The Economics of De-Growth

It is the law of the universe. What goes up must come down. And it’s not whether we are coming down, but how fast we will come down that is the issue.  

We seem stuck on economic growth, but it is not a wholesome growth, it is a growth that undermines itself.  The ecological economist Herman Daly asks:  “ When the economy is growing, what is it that is getting bigger?”.  

“Throughput is the relevant magnitude for answering the question of how big the economy is” , Daly says.    It’s “the metabolic flow of useful matter and energy from environmental sources, through the economic subsystem and back to the environmental sinks as a waste. “  

Most economists picture the human economy in a separate box somewhere, existing independently of nature.  It’s a way of simplifying the initial assumptions in order to build a model of human behaviour .  This assumption works  well for deriving supply and demand curves but there is a problem with these assumptions when the concept of economic growth is introduced.  With growth, our assumption of the economy being independent of nature leads to disastrous results.  

Why is this idea of throughput relevant? Because the earth and the living system that exists on it is finite. There is a finite amount of energy and materials available to the  web of life that supports us.

 The human economy is a part of the earth’s Eco-systems but the economy is growing big enough to threaten the entire web of life.  A major extinction event, like the one that finished off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago,  the kind that has happened about every 100 million years in Earth’s history, is happening right now.  And it’s human economic growth that is fueling it.  We are burning up our future inheritance in a giant flare of fossil fuels.

If the economy is growing what is growing?  Throughput.   Through-put is taking things from nature, then processing them and consuming them and sending the remains back into nature in a degraded state. The best illustration I have seen of this idea is  an entertaining two minute  youtube video called “The Impossible Hamster.”   

If we live on a world, that world has bounds.  We cannot escape those bounds. However,  we could extend out our future on Earth if we stopped economic growth.

 In his new book Prosperity Without Growth, British Economist Tim Jackson, explains what’s involved in stopping growth, why it’s controversial, and sketches how we would go about doing it.

One of Jackson’s arguments is that  The focus  of the present system on continually increasing the efficiency of  labour is  wrong when the result is increasing inequality,  job loss, and declining communities. .  A job is a fundamental part of a meaningful life.  Every community works better when there is less unemployment.  Jackson suggests that job-sharing and worker owned enterprises be expanded.  

This is a similar position that local, Vancouver author Conrad Schmidt also emphasizes in his book “Efficiency Shifting”. What economic efficiency usually means is needing less people to do the same thing.  So if agriculture becomes more efficient, then we get a lot of unemployed agricultural workers. 

Schmidt recognizes that we cannot keep growing the economy in order to reduce this  unemployment.  He argues that we can avoid  both growth and unemployment if we  let certain economic sectors such as education, healthcare, and agriculture become more inefficient by employing more labour.  Too much efficiency in education and healthcare leads to inferior quality and less caring. These are activities that benefit from people taking more time rather than less time to do the job right.  

Schmidt devotes a separate chapter to agriculture.  In it, he argues that a policy of encouraging organic farming would be better for farmers in less developed nations because it wouldn’t flood global markets with cheap food, as does present U.S. policy of encouraging industrial farming. Plus organic farming  employs more labour and uses less pesticides, and encourages less meat production than industrial farming.

Economic efficiency is not as important as the fulfilment of human potential.   People ought to be productively employed, jobs ought to be fulfilling and rewarding.  Economic incentives ought to be turned around to support investment in social capital, natural capital, and in strengthening the  public sector.   People’s worth and dignity need to always be respected over the demands of the market.  

As the authors of Economics Unmasked say:  Economy for the people, not people for the economy. Profits and prices need to be driving sustainability not the degradation of humanity and nature.

 As Tim Jackson argues, the financial sector needs to change into the Eco-economic sector:  the overall incentive structure should encourage investments in renewable energy and in increasing resource efficiencies, and discourage the underemployment of human resources.

