The Future of War: We're Not Ready

For the first minute of this clip, which suddenly came on during a break in the Laker game last night, I thought I had lost my mind:

The military-industrial-entertainment complex in action.

Competing climate change futures

Via Jason Tester, the blog Burrito Justice offers up an amusing and nicely written scenario on what San Francisco may look like if we experience 25m+sea level rise on account of unabated climate change. A glimpse of our watery future by the Bay:

Part of what's compelling about BJ's scenario is that it's written in a compelling voice, that of the wire-story-as-stenography-for-civic-boosters, a genre we're all woefully familiar with. For example:

Development of high rises along the Sunset Coast and Cape Dolores has not been without controversy. The SHSFPA (Submerged Historic San Francisco Preservation Association) has once again protested and filed an environment historic review. “Old San Francisco is still alive in our hearts and minds, even if only the tops of the buildings can be seen! Look at the Flickr archive! Viva La Décimonovena! Viva El Vigésimocuarto!” While the SHSFPA frustrate many, all agree that their work floating Victorians and Italinate era homes and converting them houseboats has been a grand success, and has fueled a tourist boom along the Noe, Bernal and Dolores docks. The historical reenactments of life in the Mission District of the early 21st century have proven particularly popular.

In other words, even in a San-Francisco-become-Atlantis future, we'll still be beset by civic boosters promoting the same vision for our fair City by the Bay. Sure, the shoreline will have moved, but everything else will be largely the same. The narrative voice here has the same function as the Howard Johnson's on the moon in "2001: A Space Odyssey": it offers the reader the tacit reassurance that the social atmospherics of the future will be much the same as in the present.

But here's the thing. As usual with science/technology-driven scenarios, there's a hidden (and false) assumption that social-political-economic conditions will largely hold steady, and that the ONLY thing that will change is the science and technology (or in this case, the environment). Indeed, holding the social-political-economic context constant allows the writer (and reader) to bring the environmental parameters into sharper relief in the minds of readers. But in doing so, it also paints a profoundly false image of what the actual future is likely to look like.

In fact, along the way to this dramatic environmental future there will be huge social, economic, political, technological (not to mention military) changes, and the pace of change in these latter areas is bound to be far faster than the pace of change of the environment. (If you're interested in pace-layering, more on that here.) The environment may be the driving variable BJ wants to focus on, but the change will be much more radical and rapid in these other layers. The real challenge in imagining what climate change will do to us, in other words, is not to paint a revised sea level map of San Francisco, but to think through the social, economic and political changes that will (must) happen along the way and as a result of the environmental ones.

Let's start with the simplest point: a sea level rise of the sort this scenario imagines would imply a global and national economic catastrophe of a magnitude that would almost certainly propel the collapse of existing political institutions, locally, nationally, and internationally. If these conditions pertain in San Francisco, just consider what's happening in the rest of the world: goodbye London; abschied Amsterdam and Hamburg; zàijiàn Shanghai and Hong Kong; sayonara Tokyo and Osaka; adios Miami, Los Angeles, New York, Washington; etc. etc. (Here's a map you can play with to get a sense of the scale of the geographic losses.)

This sort of loss of land, especially at the pace this scenario imagines, implies not a gradual process but rather a series of catastrophic storms that rearrange coastlines by hundreds of meters at a time in a cascading series of unsalvageable fell swoops. We're talking about a Hurricane Katrina / New Orleans scenario, in every major coastal city in the world, more or less simultaneously, with no one ever coming over the horizon to help the survivors. Just at a human level, imagine the refugee crises, and the grasping for resources that this will create. It will spell the utter ruin of these nation-states, and with it, the associated economies. This, in turn will necessarily precipitate a catastrophic social implosion (probably including a demographic one).

The idea that under such circumstances we in the Bay Area are going to be continuously rebuilding high-tech infrastructure, as opposed to engaging in mere sauve qui peut salvage operations, is rather foolish. Instead, the various islands and archipelagos of the San Francisco Bay region are more likely to be ruled by warlords and neo-tribal clans of various sorts. It will be an armed society, but probably not a polite one. Which in turn implies that the central literary conceit of BJ's scenario, namely that local civic associations in San Francisco will survive and remain focused on things like historic underwater preservation, is a joke of questionable taste.

