish. I had invested a good portion of myself in that job, regularly putting in an additional 25-30 hours per week outside what I spent in the classroom, so when the district administration essentially let me know that my efforts were not valued nor appreciated, it affected me quite significantly. I had to eventually seek counseling in order to maintain my state of mind while working in a less-than-hospitable environment.
When the fall came and I was still unemployed, and my family was facing great financial difficulty as a result, I slipped into the depths of a depression that I just could not get out of. By depression I am not talking about just feeling a "little down," I am talking of being consumed with thoughts for significant lengths of time on how to hang myself down in my basement, or to simply speed up my car and swerve into a bridge abutment, and so forth. I'm not kidding in the least -- it got that bad. I probably was not that far from actually acting on these impulses, a thought that sends chills down my spine today when I think about how it would have affected my wife and young daughter.
When my wife finally confronted me on this and basically told me that I had to get some kind of help, I figured that the best place to turn would be the counselor I saw at the end of the previous school year since we already had an established relationship. I needed help immediately, so I scheduled an appointment and resumed counseling.
Since I had lost my job, we also lost the health insurance policy we had used the previous year and had to switch to my wife's plan. Not to worry my counselor told me, he was a participant in my new plan, so all I had to do was to make the co-pays. Except after a few sessions, I started receiving statements from my wife's insurance demonstrating that my counselor was NOT a participating provider, so the services were not covered, and instead of paying a $30 co-pay for the appointments I would have to cover $120 per visit!
As it turned out, the provider we had (and still have) has a myriad of different plans. While my counselor was a participating provider on most or all of the other plans, he was not a participating provider on the specific plan that we had. Fortunately for me, he was willing to drop the fee from $120 to $60 per visit, and I was able to keep seeing him. Eventually, after going on medication for a period of time, I was able to gain the perspective on my illness and overcome it. However, this experience certainly gave me a personal perspective on our health care system as it currently is, and how it needs fixed.
First of all, one of the common refrains heard in opposition to any kind of government-run system is that "decisions should be left between a doctor and patient, not put in the hands of some government bureaucrat." Funny thing is, under our for-profit system, decisions were NOT in the hands of my provider and myself. They were subject to corporate decisions.
Secondly, losing one's job and the inability to get another one is one of the most traumatic experiences that a person can go through -- especially a man in our society. When I was not able to work, I felt that I could not make any contributions to my family -- primarily because the way our society measures a person's worth to their family is the financial income they contribute. I was lucky in that my wife has a successful career that provides us health insurance. Given the current state of our economy, what about the millions of others who may be in similar situations but are not fortunate enough to have a "Plan B" like we had? Where do they turn in our for-profit system that ties health insurance to employment status? Answer: there is NOWHERE for them to turn.
Thirdly, when I lost my job an additional $30 (or $60) per week in counseling expenses was one that we really could not afford on our already-strained budget. When you don't have income, a medical co-pay can be something that strains your home finances past the breaking point. However, given my state of mind at the time, forgoing professional help was not really an option. Lucky for us, my parents stepped in and paid for the services. But regardless of our good fortune in this regard, what are those who are not lucky enough to have outside support like us supposed to do? Where are they to turn under our current for-profit system? Answer: there is NOWHERE for them to turn. It is undoubtedly situations like mine (and more dire than mine) that are the reason that medical costs are the #1 reason for bankruptcy filings in our nation over the past several years.
Now, the self-interested way of looking at this scenario might be for me to simply say that I was able to get through it and make it work, therefore other people should do the same. However, I cannot do that when I think of others who could be going through similar (or worse) circumstances and do not have the outside support to get the help they need. This is why I support, at a minimum, a public option in our health care system. I would rather see a single-payer system, because I believe it would completely circumvent many of the problems that I encountered. However, a public option would ensure that those who find themselves unemployed, underemployed, or in other difficult circumstances would not be simply left out in the cold.
At the heart of the matter, our health care is a MORAL ISSUE. It speaks to who we are as a society. It is way past due to listen to the better angels of our nature, and show ourselves to be a society that promotes the common welfare rather than self-interest. It is past time to institute a viable public option that will allow the government to use its volume to negotiate for lower prescription drug and service costs. It is past time to ensure that people have access to services WHEN THEY NEED THEM, and not tie that access to present employment status in an economic downturn.
I support a government takeover of our healthcare system because, based on my own experience and the mountains of evidence available, our current for-profit system has failed too many of those who needed health care. It is well past time for them to step aside. The kind of thinking and approach that got us into our current predicament is not going to get us out of it.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
A Question of Taxation
The following post is based upon an email exchange I recently had with a friend of mine (and since he's one of the few people who check out my posts, I'm sure he'll recognize it). He asked me whether or not I thought I was taxed too much. The more I thought about the question from a historical perspective, I was intrigued by it. Anyway, here's the response....
I wanted to get back to you on the question you posed earlier, whether or not I think I pay too much in taxes. In short, my answer is no -- I do not pay too much in taxes, considering what taxes are necessary to maintain a somewhat stable society that exhibits highly advanced job specialization and interdependence.
Let me explain. From the time that people abandoned small-scale and egalitarian hunter-gatherer ways of life for larger, more centralized and stratified agricultural societies, there has always been an increasing need for government intervention to maintain political order.
One of the biggest problems faced by any society is social stratification. Those toward the lower end of the scale want more of what those in charge have. Those in charge will want to retain their advantages however they can. The problem is in how do you reconcile these unequal classes in an orderly fashion?
The most common means through which this was accomplished in ancient history was the rise of a centralized monarch who held the very real power of meting out physical violence at their command. However, force alone was never enough. The monarchy, in order to become a dynasty rather than rise and fall with one generation, had to ally itself with some sort of religious or quasi-religious justification for their dominance. In China, this was the "Mandate of Heaven" claimed by emperors. In the Middle East, it was exemplified by the Islamic Caliphate that unified disparate peoples under one rule for centuries. The medieval Christian Church legitimized rulers who followed its religious demands. The attitude of medieval rulers toward excommunication demonstrates the seriousness with which people took the dictates of the Church.
There is another important commonality between these three examples. They helped unify their diverse subjects under a common script, often infused with a divine inspiration. China's uniform ideographic script, initially imposed by Qin Shi Huangdi around 221 B.C., was a political tool that allowed diverse spoken tongues to continue around a single script (a situation that continues to this day). For Islam, the script was Arabic -- the language in which the archangel Gabriel delivered the Quran to Mohammed in the early 600s. For Christendom, the language was Latin -- the only written language learned through much of the European Middle Ages, because it was the language of the Church's sacred scriptures. Medieval Europeans viewed Latin literally as a means of talking to God, infusing the bilingual Church intelligentsia with significant social power.
What does all of this have to do with taxation? Well, for all of these entities, the larger and more centralized they became, the larger and more bureaucratic their governing apparatus became, primarily out of necessity. This trend hits a spike at about the same time to which we can trace the origins of capitalism. This is due to several factors.
The first is the spread of news as a commodity among the merchant class. The first literal "news letters" were letters circulated among Renaissance Italian merchants that detailed political and economic developments in distant ports. After all, a good merchant could not make good business decisions without knowledge of those events.
The philosophy of humanism developing from the re-discovery of Greek philosophy was also more readily accepted by a merchant class whose orientation was toward rationalism and away from tradition founded upon religious belief. Merchants became successful by paying attention to worldly events, not by attending extra prayer and confession. This meant that the gathering of news itself and selling "news letters" gradually became a market in itself -- news developed as, and continues to be, largely a commodity.
However, there was one advance from the period surrounding the beginnings of capitalism that was more incendiary than the others -- movable type printing. The explosion of ideas enabled by Gutenberg's printing press expanded literacy enabled the Protestant Reformation to succeed, brought down the dominance of the Catholic Church, precipitated the Scientific Revolution, furthered the Enlightenment, and encouraged the development of societies ruled by dominant bourgeois (Western Europe, North America, Japan) or intellectual classes (Soviet Union, Communist China) that overthrew (United States, France, Russia) or controlled (Britain, Germany) the old tradition of dynastic rule.