There needs to be a massive shift from consumption to savings.  And a new incentive structure in place to encourage investment in public enterprises like mass transit, railways, universal education,  and in the conservation of Eco-systems for they form the basic support for our economies.If we invested in Eco-system health and maintenance we would be ensuring our survival and the stability of our civilization.  

Because the earth’s climate has gotten warmer we know we’ve reached a limit.  We need to stop the growth of throughput, if we are to save the earth’s biological systems from degrading.      Better to take a slow descent by putting on the brakes now, then overshooting the peak and running off a cliff.  Planning for the worst and making ourselves more resilient, more able to survive and adapt to shocks to the system  is the most prudent option.
 
 It’s not because it’s not possible, it’s because of the way we define economic variables and the way we’ve structured the system that it seems so difficult to see our way out of it.  Let’s redefine economics so that the economy is recognized as a part of the Earth’s biosphere.  This alone would lead to fundamental changes.  

The other big point of leverage is fossil fuel use.  Fossil fuels are exactly what has allowed our economies to  grow and they have done this by fueling the rapid acceleration of throughput.  This acceleration is at the heart of what is causing global warming and mass extinctions.  

One of the least difficult, but most significant things we could do to change this destructive spiral is to accompany our children to school, either by walking or by cycling, rather than driving them.   And if that is not physically possible consider moving to a community where it is safe to walk or cycle to school.   It is an opportunity to let our children  be more active and self-sufficient.  The results will be healthier adults and a healthier society.  

Our dependence on fossil fuels is a terrible trap that is slowly choking the life out of this planet. There should be massive dis-incentives to fossil-fuel use.  A carbon tax, should be put on all fossil fuels at the well-head or in the coal mine.  All subsidies to the fossil fuel industries should be eliminated.  It is, after all, the richest industry on the planet and can survive very well without subsidies.

There are many unacknowledged costs to economic growth and fossil fuel use. For example, destruction of clean water by fossil fuel extraction and processing.  The greater risks of cancer from being downstream of tar sands oil extraction or nuclear plant disasters.   The increase in respiratory ailments due to particulate matter and toxic byproduct from burning fossil fuels.  The loss of our physical health from our overuse of motor vehicles and subsequent  lack of exercise.  Our loss of mental health and the destruction of once viable communities  due to the  Increasing isolation and excessive individualism of consumer, suburban, automobile culture. I’m only highlighting a few of the costs. And others could list many more.
 
Unfortunately our political and ideological systems are fixated on seeing economic growth as the only way forward.  This almost religious tendency -  to see growth as our salvation, is having the bizarre consequence of leading our political and economic elite to embed themselves with the fossil fuel industry.

It’s a big mistake to leave economic planning up to our political leaders.    We should All participate in planning a new economic system.

Jeremiah and Resilience

Resilience is the ability of communities, cultures, and social systems to survive major shocks. When we look around us, what social institution stands out as being resilient over a major span of time?

What stands out for me is the history of Judaism. What other religion, language, or people has survived in the face of repeated foreign conquests, forced exiles, and enslavement for 3000 years and counting? I would call the continued survival and prospering of Judaism the prime historical example of human resilience.

What is it then that made Judaism resilient? Strange as it seems, I believe that part of the answer to this question lies in the writings of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah.

The lifetime of Jeremiah ( 655 -586 BCE) was a profoundly crucial time in Jewish history. Jeremiah had predicted that Jerusalem, the Jewish capital, home to Solomon’s great Temple, was about to be conquered by the Babylonians, a prediction which was not implausible given that at the time the Babylonian army was laying waste to most of the rest of the Middle East.

But the people of Jerusalem were in denial. Jeremiah was characteristically unrelenting, he unnerved them, as he would us today. They did not want to hear Jeremiah’s message and they rejected him and brutalized him, treating him as a pariah.

Unfortunately for the people of Jerusalem, Jeremiah’s prophecy came true. After a prolonged siege, which caused terrible suffering, the Babylonian army took Jerusalem and destroyed the Jewish temple, put to death much of the Jewish leadership, and enslaved the rest of the Jews and marched them off to Babylon. Jeremiah they spared, and he was left to live where he chose.