I should hasten to add that I don't think this at all an unrealistic scenario that I am offering as an alternative. It's more or less what happened, for example, in Rome in the five hundred years following the conversion to Christianity: political and economic crisis, repeated sackings by barbarian hordes, and eventually a 99% fall in population, from over a 1,000,000 in 210 AD to perhaps just 10,000 at the turn of the first millennium. By 1100, each of Rome's seven hills was governed de facto by a different warrior clan, who would graze their cattle and occasionally do battle with each other amid the ruins of antiquity down in the plains. Other than a few monks, almost no one remembered the origins of those ruins. Instead, the were treated as a useful quarry for scavenging building materials to construct fortifications for self-defense against rival gangs.

Something like that, except with high-power rifles, is a more likely outcome for the kind of climate change scenario that is the premise for BJ's scenario. But don't worry, it'll still be sweet reading about all of it on our 77th-gen iDevice...

Deviant Globalization and the Origins of AIDS

Part epidemiological whodunnit, part late colonial history, Jacques Pepin's new book The Origins of AIDS is the definitive text on the origins and globalization of HIV. While the book contains many wonderful things, of particular note is its emphasis on how both the humanitarian horrors of colonial development and the chaotic breakup of colonial authority led to fundamental changes in a variety of deviant industries, which in turn facilitated the spread of AIDS.

At least six different deviant industries were crucial in enabling or propagating the AIDS epidemic. First, Belgian and French colonial development efforts (railroad building and mining, in particular) in central Africa increased demand for meat. This in turn spurred the hunting of simians, a dangerous and sanguinary activity which often led to injuries for those hunting and slaughtering the animals. It was this wrangling with apes that led to the seminal crossing of the HIV-1 virus from chimps to humans, some time around 1920.

Second, the breakup of colonialism in Africa, and particularly the extreme chaos of the Belgian departure from Congo in 1960, led to wholesale changes in the local markets for commercial sex. During the late colonial period, Central African prostitution generally took the form of a fairly stable institution where a "free woman" might perhaps have a handful of regular clients. In the wake of the Belgian departure, chaotic mass urbanization and pauperization transformed the local prostitution industry into one where the prostitutes had little choice but to turn dozens of tricks weekly with many more clients. This change in sexual habitus amplified the transmission of all sorts of STDs within urban centers of Congo and former French Central Africa, including HIV.

Third, the global transmission of the virus out of Africa itself was a product of a certain kind of moral arbitrage, as the United Nations dispatched troops to Congo as part of the mission to "restore order" in that broken country. Inevitably, these soldiers became consumers of the local prostitution industry, which would soon transform them into vectors for the propagation of what until then had been a disease confined to Africa. Specifically, it may be surmised that at least one of the 3500 Haitian soldiers brought the HIV virus back to Haiti some time in the mid-1960, where he introduced it into the general population, perhaps with further visits to prostitutes.

Fourth, like many other miserably poor countries with virtually nothing else to produce or export, Haiti in the 1970s was the site of two additional deviant industries, each of which would prove crucial for the globalization of HIV. On the one hand, in the early 1970s, Haiti became the site of a commercial market in blood products (organized by a Miami businessman) such as plasma. Poor sanitation in this industry may well have helped to diffuse the HIV virus within Haiti, though the evidence here is spottier. On the other hand, Haiti was also an important site for sexual tourism, an industry which was flourishing in the post sexual-liberation era. More specifically relevant, Haiti was a go-to destination for gay sex tours organized out of San Francisco and New York during the 1970s. It was in this way, Pepin argues, that HIV was introduced into the United States some time in the early-to-mid-1970s.

Finally, once the plague arrived on these shores, injection drug usage facilitated the spread of the disease within the archipelago of 1980s urban demimondes. More specifically, the prohibition on drugs encouraged needle-sharing among drug addicts, and this in turn proved crucial for exploding the number of infections within this population, as well as with their sexual partners.

Metaphors We Die By

My colleague Mick Costigan and I have just published a short rejoinder to Michael Lind's thought-provoking essay, "Against Cosmopolitanism." Ulrich Beck also has a comment. The whole discussion is here.