It was movable type priinting that allowed the creation of an imagined community of bourgeois individuals. Print enabled a writer and reader to have a conversation of sorts, thus creating an imagined social bond between two people who may never meet face to face, and who may even be living during different time periods. I can appreciate this point of view in light of how the death of Kurt Vonnegut, a writer whom I never met but all of whose books I read, made me feel as if I had lost a personal friend. It was this "imagined community" among bourgeois merchants that allowed the formation of the joint stock venture, perhaps the most important economic development in the history of capitalism.
The Virginia Company of England was a joint-stock company formed specifically for the colonization of the Americas. It was the only way that they could raise the capital required for such a venture, and it also insulated shareholders against risk. However, investors would not be willing to invest without certain guarantees -- namely, government guarantees for political and military support. These guarantees require a standing army and navy. Standing armies and navies required a constant flow of funds, which meant higher (and more regular) taxes. Regular taxation required an expansion of the government bureaucracy, especially around the treasury.
Business interests get increasing governmental guarantees for open markets through diplomacy and military force, which allows them to expand their business, which means that the government collects more revenue in taxes. It's a situation that benefits both those in government and business. It is also a system organized around the idea of constant growth. It is this expectation of growth that permits banking to take on increased levels of debt -- something done only when future growth can be expected to pay it back. However, it can also lead to greater social unrest due to widening inequality between those with access through contacts and/or capital, and those left on the outside looking in.
In my estimation, this was the means for the Progressive and New Deal periods in American history -- a need to reduce the level of social unrest due to widening inequality. The solution wasn't to eliminate Western capitalism as was done in Russia (for reasons specific to Russian demographics and history, that I won't go into here), it was to spread its benefits around a bit. Since business had proven unwilling to do so (resulting in violent confrontations and increasing radicalism on the part of workers), the government had to intervene. Thus, we see that government and business both grew in concert with each other AND in competition with each other.
Higher levels of taxation have arisen because not only has government expanded in order to guarantee markets for business, it has also has expanded to provide a counter to unbridled capitalism and the inequality and social unrest it has engendered. In summary, our modern levels of taxation continue to be for three purposes: to provide business interests with access to more markets thus enabling constant growth, to expand the scope of government and empower those individuals within its highest ranks, and to maintain some level of welfare state to keep a lid on social disorder as a result of capitalism's inequalities and extreme levels of specialization and interdependence. We can debate the merits of such a system in and of itself, but that doesn't change the fact that this is the system we have right now. In my own estimation, if we were to remove any of the three purposes I outlined above, we would risk social chaos -- but the end of our expectation of growth may make all of those impossible within a certain frame of time anyway.
Considering that I think that significant social unrest may be a result of reducing my tax burden because of sharpened inequality, I do not think that my tax burden is too high. Sometimes I wonder if it is enough, especially in regards to reorienting ourselves away from what John Kenneth Galbraith described as afflicting 1950s Amerca: "private opulence and public squalor."
I wanted to get back to you on the question you posed earlier, whether or not I think I pay too much in taxes. In short, my answer is no -- I do not pay too much in taxes, considering what taxes are necessary to maintain a somewhat stable society that exhibits highly advanced job specialization and interdependence.
Let me explain. From the time that people abandoned small-scale and egalitarian hunter-gatherer ways of life for larger, more centralized and stratified agricultural societies, there has always been an increasing need for government intervention to maintain political order.
One of the biggest problems faced by any society is social stratification. Those toward the lower end of the scale want more of what those in charge have. Those in charge will want to retain their advantages however they can. The problem is in how do you reconcile these unequal classes in an orderly fashion?
The most common means through which this was accomplished in ancient history was the rise of a centralized monarch who held the very real power of meting out physical violence at their command. However, force alone was never enough. The monarchy, in order to become a dynasty rather than rise and fall with one generation, had to ally itself with some sort of religious or quasi-religious justification for their dominance. In China, this was the "Mandate of Heaven" claimed by emperors. In the Middle East, it was exemplified by the Islamic Caliphate that unified disparate peoples under one rule for centuries. The medieval Christian Church legitimized rulers who followed its religious demands. The attitude of medieval rulers toward excommunication demonstrates the seriousness with which people took the dictates of the Church.
There is another important commonality between these three examples. They helped unify their diverse subjects under a common script, often infused with a divine inspiration. China's uniform ideographic script, initially imposed by Qin Shi Huangdi around 221 B.C., was a political tool that allowed diverse spoken tongues to continue around a single script (a situation that continues to this day). For Islam, the script was Arabic -- the language in which the archangel Gabriel delivered the Quran to Mohammed in the early 600s. For Christendom, the language was Latin -- the only written language learned through much of the European Middle Ages, because it was the language of the Church's sacred scriptures. Medieval Europeans viewed Latin literally as a means of talking to God, infusing the bilingual Church intelligentsia with significant social power.
What does all of this have to do with taxation? Well, for all of these entities, the larger and more centralized they became, the larger and more bureaucratic their governing apparatus became, primarily out of necessity. This trend hits a spike at about the same time to which we can trace the origins of capitalism. This is due to several factors.
The first is the spread of news as a commodity among the merchant class. The first literal "news letters" were letters circulated among Renaissance Italian merchants that detailed political and economic developments in distant ports. After all, a good merchant could not make good business decisions without knowledge of those events.
The philosophy of humanism developing from the re-discovery of Greek philosophy was also more readily accepted by a merchant class whose orientation was toward rationalism and away from tradition founded upon religious belief. Merchants became successful by paying attention to worldly events, not by attending extra prayer and confession. This meant that the gathering of news itself and selling "news letters" gradually became a market in itself -- news developed as, and continues to be, largely a commodity.
However, there was one advance from the period surrounding the beginnings of capitalism that was more incendiary than the others -- movable type printing. The explosion of ideas enabled by Gutenberg's printing press expanded literacy enabled the Protestant Reformation to succeed, brought down the dominance of the Catholic Church, precipitated the Scientific Revolution, furthered the Enlightenment, and encouraged the development of societies ruled by dominant bourgeois (Western Europe, North America, Japan) or intellectual classes (Soviet Union, Communist China) that overthrew (United States, France, Russia) or controlled (Britain, Germany) the old tradition of dynastic rule.
It was movable type priinting that allowed the creation of an imagined community of bourgeois individuals. Print enabled a writer and reader to have a conversation of sorts, thus creating an imagined social bond between two people who may never meet face to face, and who may even be living during different time periods. I can appreciate this point of view in light of how the death of Kurt Vonnegut, a writer whom I never met but all of whose books I read, made me feel as if I had lost a personal friend. It was this "imagined community" among bourgeois merchants that allowed the formation of the joint stock venture, perhaps the most important economic development in the history of capitalism.
The Virginia Company of England was a joint-stock company formed specifically for the colonization of the Americas. It was the only way that they could raise the capital required for such a venture, and it also insulated shareholders against risk. However, investors would not be willing to invest without certain guarantees -- namely, government guarantees for political and military support. These guarantees require a standing army and navy. Standing armies and navies required a constant flow of funds, which meant higher (and more regular) taxes. Regular taxation required an expansion of the government bureaucracy, especially around the treasury.
Business interests get increasing governmental guarantees for open markets through diplomacy and military force, which allows them to expand their business, which means that the government collects more revenue in taxes. It's a situation that benefits both those in government and business. It is also a system organized around the idea of constant growth. It is this expectation of growth that permits banking to take on increased levels of debt -- something done only when future growth can be expected to pay it back. However, it can also lead to greater social unrest due to widening inequality between those with access through contacts and/or capital, and those left on the outside looking in.
In my estimation, this was the means for the Progressive and New Deal periods in American history -- a need to reduce the level of social unrest due to widening inequality. The solution wasn't to eliminate Western capitalism as was done in Russia (for reasons specific to Russian demographics and history, that I won't go into here), it was to spread its benefits around a bit. Since business had proven unwilling to do so (resulting in violent confrontations and increasing radicalism on the part of workers), the government had to intervene. Thus, we see that government and business both grew in concert with each other AND in competition with each other.