At this point the Jews as an identifiable people should have disappeared from history. But, in fact, just the opposite occurred. During the next sixty years of slavery, the exiled Jewish community thrived and developed a resilience that is maintained to this day.

Within a hundred years of the exile the Hebrew Bible had been compiled and gathered together, largely in the form we see it today, with Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Kings, Lamentations, Psalms, the Prophets, and the wisdom literature.

What role did Jeremiah, who was left behind in the ruins of Jerusalem, have in all of this? Because the Jews were in exile, and the Jerusalem temple was no more, the strategy, championed previously by Jeremiah himself, of basing Judaism on a centralized temple with its hierarchy of temple priests became unworkable.

But this went against the whole tenor of ancient Middle-Eastern religions, which was that any particular religion was based on location.

Jeremiah, at some point, realized that basing a religion on sacrificing at a temple created a fatal vulnerability. His innovation was to promote the idea of an “inner covenant” - an inner relationship between individual Jews and God best exemplified by the daily Jewish prayer from Deuteronomy called the “Shema”.

By reciting this prayer everyday any Jew could keep covenant without the need to make sacrifices in the holy temple. Thus permitting Judaism to thrive in exile, or in any place where there were a gathering of Jews, even where a Jew existed outside of any Jewish community.

The Shema is still recited twice daily by observant Jews. At the very beginning of the day and at the end of the day. It goes:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart...

The book of Deuteronomy, which contains the Shema, as well as a second retelling of the Ten Commandments, hence the name “Deuteronomy”, appears to have been “rediscovered” during King Josiah’s rein. Jeremiah was closely associated with King Josiah and there is good reason to believe that Jeremiah probably had a hand in writing Deuteronomy and in its “rediscovery”.

The centralization of Judaism in the sacrificial temple in Jerusalem had given the Hebrews the illusion of enduring power. But successive conquests by the Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans proved the folly of this idea.

When things fall apart, people often have difficulty facing and accepting the changes that are required to survive.The choices seem to be either to embrace expediency and abandon tradition altogether, or rigidly adhere to tradition and deny that anything has really changed.

But the first choice of abandoning tradition leads to dissolution and the eventual loss of identity. The second choice, of rigid adherence and denial leads to escape from reality and self-destruction as the familiar world falls apart around one’s ears.

This situation is a lot like the worsening ecological and economic crisis that confront us today. In the face of these crisis many people may recognize that there is a problem, but they will deny that we need to make any major changes to our comfortable way of life.

Like Jeremiah, modern environmentalists predict disaster but things still don’t seem that bad,so they are mocked and ignored as scolds and annoyances.

But, eventually this commonplace view will prove untenable, as the global economic and political crisis deepens. We may well have to adapt to severe economic shocks and the breakdown of social structures in the wake of these shocks. Our entire global civilization may be at risk of collapse.

In today’s world, political leaders have relied on the continuing prospect of economic growth to solve our most pressing problems - best exemplified by the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats. But the expanding global economy is rapidly drawing down our reserves of fossil fuels, while the global exponential increase in energy use is leading to the spectre of uncontrollable global warming.

The idea that we can continue growing our national and global economies in the face of finite resources and finite reserves of fossil fuels is a similar kind of illusion to the one in Jeremiah’s day that a religion could remain powerful only if it continued to be identified with a certain location.

. Our Industrial way of life, that is predicated on the massive utilization of cheap fossil fuels, appears to us as powerful and impregnable. But it is incredibly vulnerable to disruption once we reach peak oil, and the effects of climate change begin to overwhelm us.

The signs of these coming catastrophes are all around us, but, as in Jeremiah’s time, most people choose to ignore them or discount their relevance. The lesson of Jeremiah is that resilience - the ability to survive shocks and insults - comes not from economic or political power or advanced technology. Resilience comes from inside of us as we work together on achieving a sustainable civilization.