In contrast to Lind, who argues that the nation-state has never been a stronger and more effective force, and is destined to become even more powerful, we argue that:

Nation-states are being undermined simultaneously (1) from below, by transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), and (2) from above, by transnational financiers who have innovated means to capture or to evade national regulatory apparatuses. Unlike the cosmopolitans, these actors do not have as a goal the usurping of the nation-state either individually or as some form of conspiratorial group. Rather, degrading the capacity and legitimacy of their "host" nation-states is simply an emergent, unintended, and indeed unwanted byproduct of their activities.

The effects of these non-state actors on different kinds of countries varies quite dramatically, in ways that might best be understood by way of a metaphor. In our view, the old nation-states are the geopolitical equivalents of blocks of ice, upon which the rise of tech- and globalization-empowered non-state actors act like a rising heat. The size of the ice-block (e.g. the size and institutional capacity of the state at T=1970) determines both the rate effects of the heat on the ice and the downstream effects of the melt.

A state like, for example, Zaire was the equivalent of a wee ice-cube: the heat of globalization very quickly melted it away altogether, with catastrophic local consequences but limited external effects. By contrast, a country like the US is more like the Greenland ice sheet: it will take a very long time to melt completely, but as it does, the deluge will be devastating far beyond its own perimeter.

The essential contradiction of neoconservatism

The essential contradiction at the heart of contemporary American neo-conservatism, phrased as a takedown of Bill Kristol:

Abroad, Kristol's U.S. government can do no wrong. At home, it can do no right, or more precisely, it should do no right. In his 1994 and 2009 memos counseling his fellow Republicans on Clinton-care and Obama-care, respectively, Kristol cautioned GOP legislators not to let the Democrats create universal health care, lest it win them the support of a grateful nation. [NB: here's a link to the 1994 memo.] That government is best, Kristol believes, that governs least at home and transforms nations abroad. 

Kristol's neo-con incoherence remains a major tendency in American conservatism, no matter the total discrediting of its case for the Iraq War. Championing radical anti-statism at home, and such anti-statist demagogues as Sarah Palin, while radically overestimating our government's capacity for nation-building abroad, Kristol has produced a body of thought that is an intellectual nullity -- an intellectual nullity, moreover, that is the centerpiece of what passes for Republican and right-wing thinking.

Hammering on this contradiction is a core wedge issue: if you don't think the government can be effective in a wealthy, stable country that we know intimately -- like, say, the United States -- how on earth can you believe that the US government has any hope of being effective in a benighted, godforsaken place like Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, or Somalia?

What I read this year

The books, as always fewer than I expected:

1. Misha Glenny, DarkMarket: CyberThieves, CyberCops, and You 
2. Richard Graham, The Idea of Race in Latin America 
3. Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century 
4. Luc Boltanski, The New Spirit of Capitalism 
5. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases 
6. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited 
7. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude 
8. Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers 
9. Georges Simenon, Dirty Snow 
10. Claudio Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico 
11. Enrique Florescano, National Narratives in Mexico
12. Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico 
13. Scott Carney, The Red Market 
14. Oscar Lewis, Children of Sanchez 
15. Christian Smith, at al., Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood 
16. Boucek & Ottaway, Yemen on the Brink 
17. Paul Dresch, A History of Modern Yemen 
18. Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip 
19. Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord 
20. Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States
21. Peter Tamas Bauer, From Subsistence to Exchange and Other Essays
22. Salvatore Lupo, History of the Mafia
23. Francis Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order
24. Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia
25. World Development Report 2011 
26. William Appleman Williams, Contours of American History 
27. Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country 
28. Georgi Derluguian, The Deepening Crisis: Governance Challenges after Neoliberalism 
29. Antoine J. Bousquet, The Scientific Way of Warfare
30. Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale

The Crises of Democratic Capitalism

A former student of Jurgen Habermas, Wolfgang Streeck, has an important new article in the New Left Review, entitled "The Crises of Democratic Capitalism." It describes the ineluctable contradiction between two principles of allocation under democratic capitalism: the democratic, which proposes that society's resources be distributed, first and foremost, on the basis fo social rights to various benefits we have become familiar with under so-called "welfare states," on the one hand; and the capitalistic, which argues that society's resources should be allocated on the basis of individuals' contributions to marginal productivity, as evaluated by the market, on the other.

