Tipping & Fiddling
Eminent scientists, statesmen, and other respected observers of our world warn that we may be approaching or at a tipping point, where humankind will be unable to reverse the runaway harms we’re causing to ourselves and the planet. We can’t keep on fiddling around while forests burn and ice caps melt, coral reefs die, and untold species go extinct, they say. Such problems, bad enough in themselves, signal a sickness in our world at large that requires us all to think long and hard about our present—to take nothing for granted and be open to questioning everything about our situation and how we got here.
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What Is The Matter
Recently I got on the Departure Bay ferry in Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island where I live, for the thirty mile sailing across the Salish Sea (formerly the Georgia Strait) to Vancouver city on the southern mainland coast of British Columbia. With nearly 2.5 million people, the Vancouver metropolitan area is northernmost in the chain of great west coast cities, and the third most populous urban center in Canada. The ferry terminal sits on the northwest edge of the city and my destination was in Surrey, south and east of down town, so I had to go right through the city. The trip takes about an hour and a half by car, depending on traffic conditions, and about the same by bus and skyTrain (Vancouver’s excellent grade-separated automated rapid transit system), depending on connections. I “walked on” the ferry and took the bus and train.
The bus and especially the elevated train give cross-sectional and panoramic views of mile after mile of commercial districts, neighborhoods, high-rise condominiums, shopping malls, and everywhere congested roadways. Vancouver is a beautiful city
as cities go, in a beautiful setting—but it’s still a big city. I looked down on one multi-lane, bumper-to-bumper busy intersection and thought, “How in the world are we ever going to fix this mess?” Each one of the millions of people who make up the great city, just like me, is driven by his or her own needs and desires (which the city in myriad ways both engenders and fulfills). Great cities are nodes, central places, in our social economy that lurches along like a huge, runaway, self-perpetuating machine—which in fact is precisely how the capitalist economy was originally conceived and set it in motion.
Each one of us is a tiny part in the machine. And it’s not just something abstract, like “the market,” or “democracy,” or “our system of government.” It is these things, but it’s also completely material. It is our roads and highways and all the vehicles on them; it’s buildings, supermarkets and suburbs and subways, dams and power plants and transmission lines, planes and ships. It’s computers, cell phones, the internet, and the material infrastructure that makes it all possible. It’s steel and concrete and exotic catalytic metals, water and wood, fish and grains and meat, all wrested from the Earth and made part of our social/economic machine. It represents, all together, an inconceivably huge, towering capital investment integrated by an ever more precarious economy that we’re committed to in the most real, material, concrete ways. I, my co-passengers on the train and bus, all the people in the cars and condos and office buildings along the route, everyone in the city, the population of North America, and now the human residents of our globalized world—we all live our lives in the material reality of the system we’ve created.
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Reflexive Consciousness & Social Change
How do you get any real perspective on the overwhelming immensity of all that we are in and part of—any less begin to shift or change it? How do you begin stop taking it all for granted, and be open to questioning it in meaningful ways? Some anthropologists say that a person can only really understand their own culture from some standpoint outside it; and the only foothold outside one’s culture is some other culture, or some part or perspective of another culture. Now I’m not sure that this is really true anymore. Our culture has become so diverse and complex that it offers different standpoints from which to view itself. Reflexivity, or reflexive consciousness, has developed slowly in modern Western culture since the Enlightenment, and is still evolving.
Today, science drives our evolving abilities to see ourselves more objectively. And it does so, often, by showing just where we’ve been wrong or too limited—just where treasured beliefs, values, and attitudes need adjusting. In the sixteenth century Copernicus disrupted the world-view and social order of Medieval Europe by showing that the Earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. Ever since, science has shaken up entrenched ideas and beliefs. The next big hit came from Darwin’s theory of evolution in the 1800s.
Today, the social sciences, finally, join physics and biology in generating the truly seismic shifts in our understanding and world-view—not by re-arranging our view of ourselves in the cosmos, nor by placing us more realistically within the complex diversity of life on Earth, but rather by showing us to ourselves.
Here, then, is a good place to take on some of the deep questioning that our times call for. What do today’s social sciences tell us about us? And where do heated controversies flare up? That might be just where new understandings push against and disrupt established ideas and ways of living. That thought could branch off into different directions, different trails to follow. One big bumpy road runs directly to our economy.
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Everywhere we look we find extremes—extremes of wealth and poverty, of beauty and squalor, theories of the cosmos and the quantum, magnificent technologies and some of the stupidest, most debased politics the U.S. has ever seen. And all of it pushes in on us daily through broadcast TV and the internet, channeled by the ubiquitous “devices” that dominate our living rooms and go with us on the bus, in the car, even as we walk down the street. We’re more “connected” to the wider world through mass media, but less connected to each other personally and to the places where we actually live.
How can we make sense of it all? One good place to begin is the economy we have. I’ll take that up in later posts.