Higher levels of taxation have arisen because not only has government expanded in order to guarantee markets for business, it has also has expanded to provide a counter to unbridled capitalism and the inequality and social unrest it has engendered. In summary, our modern levels of taxation continue to be for three purposes: to provide business interests with access to more markets thus enabling constant growth, to expand the scope of government and empower those individuals within its highest ranks, and to maintain some level of welfare state to keep a lid on social disorder as a result of capitalism's inequalities and extreme levels of specialization and interdependence. We can debate the merits of such a system in and of itself, but that doesn't change the fact that this is the system we have right now. In my own estimation, if we were to remove any of the three purposes I outlined above, we would risk social chaos -- but the end of our expectation of growth may make all of those impossible within a certain frame of time anyway.
Considering that I think that significant social unrest may be a result of reducing my tax burden because of sharpened inequality, I do not think that my tax burden is too high. Sometimes I wonder if it is enough, especially in regards to reorienting ourselves away from what John Kenneth Galbraith described as afflicting 1950s Amerca: "private opulence and public squalor."
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Norbert Elias and System Collapse
As part of my studies toward my Masters' degree in history, I had to read excerpts from The Civilizing Process by Norbert Elias. This reading is part of a seminar on historiographical methods and analysis, focusing on different social theories and the way they affect the work of historians in trying to explain the past.
I found Elias's work to be quite fascinating. Basically, it theorizes that the process of "civilization" is largely the result of people subordinating their impulsive drives -- the repression of the id by the ego and superego, in Freud's terminology -- as their social organization changes over time. Elias says that this process is mutually reinforcing and not entirely rational. People demonstrate greater self-restraint as their social organization becomes more complex and interdependent. Likewise, increased levels of self-restraint propel a greater level of complexity and interdependence. Central to Elias's notion of "progress" along the scale of impulsiveness to self-restraint is the level of security under which people live. In societies that do not provide a high level of physical or material security, the impulsiveness of the id reigns. For those that achieve a high level of security, the restraint of the ego and superego keep the id in check.
To support this idea, Elias cites the changes in human behavior as Western Europe changed from a feudal society of warrior-nobles and knights into the court society of absolutist kings and aristocratic nobles. In the former, the use of violence was highly decentralized. Most people did not have adequate levels of security -- especially physical security. To venture on the roads outside of town was to invite the certain predations of highwaymen or rival soldiers. Disputes between individuals (particularly nobles) were settled by violent confrontation. By contrast, in the society of absolutist kings, the use of violence was monopolized by the monarch. Nobles could no longer settle their disputes through violence, so the court society (with its emphasis on manners, fashion, elaborate titles and intrigue) evolved instead as a forum for noble competition and a means of differentiating the aristocracy from the commoners. The latter was also a much more complex and interdependent society than the former. Finally, the former had a general world view largely characterized by fear and emotion (superstition and religion), while the move toward "civilization" appealed increasingly to empirical rationalism (observation and science).
As far as historical reference goes, Elias provides a decidedly Marxist superstructure for his theories. Basically, his history begins in medieval Europe and proposes a rather linear view of civilization's development, as well as describing Western Europe as the vanguard of civilization's progress. I wonder how Elias would describe the notion of a society moving away from "civilization" -- from a highly complex, centralized, interdependent society to one that is decidedly less so.
Central to any analysis of collapse through Elias's lens is the loss of material or physical security. Also, the relationship between changing social organization and the loss of security must be viewed as a mutually reinforcing process. I believe that if Elias had gone back a little further, he could have found an excellent model for this process-in-reverse: the Roman Empire.
The collapse of the Roman Empire was certainly predicated by internal problems -- declining harvests, political intrigue, etc. However, these internal problems greatly contributed to the rolling back of the frontier by Germanic barbarians. When the highly complex society of Rome lost steam, it lost its cohesive force among its populace. Where the citizens of Rome once were willing to sacrifice for her, now they concerned themselves with the circuses of the Colosseum even as the empire crumbled around them. A substantial internal proletariat -- people who lived within Roman borders but felt no affinity or allegiance to Roman ideals -- swelled in number. A fine example of this proletariat is offered by the rapid spread of Christianity through Rome, in spite of its initial criminalization by the Roman authorities. (Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History)
So, the short version is that eventually complexity imploded, the "barbarian" conquered the "civilized," and Europe plunged into the Dark Ages. However, traces of the "civilized" still remained after 476 A.D. -- namely the Catholic Church. It is strange that what initially was a proletarian movement within Rome (Christianity) became its vehicle for the preservation of classical culture as society became less complex, less secure, less rational and more violent. What this demonstrates, however, is that the move either forward or backward on the scale of "civilization" is often a process of negotiation between the old and the new, the more and less "civilized." Even as Rome fell, it planted the seeds of what would eventually bloom after the Dark Ages had passed. Many ideas of the Renaissance, scientific revolution and Enlightenment found their genesis in the work of classical Greek and Roman scholars.
Fast-forward now to the present. Currently, we face a wide range of predicaments -- climate change, peak "everything," overpopulation, unsustainable debt, etc. The unprecedented complexity and interdependence of our social organization is largely the result (and cause) of increased material and physical security. What happens if these predicaments cause this security to deteriorate? Will we become stuck in a downward spiral like Western Europe after the fall of Rome, unable to regroup until after we hit rock bottom? Or will we be able to adjust our organization to meet new realities? Will the negotiation between complex and decentralized take place in a more rational manner this time around, or is a lack of rational forethought a fait accompli of this process?
I found Elias's work to be quite fascinating. Basically, it theorizes that the process of "civilization" is largely the result of people subordinating their impulsive drives -- the repression of the id by the ego and superego, in Freud's terminology -- as their social organization changes over time. Elias says that this process is mutually reinforcing and not entirely rational. People demonstrate greater self-restraint as their social organization becomes more complex and interdependent. Likewise, increased levels of self-restraint propel a greater level of complexity and interdependence. Central to Elias's notion of "progress" along the scale of impulsiveness to self-restraint is the level of security under which people live. In societies that do not provide a high level of physical or material security, the impulsiveness of the id reigns. For those that achieve a high level of security, the restraint of the ego and superego keep the id in check.
To support this idea, Elias cites the changes in human behavior as Western Europe changed from a feudal society of warrior-nobles and knights into the court society of absolutist kings and aristocratic nobles. In the former, the use of violence was highly decentralized. Most people did not have adequate levels of security -- especially physical security. To venture on the roads outside of town was to invite the certain predations of highwaymen or rival soldiers. Disputes between individuals (particularly nobles) were settled by violent confrontation. By contrast, in the society of absolutist kings, the use of violence was monopolized by the monarch. Nobles could no longer settle their disputes through violence, so the court society (with its emphasis on manners, fashion, elaborate titles and intrigue) evolved instead as a forum for noble competition and a means of differentiating the aristocracy from the commoners. The latter was also a much more complex and interdependent society than the former. Finally, the former had a general world view largely characterized by fear and emotion (superstition and religion), while the move toward "civilization" appealed increasingly to empirical rationalism (observation and science).
As far as historical reference goes, Elias provides a decidedly Marxist superstructure for his theories. Basically, his history begins in medieval Europe and proposes a rather linear view of civilization's development, as well as describing Western Europe as the vanguard of civilization's progress. I wonder how Elias would describe the notion of a society moving away from "civilization" -- from a highly complex, centralized, interdependent society to one that is decidedly less so.
Central to any analysis of collapse through Elias's lens is the loss of material or physical security. Also, the relationship between changing social organization and the loss of security must be viewed as a mutually reinforcing process. I believe that if Elias had gone back a little further, he could have found an excellent model for this process-in-reverse: the Roman Empire.