For decades, Streeck argues, the contradictions between these two modes have been papered over by various political tricks, but these tricks have finally run out as of 2008, and now the question lies nakedly before us whether the system is going to be run according to democratic principles to protect the economically marginal, or for the benefit of economic powerholders. He enlarges on this:

In the four decades since the end of post-war growth, the epicentre of the tectonic tension within democratic capitalism has migrated from one institutional location to the next, giving rise to a sequence of different but systematically related economic disturbances. In the 1970s the conflict between democratic claims for social justice and capitalist demands for distribution by marginal productivity, or ‘economic justice’, played itself out primarily in national labour markets, where trade-union wage pressure under politically guaranteed full employment caused accelerating inflation. When what was, in effect, redistribution by debasement of the currency became economically unsustainable, forcing governments to put an end to it at high political risk, the conflict re-emerged in the electoral arena. Here it gave rise to growing disparity between public spending and public revenues and, as a consequence, to rapidly rising public debt, in response to voter demands for benefits and services in excess of what a democratic-capitalist economy could be made to hand over to its ‘tax state.’

When efforts to rein in public debt became unavoidable, however, they had to be accompanied for the sake of social peace by financial deregulation, easing access to private credit, as an alternative route to accommodating normatively and politically powerful demands of citizens for security and prosperity. This, too, lasted not much longer than a decade until the global economy almost faltered under the burden of unrealistic promises of future payment for present consumption and investment, licensed by governments in compensation for fiscal austerity. Since then, the clash between popular ideas of social justice and economic insistence on market justice has once again changed sites, re-emerging this time in international capital markets and the complex contests currently taking place between financial institutions and electorates, governments, states and international organizations. Now the issue is how far states can go in imposing the property rights and profit expectations of the markets on their citizens, while avoiding having to declare bankruptcy and protecting what may still remain of their democratic legitimacy.

I have two critiques of the the piece. First, it isn't as sharp as it might be on how an ideology of endless growth was was the key point of conjunction between the democrats and the capitalists, in that it allowed all parties to imagine that politics could center on splitting the marginal extras rather than on redistribution as such. If you believe that we are in an era where growth maybe has gone away (or can no longer be presumed), then we're back to zero-ish-sum political-economics games, and the politics of such games are far nastier than the politics of splitting a growing pie.

The second critique is more fundamental, and that is that the piece sets up a too-neat division between the two poles he is describing. It ignores that the neoliberal economic order is not actually a "free market," but rather one in which the government very much takes an active role in shaping and controlling market outcomes — in favor of incumbents and the rich. In other words, Streeck takes too seriously the neoliberal claim that the political economic order of the last forty years has moved us toward a Hayekian model of "deregulation" and non-interference in the pure workings of the capital markets. In fact, the real political economy of the last 30 years has involved massive government interventions in markets in favor of the capitalists. A Hayekian world would be better than the crony capitalist one we actually have. In other words, we don't have a deregulated market (in housing, finance, energy, what have you); we have a market characterized by regulatory capture.

To see the difference, just look at what was happening three years ago. Whatever you think of the wisdom (political or economic) of the bailout of the big financial firms and automakers, it certainly was not the case that the government didn't manage the market. This is exactly what so infuriated the true believers on the right about the bailouts — it was naked government interference in the market, a clear violation of their ideological principles. For the left, on the other hand, it showed that the rhetoric of market discipline had been class-warfare malarky all along: something that only applied to poor people, not to capitalists. And for the last three years, the neoliberal technocrats have tried to sweep this naked emperor back under his rug: nothing to see here, move right along.


Hat tip: MC.

The anatomy of deviant globalization

It is well known that Cyprus is one the epicenters of deviant globalization. Located on the periphery of the European Union — in all senses: geographic, moral, economic, political, etc. — Cypriots are in a perfect position to offer all sorts of "arbitrage" services, from financial arbitrage, e.g. off-shore tax havens (and its deviant twin, money laundering) to climate arbitrage, e.g. tourism (and its deviant twin, human trafficking). But one other realm of arbitrage, which I didn't know about, is Cyprus's position as a provider of globalized medical services, particularly, fertility services.