Autism and Executive function deficit

The science behind the study of executive functions is still relatively new even though these abilities have been around long before humans evolved.

We can list a series of skills that a captain needs to sail a ship: Commanding a crew, planning and setting a course. Monitoring the behaviour of the ship, the behaviour of the crew, and the weather, and correcting deficiencies and changing course if conditions warrant; Being able to navigate and negotiate dangerous and technically difficult waters; Anticipating and correcting for future changes in conditions.

Perhaps one could say that while sometimes the ship can sail on auto-pilot, unanticipated events can and will happen that will challenge the ship and its crew and call upon the captain to make a decision that only he can make.

Neurologists know that the ability to initiate and inhibit behavior, the ability to monitor the environments response to our behaviour and to alter our behaviour in response to changing conditions, are all part of an interrelated group of functions centered around the prefrontal cortex.

We think we know about executive functions, but in actuality we take them for granted and don’t know very much about how they work together. We use these skills to shape our own behaviour, but their use in others is often invisible to us because a lot of it has to do with self monitoring, which is something that’s hard to observe in others.

It turns out that adolescents are lacking fully operational executive functions and their prefrontal brains are still developing. That’s why adolescents attend school and are under their parents responsibility and not completely free agents. Sometimes they need their parents executive functioning to survive.

It’s in adolescence that we have to learn to do things even when we don’t want to, to control our impulses, not to fight, not to lie or to steal. We learn to internalize morality and not just to act in order to avoid punishment. It’s in adolescence that we learn to distinguish between true friends and people who are just out to use us.

All these skills we develop as adolescents, require the mastery of executive functions: planning, anticipating consequences, inhibiting impulses, monitoring ourselves and correcting for errors.

“Executive function deficits are disastrous to a normal life” That’s a central point that Nancy Perry makes early on in her book, Adults on the Autism Spectrum Leave the Nest . According to Perry if you have executive function deficits you cannot live as an independent adult. And some kinds of brain-damage and high functioning autistic individuals have deficits in executive function.

It’s most noticeable when these individuals are dealing with novel situations where typical behaviour doesn’t work. They end up in trouble and needing the help of adults who, in effect supply the needed executive function.

These individuals are not retarded, their thought processes are intact. they can be of normal or above average intelligence, they can do well in schools. But things like dealing with money, balancing food and rent, getting and keeping a job, dealing with strangers, and developing a relationship or a friendship are much more difficult for them than for the normal population.

According to Perry, individuals with executive function deficits can’t do two cognitive things at the same time. For instance, they can’t do what they are doing and think about the probable consequences at the same time. “….they don’t think about the morality of their actions, unless directed to stop and think by another person who serves as the missing executive function.”

So autistic individuals will insult others or say hurtful things without thinking about consequences, and will often argue that they are just “telling the truth” when challenged.

Perry relates how she once inadvertently observed her students in a grocery store, mesmerized by the big pyramidal display of soda pop and ending up spending their entire week’s grocery money on pop and chips, with nothing left over to pay for basic groceries.

They have difficulties learning proper behaviour in social situations because they cannot both engage in a social situation and hold in their mind’s eye an awareness of how they are functioning. Most of us do it so easily that we take it for granted. Not so for autistic people.

Hence the reason for the popular theory that autistic people cannot put themselves in someone else’s shoes. This requires doing two things at once in the mind. Imagining we are in someone else’s situation, and comparing it with our own.

They can get along if the environment is more structured but as soon as things happen that are outside of the ordinary they will have trouble functioning, still trying to adhere to behaviour patterns rigidly, without being able to adapt and change course.

Just at the point that the crew needs the captain to intervene and make a decision the captain is not there. The ship founders and heads for the rocks unless there is somebody there to take charge.

To be independent one needs to be able to make adjustments to one’s behaviour according to changes in the environment. You learn to avoid getting killed in traffic. You design your life around a career and a family or some combination of elements. These all require executive functioning.