The collapse of the Roman Empire was certainly predicated by internal problems -- declining harvests, political intrigue, etc. However, these internal problems greatly contributed to the rolling back of the frontier by Germanic barbarians. When the highly complex society of Rome lost steam, it lost its cohesive force among its populace. Where the citizens of Rome once were willing to sacrifice for her, now they concerned themselves with the circuses of the Colosseum even as the empire crumbled around them. A substantial internal proletariat -- people who lived within Roman borders but felt no affinity or allegiance to Roman ideals -- swelled in number. A fine example of this proletariat is offered by the rapid spread of Christianity through Rome, in spite of its initial criminalization by the Roman authorities. (Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History)
So, the short version is that eventually complexity imploded, the "barbarian" conquered the "civilized," and Europe plunged into the Dark Ages. However, traces of the "civilized" still remained after 476 A.D. -- namely the Catholic Church. It is strange that what initially was a proletarian movement within Rome (Christianity) became its vehicle for the preservation of classical culture as society became less complex, less secure, less rational and more violent. What this demonstrates, however, is that the move either forward or backward on the scale of "civilization" is often a process of negotiation between the old and the new, the more and less "civilized." Even as Rome fell, it planted the seeds of what would eventually bloom after the Dark Ages had passed. Many ideas of the Renaissance, scientific revolution and Enlightenment found their genesis in the work of classical Greek and Roman scholars.
Fast-forward now to the present. Currently, we face a wide range of predicaments -- climate change, peak "everything," overpopulation, unsustainable debt, etc. The unprecedented complexity and interdependence of our social organization is largely the result (and cause) of increased material and physical security. What happens if these predicaments cause this security to deteriorate? Will we become stuck in a downward spiral like Western Europe after the fall of Rome, unable to regroup until after we hit rock bottom? Or will we be able to adjust our organization to meet new realities? Will the negotiation between complex and decentralized take place in a more rational manner this time around, or is a lack of rational forethought a fait accompli of this process?
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Marx, McCain and Health Care
Back in the second Presidential debate, a question was asked of the candidates which I found very penetrating and revealing. A woman asked, "Do you believe that health care should be treated as a commodity?" Barack Obama's answer was standard, nondescript fare, and I really can't remember a whole lot from it so I won't bother discussing it.
McCain gave a long-winded answer about consumer choice and a national medical records database and the like. However, his answer could have been a lot simpler and to the point if he had simply replied, "yes." I say that because basically his answer revealed that he thinks health care should be treated like a commodity.
Thus, the title of this post.
Karl Marx wrote extensively on the nature of "commodities" in Das Kapital, even dedicating an entire chapter to them (The Fetishism of Commodities). The subject of Marx also recently came up in email exchanges I had with a friend of mine in reference to Barack Obama (whom he does not trust as a candidate). I certainly can come up with many criticisms of Obama's economic plans, but calling it "Marxist" is nowhere near the truth -- it is a bugaboo paraded around by the right wing to scare and divide people that we are moving toward some kind of dictatorship of the proletariat, as if a candidate backed by significant Wall Street interests is somehow surreptitiously leading that charge.
Let me be clear -- I do not believe that Karl Marx provided a realistic template for social or economic change. However, I do believe that he provided one of the best critiques of industrial capitalism that was ever written. The tendency of capitalism to commodify all areas of life is central to this critique, and I think it is one that deserves further attention.
On the surface, Marx's criticism of commodities focuses on the way in which the purchasers of "commodities" (anything that is a manufactured good and has labor-added value is defined by Marx as a "commodity") are insulated from exploitation at every step along the way of the process. At first glance, this may appear that Marx is simply outlining the way in which people should be aware that exploitation exists in the supply and manufacturing chain, and try to avoid supporting such behaviors in pursuit of profit. However, historical perspective is necessary in truly analyzing what is being said here.
Marx developed these ideas in the midst of the industrial revolution, and although he wrote extensively about the industrial proletariat, he traveled in circles of craft artisans. It was this class with whom he most identified. Therefore, it is imperative to consider the plight of craft artisanry during the industrial revolution in order to unpack what Marx is really saying here.
Prior to the industrial revolution, anything that could be considered a "commodity" was produced by artisans. These artisans were members of guilds that set prices and maintained standards for quality and production. Typically, they labored in small shops and created goods from start to finish. Artisans made up the backbone of a growing middle class -- not the middle class of literacy and bureaucracy that we recognize today, but one of skilled labor that produced manufactured goods. In this sense, Marx was probably expressing a somewhat narrowed class interest that he and his contemporaries criticized in the bourgeoisie.
The industrial revolution eviscerated the artisan class. Goods that previously had to be made by hand, from start to finish, were instead manufactured by unskilled workers and industrial machinery in piecemeal fashion. Perhaps most distressing in this turn of events to Marx, however, was the destruction of the social fabric.
When goods were made by artisans, economic exchange for those goods had an added social dimension. The artisan was, at most, one step removed from the economic exchange if he was a journeyman laboring for wages in a master's shop. Since prices were largely set by the guilds, the practice of different shops undercutting each other by better exploiting their labor force was not really an option. Sure, goods were much more expensive and there were less of them -- but the social dynamic at play ensured that all parties involved were not subject to the whims of the market.
As Marxist historian and philosopher Juergen Habermas pointed out, the development of bourgeois capitalism was based upon two primary assumptions that were a reaction against the feudal system it eventually replaced. The first of these was the notion of free competition -- the idea that all commodities were exchanged according to their "value." The second one -- and perhaps more important one -- was that all producers would have equal access to the means of production. This assumption in itself implies an economy based upon small producers -- the artisan's shop.
By Marx's time, it was painfully apparent that at least the second one of these presumptions was no longer valid. A journeyman artisan could reasonably gain access to the old means of production -- tools -- because they did not require a great capital outlay. However, the vast majority of artisans could not afford to buy their own factory, and as the industrial revolution took hold, this is what was required in order to have equal access to the means of production.
Where Marx focuses his critique, however, is not so much upon the change in control over the means of production, but rather on the effect of this transformation upon social relationships. To reference Habermas again, the development of bourgeois capitalism meant that even these social relationships themselves were transformed into commodities. I believe that this is to what Marx is referring when he outlines the layers of exploitation inherent in industrial capitalist production. At every step of the process, what previously was an economic exchange with a social foundation is transformed into a narrow focus on leveraging economic advantage devoid of any social consideration. I am not saying that the old world of artisans did not have exploitation, nor that economic advantage was ignored in these exchanges. I am simply saying that there was an attendant dynamic at play in these exchanges that highlighted broader social considerations.
Back to McCain and health care. The basic relationship in health care should be between a doctor and a patient. This is primarily a social relationship. The patient has a vested interest in seeing that the doctor is not taken advantage of, otherwise he or she could no longer continue to practice. Likewise, the doctor has an interest in providing quality treatment, otherwise he or she will lose his or her client base. However, the introduction of health insurance for profit has no concern over these relationships. It is removed from the level of social interaction and instead interested only in maximizing its profit from the patient while minimizing the payment to the doctor. If the patient suffers due to lack of coverage or the doctor's care degrades in quality due to being squeezed by the insurer, it matters not. What matters is profit, pure and simple.
Customer "choice" has nothing to do with helping customers, because the entire exchange is devoid of social utility. The providing of health insurance is treated purely as a commodity -- except in this instance it is a labor-added service that has "value" only in the sense that people in modern society need health care, and the insurers have exploited a niche in which they can turn a buck.
The question I inevitably come back to in this consideration is, "Is this really the best way we can do things?" I readily admit that I am a fan of a government-administered, single payer system for a few reasons. The first is purely economical -- it actually costs less to administer a single-payer plan because the government is interested in breaking even, not turning a profit. The second, however, is social. The removal of insurer profit from the system pushes it more in a social direction. The focus of the system can once again be on doctors and patients, and the expression of their mutually-beneficial self-interest.
Blind faith in "market solutions" assumes that capitalism always provides the best way for doing things. In the arena of health care -- a sector of economic activity more concerned with social interaction than the manufacture of goods -- I'm not certain that is the case.
McCain gave a long-winded answer about consumer choice and a national medical records database and the like. However, his answer could have been a lot simpler and to the point if he had simply replied, "yes." I say that because basically his answer revealed that he thinks health care should be treated like a commodity.
Thus, the title of this post.
Karl Marx wrote extensively on the nature of "commodities" in Das Kapital, even dedicating an entire chapter to them (The Fetishism of Commodities). The subject of Marx also recently came up in email exchanges I had with a friend of mine in reference to Barack Obama (whom he does not trust as a candidate). I certainly can come up with many criticisms of Obama's economic plans, but calling it "Marxist" is nowhere near the truth -- it is a bugaboo paraded around by the right wing to scare and divide people that we are moving toward some kind of dictatorship of the proletariat, as if a candidate backed by significant Wall Street interests is somehow surreptitiously leading that charge.
