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The Pleasure Principle

Happiness is a kind of Dodo, an odd bird, though certainly not extinct. It means as many different things as there are people, though our predilection for collective experience has shaped a view toward happiness that we generally agree on. Departures from this are seen as just that – alternative, avant ‘something’, deviant – indeed that is where these concepts come from. But we have given the pursuit of happiness such a central role in our public and private lives, it has become the thing we guard the most as well as infringe upon most regularly. The very flexibility of happiness in this regard seems to be its key and its lock, if you will.

As we often ignore the big problems in favor of smaller, more manageable ones, happiness can be difficult to deal with. Not being happy, per se, but defining what it is and going on from there. Simply because the royal We have attached many things to this idea or achieving it (a combination of property and resources that equal a certain level of luxury) those things must then be compromised as we pivot toward becoming more planetary minded. But does this mean we will have to compromise our levels of happiness? This is a high-minded question, surely, weighted-down with the concrete boots of bourgeois comforts that surround us, that make happiness, like most other things, needlessly more complicated than it needs to be.

But it’s the tale of the green tape, right? If we could just cut our consumption of food, fuel and shelter by eighty per cent and not be concerned about its impact on our happiness, the prosperous way down would lose both its spartan implications and its sex appeal and hence, become a limp marketing tool. It would seem to imply that we would become ambivalent about our self-preservation, which is impossible. So what are we trying to preserve if not our most flexible characteristic, i.e., our definition our happiness?

 

Via, the new economics foundation has released its second Happy Planet Index, an attempt to quantify happiness in terms of some factors more tangible than GDP, but also as a function of resource consumption. This is interesting on its own and represents multiple philosophical tangents at once. One way of getting to the point of being able to perceive and then opt for the reality of less is to release ourselves of some of the constraints we have battened to our happiness. 

Whatever it is, SUVs, suburbs, exurbs, plastics, a forty-hour work week with two weeks of vacation per year, a cellphone plan as individual as you are, the idea has grown more rather than less contained, simply because of all the pre-requirements.

The ways we use happiness to sell ourselves products bares a rather perverse relationship to the methods we use to shield our delicate selves from some of the unsavory things necessary to live as we do. What we are doing is protecting our happiness as if it were a sort of achievement in and of itself, and not a journey that could entail many things. That could even be quite different and nonetheless, still make us happy.

After all, if we can compare ourselves to others and imagine how things could be worse, can’t we also imagine how they could better?

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How to Ctrl-Shift the Labor Force

I take this is essay in Foreign Policy, via, on the imminent “death of macho,” as mostly another set-up to establish the ever-present victimization of the most persecuted sub-species in the history of the world as seen through the prism of the last 2000 months: the white male. If it can be established to a reasonable doubt that the era of patriarchal hegemony is over, then the ground work can begin to rehabilitate, if not re-establish, its dominance.

Most titans of finance, captains of industry, even ‘fishers of men’ have sought to identify with the working man. Our bizarre allergy to elitism itself originated in what is perceived, from above, as the upward insecurities of the blue collar man, even though this phenomena resembles more a refusal to demean one’s position and accept certain peers, than any contempt for learning or the finer things. Still, the shift from an industrial- to an information-economy, while I might cheer the re-kindled emphasis on the mining of words, does appear to be a leveler from both directions, as the unwanted skills one group disdained and the other couldn’t afford begin to pile toward the center of the plate as the new source of growth and progress.

For several years now it has been an established fact that, as behavioral finance economists Brad Barber and Terrance Odean memorably demonstrated in 2001, of all the factors that might correlate with overconfident investment in financial markets—age, marital status, and the like—the most obvious culprit was having a Y chromosome. And now it turns out that not only did the macho men of the heavily male-dominated global finance sector create the conditions for global economic collapse, but they were aided and abetted by their mostly male counterparts in government whose policies, whether consciously or not, acted to artificially prop up macho.

Fine. I’m not going to disturb children fighting dragons with paper swords. But these kinds of built-environments, where fields of straw men bleed seamlessly into subdivided new attacks on old resentments, are sprinkled with acknowledgements of collapse and economic re-alignment. And there, we should welcome the cover fire, even if it is just a sound effect-mimic from the mouths of babes.

How will we shift the labor force, from the chairman’s suite to the break-truck, from burning things to making things? What does that even mean? It’s not just green, of course,  but a whole slew of implications about all the things we’ve built society on that we’ve got to stop doing. And yet, people will still need jobs – more to the point, people will need education, healthcare and the raft of other social services that we have always needed but which been downgraded on the payscale and prestige-o-meter to the point where we ignored them and THAT became as much of an explanation for our deplorable state of waste and natural illiteracy as much as the machinations of a single gender.