For all young adults becoming independent is an important goal to achieve. But for autistic and brain-damaged individuals becoming independent is  problematic, because of their deficiencies in executive function.

Complex vs Simple: Thinking in Systems

There are two basic ways to see things: as simple issues with only two ways to see them or as complex issues that deserve our attention and understanding.

Simple sees things only in black and white and avoids colours and shades of grey. Simple is good to grab people’s attention but it doesn’t sustain it.

Simple thinks there’s only two choices when there are many.Too much simplification leads to polarization as well as to prejudice and hatred, and ultimately to social fragmentation and war.

Simple thinks that the easiest way to solve problems is to get rid of people. Joseph Stalin, one of the worst mass murderers in history, said: “No people, no problems.” You can see that same kind of frightening stupidity in racist rants about undesirables, and illegal immigrants. You can also see it in people who say the earth would be better off without humans.

Life is simple if you just consider it to be about birth, marriage, and having children. But it’s complex if you consider that everything living is connected to everything else.

The economy exists, and society exists because they are systems. They are not simple. And that means that our response to them cannot be simple either.

Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of Great Britain back in the 1980s, once said: “ There is no such thing as society”

I know that society is a real thing because it has effects: we are who we are, with the language, customs, food, clothing, and livelihoods that we have because we live in certain kinds of societies.

So much of what we do we do in groups. We are defined in many ways by being in these groups, in effect being in society. Yes we are individuals, but we couldn’t be who we are without the cooperation and trust of countless others.  What would we be, without our parents to raise us,  without our peers to play with us when we were children and work with us when we are adults,  and without our teachers to teach us?

I can’t help feeling that Margaret Thatcher denied the reality of society, because she didn’t want to face the moral questions that become relevant with the existence of society. Moral questions such as: How much is too much? Why is there inequality and what should we do about it? How can we as a society facilitate citizens to reach their fullest potential as human beings?

Like society, an economy is a real thing too, a system made up of billions of human parts. And the regional economies, the national economies, and the global economy all have huge effects on people and on nature.

When it comes to understanding systems, understanding how much is too much comes to the fore. The human economy cannot grow indefinitely because it depends on the earth, which is finite.

According to many politicians, economists and business leaders the present global economic system, is the best system possible, because continued economic growth will lead to everyone’s eventual betterment.

But to do it justice we need to look at the economic system as a subsystem within the larger biosphere of living ecosystems. Our ability to survive depends not only on non-renewable resources such as metals and fossil fuels, that are priced in markets, but it also depends on renewable resources that are not priced in markets.

I am talking about agricultural soils, clean water, and the ability of earth’s water and atmosphere to absorb pollutants and recycle life’s vital molecules. All of these are renewable resources, but it takes time for the earth to renew them and the exponential growth of our global economy is surpassing that ability. These un-priced renewable resources are fast becoming non-renewable because the growth in human populations and economies is depleting them.

The problem is that many economists do not see that the global economy is  just a subset of the earth’s ecosystems. Therefore, they do not see that “How much is too much?” is a pertinent question to ask. And because vital ecosystem services, which we all depend on, do not have prices, economists don’t see any evidence for their depletion.

Global warming is the clearest evidence that our global economic growth has surpassed the earth’s ability to absorb our increasing output of stuff. It also suggests that other physical limits to economic growth are not far behind.

Human systems work by rules and by market forces. Rules tell us what behaviour is expected or prohibited. Rules also determine the relative size and direction of market forces. Change the rules and you change the incentives behind production and consumption. But, to be successful something more is needed because there are some very big players, for instance, fossil fuel corporations, that don’t want those rules changed.

It is no coincidence that people continue to deny that global warming is caused by human activities. To accept the facts of global warming would be to recognize that our present economic system needs to be overhauled. In other words, we need to change the rules so that the depletion of soils, clean water, and clean air are taken into account. And the most efficient and effective way to do this would be to put a price on carbon emissions. By doing that we could use the efficiency of the market system to change people’s behaviour so that we can keep living on this earth indefinitely.