Let me be clear -- I do not believe that Karl Marx provided a realistic template for social or economic change. However, I do believe that he provided one of the best critiques of industrial capitalism that was ever written. The tendency of capitalism to commodify all areas of life is central to this critique, and I think it is one that deserves further attention.
On the surface, Marx's criticism of commodities focuses on the way in which the purchasers of "commodities" (anything that is a manufactured good and has labor-added value is defined by Marx as a "commodity") are insulated from exploitation at every step along the way of the process. At first glance, this may appear that Marx is simply outlining the way in which people should be aware that exploitation exists in the supply and manufacturing chain, and try to avoid supporting such behaviors in pursuit of profit. However, historical perspective is necessary in truly analyzing what is being said here.
Marx developed these ideas in the midst of the industrial revolution, and although he wrote extensively about the industrial proletariat, he traveled in circles of craft artisans. It was this class with whom he most identified. Therefore, it is imperative to consider the plight of craft artisanry during the industrial revolution in order to unpack what Marx is really saying here.
Prior to the industrial revolution, anything that could be considered a "commodity" was produced by artisans. These artisans were members of guilds that set prices and maintained standards for quality and production. Typically, they labored in small shops and created goods from start to finish. Artisans made up the backbone of a growing middle class -- not the middle class of literacy and bureaucracy that we recognize today, but one of skilled labor that produced manufactured goods. In this sense, Marx was probably expressing a somewhat narrowed class interest that he and his contemporaries criticized in the bourgeoisie.
The industrial revolution eviscerated the artisan class. Goods that previously had to be made by hand, from start to finish, were instead manufactured by unskilled workers and industrial machinery in piecemeal fashion. Perhaps most distressing in this turn of events to Marx, however, was the destruction of the social fabric.
When goods were made by artisans, economic exchange for those goods had an added social dimension. The artisan was, at most, one step removed from the economic exchange if he was a journeyman laboring for wages in a master's shop. Since prices were largely set by the guilds, the practice of different shops undercutting each other by better exploiting their labor force was not really an option. Sure, goods were much more expensive and there were less of them -- but the social dynamic at play ensured that all parties involved were not subject to the whims of the market.
As Marxist historian and philosopher Juergen Habermas pointed out, the development of bourgeois capitalism was based upon two primary assumptions that were a reaction against the feudal system it eventually replaced. The first of these was the notion of free competition -- the idea that all commodities were exchanged according to their "value." The second one -- and perhaps more important one -- was that all producers would have equal access to the means of production. This assumption in itself implies an economy based upon small producers -- the artisan's shop.
By Marx's time, it was painfully apparent that at least the second one of these presumptions was no longer valid. A journeyman artisan could reasonably gain access to the old means of production -- tools -- because they did not require a great capital outlay. However, the vast majority of artisans could not afford to buy their own factory, and as the industrial revolution took hold, this is what was required in order to have equal access to the means of production.
Where Marx focuses his critique, however, is not so much upon the change in control over the means of production, but rather on the effect of this transformation upon social relationships. To reference Habermas again, the development of bourgeois capitalism meant that even these social relationships themselves were transformed into commodities. I believe that this is to what Marx is referring when he outlines the layers of exploitation inherent in industrial capitalist production. At every step of the process, what previously was an economic exchange with a social foundation is transformed into a narrow focus on leveraging economic advantage devoid of any social consideration. I am not saying that the old world of artisans did not have exploitation, nor that economic advantage was ignored in these exchanges. I am simply saying that there was an attendant dynamic at play in these exchanges that highlighted broader social considerations.
Back to McCain and health care. The basic relationship in health care should be between a doctor and a patient. This is primarily a social relationship. The patient has a vested interest in seeing that the doctor is not taken advantage of, otherwise he or she could no longer continue to practice. Likewise, the doctor has an interest in providing quality treatment, otherwise he or she will lose his or her client base. However, the introduction of health insurance for profit has no concern over these relationships. It is removed from the level of social interaction and instead interested only in maximizing its profit from the patient while minimizing the payment to the doctor. If the patient suffers due to lack of coverage or the doctor's care degrades in quality due to being squeezed by the insurer, it matters not. What matters is profit, pure and simple.
Customer "choice" has nothing to do with helping customers, because the entire exchange is devoid of social utility. The providing of health insurance is treated purely as a commodity -- except in this instance it is a labor-added service that has "value" only in the sense that people in modern society need health care, and the insurers have exploited a niche in which they can turn a buck.
The question I inevitably come back to in this consideration is, "Is this really the best way we can do things?" I readily admit that I am a fan of a government-administered, single payer system for a few reasons. The first is purely economical -- it actually costs less to administer a single-payer plan because the government is interested in breaking even, not turning a profit. The second, however, is social. The removal of insurer profit from the system pushes it more in a social direction. The focus of the system can once again be on doctors and patients, and the expression of their mutually-beneficial self-interest.
Blind faith in "market solutions" assumes that capitalism always provides the best way for doing things. In the arena of health care -- a sector of economic activity more concerned with social interaction than the manufacture of goods -- I'm not certain that is the case.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
IEA predicts oil decline
The Financial Times (UK) has leaked an International Energy Agency (IEA) report that predicts global oil prediction annual declines of between 6.4% and 9.1%. Since the IEA is a truly international organization, and also is not given to pessimistic scenarios, this is indeed alarming.
It should be noted that this kind of decline means that the world needs to discover a new Saudi Arabia every few years just to keep up. Given that global oil discoveries peaked in the mid-to-late 1960s, I find it hard to believe that this will happen. What the IEA is essentially saying here is that the age of cheap, readily available petroleum is likely coming to an end.
Also, given the way that industrial economies -- especially the United States -- are highly dependent upon ready supplies of cheap petroleum, it seems that a transitory phase of human civilization is rapidly approaching. Personally, I find it hard to imagine that many of the highly centralized and specialized institutions we have come to take for granted will survive the end of cheap oil. As Chris Martenson says in his "crash course" on economics, energy and the environment, "The next twenty years will be very different from the last twenty years."
It seems the debate over peak oil has largely ended. The new debate has to be one of preparedness and adjustment. I guess I fall on the side of the "pessimists" who do not believe that technology will save us -- after all, technology and energy are actually two different things, in spite of beliefs to the contrary prevalent in our society -- and that our future will be much more localized and offer much less in the way of material comfort.
World will struggle to meet oil demand
By Carola Hoyos and Javier Blas
Published: October 29 2008 02:00 | Last updated: October 29 2008 02:00
Output from the world's oilfields is declining faster than previously thought, the first authoritative public study of the biggest fields shows.
Without extra investment to raise production, the natural annual rate of output decline is 9.1 per cent, the International Energy Agency says in its annual report, the World Energy Outlook, a draft of which has been obtained by the Financial Times.
The findings suggest the world will struggle to produce enough oil to make up for steep declines in existing fields, such as those in the North Sea, Russia and Alaska, and meet long-term de-mand. The effort will become even more acute as prices fall and investment decisions are delayed.
The IEA, the oil watchdog, forecasts that China, India and other developing countries' demand will require investments of $360bn (£230bn) each year until 2030. The agency says even with investment, the annual rate of output decline is 6.4 per cent.
The decline will not necessarily be felt in the next few years because demand is slowing down, but with the expected slowdown in investment the eventual effect will be magnified, oil executives say.....
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0830883c-a55b-11dd-b4f5-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1It should be noted that this kind of decline means that the world needs to discover a new Saudi Arabia every few years just to keep up. Given that global oil discoveries peaked in the mid-to-late 1960s, I find it hard to believe that this will happen. What the IEA is essentially saying here is that the age of cheap, readily available petroleum is likely coming to an end.
Also, given the way that industrial economies -- especially the United States -- are highly dependent upon ready supplies of cheap petroleum, it seems that a transitory phase of human civilization is rapidly approaching. Personally, I find it hard to imagine that many of the highly centralized and specialized institutions we have come to take for granted will survive the end of cheap oil. As Chris Martenson says in his "crash course" on economics, energy and the environment, "The next twenty years will be very different from the last twenty years."