So, godspeed the death of macho, if that’s going help facilitate the shift. But I would fear, from the straw sticking out of his sad, thread-bare Zegna, that reports of its death are indeed an exaggeration.

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Sustainable You

In order to keep oneself going, there are basic needs involving inputs and outputs which determine whether an entity dies or remains viable. In the debate over global climate change and whether anything should be done about it, we discuss and reflect on the effects of various elevations in temperature on our ability to secure the inputs necessary for viability. Or we act like there’s no such thing as climate change at all. But we’ll set that aside and believe for a moment that most people are sufficiently convinced.

Granting this, even if we can summon the political will to begin to limit greenhouse gas emissions to combat runaway climate change, would the resulting society otherwise be viable into the future? Do we believe we can achieve this and then be able to keep things – living standards, consumption levels – much as they are? In other words, would a reduced carbon-centric model be sustainable?

Many of the policy implications of limiting co2 emissions would necessarily alter the way we live. I trust this is a well understood point – and vociferous opposition to Waxman-Markey suggests that it is. The distaste and outrage toward this kind of change does not mean that it is any less likely. You can see the same evidence in the collapsed housing market, the financial services industry in tatters, the job losses in manufacturing, fractured global supply chains. When will this economy begin to recover? The question, taken with its constituent parts, almost answers itself. Or it should.

Even if there were no such things as rising oceans or the greenhouse effect, we could not sustain anywhere near present levels of energy consumption, and without those amounts of cheap energy, our society as presently construed cannot keep up its requisite levels of inputs needed for viability. We could not even keep it were it is.

Now, whether this adjustment is down or up would depend on nothing so much as our relative capacities for creativity and imagination – of course, the very reasons it all seems so unthinkable to so many. It is, literally. In order for there to be an evolution of our ideas about green, there will have to be a throughway beyond even sustainability.

Image: Henrik Hakansson, Fallen Forest, 2006.

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The Sound of a Tree Not Falling

Social Eco progress continues in Latin America, while the rest of the world fixates on reality t.v. shows and/or burns.

In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies – and, for today, they have won.

…

Human beings need to make far more decisions like this: to leave fossil fuels in the ground, and to leave rainforests standing. In microcosm, this rumble in the jungle is the fight we all face now. Will we allow a small number of rich people to make a short-term profit from seizing and burning resources, at the expense of our collective ability to survive?

If this sounds like hyperbole, listen to Professor Jim Hansen, the world’s leading climatologist, whose predictions have consistently turned out to be correct. He says: “Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know. We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with a sea level 75 metres higher. Coastal disasters would occur continually. The only uncertainty is the time it would take for complete ice sheet disintegration.”

via.

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Reach of the Blind Eye

This is like a sad, parallel history about where we once were that circles back around to the present and how we arrived here. We need not separate the aesthetic from the practical as they once were wed, an example that easy to see at this site showing 11 beautiful train stations that fell to the wrecking ball.

Having just passed through the current iteration of Penn Station, this image brings a shutter. You want to turn away at what we’ve done here, as well as the other stations shown in Then and Now comparisons. It is hard to escape the depths of just how badly we have screwed up our transportation system in the race to make way for the automobile and not see it as a metaphor for the harm we’ve done to our other systems, from agriculture to any other kind of culture. And the whole thing was so short lived! And now we struggle to reconnect or ‘reconnect’, as we have come to refer to ideas which have become puzzling and esoteric.

That the old Penn Station is as glorious as the Gare St. Lazare or any of the other beautiful examples of practical architecture around the world should be a cautionary note about all we have chosen to systematically eliminate. And why.

Two other great links on that page, as well.

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Cognitive Dissidents

Foreign fighters among the Taliban with Birmingham (U.K.) accents? NASA planning massive space explosions in search of water on the moon? Unrelated incidents to be sure, but what, exactly, is going on?

These sort of bizarre happenings in parallel occur all the time, of course, and they have become a part of living in our present day – as curious as horseless carriages must have once seemed. Unpacking them at all, they may become even more Byzantine as curiosities. The Aston Villa tattoos on the recently-killed Taliban fighter are as crazy/easy to explain as would have been the case had their accents been from Birmingham, Alabama. Okay, maybe not. That would have been crazy. But no more so than scientists preparing to fly a rocket booster into the moon in order to trigger a six-mile-high explosion.

The four-month mission of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which will be directed from NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, is to discover whether water is frozen in the perpetual darkness of craters near the moon’s south pole. As a potential source of oxygen for life support and hydrogen for rocket fuel, that water would be a tremendous boost to NASA’s plans to restart human exploration of the moon.