There’s the thing - as individuals we are just a tiny part of so many human and non-human systems. It’s the systems that have such powerful effects.
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To start the process of building truly sustainable societies means first rethinking where we are going. We can’t change the system only by exercising individual consumption choices. We gain the power to change through joining organizations. We are most powerful exercising our rights as citizens to inform ourselves and to participate in decision making and planning for the future.

Economies and societies are our living systems. Their continued existence depends on earth’s ecosystems to support them. We cannot survive without oxygen, clean water, a liveable climate and a thriving and diverse biosphere.

If we think too simplistically, that it’s only about individuals, property rights, small government, and "free enterprise", we ignore the fact that our economic system is just a part of an even greater earth biosystem. We need to take this inherent complexity into account if we are to ensure our continued survival.

Machines Make Us Different.

What makes us different from everything else? Some say language, some say morality. Some say tool use. But these have predecessors in nature: birds and mammals exchange signals and information via cries and body language; chimpanzees and elephants exhibit empathy and altruism; chimpanzees use sticks as tools.

What’s new about humans is that they make machines. Although you could argue that beavers also make machines. The beaver dam is a system that runs on water and gravity. A kind of proto-machine.

Machines are a kind of tool that uses energy to perform a pre-designed activity. Machines are built, maintained and have evolved, with the care and guidance of human hands.

Simple tools like a hammer require the human body to apply the energy, but many machines run by themselves with the assistance of some power source. A machine like a computer, can execute a human command to fetch or manipulate information all on its own.

Machines are a wholly new phenomenon. They did not exist before humans existed. That’s why it is an error to conceptualize living things as machines, as was done by Descartes. Descartes was the first modern philosopher. He framed the famous body-mind dichotomy for the modern era.

Machines don’t have instincts. They require human purpose and guidance in order to survive over time. If you look around at nature, it does not require human purpose and guidance. It’s parts are self organized. The Earth does not require our help to orbit the Sun.

We call living things like cells and mitochondria - machines. We say, in a metaphorical fashion, that the mitochondria “is designed” to provide energy for the cell.

That’s our inner engineer talking. Once we started building machines they started to influence us and the way we looked at the world. We’re envious of the natural world where things work by themselves, independently of us.

It appears that the evolution of machines is going in the direction of greater autonomy. There are now robotic submarines and spaceships that can work on their own, separated by great depths and huge distances.

And this seeming trend towards machines gaining autonomy has actually spawned a a new religion out there, which has influenced the minds of Silicon Valley, with the awkward title: Singulatarianism. It’s main tenant appears to be straight out of the plot of “The Terminator” the 70’s science fiction movie. It’s actually based on the theories of a writer named Raymond Kurzweil. The idea is that when computers are all interconnected and reach a certain processing speed and degree of technological sophistication, they will combine into a globally conscious self (the singularity) which will be able to maintain itself and replicate without human intervention.

What makes this a religion, is the insistence that this is inevitable, and that it will lead to eternal life. (I won’t get into the specifics here, but you can check it out on Wikipedia.

Most Religions see God as creating nature, whereas Singulatarianism sees humans as creating God. Perhaps this is apt, coming from Silicon Valley. But is it really something to look forward to?

And does it not remind you of genetic engineering? Corporations are creating plants with characteristics designed for industrial purposes in order to improve on nature. And once these plants are created and shed their pollen, they are out there, able to replicate themselves and share their genes with natural varieties, because that’s what life does.

Machines and other human creations don’t have empathy or caring for others. That requires emotions and their coordination in human minds and bodies. Computers can replicate ideas but they can’t replicate emotions like love, desire, and happiness. We’ve forgotten that it takes both positive and negative emotions to make decisions, to understand the past and plan for the future, and to change our behaviour. That’s our responsibility as humans, something we can’t delegate to machines or market forces.