It seems the debate over peak oil has largely ended. The new debate has to be one of preparedness and adjustment. I guess I fall on the side of the "pessimists" who do not believe that technology will save us -- after all, technology and energy are actually two different things, in spite of beliefs to the contrary prevalent in our society -- and that our future will be much more localized and offer much less in the way of material comfort.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
The Myths of Historical Positivism
We Americans have a rather short collective memory. As I watch the current incarnation of the quadrennial charade we refer to as a Presidential election, I cannot help but be overwhelmed by the way that historical positivism completely overwhelms our cultural narrative -- to the point that it blinds us to the realities that are all around us.
Perhaps some explanation is in order here. When I refer to "positivism," I am referring to the philosophy that grew out of the Enlightenment that discounted metaphysical or spiritual explanations for phenomena of the natural world. Instead, followers of positivism believed that knowledge could only come from sensory experience and the empirical measurement or classification of that experience. While this mode of thought certainly spurred great advances in human society -- the scientific method perhaps greatest among them -- it also later created controversy.
The controversy really took off when social scientists began to apply positivism to their own approaches. It is out of the philosophy of positivism that we gained the myth of "rational actors" so prevalent in classical economics. It also helped spawn Marxism and its dialectical, linear view of history. Essentially, positivists tend to believe that just because certain things have worked out a certain way in the (recent) past, that they will continue to progress that way in the future.
The attitudes of most Americans toward technology provides an excellent example of how this positivist view can distort and even blind us to reality. Technological advancement is a central part of the American story. For all our lives, and those of the preceeding generations, technology has advanced at a dizzying pace, making our lives easier in countless ways. And because this narrative of technology is central to our cultural narrative as Americans, we tend to believe that technological advancement will continue apace well into the future, solving our myriad problems as they pop up before us.
Climate change? Green technology will save us. Peak oil? Renewable energy sources harnessed by new technology will save us. Rapidly growing population and reduced topsoil? Genetically-modified crops and new agricultural technologies will save us. Global war on terror? New military technologies will save us.
However, I believe this represents a very shortsighted and misguided view of the reality of our current situation. History is not linear -- it is more cyclical. I am certain that people living in ancient Rome thought that they had reached the pinnacle of civilization, and the glory that was Rome would continue on forever. Except it didn't. When Rome's complex, centralized organizational structures -- political, economic and military -- began to crack and groan under the weight of its empire, it only took waves of hungry barbarians to bring it to its knees and usher in the Dark Ages. In most ways -- politically, economically, culturally -- Western Europe returned to a state that more closely resembled that before the Roman Empire. Things showed themselves to be much more cyclical than linear.
Of course, nothing I'm saying here is really all that new. Arnold Toynbee advanced these ideas in his magnum opus, A Study of History. The critical theorists of the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, etc.) had similar views of Western culture and society. But these views are decidedly out of the mainstream, especially in American society. To acknowledge their possible veracity would be to call into question the entire narrative of American progress, to suggest that it might not go on forever, to pull the rug out from under the accompanying myth of American exceptionalism -- the idea that America is different and the rules of history do not apply to us.
These ideas, as I stated previously, have always been at the heart of the American narrative. However, they took on additional energy in the period following World War II. At the conclusion of that war, Europe and Japan were literally bombed-out shells of their former selves. However, the United States emerged from the war with its infrastructure completely unscathed and over 50% of the entire world's industrial capacity (and a seemingly bottomless supply of oil). This imbalanced state of affairs provided an engine that was used to create more wealth than the world had ever seen before. However, it couldn't last forever -- as Europe and Japan were rebuilt, they gradually began to take some of this share of global production away from the United States.
The only problem with this re-emergence of Europe and Japan was that the historical abberation that was the United States after WWII was seen by many Americans as proof of our exceptionalism. When our share of global industrial production began to decline through the 1960s and 1970s, and we passed our peak of oil production in 1970, we refused to acknowledge these new realities. Instead, in 1980 we turned toward Ronald Reagan's promises of "morning in America. We pushed our economy increasingly toward the financial sector, continued to pump ever-increasing sums of money into our military leviathan, and took an ever-increasing standard of living as our American birthright. Profligacy, not prudence, became the American way. Debt and deficits soared as we effectively charged our future to American Express on every level -- household, municipal and federal -- with a diminishing hope of ever paying it back. As Dick Cheney famously said, "The American way of life is non-negotiable."
The only problem with this kind of outlook is that it completely ignores reality. It ignores the political, economic and ecological limits to our expansion. It ignores the lessons learned from past empires that eventually were ground down by the costs of simply maintaining the status quo. It puts off the inevitable for the next generation to deal with. Many aspects of this Presidential campaign provide stark examples of this phenomenon at work.
One striking area in which this ignorance of reality reveals itself is energy. Both candidates seem to cling to the belief that we can become "energy independent" (the new buzzword of the political season) within 10 years, and neither one of them mentions the word "conservation" in how we are to achieve this aim. Nor do they address the difficulties in maintaining current levels of global oil production. Nor do they address the role of increasing oil consumption by China, India and the rest of the developing world. Nor do they address the inherent predicaments posed by other forms of energy such as reduced energy return on energy invested (ERoEI), storage issues or portability -- all areas in which oil has significant advantages over all other energy sources. It's as if they believe that by simply saying it, they can bring it into being -- just like in Genesis Chapter 1. The writer James Howard Kunstler calls this the "Jiminy Cricket syndrome" -- the idea that if you just wish upon a star, all your dreams will come true.
Another striking area in which this phenomenon reveals itself is military spending and its impact on the federal budget. Neither candidate acknowledges how it is hopeless to balance the federal budget while keeping military spending at it current ridiculously high levels -- estimated at $623 billion for FY 2008, more that the rest of the world combined. This spending, if we include the costs of past wars like long-term veterans' care and interest on the debt, accounts for 41% of the federal budget. For either major-party candidate to pretend that they will somehow balance the budget and reduce the national debt while leaving military spending sacrosanct is patently absurd. Of course, military spending has become the sacred cow of Americanism, in spite of Dwight Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial complex (he wanted to call it the military-industrial-congressional complex, but dropped the "congressional") in his farewell address almost 48 years ago, and the fact that our federal government is collapsing under its weight.
I could go on, but I'll stop here before the argument spins any further out of control and instead bring it back together. Let's review a few of these myths of positivism that affect our collective cultural outlook:
- To be an American is to have an ever-increasing standard of living indefinitely into the future, because that's what it has happened in the past.
- Since technological complexity has always increased throughout America's history, it will continue to increase indefinitely into the future (and has no dependence upon energy availability).
- America has always been the world's guarantor of liberty, and does not act in strategic self-interest as other nations do, so we must continue to spend increasing sums on our military and project it to every corner of the globe.
- We have always enjoyed increasing amounts of energy available for our use, so we can expect this situation to continue into the future.
- The Green Revolution in petroleum and chemical-intensive farming staved off the gloomy predictions of Thomas Malthus, so we can expect to continue to feed an ever-growing population without serious difficulty.
What happens when you begin to question these assertions? What happens when you try to look at the deeper reality beneath them? Do they remain prima fascie perceptions of reality? Or do they begin to call into question the most basic assumptions upon which we have constructed our cultural narrative?
I know what my answer is. You can draw your own conclusions.
Perhaps some explanation is in order here. When I refer to "positivism," I am referring to the philosophy that grew out of the Enlightenment that discounted metaphysical or spiritual explanations for phenomena of the natural world. Instead, followers of positivism believed that knowledge could only come from sensory experience and the empirical measurement or classification of that experience. While this mode of thought certainly spurred great advances in human society -- the scientific method perhaps greatest among them -- it also later created controversy.
The controversy really took off when social scientists began to apply positivism to their own approaches. It is out of the philosophy of positivism that we gained the myth of "rational actors" so prevalent in classical economics. It also helped spawn Marxism and its dialectical, linear view of history. Essentially, positivists tend to believe that just because certain things have worked out a certain way in the (recent) past, that they will continue to progress that way in the future.