It is in this climate, where we have become nearly unable to differentiate the fabulous from the actual, where the words ‘incredible’ and ‘amazing’ have been displaced of their original meanings, where extraordinary measures of all sorts limbo beneath the radar, causing not the slightest flinch. Maybe it’s always been like this; or perhaps the volume of information bombardment itself is causing the greatest psychological displacement, such that we begin to allow for the unallowable. How else to explain this:

Using iron “seeding” to set off massive plankton growth in the ocean to slow climate change; creating artificial volcanic eruptions to release cooling sulfur into the atmosphere; increasing the solar reflectivity of clouds by adding sea-salt particles; building a giant space mirror to stop ice from melting in Greenland. These may sound like concepts straight out of a George Lucas film, but they are real ideas being proposed by scientists as part of the “geoengineering” movement — a school of thought based upon the idea that humans can engineer ourselves out of global warming on a massive scale.

How many people listened to this report on NPR driving home on Tuesday, looked around at the traffic and nodded their heads? Did they say to themselves, ‘that sounds like a good idea,’ or “I’m glad people are thinking about this’? Even the report hedged itself with a kind of reality check.

And experiments could create disasters. Alan Robock of Rutgers University cataloged a long list of risks. Particles in the stratosphere that block sunlight could also damage the ozone layer, which protects us from harsh ultraviolet light. Or altering the stratosphere could reduce precipitation in Asia, where it waters the crops that feed 2 billion people.

Should we be outraged* by these kinds of suggestions? We seem to be caught in an information spiral, where we’ve down-graded the importance of expertise in favor of a balance between opposing viewpoints. We lend credence to both and preserve the power to play Solomon, though we are greatly ill-educated and prone to believing in both our better impulses and the existence of an easy way out. Sitting in that car in traffic, we may need to first begin to agitate among ourselves, to regain control of what’s happening inside the car, first. Why shouldn’t we be able to counter the effects of climate change without driving less, wasting less, living differently? Do we even know?

* this can be a rather complex proposition in itself, e.g., toward what would the outrage be directed?

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Sliced and Diced by the Cutting Edge

What else would it be for?

Now that scientists have disproved the theory that fingerprints serve to improve the grip between people’s hands and the surface they are holding, they are wondering just what fingerprints are for. Really. We get all CSI about everything just as we realize several of our grand strategies are failing at once, and of course the goal of evading responsibility becomes key. This sort of all just happened to us – the auto-realized logic of self-justifying greed – and now we’re mostly wet-behind-the-ears again/still. And we don’t know what fingerprints are for.

There a section in One Hundred Years of Solitude when an insomnia plague causes the people of Macondo to lose their memories and forget even the names of commonplace objects, such that they have to label even chairs and clocks. They even hang a sign on a cow:

This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk.

Kunstler writes that we’re just too stupid to survive, and he’s right that we tend to get hypnotized by the (:our) glimmering reflection in the cutting edge, never imagining that it has perhaps been sharpened to come down someplace/anyplace that could well be our own tender nape. We’ve grown tepid even about the possibility that technology will save us. But as that enthusiasm wanes, what do we fall back on? God? guns?

All of this is about a re-visualized self-realization, to sound perfectly po-po-mo about it. Inner freedom, as some have distinguished it – but to discover this requires a great amount of self-knowledge, which itself is predicated on getting to know as much as about what we’ve done to ourselves and our world as possible. And all of this in the very short time that is the average lifespan. Not after work – it is your work. And your only pay is the world you help create and make free. It’s only called a civilization as long as it flies along a soaring arc, right? It’s not as though comets struck our grade schools or made our universities into banal, value-added credential mills and started us down this road.

Maybe we should label our fingerprints.

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Unsubstantiated Claims

It was an organic indictment, grown up naturally around the tendency to overstate positive benefits and cash in on the trend that forms the mutually inclusive, double-fisted appeal of green. No one noticed until they came for Cheerios, and even though the floodgates reopen every now and then, no one’s yet asking what’s in all those meds everyone’s taking.

Now, via, our own Federal Trade Commission has charged a couple of companies with making false claims about touting the biodegradable nature of their products. Imagine that; almost like there was a government watchdog with the power to regulate things under its control.

Just beneath the question as to whether Moist Wipes are, in fact, biodegradable, lies the question as to whether Moist Wipes can be biodegradable. They (said cleanliness delivery system) come out of a plastic bottle; they’re already moist; you can wipe (away) stuff with them, inferring, I guess, that 1) the stuff goes somewhere and 2) a residue of demonstrable cleanliness remains. How does any of this come about? In what time frame should we consider how long any of the cds might stick around or take to go away by itself? Bonus: where will it go?