As simple as boys versus girls

Is this the twilight of the patriarchy? Cracks have appeared in the edifice of the Catholic Church with its all-male hierarchy. It’s certainly not like the way things used to be, when women knew their place and didn’t step out of line.


That way of life is on the wane because women can now own property, they can earn money outside the home, they have legal rights, and they can vote. They can send their children to daycare and public schools. They can teach and write books, and they can call out men for their moral failings without fear of being beaten or killed.

Before modern society, women could not rise to fulfil their talents. They were forbidden to do many things. The Taliban, the modern Islamic Fundamentalist political movement in Pakistan and Afghanistan, specifically targeted women. They made a point of publicly executing women for being independent.

Christian Fundamentalists are not as crude as the Taliban but they can be just as afraid of women. Why do you think they are so dead set against birth control and abortion? Both are ways that women can use to raise smaller families or just focus on a career. They don’t want women to have those freedoms.

But there is a darker secret. There is a hidden relationship between patriarchy and sexual abuse and it has to do with a simple but unavoidable fact - the vast majority of sexual abusers of children are men.

It’s not hard to see why. Most women don’t have the powerful sexual drives that men have. And women make it their business to care for and about children, whereas most men are less involved in child care.

Men who like to abuse others can easily hide within the confines of a patriarchical system. Patriarchy is the original old-boys club. As men, we tend to forgive and make wide allowances for our shared shortcomings. “Boys will be boys.” If you have an organization where the hierarchy is exclusively male, it’s bound to be protective and secretive.

In a real old fashioned patriarchy, certain men have absolute power and women and children are not allowed to question their authority. This works very well for men who sexually abuse children, because they can effectively forbid their prey from telling others. In such a society a man’s word cancels out a woman’s or a child’s, so the man can get away with more.

Lately the Catholic Male Hierarchy has let the cat out of the bag. In a Vatican press conference last week, sexual predation and the ordination of women were both called “graviora delicta”, which means: a grave offense. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/opinion/17sat4.html?ref=roman_catholic_church_sex_abuse_cases

Most of us know of or have heard of female clergy. We might disagree and dislike them but we are not likely to hold them in the same contempt we hold a sexual predator. How could the consequences of a woman giving the sacraments be of the same gravity as a priest sexually abusing children? Only in the mind of someone so bound to the patriarchal system that he is deathly afraid of women’s sexuality.

How else to explain the disproportionate zeal with which the Church rejects the idea of the ordination of women, compared to their painfully slow and lacklustre campaign to stop priests from abusing children. In one case the Church bureaucracy is pulling out all the stops in order to prevent heterodoxy, and in the other, it has been using the full weight of its bureaucracy to stonewall police investigations into child abuse cases.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of these guys thought that ordaining women was worse than sexual predation. Sexual predation ruins some people’s lives, it turns even more people away from the church, but ordaining women strikes at the very heart of the system. It could mean the end of the Catholic Church as we know it.

There are plenty of women out there who would be willing to make up for the alarming shortage of male priests. But, by God! If women could be priests then they could exert authority over men. They could change doctrine. They could dismantle the hierarchy. That would mean the end of the old boys club wouldn’t it?

A patriarchal church hierarchy feels instinctively threatened by girls who want to take charge. Could be as simple as that.

What is the Earth?

I belong to a little-known organization called the metaphor police. Our job is to seek out inappropriate metaphors and stop them from further damaging the collective consciousness by exposing their inappropriateness in the light of day. It has fallen to me, then, to attack and destroy the metaphor of “spaceship earth” once and for all.

What is the Earth? The Earth is a planet, a self-organizing system that has evolved over the vast time period of four billion years. The earth is a planet in the solar system, a self-organizing system of the Sun and the nine or so planets in elliptical orbits around it.

Perhaps the universe as a whole was designed. Perhaps not. One can just as easily argue either way because there is no way of knowing what preceded it. But all matter organizes itself. It coalesces into atoms, and atoms into stars and planets by the force of gravity and by other fundamental forces of nature.