The attitudes of most Americans toward technology provides an excellent example of how this positivist view can distort and even blind us to reality. Technological advancement is a central part of the American story. For all our lives, and those of the preceeding generations, technology has advanced at a dizzying pace, making our lives easier in countless ways. And because this narrative of technology is central to our cultural narrative as Americans, we tend to believe that technological advancement will continue apace well into the future, solving our myriad problems as they pop up before us.
Climate change? Green technology will save us. Peak oil? Renewable energy sources harnessed by new technology will save us. Rapidly growing population and reduced topsoil? Genetically-modified crops and new agricultural technologies will save us. Global war on terror? New military technologies will save us.
However, I believe this represents a very shortsighted and misguided view of the reality of our current situation. History is not linear -- it is more cyclical. I am certain that people living in ancient Rome thought that they had reached the pinnacle of civilization, and the glory that was Rome would continue on forever. Except it didn't. When Rome's complex, centralized organizational structures -- political, economic and military -- began to crack and groan under the weight of its empire, it only took waves of hungry barbarians to bring it to its knees and usher in the Dark Ages. In most ways -- politically, economically, culturally -- Western Europe returned to a state that more closely resembled that before the Roman Empire. Things showed themselves to be much more cyclical than linear.
Of course, nothing I'm saying here is really all that new. Arnold Toynbee advanced these ideas in his magnum opus, A Study of History. The critical theorists of the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, etc.) had similar views of Western culture and society. But these views are decidedly out of the mainstream, especially in American society. To acknowledge their possible veracity would be to call into question the entire narrative of American progress, to suggest that it might not go on forever, to pull the rug out from under the accompanying myth of American exceptionalism -- the idea that America is different and the rules of history do not apply to us.
These ideas, as I stated previously, have always been at the heart of the American narrative. However, they took on additional energy in the period following World War II. At the conclusion of that war, Europe and Japan were literally bombed-out shells of their former selves. However, the United States emerged from the war with its infrastructure completely unscathed and over 50% of the entire world's industrial capacity (and a seemingly bottomless supply of oil). This imbalanced state of affairs provided an engine that was used to create more wealth than the world had ever seen before. However, it couldn't last forever -- as Europe and Japan were rebuilt, they gradually began to take some of this share of global production away from the United States.
The only problem with this re-emergence of Europe and Japan was that the historical abberation that was the United States after WWII was seen by many Americans as proof of our exceptionalism. When our share of global industrial production began to decline through the 1960s and 1970s, and we passed our peak of oil production in 1970, we refused to acknowledge these new realities. Instead, in 1980 we turned toward Ronald Reagan's promises of "morning in America. We pushed our economy increasingly toward the financial sector, continued to pump ever-increasing sums of money into our military leviathan, and took an ever-increasing standard of living as our American birthright. Profligacy, not prudence, became the American way. Debt and deficits soared as we effectively charged our future to American Express on every level -- household, municipal and federal -- with a diminishing hope of ever paying it back. As Dick Cheney famously said, "The American way of life is non-negotiable."
The only problem with this kind of outlook is that it completely ignores reality. It ignores the political, economic and ecological limits to our expansion. It ignores the lessons learned from past empires that eventually were ground down by the costs of simply maintaining the status quo. It puts off the inevitable for the next generation to deal with. Many aspects of this Presidential campaign provide stark examples of this phenomenon at work.
One striking area in which this ignorance of reality reveals itself is energy. Both candidates seem to cling to the belief that we can become "energy independent" (the new buzzword of the political season) within 10 years, and neither one of them mentions the word "conservation" in how we are to achieve this aim. Nor do they address the difficulties in maintaining current levels of global oil production. Nor do they address the role of increasing oil consumption by China, India and the rest of the developing world. Nor do they address the inherent predicaments posed by other forms of energy such as reduced energy return on energy invested (ERoEI), storage issues or portability -- all areas in which oil has significant advantages over all other energy sources. It's as if they believe that by simply saying it, they can bring it into being -- just like in Genesis Chapter 1. The writer James Howard Kunstler calls this the "Jiminy Cricket syndrome" -- the idea that if you just wish upon a star, all your dreams will come true.
Another striking area in which this phenomenon reveals itself is military spending and its impact on the federal budget. Neither candidate acknowledges how it is hopeless to balance the federal budget while keeping military spending at it current ridiculously high levels -- estimated at $623 billion for FY 2008, more that the rest of the world combined. This spending, if we include the costs of past wars like long-term veterans' care and interest on the debt, accounts for 41% of the federal budget. For either major-party candidate to pretend that they will somehow balance the budget and reduce the national debt while leaving military spending sacrosanct is patently absurd. Of course, military spending has become the sacred cow of Americanism, in spite of Dwight Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial complex (he wanted to call it the military-industrial-congressional complex, but dropped the "congressional") in his farewell address almost 48 years ago, and the fact that our federal government is collapsing under its weight.
I could go on, but I'll stop here before the argument spins any further out of control and instead bring it back together. Let's review a few of these myths of positivism that affect our collective cultural outlook:
- To be an American is to have an ever-increasing standard of living indefinitely into the future, because that's what it has happened in the past.
- Since technological complexity has always increased throughout America's history, it will continue to increase indefinitely into the future (and has no dependence upon energy availability).
- America has always been the world's guarantor of liberty, and does not act in strategic self-interest as other nations do, so we must continue to spend increasing sums on our military and project it to every corner of the globe.
- We have always enjoyed increasing amounts of energy available for our use, so we can expect this situation to continue into the future.
- The Green Revolution in petroleum and chemical-intensive farming staved off the gloomy predictions of Thomas Malthus, so we can expect to continue to feed an ever-growing population without serious difficulty.
What happens when you begin to question these assertions? What happens when you try to look at the deeper reality beneath them? Do they remain prima fascie perceptions of reality? Or do they begin to call into question the most basic assumptions upon which we have constructed our cultural narrative?
I know what my answer is. You can draw your own conclusions.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Comments on the Second Presidential Debate
I avoided watching either the first Presidential debate or the VP debate. I have come to view such things as primarily political theater that is not meant to seriously inform me about the candidates beyond what I already have come to know. However, I did turn in to tonight's debate. Despite the risk to my future sanity, I'm glad I did -- but probably not for the reasons that more traditional political observers might suspect.
First, I confirmed my suspicions surrounding the debates being little more than political theater. If this debate is to serve as a good picture of the people from whom we have to choose on November 4th, then we're pretty much screwed as a country. On the one hand, we have a charismatic, relatively young candidate who offers next-to-nothing in the way of specifics. On the other hand, we have a candidate from an earlier generation who seems to still have both feet and his gaze firmly planted there, oblivious to the changes in the world around him. Of course, the talking heads will gush about the "exchanges" between the candidates -- but I found the performance to leave me with more questions than before I watched.
The first question of the debate surrounded the financial meltdown of the United States -- the unraveling of the "wealth" created over the past many years that has turned out to be little more than slips of paper without any real value behind them. Obama's answer first blamed the Bush administration, and then talked about the need for "accountability" and "regulation" while completely avoiding any specifics. McCain, however, did go into specifics. The only problem was that when I did the math required of those specifics, I swear I ended up with an imaginary number!
First, McCain spoke of the need for government intervention in the mortgage crisis and stop the downward pressure on real estate values. His proposal was to have the government buy up all of the "bad" mortgages from the holders, and then to renegotiate those mortgages at current market value, which would enable those homeowners to remain in their homes. This proposal would make the U.S. government the #1 mortgage holder in the United States. Since the government would be renegotiating all of these mortgages at a lower cost than what they paid for them, by how much would this be increasing the federal deficit in a short amount of time? Five trillion dollars? Eight trillion? Ten trillion?
In response to that same question, McCain mentioned the crushing deficit that we are passing on to the next generations, and that we must do something about it. Finally, he read directly from the Republican ideological script and proposed across-the-board tax cuts.
To summarize, it is wrong to pass on such a large deficit to our future generations. So, in order to deal with the current financial crisis -- the roots of which lay in the fact that we are a debtor nation on every level -- the government is going to take on trillions more in mortgage debt AND reduce government revenues by cutting taxes. It reminds me of the old "GOTO" function in BASIC programming, with the result being an ever-increasing deficit. The only problem is that this one is not an endless loop -- it has a nasty fall at the end.