This description of Cypriot market-making for human eggs, from Scott Carney's superb The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers, is a textbook description of how deviant globalization works, at bottom, via moral arbitrage:

Cyprus has more fertility clinics per capita than any other country, making it one of the most highly egg-harvested locations on the planet. Whether licensed or unlicensed, they offer IVF as well as a range of fertility services, even some that are typically proscribed elsewhere, like selection. The fertility business here blends the shady netherworld of gray market financial transactions with the commercialization of human tissue. People travel here from Israel, from Europe, from all over the world. Couples who want a child can find cut-rate help here; while poor women find a market for their eggs. Cyprus is an egg-bazaar that capitalizes on both sides of the supply-and-demand equation. Internationalization has made oversight laughable.

As Carney tells it, the Cypriot fertility market began with the recognition that its peripheral position within "Europe" put it in a good position to exploit gaps in the global regulatory apparatus regarding a repugnant market, in this case, the market in human fertility. With the benefit of local governmental "benign neglect," medical entrepreneurs (not just Cypriots, actually) set themselves up as a broker and arbitrageur for would-be donors (mainly from Russia and the Ukraine) and eager buyers (mostly from Europe, who want "whiter" babies, and Israel, which recently banned the sale of human eggs).

The sting to this classic deviant globalization story, as usual, is in the tail: while this fertility market began as a deviant globalization pure-play, over time, it began to spill over into the local economy. Set up at first to meet global demand with imported supply, local fertility clinics began to draw on "local talent." The result is that, by now, 1 in 50 eligible women donate eggs annually in Cyprus (compared with 1 in 14,000 in the US, for example). Of course, the irony is that these "local" donors are usually also Russian and Ukrainian women, who have arrived in Cyprus for, ahem, other reasons.

On Rupert Murdoch

Conrad Black on Rupert Murdoch:

Although his personality is generally quite agreeable, Mr Murdoch has no loyalty to anyone or anything except his company. He has difficulty keeping friendships; rarely keeps his word for long; is an exploiter of the discomfort of others; and has betrayed every political leader who ever helped him in any country, except Ronald Reagan and perhaps Tony Blair. All his instincts are downmarket; he is not only a tabloid sensationalist; he is a malicious myth-maker, an assassin of the dignity of others and of respected institutions, all in the guise of anti-elitism. He masquerades as a pillar of contemporary, enlightened populism in Britain and sensible conservatism in the US, though he has been assiduously kissing the undercarriage of the rulers of Beijing for years. His notions of public entertainment and civic values are enshrined in the cartoon television series The Simpsons: all public officials are crooks and the public is an ignorant lumpenproletariat. There is nothing illegal in this, and it has amusing aspects, but it is unbecoming someone who has been the subject of such widespread deference and official preferments. (via The Daily Beast.)

OK, so I had to make it 25 books

In the order in which they were published:

1. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
3. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
4. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
5. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
6. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological
7. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
8. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
9. Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem
10. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
11. Christopher Lasch, Culture of Narcissism
12. Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs
13. Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
14. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History
15. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert
16. Paul Fussell, Class
17. Griel Marcus, Lipstick Traces
18. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions
19. Mike Davis, City of Quartz
20. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
21. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity
22. James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine
23. James Scott, Seeing Like a State
24. John Robb, Brave New War
25. Misha Glenny, McMafia

And, if I really had to boil it down to the ten that probably most influence my thinking today (not necessarily the same as the ones who made the biggest impression on me when I read the book), it would probably be Nietzsche, Polanyi, Canguilhem, Kuhn, Bell, Davis, Jameson, Ferguson, Scott, and Robb.

Favorite nonfiction books

Since everyone seems to be doing it, here's my dozen favorite nonfiction books (in no particular order), defined as books that changed the way I looked at the world in some fundamental way:

• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
• James Scott, Seeing Like a State
• Donna Haraway, Primate Visions
• George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
• Paul Fussell, Class
• Misha Glenny, McMafia
• Mike Davis, City of Quartz
• Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem
• Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs
• Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
• Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert
• Griel Marcus, Lipstick Traces

What strikes me most about this list is that I read almost every one of these books in the 1990s. Does that mean I don't read enough any more, or simply that it's hard for a book to shake me from my preceptions?