Underlying the growing concept of sustainability and various definitions of what it is, the list of conditions by which people enter into what has always been (though we have ignored it) the social contract of buying stuff will begin to be shaped by how it arrived and where will it go after use. Really, this is basic stuff. The supermarket is not a magic warehouse – things don’t just appear there. The constituent parts come from some place, often far away, and require assembly and perhaps others embellishments we should find objectionable. But, importantly, we can leverage these predilections to change more-elemental factors that determine what we see on the shelves.

Paying the full price means just that, and as we tag our objections to what we buy, we can (by no means an inevitable turn) adjust upward what we consume. This means to you what it means; your freedom is intact, we’re just attaching the whole story to what it means to be free. The economics of sustainability will be as much about pricing in the real costs – and becoming aware of them – as it is about innovative design.

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Green Idolatry

It’s really American Idolatry, but we wouldn’t like it if anyone called it that. The two words almost meld into one with this phenomenon, a little too close for comfort, not quite close enough to be called a definitive rendering. In a phrase, just the way we like it.

It’s ostensibly just TV criticism, but you have to really squint not to see the Darwinian parallels to our shallow, wasteful nature.

But it isn’t necessary to seek deeper meaning in the finale; it’s the “American Idol” franchise itself that best speaks to the state of the nation.

“American Idol” matters not just as a pop culture phenomenon, but as an institution that works — with scary efficiency — at a time when so many other American enterprises seem flawed or imperiled. It stands out this season in particular: “American Idol” is a money-making machine in the middle of a worldwide recession, an old-fashioned must-see television hit at a time when the Internet and cable have eaten away at the networks’ hegemony.

Equal parts commercialized excess and live TV so scripted even its delayed gratification drips in perfect, pre-measured droplets, each constituent part supplies just a little more sadness than the last in a perfectly conceived formula ordained to guarantee the success of the whole. This is the sort of relentlessness that we can respect and believe in, even as it’s weighed down by self-knowledge that’s as loathsome and desperate as the pursuit of fame and fortune itself.

As a commodity, we eat fun and humiliation for breakfast, but not before we slap a corporate logo on them.

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So You Don’t Have To

Clamoring for a worldwide tracking survey on consumer choice and the environment? National Geographic sort’ve answers the bell with their Greendex. This kind of fix offers the needed splitting of the hair that at once tells who is ‘out front’ on being green and makes a mockery out of the entire endeavor. The more Going Green plays itself out, the more it looks like an utter construct of the planetary forces of pillage.

This is to say that, despite the colorful graphics and trappings of informing us, sustainability issues are better laid out between the lines. Because as a matter of scorecards that presuppose how we can/will maintain what we are doing with little tweaks here and there, the issue is a non-starter. Because we can’t.

Take, for example this article from Harper’s, on the life of an oil fixer. When you realize the energy conundrum as a puzzle the key to which is hiding or losing a few integral pieces, then the puzzle can come to make some sense.

Africa has remained the main focus of Calil’s operations, but he now does business around the globe. In addition to operations in Russia and the Middle East, he owned a Houston-based firm called Nautilus, which obtained oil and gas concessions in South America and Central Asia. He sold Nautilus to Ocean Energy, which subsequently was bought by Devon Energy, now the largest U.S.-based independent oil and gas producer. Calil also won a gas concession in Brazil, which he later sold to Enron. “When buying and selling oil concessions, you’re dependent on your skills and knowledge, but you’re also very much dependent on the goodwill of the local government, from presidents to ministers,” Calil told me. “You end up building a political network to a) build up the business and b) protect it.”

But this isn’t about accrued personal wealth, conspiracy theories or geo-political middlemen. It’s primarily about a $2 trillion dollar-a-year industry that has a few good years left in it, that fully expects us all to play out the string right up until then end. The place that we’re left then is really of no concern to the countries, companies and individuals involved. They know we’re afraid of the dark, much less walking in it and God forbid bumping into each other, and so don’t need to do much to frighten us – just offer a bit of increasingly expensive relief from perceived oppressions upon our time, livelihoods and general ability to move about freely. These sacred activities uninfringed is precisely where we have agreed the bar should be set.

Just try to eat well or lower your carbon footprint within that set of constraints. And one odd thing: with consuming personal space set as your idea of freedom, anything else will feel like prison. To think/act otherwise, you’d need to being playing by a completely different set of rules, with a different ball, even.

And if/when you hear any mishigas about who killed the electric car or canned the trolley, just remember the suspects are playing a completely different game than anyone concerned about a sustainable, blue planet.