But there's an even bigger problem that I have with this approach. It is the investment of the government into private wealth. I'm not against government investment into the economy. However, I'm against government investment or intervention in areas that do not demonstrate a significant common benefit. It demonstrates to me the fruition of John Kenneth Galbraith's assertion in the 1950s that we were a nation of private affluence and public squalor. Every year the American Society of Civil Engineers grades our infrastructure. I can't remember the last year it was higher than a "D". If we're going to invest hundreds of billions (or trillions) of taxpayer dollars, wouldn't it be more prudent to invest it in revitalizing our infrastructure? It would not only create jobs, but provide us with a lasting product with long-term benefits. This approach was used once before -- by FDR with agencies like the Works Progress Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority. I'm not saying we should copy this effort wholesale, nor that we will necessarily have the capital for it in the future given the current economic outlook, but if we ARE going to spend taxpayer dollars it should be on something that will benefit that great mass of taxpayers.
Barack Obama claimed that we can reduce foreign oil imports within 10 years. For support in this argument, he cited JFK's call to put a man on the moon within that same time frame. He said that at the time of that speech, nobody knew how we would do it, but that we were able to do it. Ipso, facto, this time we should be able to do the same.
What Obama's "argument" (if you want to call it that) fails to acknowledge is that during JFK's time, the United States had two things in abundance that it does not have today -- cheap energy and capital. Also significant, Obama did not once mention the word conservation in any of his statements regarding energy. Finally, his plan demonstrated either an ignorance or an avoidance of the scale upon which any of these new technologies would have to take hold in order to replace fossil fuels. McCain was not any better than Obama in addressing these realities.
Finally, both of these candidates espouse a foreign policy that supposes that the United States is an exception to history (McCain twice referred to us as "the greatest force for good in the history of the world") and still a global hyperpower. Neither is true, based upon the evidence that I have gathered over my studies. The United States intervenes militarily based upon its strategic and economic interest, not its concern for "spreading freedom." Also, the United States is a declining power in almost every sense of the term -- especially on the military and economic fronts.
My personal belief is that we will try to sustain our global "empire" at all costs, to the expense of all else. The imperial beast will devour our treasury and economy. It will tear our "liberties" asunder. It will chew up our current and future generations of young people. But, at some point, it will end as all empires do. Kevin Phillips sees us adjusting to a role much like that of Great Britain after the Second World War. That is a much more attractive option than the other end of the spectrum -- the collapse of the Roman Empire in Western Europe and the beginning of the Dark Ages. If the collapse is ONLY the American Empire, then Phillips may be close to the mark. However, if we are in the midst of a epochal civilization falling -- that of "Western" civilization since the Renaissance, and its accompanying importance of the individual -- then I see much darker times ahead.
Regardless of the long-term problems and predicaments we face, what I saw tonight was two men who seem very ill-equipped to deal with them. They are products of our political intertia, a view into the looking-glass of our national psyche. That inertia presently has us moving further and further away from facing up to and dealing with reality before it deals with us.
First, I confirmed my suspicions surrounding the debates being little more than political theater. If this debate is to serve as a good picture of the people from whom we have to choose on November 4th, then we're pretty much screwed as a country. On the one hand, we have a charismatic, relatively young candidate who offers next-to-nothing in the way of specifics. On the other hand, we have a candidate from an earlier generation who seems to still have both feet and his gaze firmly planted there, oblivious to the changes in the world around him. Of course, the talking heads will gush about the "exchanges" between the candidates -- but I found the performance to leave me with more questions than before I watched.
The first question of the debate surrounded the financial meltdown of the United States -- the unraveling of the "wealth" created over the past many years that has turned out to be little more than slips of paper without any real value behind them. Obama's answer first blamed the Bush administration, and then talked about the need for "accountability" and "regulation" while completely avoiding any specifics. McCain, however, did go into specifics. The only problem was that when I did the math required of those specifics, I swear I ended up with an imaginary number!
First, McCain spoke of the need for government intervention in the mortgage crisis and stop the downward pressure on real estate values. His proposal was to have the government buy up all of the "bad" mortgages from the holders, and then to renegotiate those mortgages at current market value, which would enable those homeowners to remain in their homes. This proposal would make the U.S. government the #1 mortgage holder in the United States. Since the government would be renegotiating all of these mortgages at a lower cost than what they paid for them, by how much would this be increasing the federal deficit in a short amount of time? Five trillion dollars? Eight trillion? Ten trillion?
In response to that same question, McCain mentioned the crushing deficit that we are passing on to the next generations, and that we must do something about it. Finally, he read directly from the Republican ideological script and proposed across-the-board tax cuts.
To summarize, it is wrong to pass on such a large deficit to our future generations. So, in order to deal with the current financial crisis -- the roots of which lay in the fact that we are a debtor nation on every level -- the government is going to take on trillions more in mortgage debt AND reduce government revenues by cutting taxes. It reminds me of the old "GOTO" function in BASIC programming, with the result being an ever-increasing deficit. The only problem is that this one is not an endless loop -- it has a nasty fall at the end.
But there's an even bigger problem that I have with this approach. It is the investment of the government into private wealth. I'm not against government investment into the economy. However, I'm against government investment or intervention in areas that do not demonstrate a significant common benefit. It demonstrates to me the fruition of John Kenneth Galbraith's assertion in the 1950s that we were a nation of private affluence and public squalor. Every year the American Society of Civil Engineers grades our infrastructure. I can't remember the last year it was higher than a "D". If we're going to invest hundreds of billions (or trillions) of taxpayer dollars, wouldn't it be more prudent to invest it in revitalizing our infrastructure? It would not only create jobs, but provide us with a lasting product with long-term benefits. This approach was used once before -- by FDR with agencies like the Works Progress Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority. I'm not saying we should copy this effort wholesale, nor that we will necessarily have the capital for it in the future given the current economic outlook, but if we ARE going to spend taxpayer dollars it should be on something that will benefit that great mass of taxpayers.
Barack Obama claimed that we can reduce foreign oil imports within 10 years. For support in this argument, he cited JFK's call to put a man on the moon within that same time frame. He said that at the time of that speech, nobody knew how we would do it, but that we were able to do it. Ipso, facto, this time we should be able to do the same.
What Obama's "argument" (if you want to call it that) fails to acknowledge is that during JFK's time, the United States had two things in abundance that it does not have today -- cheap energy and capital. Also significant, Obama did not once mention the word conservation in any of his statements regarding energy. Finally, his plan demonstrated either an ignorance or an avoidance of the scale upon which any of these new technologies would have to take hold in order to replace fossil fuels. McCain was not any better than Obama in addressing these realities.
Finally, both of these candidates espouse a foreign policy that supposes that the United States is an exception to history (McCain twice referred to us as "the greatest force for good in the history of the world") and still a global hyperpower. Neither is true, based upon the evidence that I have gathered over my studies. The United States intervenes militarily based upon its strategic and economic interest, not its concern for "spreading freedom." Also, the United States is a declining power in almost every sense of the term -- especially on the military and economic fronts.
My personal belief is that we will try to sustain our global "empire" at all costs, to the expense of all else. The imperial beast will devour our treasury and economy. It will tear our "liberties" asunder. It will chew up our current and future generations of young people. But, at some point, it will end as all empires do. Kevin Phillips sees us adjusting to a role much like that of Great Britain after the Second World War. That is a much more attractive option than the other end of the spectrum -- the collapse of the Roman Empire in Western Europe and the beginning of the Dark Ages. If the collapse is ONLY the American Empire, then Phillips may be close to the mark. However, if we are in the midst of a epochal civilization falling -- that of "Western" civilization since the Renaissance, and its accompanying importance of the individual -- then I see much darker times ahead.
Regardless of the long-term problems and predicaments we face, what I saw tonight was two men who seem very ill-equipped to deal with them. They are products of our political intertia, a view into the looking-glass of our national psyche. That inertia presently has us moving further and further away from facing up to and dealing with reality before it deals with us.
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