Five stages of global warming denialism

I think there are five successive variants of climate change denialism. I'll try to assign names to people who subscribe to these at some point later, but for now I'd like to just note these:

1. Those who deny that the climate is changing at all.
2. Those who admit that the climate is changing, but who say it has nothing to do with human GHG emissions (e.g. it is "natural variation").
3. Those who admit that the climate is changing, and that this is a result of human GHG emissions, but who say that for the most part it won't have malign effects on humans.
4. Those who admit that the climate is changing, and that this is a result of human GHG emissions, and that it will have malign effects on humans, but who say that there's nothing we can do about it.
5. Those who admit that the climate is changing, and that this is a result of human GHG emissions, and that it will have malign effects on humans, and that we could do something about it, but who think that this "something" is a lower priority than other things we could be doing to improve the human condition.

I guess if I were to provide a basic summary of what I think of each of these positions it would be, respectively: delusional, anti-scientific, historically blind, defeatist, and a sign of poor priorities.

A constitutional amendment that would save $2B a year

From the Economist:

The constitution calls for an “actual enumeration” of the population. That may make newfangled census methods vulnerable to challenges from the courts. A Supreme Court ruling already limits the use of statistical sampling, which adjusts survey data to include more accurately minorities, who are generally undercounted by older methods. In December the Government Accountability Office noted that the census’s cost has on average doubled each decade since 1970. Without “fundamental reforms”, the next one could cost $30 billion. [Emphasis added.]

How about this for a simple, massively cost-saving Constitutional Amendment:

The decennial census shall be conducted using modern statistical methods.

A carbon-intensive lifestyle = the moral equivalent of slaveholding

I was listening last night to a Terry Gross interview with Adam Goodheart, Washington University history professor and author of 1861: The Civil War Awakening, on the significance of this year's 150th anniversary of the Civil War. At one point (about 25:45 into the interview), Goodheart uses a fascinating analogy to explain how antebellum Americans rationalized slave ownership:

Thinking about how interwoven slavery was into Southern society, into American society… one example I use with my college students …is to talk about today, when many of us recognize that in burning fossil fuels we're doing something terrible for the planet, we're doing something terrible for future generations; and yet, to give this up would mean unravelling so much of the fabric of our daily lives — sacrificing so much, becoming these radical eccentrics, riding bicycles everywhere — that we continue guiltily to participate in the system. And, that is something that I use as a comparison to slavery, that many Americans in the North (and even, I believe, secretly in the South) felt a sense of shame, knew that this slave system was wrong, but were simply addicted to slavery and couldn't give it up.

Part of what makes this analogy brilliant is that it illuminates equally well in reverse: 150 years from now, the remaining humans (that is, those few who retain the capacity to recollect the golden age of the late 20th century) will look back at those of us who lived in huge heated and cooled houses, drove gas-guzzling cars to things we could have walked to, and jet-setted around the planet for fun — all in the plain knowledge that our actions were willy-nilly destroying the planet for the future of race — and they will wonder: what they hell were they thinking? And the answer will be precisely the one that Goodheart suggests: we knew perfectly well that what we were doing was wrong, but we were too weak to make the shift, too afraid of giving up the material and social benefits associated with a plainly immoral way of life, and frankly too afraid of the social opprobrium that would accompany actually leading our lives the right way, right now.

Sure, there are individuals out there who are trying to live carbon-neutral lives, and who spend a lot of time trying to convince the rest of us to do it. And how are they described by the mainstream? Consider Saul Griffith's profile in the New Yorker, which describes him as, well, a radical eccentric, riding bicycles everywhere. Or John Michael Greer, whose wonderful Archdruid blog gets dismissed by (a very green) Stewart Brand as "a bit woo-woo" (personal communication). But don't blame the press; almost all of us, faced with the stark reality of having to live with radically less — which is what any effective limitation of GHG emissions MUST mean — ultimately lack the moral courage to embrace the changes.