Anybody who calls the solar system a “machine” or a “mechanism” is making a fundamental error. All machines are made by human beings. Each machine is designed by someone to do a certain kind of work. A water pump is designed to pull water out of the ground.  A bicycle is designed to carry a person from one place to another.

They are all designed to work for various human purposes. The solar system was not designed to be a solar system. It came into being because matter coalesced into bodies by the force of gravity, and these bodies then interacted with each other through the force of gravity. The planets orbit the sun because the sun happens to have a disproportionate amount of mass compared to the rest of the planets.

When we call a natural phenomenon like the solar system a machine we are anthropomorphizing. That is, we are taking what we know about ourselves and projecting it on to other things which were not made by us.

We look at the solar system and we realize that it serves a purpose for ourselves. It provides a source of energy and a stable liveable environment for life on earth. Because it serves an important human purpose - making our continued survival possible - we can easily fall into the trap of perceiving the solar system as designed for our sake. This is like a small child who believes that the world exists solely to further its own existence.

In order to understand how different phenomena work we have learned to analyze things according to scientific principles about the composition of matter and the forces that influence and interact between the component parts. We take these principles too far when we talk about the design or mechanism of natural entities.

When we say that the huge wings of an albatross are “designed” for long-distance flight we are speaking metaphorically. But it is sometimes not easy to realize this. The albatross's wings make long-distance flight possible, just as the wings on a jet plane make long-distance flight possible. But no-one designed an albatross. The albatross evolved over millions of years from previous kinds of birds. There was no conscious design involved. The principle involved is given the particular environment that these birds lived in - namely the open ocean, those birds with longer wing spans up to a certain limit, were more likely to survive and produce progeny than birds with shorter wings, and the progeny will have longer wings because they have inherited the DNA of their parents. This is Charles Darwin’s theory of the evolution of life by natural selection plus a bit of modern chemistry.

It is a mistake to call natural selection a “mechanism” although lots of biologists do so. Natural selection is a form of self organization amongst populations of the same species and their environment. Living things try to maintain themselves. In order to do so they eat each other. They sometimes cooperate. They mate and produce offspring. They die. In doing this some life forms pass on more progeny than others and eventually some of these surviving life-forms become separate species. Their is no overriding purpose to this other than that each living thing wants to survive and pass on its progeny.

When we call natural selection a “mechanism” we are speaking metaphorically. But, unfortunately, by using the term “mechanism” to describe natural phenomena we import the idea of design and purpose into our perception of these phenomena.

When we call the Earth, “Spaceship Earth” we are making the same mistake. The Earth exists and evolves by the self-organization of it’s parts, as in the interaction of earth, water, fire, air and life. A spaceship is a human machine, designed and built to escape the Earth’s gravitational field and fly into space. It is somewhat self-contained, in that astronauts who fly in spaceships can live for short periods of time in space without physical contact with earth.

But note the proviso: “short periods of time.” No-one has invented a spaceship that serves as a world. That is, no-one has invented a spaceship that allows people to survive indefinitely in space away from the planet earth. Every astronaut that leaves earth’s gravitational field is just as totally dependent on the materials from earth for his survival as is all the rest of humanity who remain on earth.

The idea of “Spaceship Earth” was developed by Kenneth Boulding to emphasize the point that our economic system is bounded by the limits of the earth, which is a finite thing. The earth does not receive any significant amount of materials from outer space, so we must make do with what is here already.

Unlike a spaceship, the Earth does allow human beings to survive indefinitely, because life forms a self organized system on Earth, of which we form a part. We may have spent hundreds of millions of dollars designing and building spaceships but no-one has been able to design a spaceship that can maintain itself and the life inside it independently.

The idea of such a spaceship is a fantasy. But the Earth is a reality. If what we want to do is live responsibly within the limits of the Earth, so that we continue to survive as a living species, we need to base our perception of Earth on reality, not fantasy.