Of course, there are obvious differences between these two things. Slavery inflicted a living hell on people right there in its immediate present day (though these things were over the horizon of most Northern textile manufacturer enjoying the cheap cotton, as well as many a fine Southern lady sitting up in the plantation manor house) whereas the human destructiveness of our collective GHG-intensive lifestyle is "over the horizon" both geographically and temporally — that is, the suffering will mostly take place decades from now, in the economic and ecologically marginal communities of Asia, Latin America, and above all Africa.

Likewise, the sorts of rationalizations that people use to justify their ongoing participation in the system are also a bit different. In the case of slavery, it was an ideology of white supremacy that claimed that blacks were "naturally" inferior to whites, and therefore deserved and perhaps even needed to be enslaved by whites. By contrast, today the ideology that justifies continued GHG profligacy is techno-optimism, the cheery belief that if humanity can just get wealthy enough fast enough and/or get the carbon prices right, then a technical fix will inevitably emerge (and get deployed in time!) to prevent excessive CO2 buildup and the ensuing train of ecological and civilizational calamity. In both cases, however, the fervency with which the advocates hold these ideological commitments does little to cover for the poverty of the moral imagination involved.

I am quite sure that people 150 years from now — when the CO2 PPM is twice what it is now; when global temperatures will likely be many degrees higher than they are now; when climate-change-exacerbated hurricanes, droughts, and floods will have destroyed many of today's global cities; when hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people have been killed or displaced by climate change — will look back with wonder at the gutlessness of all of us who rationalized the lifestyles that led to the destruction of the very lifeworld we allegedly so cherish. Contemplating the ruins, our grandchildren will ask about us the same question we today ask about slaveholders: how could they possibly have thought that what they were doing was OK?

A few years ago I interviewed David Reiff about the likely impacts of anthropogenic climate change on human civilization. As we discussed the abject refusal of contemporary national or global leadership to make hard choices about cutting back emissions, David argued that the ultimate problem is not the leaders, but the followers — that is, all of us — who just don't want to contemplate cutting back, who in fact have literally no conception what cutting back means. David concluded our chat with a simple, powerful phrase: "Our grandchildren will curse us."

GBN in Conversation: Deviant Globalization

Global Business Network is hosting a talk next month on the topic of our new book, Deviant Globalization. Here's a precis of the conversation:

Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century analyzes the dark side of global trade: the illicit flows, black markets, and trafficking in drugs, human bodies and other 'repulsive' commodities that are as much a part of the new world (dis)order as legitimate global corporations and financial markets. These deviant industries represent more than just a stain on legitimate business or the growing pains of a global economy; they pose clear and immediate risks to supply chains, intellectual property, brands, and employees. And they deeply affect the socio-political foundation on which business rests in places from the favelas of Brazil to the slums of India to -- ultimately -- the skycrapers of Wall Street and Washington DC. But if you see deviant globalization for the human and economic energies it holds, rather than only through a moralistic lens, there's enormous opportunity to be found. What Gilman, Goldhammer, and Weber call 'deviant entrepreneurs' know things about innovation and growth that legit businesses, NGOs, and governments can and should learn from. That doesn't mean doing illegal things, it means understanding how no-holds-barred innovation works in underregulated spaces.

The event is by invitation only and will be taking place the evening of May 10, at the GBN headquarters at 101 Market Street, in the San Francisco financial district. If you're interested in attending, let me know.

Libya as example of R2P?

There have been not a few commentators, from the bleeding hearts on the liberal left to the usual suspects on the neocon right, who have been celebrating the raining down of Tomahawk missiles on Libya as a wonderful return of morality to foreign policy. In particular, there has been all sorts of palaver about how the much-ballyhooed efforts of Europeans in 2005-6 to instantiate a permanent "responsibility to protect" (R2P) the weak from the depredations of their own governments has finally found its clarion case in Libya, thus putting behind us all our painful failure to act in places like Rwanda, Darfur and elsewhere. No sooner does Qadaffi roar about how he will pursue the rebels without mercy than "the international community" (e.g. the UN Security Council) votes to impose a no fly zone. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!

But there at least two reasons to be skeptical about this narrative of how Libya represents a new dawn for humanitarian interventionism and R2P. First, the vote in the Security Council is not nearly what it appears from the headline. Notably, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Germany abstained from the vote. Although Qadaffi has no friends left who are actively willing to cast votes to defend his regime, the BRIC nations have been increasingly vociferous in denouncing the intervention by the French, British, and Americans. Even more shocking is that Germany, one of the original promoters of the R2P principle five years ago, pointedly refused to vote in what supposedly was a black and white test case. When countries representing half the world's populations and the majority of its economic growth are refusing to participate in this new moral foreign policy, it's hard to argue that we are seeing some emergent new framework for international relations.

Second, the reasoning for applying a no fly zone to Libya is so selective as to make a mockery of the R2P principle itself. Where is the no fly zone over Yemen or Bahrain, where Western-supported dictators are slaughtering civilians? OK, you might say, but it's not like Saleh or al-Khalifa are strafing their civilian populations from the air, or vowing a war without pity. Of course, that's exactly what Israel did in Gaza yesterday, and it's just a few years ago that then-Israeli PM Olmert promised a campaign "without hesitation and without pity"... but curiously, no "no fly zone" over Palestine seems to be in the works.

Ultimately, I think Eugene Robinson gets the real story behind the Libya intervention exactly right, particularly in his last paragraph:

Gaddafi is crazy and evil; obviously, he wasn’t going to listen to our advice about democracy. The world would be fortunate to be rid of him. But war in Libya is justifiable only if we are going to hold compliant dictators to the same standard we set for defiant ones. If not, then please spare us all the homilies about universal rights and freedoms. We’ll know this isn’t about justice, it’s about power.

Cross-posted at Humanity.

Image of the day II

Image of the day

No just today's tragedy, but also warning about the warming future...

Defining victory in Afghanistan

Critical to any effective strategy (corporate or military) is to be judicious about where to play. As a general rule, one shouldn't pick battles that one can't win. In Afghanistan, our biggest problem is that the United States has yet to define victory in a way that is achievable.

If the US continues to insist on defining victory in Afghanistan as "leaving behind" a social and political system in which the men there treat their womenfolk in a way we deem appropriate - the implicit argument, for example, of idiocies like the Time Magazine cover on the right - then there is little doubt that we'll be banging our heads against the mud walls of their villages for the rest of this century.

On the other hand, if the US chooses to define success as making it clear to the local Afghan leaders (yes, including the Taliban) that they must prevent terrorists from planning attacks on the West from their territory - and should they fail to do so, that we will rain holy hellfire down on their fields and villages - then we can probably find an exit in reasonably short order.

Top 10 films noir

Inspired by this post on the intellectual history of commentary on noir films (how is that for meta?), here are my ten+ favorite films noir:

Classic Noir

• The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• Double Indemnity (1944)
• The Big Sleep (1946)
• The Third Man (1949)
• Sunset Blvd (1950)

Neo-noir

• Chinatown (1974)
• Blade Runner (1982)
• After Dark, My Sweet (1990)
• Pulp Fiction (1994)
• Fargo (1995)
• Memento (2000)

There are a lot of debates about what makes a film noir, and whether in fact it is a genre unto itself, or simply a style. My own sense of it is that noir began as a particular genre, growing out of interwar German expressionist filmmaking (M is often named as the originator of the genre), but evolved into a "style," that is a set of "noirish" elements -- including character types (grifters and conmen, cynical cops, private eyes, femmes fatales); stylistic points (urban nightscapes, rain or fetid heat, rotating fans, voice-overs); plot elements (heists gone wrong, adultery, double-crosses); settings and locations (from anonymous small towns and seedy hotels to Los Angeles and Central European cities) -- that can be introduced or remixed into any other genre. Thus it is possible to have "Sci-fi noir" (e.g. Blade Runner), "Western noir" (e.g., 3:10 to Yuma), "Comedy noir" (e.g. Fargo), "Horror noir" (e.g., The Brute Man), and so on.

Ultimately, what makes a film noir is less any of the above elements than a certain sensibility of what one might call alienated fatalism: a sense that the world as a whole is ultimately defined by corruption in every sense of that word (moral, financial, physical). Some critics have naturally chosen to label that attitude as a "cynical" but I would reject that; as always, the word "cynical" is just a scare word that foolish optimists use to malign realists. With that said, I should admit that my interest in deviant globalization is closely related to my predilection for film noir.